Fleet Air Arm Legends: Supermarine Seafire

By Matthew Willis

Renowned naval aviation author Matthew Willis tells the story of the Supermarine Seafire – a navalized version of the famous Spitfire adapted for use on aircraft carriers. Some 2646 examples were built and saw action with the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm from November 1942 until after the Korean War in the early 1950s. It was involved in combat during the Allied landings in North Africa (Operation Torch), the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, the D-Day landings, and Operation Dragoon in southern France. With the Pacific fleet, the Seafire proved capable of intercepting and destroying the feared Japanese kamikaze attack aircraft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tempest
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911658825

Book preview

Introduction: Crisis

In September 1941, the Chief of Naval Air Services (CNAS), Admiral Lumley Lyster, wrote a memorandum outlining the importance of single-seat fighters to the Royal Navy.

The situation was dire. Lyster declared that four of the RN’s large fleet aircraft carriers had been ENTIRELY DEPRIVED OF FIGHTER PROTECTION. The Fleet Air Arm was running out of fighters. The few it did have were inadequate. The service was fighting in the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean. It would soon face Japan, as well as Germany and Italy, with its armoury half-empty.

The situation had not arisen suddenly. Prewar misconceptions, supplies from the US slowing to a trickle, the priorities of the Air Ministry, politics, and delays to new British designs created a ‘perfect storm’ in the supply of equipment. By late 1941, the Fleet Air Arm was reliant on a few hundred obsolescent Sea Hurricanes, and the Grumman Martlet which was more suitable but was increasingly prioritised for the US Navy. New British designs would not be available until at least 1943.

Furthermore, operations in Norway and the Mediterranean had showed that pre-war assumptions on which the service had been equipped were utterly false. In 1940 and 1941 the small number of low-performance two-seat fighters available were completely insufficient to protect the fleet from air attack.

Soon after Lyster issued his plea, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, visited the new armoured carrier HMS Indomitable. He was dismayed to see that only a few Sea Hurricane Is would be its fighter strength and demanded that henceforth, Only the finest aeroplanes that can do the work go into all aircraft-carriers, especially the highest class fighters.

But the following month, the US Navy refused any more Martlets for the RN after existing orders were fulfilled. The Fleet Air Arm’s fighter position was now critical. With further urging from Churchill, the RAF grudgingly transferred 200 more fighters. These would not be more Hurricanes: the pride of Fighter Command, the Supermarine Spitfire, was finally going to sea.

RNVR officers in pilot training cluster around the cockpit of a Seafire IB, or hooked Spitfire, familiarising themselves with the controls.

Chapter 1

Genesis of the Seafire

The genesis of the Seafire is convoluted and confused. Rather than a single, ongoing process, two overlapping but largely unconnected programmes ran concurrently in late 1939–early 1940: one for a straightforward navalisation of existing Spitfires, and another for a comprehensively redesigned aircraft, fully adapted to carrier operation.

Though the Admiralty may have approached Fairey with the idea of licence-building a naval Spitfire in 1938, the first concrete proposal did not arise until late the following year. The Admiralty’s Advisory Committee on Aircraft examined a drawing of a proposed arrestor hook installation for a Spitfire on 27 October 1939. Soon after this, Vickers and the Admiralty began working on the problem of folding the Spitfire’s wings for carrier stowage.

At the same time, plans for a distinctive naval Spitfire were under development. This would have had totally new wings and engine cooling layout, while the rest of the aircraft would be changed to a greater or lesser degree. In the summer of 1939, the Air Ministry issued Specifications N.8/39 and N.9/39 for a new naval fighter, requested, according to contemporary doctrine, as a conventional twoseat fighter and a turret fighter. By December 1939, wartime experience had thrown a different light on FAA requirements so N.8/39 was revised to call for a two-seat fighter and a single-seat fighter, preferably to the same basic design.

For the single-seater, Supermarine turned to its tried-and-tested fighter and offered the Type 338, a design described as a Spitfire with a Griffon engine,¹ though it differed in numerous respects from the Spitfire then in service. This development was unsurprising, on the basis that the company had issued a brochure for a Griffon Spitfire a few weeks before the revisions to N.8/39 were issued. Supermarine was confident that the Spitfire could handle the extra power of the Griffon, on the basis that the one-off aircraft developed for a speed record attempt had flown with over 2,000 hp with no handling problems. (An alternative with an even more powerful Napier Sabre was offered, though this would have required a new forward fuselage.)

The proposal was recognisable as a Spitfire, though there were significant differences in the wing. The planform was altered to increase area with greater chord thanks to greater leadingedge curvature, while reducing span by slightly squaring off the tips (not dissimilar to the tip form on the later Seafire Mk 45–47 models). The simple dihedral of the Spitfire wing was changed to a cranked ‘inverted gull’ form (as on the two-seat Type 333 designed to the original N.8/39), with the undercarriage moved out to the dihedral break, making for much shorter oleos and a wider track. The radiators were relocated to a ventral ‘tunnel’ beneath the fuselage. Unlike the later Seafire, the Type 338’s wings folded back along the fuselage, clearly derived from the wing fold system developed for the Type 333. Supermarine had taken some pains to try to integrate the Griffon into the airframe tightly, and the axis was lowered to improve visibility forward. Had this development gone ahead in 1940, it is likely that many of the problems the Seafire later faced would not have arisen, though it would have taken longer to bring into service.

The technical merit of the naval Griffon Spitfire was praised at the tender conference on 5 January 1940, but Supermarine narrowly lost out to Fairey, on the basis that the Spitfire’s view for deck landing was judged to be poor. This programme for a thoroughly redesigned naval Spitfire, with much attention given to its navalisation, was now over and little of the design work would be of use in future projects.

But a second route for a naval Spitfire was underway. The day before Supermarine’s N.8/39 project was rejected, Fifth Sea Lord Admiral Guy Royle held a meeting at the Admiralty to discuss ‘Future policy for fighters’.² It was noted that in addition to fleet defence and strike escort, the service was now expected to defend naval bases that the RAF could not cover. The Fleet Air Arm (FAA)’s own fighters had not been developed with this task in mind – they were expected never to confront highperformance, shore-based aircraft. The meeting concluded, in a section entitled ‘Spitfires or Hurricanes’, that it would be desirable to reinforce the weapons of the Fleet Air Arm with a number of high speed single-seater fighters of the most modern types.³

The first Seafire, BL676 was converted from a Dutch East Indies presentation Spitfire Mk Vb named Bondowoso.

In addition to the defence of UK naval bases, these aircraft could form a mobile force to defend bases overseas, months before such air defence was likely to be provided by the Royal Air Force.⁴ With basic modification, they could even be used to supplement two-seat fighters in fleet aircraft carriers, to be flown off when attack was imminent. Such fighters would need folding wings –a basic requirement due to the small lifts on modern carriers – but it was noted that both Hawker and Supermarine were working on folding wings. The idea of converting existing types was investigated with a view to putting a proposal to the Air Council – by which time the Spitfire was favoured, as only the Supermarine type was raised with the Air Ministry at the end of February.⁵ The Secretary noted that the possibility of providing some 50 Spitfires with folding wings and arrester hook has already been discussed informally, adding My Lords [of the Admiralty] would be grateful if the Air Council could give it favourable consideration.

Supermarine estimated that the first foldingwing Spitfires could be delivered by February 1941 with a prototype flying in five months, and the 50 aircraft delivered within 16 months, or 14 months if production was instigated directly, with no prototype.

The Air Ministry resisted. They pointed out that to provide 50 Spitfires with naval modifications to the FAA would cost the RAF considerably more than 50 aircraft, due to the additional time and effort it would take to tool up for the modifications. Supermarine believed that building 50 navalised Spitfires would cost the production of 75 standard Spitfires,⁶ but the Air Ministry grossly exaggerated the effect, suggesting it would rob the RAF of 200 Spitfires. On this basis, the proposal was refused in March, the decision supported by Winston