The Few | Aerial Combat

Colchester, 8 April 2020

I was wondering how to start this article when Hylton Murray-Philipson came up with the answer.

Mr Murray-Philipson spent 12 days in Leicester Royal Infirmary and five days in intensive care with coronavirus disease. Speaking to the BBC as he was finally discharged, he compared the NHS staff to “the Spitfire pilots of 1940”.

Any of us with even a passing interest in historic aviation will be well aware that 2020 marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, characterised by “The Few” Spitfire and Hurricane pilots fighting a heroic struggle against apparently overwhelming odds for months on end.

That conflict would have been my own main focus for the next few months, but events have rather overtaken us all.

It’s striking how the crisis engulfing the country – indeed the world – has left people struggling for comparisons, and typically falling back on WWII in terms of the scale of this, its life-threatening nature, and the indiscriminate impact on ordinary people.

We’re living through probably the most extraordinary times most of us have ever known, and obviously this has had a huge impact on businesses of all sorts.

I am extremely lucky – and well aware that I am – in that I work from a home studio anyway, mostly on my own, and lead a rather lockdown sort of life in that respect, so I can carry on doing so (health permitting) without too much interruption.

The print companies who supply my customers however have been impacted to a greater or lesser extent. Some of them have lost a huge amount of regular trade from larger clients. So I am keen to support them where I can by continuing to send them orders.

I’m acutely conscious for close family reasons that many people have less money at the moment, and possibly uncertain futures. But an ideal pastime if you’re stuck at home is to browse through this blog and the Flight Artworks website. They’re not just pretty pictures: most of the stories they tell involve specific people, aircraft and events, and contain lots of interesting information – and of course they’re all free to read.

NEW IMAGES

It might appear that I have not produced much new work recently but I have been steadily busy behind the scenes.

Anyone belonging to the RAF Memorial Flight (BBMF) official club would have been getting their yearbook through the post shortly. Instead, publication has been postponed because of the pandemic.

Having created a couple of new pictures for it and seen advance copies of the articles they illustrate, I know it’ll be well worth waiting for. But I’m continuing to respect their embargo so I haven’t published the pictures myself yet.

Recent licensing deals include two of my pictures for the end pages in a forthcoming book about a certain well-known aircraft type. I am reliably told by someone who’s read a proof copy that the book is “completely brilliant”.

Another features an aerial melée from November 1940 (after the official end of the Battle of Britain) which involved some very famous names. I had not known about it until I began researching it for the picture I’ve been making for a client, but it’s a fascinating story. Still, that’s for a forthcoming blog article.

For now: stay home, keep safe – and if you are one of the frontline NHS staff or other key workers who are putting yourself in harm’s way to look after us and keep things going: thank you, on behalf of all of us.

I always like getting emails from people but now especially, if anyone reading this is stuck in on their own and wants to drop me a line, I’d be delighted to hear from you on gary@easonmedia.com.

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To buy prints of any of my works please visit www.flightartworks.com.

Find Flight Artworks on Facebook, on Twitter @flightartworks, and on Instagram @flight.artworks.

Colchester, 24 October 2018

I have been aiming to publish one or two blog posts a month – so I can only apologise for taking six months off!

I was mostly enjoying the long, hot English summer and keeping well out of the sweltering studio. So it is not only the writing that has been neglected but also the picture-making. But as the days shorten, I am back at the desk and have a few things to catch up on.

Members of the RAF Memorial Flight Official Club will have seen a couple of the images I did produce in their autumn journal: a commission to illustrate a book extract about baling out of a doomed Lancaster, and another to accompany an article about the tricky skill of deflection shooting.

MOVING TARGET

It is not always immediately apparent to the uninitiated that unless you are right behind (or right in front of) your target at very close range, if you point your aircraft at another and fire – you will miss it.

You are moving, it is moving, and time will elapse during which your ammunition is flying through the air and falling under gravity. You have to shoot at where you anticipate it will be when your bullets reach it.

In my picture (top), the Hurricane pilot has positioned himself in just the right place that if he fires now, he probably will hit the crossing Messerschmitt Bf 109.

Eventually the RAF woke up to the importance of the issue and set up a gunnery school in 1942, but widespread success really only came to most fighter pilots with the introduction of complex gyro gunsights in 1944.

HELP YOURSELF

Until then, only a small percentage of fighter pilots managed to hit anything consistently. During the Battle of Britain, this was not for want of targets.

Hawker Hurricanes attacking Heinkel bombers — “The Few”

My second Hurricane offering is one of those pictures I had had in my mind’s eye for some time. It shows a pair of the eight-gun fighters turning in line astern onto a mass of attacking German bombers, a scene typical of the intense combats in the summer of 1940.

No visible markings under their wings? The RAF’s twisting and turning policies on the subject of camouflage on the top and bottom of their different aircraft types have filled books.

My depiction is of fighters of No 1 Squadron RAF over the south of England on 16 August. Underwing roundels had been dropped in June, when the Air Ministry ordered all fighters to have ‘sky’ colour undersides. They were reintroduced officially on 11 August but that does not mean to say they instantly appeared overnight and, in the absence of definitive information, I decided to omit them.

THE FEW

The squadron’s operations record book reported: “In the afternoon the squadron was engaged in its most successful action in England to date.”

Squadron Leader David Pemberton made the first attack, bringing down one of the Heinkel He 111 bombers in flames with his first burst. His own engine then caught fire – possibly because of returning gunfire – but before he had decided to bale out the flames subsided, and he landed safely.

Pilot Officer Peter Matthews followed him in, picking out one of the Messerschmitt Bf 110 heavy fighter escorts for his attack.

This was the day on which Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command’s 11 Group at Uxbridge and saw that at one point during the heavy aerial combat, all the Group’s fighter squadrons were in action, with no reserves.

As he left, Churchill said to his chief of staff, Hastings Ismay: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

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To buy prints of any of my works please visit www.flightartworks.com.

Find Flight Artworks on Facebook, on Twitter @flightartworks, and on Instagram @flight.artworks.

Aerial Combat

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Tag Archives: The Few

Heroic struggles against overwhelming odds

Two for the Hawker Hurricane fans