Wingleader Photo Archive 40 - Fairey Battle

The Fairey Battle was sleek, solid and quite capable for its day, and was a step up in technology from the biplanes that it replaced. However, the Battle had always been doomed to failure due to an insane specification that effectively required an aircraft a third heavier than a Spitfire, with twice as big a wingspan, to carry 1000lbs of bombs and three crew members… but only with the same single Merlin engine as the Spitfire! Even the design team at Fairey strongly recommended a twin engined version to the Air Ministry, but to no avail.

Digging deep into the Fairey Battle’s history for this book has been a real pleasure for all the Wingleader team. We learned a lot and can now confidently spot an early K series from a later one, as hopefully you will too after reading this book. We asked RAF expert Andy Thomas to pull it all together for us as his knowledge of RAF squadrons, codes and operations during that pre to early-war period is second to none.

As always, we’ve taken the very best in Press photos from our Wingleader Archive collection and combined them with some very rare private photos that show squadron codes never seen on Battles in print before.