Boulton Paul Defiant
 

Gentlemen...

May someone who was never anything more than a limited ground hugging pongo please ask a question of you....

In relation to the Boulton Paul Defiant of years past.

It could rotate its turret fully forward, putting its four guns either side of the pilots canopy, with the pilot able to fire the guns. But with the guns unable to fire directly ahead, only at a minimum angle of something like 19 degrees above horizontal and with no gunsight for the pilot, I wonder if it was a practical proposition to use it as a fighter, given that it had no other fixed forward firing armament.

I know someone who takes the view that it could operate as a conventional fighter aircraft of the day, and that the real problem it had was that the pilot was over the wing rather than pretty much behind it, so had a big blind spot beneath. I would have thought rolling the aircraft would have helped, and with the turret gunner providing a second set of eyes able to look in a different direction, located pretty much behind the wing visibility would not be such a problem.

Can anyone offer wise counsel to the ignorant but interested?

ab, I don't know anything directly about the Defiant but it was more a bomber destroyer than a fighter. As a fighter it lack the svelte shape of the single engine fighters of the day and was thus slower and less manoeuvrable.

As for the turret gunner, other aircraft had similar gunners but few would have been quite as agile as the Defiant.

The following article would explain things better.

Boulton Paul Defiant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Decent radar equipped night fighter judging by some articles...

Try getting a copy of Flypast for November, there is an interesting article about the Defiant and 141 Squadron's slaughter in 1940.

The aeroplane was very similar to the Hurricane to look at in the air and it had initial success when attacked from the rear as the attackers thought they were taking on Hurricanes, but the Luftwaffe quickly learned to attack from below and the rear, the guns couldn't bear and the rest is history.

It went on to be a reasonably sucessful night fighter.

The last survivor N1671 is on display at the RAF Museum Hendon.

Brave men giving all in extraordinary days.

The rationale was, as Pontius says, to use it as a bomber destroyer, the German fighters not having the range to reach UK from Germany, except perhaps the 110.

Anyone see the flaw in this splendid plan?

How was the MkII used as a night fighter?

I assume that the AI MkIV was in the back and the gunner turned the turret to the 'Schräge Musik position, completed the intercept, then had to get his night vision back before shooting at the target?

Or was there a repeater display in the front?

Whichever way, it must have been very difficult.

My brother's godfather was a wartime FAA pilot. He once described to me how he nearly flicked out of control in a Defiant whilst trying to land behind a Swordfish at some shore station - it seems the Defiant had quite a high wing loading and wasn't very forgiving at the stall.....:uhoh:

;)


My 10 minimum characters here :hmm:

Can't claim any experience, but I did speak to a BP Defiant pilot who was on the staff (either Duxford or Hendon) and he had a few types under his belt.

He suggested that the BPD was a pig and that in the limited times he had engaged, he just spent a long time on the other side of the circle trying to shoot upwards!

DOn't believe the hype about it's success at night either...Didn't it get moved into that role because the daylight utility was poor?

If you read the wikipedia article it will become clear. The circle was a defensive or protective manoeuvre adopted by 264.

At night it was highly effective given we didn't have any other night fighter :}. Once we had the Blenheim and Beaufighter . . . but that is in the same article.

You may recall the other night-fighter was the Hurricane with a Leigh light. Reading recent posts one wonders :)

It got moved to nights because it was blatted out of the skies once the Luftwaffe realised it wasn't a Hurri.

The weight of the turret -- as related above -- made it a bugger to fly and slowed it up as well. Seem to recall a problem with it when it came to ditching as well.

The above is as IIRC and does not mean I don't have huge respect for the folk that were given the job of flying them at any time of the day.

Thanks Wader, had missed the link to the Wikipedia article. Confirms that I must have been chatting to one of the ex-drivers at Hendon.

Rather them than me!

Boulton Paul are restoring one in Wolverhampton IIRC. It has been that way for a number of years.

AL1: Its a full size replica, copyright as per photo.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/markans...nt/l70304a.jpg

BEagle

Are you sure it was a Defiant?

The RN had the Blackburn Roc which was the same concept as the Defiant but based on the Blackburn Skua. It was considerably slower than the Defiant - which is saying something.

Pardon an idiot posting, but it didn't look that bad an aeroplane (you know the saying) except for that triangular tailplane ...

Second or third Airfix kit I ever constructed ...

caz, yes. The FAA used the Defiant as a target tug and brother's godfather borrowed one to take him wherever it was he was going.

Patrick Bishops Fighter Boys, covers it pretty well and sums up the usefullness of the Defiant as limited at the beginning of the war, later on it was useless and I think he deemed it as essentially sending the crews up to get killed

We should, at least, be grateful that it was the Defiant which was chosen as the standardbearer for this particular aircraft specification. The alternative was the Hawker Hotspur, the selection of which would have had a deletirious effect on Hurricane production and development prior to the Battle of Britain.

Most reports that I have read state that the Defiant was a dreadful aircraft and only showed early promise whilst the Luftwaffe pilots confused it with the Hurricane and got a 4 gun shock whilst attacking from the rear.

Below is the Gloster entry for the same competition that the Hurricane won. It is a shame that it wasn't picked up at the same time as the Hurri. One thing that I would like to know is.....Did one of the Gloster engineers have a Japanese uncle who worked at Mitsubishi?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ster_f5-34.jpg

GPMG

The aircraft that were chosen all had one thing in common - the Rolls Royce "Merlin" engine. Don't forget it was a case of playing "catch up" after years of appeasement. Different engines for each type would have meant several different supply chains all competing for funds - not to mention the training of specialist Technical Personnel for each type of engine.

What is the engine in that? Looks like a radial..

Friday 19 July 1940

Twelve 141Sqn Defiants were moved from West Malling, still under construction, to Hawkinge. They were unused to flying in larger numbers than Section or Flight formations. At 12.23 they were ordered to launch as a Squadron (12 aircraft) but three had engine problems so only nine got off to patrol a line 20nm S of Folkestone.

With no warning from GCI they were bounced from below and behind by ten Bf-109s from II/JG. “Richthofen Geschwader”. A few seconds later another set of 109s hit the breaking formation from 12 high. Four Defiants went down in this pair of attacks, one pilot survived, wounded. Another Defiant was hit and crashed in Dover. Of the four left one crashed in Hawkinge village and of the three that landed, one was struck off charge immediately, being so shot up, this aircraft’s gunner had baled out at some point but was never seen again.


Above notes culled from Francis Mason’s Battle Over Britain

F5/34 design was powered by a 840hp Mercury and with this engine reached around 316mph

GG

That speed is the same as that quoted for the Hurricane Mk 1 equipped with armour plating and carrying full fuel and weapon load.

One must also remember that Gloster was committed in respect of Gauntlets and Gladiators in the UK and Middle East and for Sea Gladiators for the FAA. It was, in fact, a Gauntlet of No 32 Sqn which carried out the first ever intercept controlled by ground radar in November 1937.

This design has been traduced because of misuse of the word "fighter". RAF/1930s bought no "fighter" because UK was to rely on the Maginot Line: Luftwaffe Army-support types - He.111/Do.17, transport-derived -would trundle beyond escort range towards Expeditionary RAF bases, to be taken out from below/astern after visual intercept. No GCI, no nightwork, on either side. Payload/endurance was sought: no single-engined type burdened by turret+its gunner could take on a nimble dasher: but Defiant would not meet one, short-range, immured beyond the Rhine.

Hurricane, Spitfire, Whirlwind, Bf.109, Bf.110 (Zerstorer) were similarly intended to be bomber-destroyers. Defence Policy has failed if our lot are within range of no-endurance, point-defence sprinters. RAF's 1936 name-change, Air Defence of G.B to Fighter Command was a budget-jerking wheeze: politicos wanted to concentrate spend on bombers.

cazatou's points re Gloster/Hawker: Air Ministry "owned" Design Rights in everything we paid for; design parents had no right to production. A.M left Defiant in BPA (and put Blackburn Roc there too, as BPA supplied the French-origin turret). BPA also built Hawker Demon and Fairey Barracuda; Gloster built 2,750 Hurricanes.

A book I have gives some detail on 96 Squadron formed in early 1941 and based in Cheshire defending Liverpool & the Northwest. At its peak they had 21 Defiants on charge.

During their tour there they had five confirmed Defiant kills (3 x He111 and 2 x Ju88) before the transfer of the Luftwaffe eastwards reduced their opportunities of combat.

As counter-balance about the same number of Defiants were lost in accidents...

Boulton Paul Defiant
 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i...iant-x8wvxcmkg

In defence of the ‘feeble’ Defiant

It was described as a “peculiar” aircraft by its own crews and derided by German aces as a feeble kill compared with a Hurricane, let alone a Spitfire. Now an author has claimed that the Boulton Paul Defiant was more deadly than its reputation suggests, and that the Battle of Britaincould have been an even greater victory if the aircraft had been given a fair chance.

The Defiant is remembered, if at all, as a design failure. Resembling the Hawker Hurricane with the addition of a gun turret behind the cockpit, it was intended to approach underneath or alongside bombers, where the gunner could devote his full attention to raking them with rounds from four .303in Browning machineguns. The design was conceived in the mid-1930s when Air Ministry officials anticipated having to defend Britain against large unescorted formations of enemy bombers. To ensure that pilots focused on getting their gunner into the best position, and for reasons of weight, it had no fixed forward-facing guns.

Its early champions included Winston Churchill, who predicted in 1938 that the turret fighter design would be “paramount” in any conflict. However, after heavy losses in the Battle of Britain, it has often been viewed as an unmitigated death trap.

In Defiant: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain, Robert Verkaik argues that standard accounts have underplayed the heroism and successes of the aircraft’s two-man crews and disregarded leadership decisions influencing its later underperformance. He said perhaps the greatest omission was the “awkward” fact that a Defiant squadron still holds the record for shooting down the most enemy aircraft in one day.

This was on May 29, 1940, when the Luftwaffe mounted five large attacks on ships evacuating soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. The German planes were met by two successive RAF patrols of four fighter squadrons, including 264 Squadron, a Defiant squadron commanded by Philip Hunter. On each patrol the Defiants and one squadron of Hurricanes or Spitfires, were tasked with downing the enemy bombers while other Hurricanes flew above to take on fighters.

Nevertheless, during the first sortie six Messerschmitt Me 109 fighters broke away from the Hurricanes that had engaged them and swept on to the Defiants’ tails from out of the sun. Rather than picking off the slower aircraft, the Germans found themselves hurtling into a hail of lead and tracer. The Defiants’ gunners continued to hammer away as the Me 109s were followed by 22 Messerschmitt Me 110 heavy fighters. By the end of the sortie, 264 Squadron had claimed two Me 109s, 15 Me 110s and a Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bomber, without losing a single aircraft.

And they weren’t done. In the second patrol that afternoon they caught a force of Stukas and Junkers Ju 88s bombing ships. While Hurricanes tackled German fighters above, the Defiants found that the Stukas were “easy meat”, Eric Barwell, a pilot, recalled.

In total that day the squadron claimed 38 enemy aircraft were destroyed. This remains a record, and, although it was likely to be an overestimate, Verkaik said it gave Britons a sorely needed morale boost. Flight Lieutenant Nicholas Cooke and his gunner Acting Corporal Albert Lippett had five kills, making them the first RAF “aces in one day” of the Second World War.

Two days later, the Defiants were involved in the RAF’s heaviest fighting of the Dunkirk campaign, claiming four Me 109s and five Heinkel He 111s. It came at a heavy price of five Defiants lost and five airmen dead, including Cooke and Lippett.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....aa85816afb.png



Verkaik writes: “There is little doubt that the two patrols involving the Defiants, which met the full force of the Luftwaffe attacks, blunted the enemy’s strikes against the Royal Navy ships which had been targeted by more than 300 enemy aircraft. That day the navy lost just two ships [minesweepers] while evacuating nearly 68,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches — the greatest number in a single day during Operation Dynamo.”

From May 12 to 31, when 264 Squadron served on the front line in the lead up to and during the Dunkirk evacuation, its Defiants shot down 65 enemy aircraft, more than any other RAF squadron.

This pre-eminence was not to last, however. On July 19, early in the Battle of Britain, Defiants of 141 Squadron at Hawkinge in Kent were scrambled to intercept German raiders. The aircraft, none of whose pilots had combat experience, were sent without fighter cover. As Verkaik recounts, they were “caught napping” by two Staffels of Me 109s, which swooped from above and behind to pick off six out of nine aircraft as airmen watched horrified from the ground.

Philip Hunter, whose 264 Squadron had performed so well at Dunkirk, was killed the next month when his squadron was sent to Manston airfield in Kent as part of the first line of defence.

Some people have argued that if the commanders Hugh Dowding and Keith Park had not resisted the Air Ministry’s ambition of equipping one third of Fighter Command with Defiant squadrons the RAF would have lost the Battle of Britain.

On the contrary, Verkaik believes that with proper fighter protection, the Defiant would have acquitted itself well and the Luftwaffe might have lost more bombers more quickly than it did. Instead he said it was “miscast” as an independent fighter, rather than a bomber destroyer operating in tandem with Hurricanes and Spitfires. He disagrees with claims that its early successes were only down to hapless German pilots mistaking it for the Hurricane and running into its guns.

Even during the Battle of Britain, the performance of the relatively small number of Defiants took a toll on the Luftwaffe. In the ten days to August 28, 264 Squadron claimed 19 kills, albeit with a loss of 11 aircraft and 13 air crew.

After the battle, the Defiant served as the most successful RAF night fighter during the Blitz before it was retired from frontline combat service after 1942.......

That’s a great piece on the Defiant, thanks for posting it up.

Its the one Aircraft type from the Battle of Britain that is claimed to be a restored tribute to its crews that is sadly missing from our skies today IMO!



Rob

If you walk out along the east side of "the pit" past the sailing club dinghy park at Blakeney, in Norfolk, there is a white concrete post, a marker of some sort, which has a brass commemorative plaque attached to it. It is a tribute to F/L Nicholas Cooke (the pilot mentioned in the article) who prior to the war was a champion sailor in the international 14 class sailing dinghy. I think he was F/L Nicholas Cooke DFC. I've always wanted to know more of his story. I assume he either was a Norfolk chap, or had some association with that part of the country, maybe the Blakeney sailing club. It would have needed considerable courage to fly a Defiant in the Battle of Britain and considerable skill to sail an International 14 well.

I think the only surviving complete BP types are the Defiant and Sea Balliol in the RAF Museum, 2 Balliols in Sri Lanka and the BP111 at Coventry...

"On the contrary, Verkaik believes that with proper fighter protection, "

So the RAF would have had to provide fighter cover for "fighters" - just like Bf-110 :ugh:

The article also repeats claims for kills made by the Defiant crews - as Wikipedia says:-

"Although 264 Squadron claimed 48 kills in eight days over Dunkirk, the cost was high with 14 Defiants lost. Actual German losses were no more than 12–15 enemy aircraft; the turret's wide angle of fire meant that several Defiants could engage the same target at one time, leading to multiple claims."

It was a dog and no amount of optimistic writing 80 years on changes that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Gresham_Cooke


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....45cacca416.png

Extract from 'Aces High' Shores and Williams.

http://memorials.rmg.co.uk/m6458/

Many thanks 'GF Ops,

I'd got as far as discovering he was lost in the Defiant, but hadn't uncovered anything more. I see we are very nearly at the anniversary of their loss, nealy 80 years ago.

Should we be sufficiently "unlocked" to get up to Blakeney I'll go and take a look.

BSD.

Lovely church at Blakeney, well worth a visit. On the north-western side of the church-yard you will find the grave of Air Commodore H.G. Brackley, a pioneer of Imperial Airways Flying Boat routes. The grave used to be kept in pristine order by his son, the Church Warden who died in 2010. Since then it has become rather neglected.
In November 1948 Brackley, then working for BSAA, drowned whilst bathing at Rio de Janeiro. Prior to the funeral his body was flown up to the airfield at nearby Langham in a BSAA York.

Also at Blakeney is a 234 Squadron window. Re-Defiant, one in the family of my wife commanded a Defiant squadron during its conversion from Defiant to Beaufighter.

During their work-up on the new fighter, 264’s Boss, Sqn Ldr Hunter flew in mock combat against a Spitfire of 65 Sqn flown by one Flg Off Tuck! Hunter flew on a course from Northolt to White Waltham and Tuck attacked when and how he liked. Hunter went into a steep turn followed by the Spitfire. In an engagement that lasted 10 minutes, the Defiant gunner expended all his cine film, but Tuck expended none as he could not bring his sights to bear. He was often able to turn inside the Defiant but this only enabled the gunner to fire on him across the arc. On one occasion Hunter managed to get on the tail of the Spitfire, slightly below so that the gunner could fire forward and upwards. This engagement showed that a well-flown Defiant, which circled when attacked by a single seat fighter could adequately defend itself, provided its speed did not drop below 160 mph, which usually involved a spiral dive. On the other hand, 141 Sqn’s boss, on a visit to 264, claimed the ac was a death trap and that he had no faith in it; a clear case of a self fulling prophecy, unfortunately, but shows a clear case of Leadership and morale being an important factor.

The Defiant wasn’t a bad aeroplane; it was simply badly misused, as there were no alternatives and desperate times called for desperate measures, but they should never have been used as single Sqns in the heat of the BoB. If, as it was intended, it had been used in conjunction with other fighters (Hurricanes and Spitfires - eg 264 Sqn integrated into Bader's Big Wing in lieu of one of the Hurricane Sqns?) it could be extremely effective. Alternatively, 264 and 141 should have been based in 13 Gp where they might have performed well against Luftflotte's 5 raid across the North Sea on 15 Aug 40. The 'Dunkirk fable' needs to be put to rest, it was never as claimed, BUT the Defiants of 264 Sqn did put up a good show when they intercepted Ju 87 and He 111 attacks on the beaches.

Acknowledgements to Alec Brew, author of ‘The Defiant File’ and Andrew Thomas - "Defiant, Blenheim and Havoc Aces" that appear to be rather more balanced views of this particular aeroplanes' effectiveness.

The one thing lacking was a forward firing gun. Bit of a problem if attacking a fighter. I suppose you could try to creep up underneath or if diving down with a speed advantage fly in front and hope you can open fire first!
Did better a night fighter but did it have radar.?

Yes, the -A variants were equipped with AI. (Mk V?)

IIRC Mason - in British Fighters- reckoned the Battle & the Defiant were there for two reasons - initially because they replaced biplanes with similar crew configuration so it was replace like with like - and secondly because they were all that they had to put through the "shadow" factories to start with. The Spitfire was too complex for people starting out

In my opinion it was criminal for the Air Staff to send out aircraft in 1940 without a front gun and only 4 in a turret when as early as 1934 they'd agreed the future fighter (s) would need 8 forward firing guns

Blakeny church is indeed worth a visit - walk up to the top of the tower for a fabulous view.

id seen the stained glass but didn’t realise the significance.

Facinating to think of the BSAA York Lansing at Langham.

BSD.