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The
Fairey Battle was a
British single-engine
light bomber designed and manufactured by the
Fairey Aviation Company. It was developed during the mid-1930s for the
Royal Air Force (RAF) as a
monoplane successor to the earlier
Hawker Hart and
Hindbiplanes. The Battle was powered by the same high performance
Rolls-Royce Merlin piston engine that provided various contemporary British
fighters[N 1], however the Battle was weighed down with a three-man crew and a bomb load. Despite being a great improvement on the aircraft that preceded it, by the time it saw action, the Battle was relatively slow, limited in terms of range and was quickly found to be highly vulnerable to both anti-aircraft fire and hostile fighters, possessing only two defensive .303 in machine guns.
[1]
The Fairey Battle participated in direct combat missions during early stages of the
Second World War. During the "
Phoney War", the type achieved the distinction of attaining the first aerial victory of an RAF aircraft in the conflict. However, by May 1940, the Battle had suffered heavy losses, frequently in excess of 50 per cent of sortied aircraft per mission. By the end of 1940, the type had been entirely withdrawn from active combat service, instead being mainly relegated to use by training units overseas. For an aircraft which had been viewed to possess a high level of pre-war promise, the Battle quickly became one of the most disappointing aircraft in RAF service.