The Fairey Battle was developed to meet a completely unrealistic light bomber specification created in 1933.  Fairey’s engineers struggled mightily to produce a single-engined aircraft capable of carrying a 1000-lb load and two (later three) crew 1000 miles at 200 mph.  There was not yet an engine powerful and small enough to make this possible, but the appearance of the Merlin saved the specification from total disaster.  Although quite elegant for a 1930s British bomber, the aircraft did not impress during its initial trials.  Nevertheless, the rearmament programs of the later 1930s saw the RAF ordering the type in moderate numbers, and by the outbreak of the war there were ten squadrons equipped with the Battle as part of 1 Group.  These went to France with the Advanced Air Striking Force, where contact with German fighters demonstrated their clear inferiority.  Underpowered, underarmed, underarmoured and unmaneuverable, they were easy prey for theBf109, but did establish some precedents that pointed the way toward the more effective second generation of bombers.  The first VC’s won by RAF personnel went to the aircrew of a 12 Squadron Battle after a disastrous raid on the Albert Canal.  The Battle was withdrawn from frontline service in 1941, but many saw service as target tugs and trainers. 

For modellers, the Battle has not been a common subject.  A couple of kits in 1/72 have been around for many years, and Classic Airframes covered all the variants in 1/48, but reference material is hard to come by.  I started the CA kit, but put it away again when I could not figure out how to detail the cockpit, and when I realized that there would be some correction required.  When I saw that SAM Publications was issuing a new booklet on the Battle that promised the reference material I needed, I ordered it immediately.

 This slim volume is the first in a new series from SAM Publications, who also produce the Modeller’s Datafile series.  The new series is intended to provide detailed coverage of lesser-known or less illustrious types, and follows the format of several other similar series, providing the reader with a short development and operational history, extracts from parts manuals, period photographs, photographs of restored examples of the airframe in questions, color profiles, etc.  The specific scheme of organisation here provides a detailed look at the aircraft by breaking it down into discrete sections: airframe, cockpit, tail, armament, undercarriage, wings and center section, each with lots of illustrations, covering 35 of the total 64 pages.  There is an excellent chapter on camouflage and markings (the author’s real specialty),  two pages of scale plans by R.J. Caruana, five pages of profiles, four pages of color photos of two preserved examples (a gunnery trainer and the RAF museum’s bomber), an appendix listing all Battle squadrons, and a bibliography.

 This book has the strengths and weaknesses common to the genre.  There is a wealth of detail information, of exactly the sort that AMS-afflicted modellers crave, without a lot of overly dramatic operational history.  Want to know what the internal structure of the rudder was? Or exactly how the undercarriage folds up into the wells?  Or what those strange retraction jacks on the Battle do?  You can find all of those answers in here, illustrated in both clear photographs and period manual extracts.  The standard of production is very good, with well-edited text and well chosen illustrations, some in color (I especially liked the detailed color cross-sections of all of the different bomb types that the Battle carried), and there is more than enough information here to produce a super-detailed Battle model.  Some of the photos have the flared, over-exposed look typical of period factory photography, but all are clearly printed.  This is a pretty good example of this type of airframe guide.

 On the debit side, the coverage exhibits the unevenness typical of the genre as well.  For a lesser type like this, the amount of source material available is less than optimal, so illustrations of the internal structure depend heavily on factory photos of the prototype, rather than production or service examples, and it is not always clear how production examples differed.  A variation of this problem that I have seen in several other books is the tendency to concentrate on the more unusual variants while failing to illustrate what is typical of the most common variant (not a problem here).  Authors also run the risk of getting bogged down in the most trivial details while ignoring larger-scale matters.  In this case, there are four different photos of the tail surfaces provided in which the caption concentrates on the fact that the rudder trim tab on the prototype extended only over two ribs, while it covered three ribs in production examples.  Does this detail require this much coverage, when the fact that the prototype rudder was on the centreline but production examples had it offset to starboard is not mentioned at all? And if there are no good original photos of the cockpit interior of production examples, why not provide photos from the preserved examples?  On the other hand, the author does not waste caption space demonstrating his plane-spotting prowess by identifying aircraft in the distant background.

 In general, this book is a great improvement over what has previously been available on the Battle, and I hope that later books  in the series (Fairey Barracuda and Short Stirling are next) will maintain a similar level of quality.  For every three new guides on the Spitfire or Bf109, it would be nice to have one on the Handley Page Hampden or the Arado Ar96.

 January 2005

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