As brutish as the Mosquito was elegant, the Bristol Beaufighter’s huge contribution to winning the War is far too often overlooked. If aircraft had personalities, the Bristol Beaufighter belongs in that grand British tradition of irredeemably malevolent working-class thugs, from Bill Sykes to Ronnie Kray to Begbie to anyone played by Ray Winstone. It has not even a sliver of the beauty referenced in its given name. It was the hardest bastard in the sky.
The classic image of a 272 Squadron Bristol Beaufighter VIF at Takali airfield, Malta.
10. Only cowards run
You wouldn’t ask Reggie Kray how fast he can run, would you? That would be taking a diabolical liberty. And the Beaufighter was just the same.
Arriving on the scene in Autumn 1940, the Beaufighter could scrape past 320mph. It was scarcely faster than the fastest of the German medium bombers, and way behind the contemporary Bf 109 and the Luftwaffe’s own heavy fighter, the Bf 110, which was already being found out as easy meat* for Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Four years later on, and despite 1000 horse-power more and over a dozen upgrades, the Beaufighter was still struggling to scrape past 320mph, despite operating in a world of ever faster 109s, Macchis and Focke-Wulfs, and the existence of its wooden friend and rival Mosquito which raised the bar above 400mph. The Beaufighter defied air performance gravity, which many other aircraft types, including its predecessor the Blenheim, couldn’t. Its speed simply didn’t matter, as it was bastard tough.
*Though there may be more to this story
9. Being scarce when the 109s are about
With any self-respecting thug, a key skill is making yourself scarce when the Old Bill arrives. A noteworthy feature of the Beaufighter is how few single-engined fighters it shot down – less than 2 percent of the Beau’s 975 victories were in this category. It very rarely got mauled by faster, more manoeuvrable fighters, mainly because the Beaufighter was generally elsewhere when they were about.
Nobody ever suggested the Beaufighter was an air superiority fighter or a match in a dogfight with 109s or Focke-Wulf Fw 190s. Not even Trafford Leigh Mallory and Sholto Douglas managed to misdeploy it as such. As a result it had a practically unblemished record of success in all theatres of war, despite its unremarkable performance as a fighter.
In this it was helped by perfect timing – it was introduced into service in September 1940, at the moment when the daylight battle was being won and the Luftwaffe was starting to shift focus to night raids. Had it been introduced four months sooner, there’s a good chance it would have been regarded as a daylight fighter, like the Bf 110, and thrown into the Battle of France, where it would have been mashed by eager 109 aces who’d already basically wiped out the RAF’s entire light bomber contingent. This would have raised doubts and damaged confidence in this superb new aircraft.
8. Built like a brick shit-house
Every successful gang needs its enforcers, endowed with brute strength and stature and built like the brick proverbial.
The Beaufighter started out with the Bristol design team, led by Leslie G.Frise, working up a ‘minimum change’ long-range fighter version of the Beaufort torpedo bomber, minimum being the operative word. If it hadn’t been given the name ‘Beaufighter’ nobody would have ever guessed it was a fighter. As a plane it was far bigger and roomier than purpose-built heavy fighters like the Me110 and the Potez 631. Its wings were as big and thick as barn doors – its wing area of 46 square metres was almost 45% greater than its Japanese rival, the Ki-45 Toryu. Its empty weight – seven tonnes – was actually greater than the maximum take-off weight of the Me 110, and a fully loaded, late-war Beaufighter could top 11.5 tonnes gross weight, enough to make a bombed-up medium bomber blush.
Yet the apparently excessive size (and internal space) of the Beaufighter made it extremely useful for its first tactical operations – as a night-fighter.
7. The whispering death
Any self-respecting gangster needs a nickname, and particularly one ‘allegedly’ given to it by his enemies – think of ‘Scarface’ or ‘Jack the Hat’ and the less imaginative ‘Mad Frankie’. And of course the Beaufighter delivers, thanks to its silent-running sleeve-valved Hercules (or P&W) engines inspiring the nickname ‘Whispering Death’. Only the Japanese never used the nickname. Nor are rumours true that Indonesia’s most notorious gangster of the 1990s, Hercules, is named after the magnificent Bristol Hercules engine, but it is worth paying tribute to this fabulous engine.
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While much of the Bristol Beaufort’s design is very obvious in the Beaufighter – the wings and the tail being identical, the key change was the switch from the Bristol Taurus to Bristol’s new 14-cylinder radial engine, the Hercules. The difference was that the Taurus, a similar 14-cylinder engine (with, you’ve guessed it, sleeve valves) which would power the Beaufort and the Fairey Albacore, struggled for reliability. A separate concern of the Bristol engine chief, Sir Roy Feddon, was that with war approaching, he needed to perfect machine manufacturing in place of hand-building the all-important sleeve valves, in order to aid mass production. Once again, the Beaufighter’s development was perfectly timed to take on the Hercules, which would prove to be an excellent and reliable engine. Its power output would increase from 1,290 horsepower (already 140 more than peak Taurus) in 1939 to 1,735 by 1943, ideal for the later ‘Torbeau’ Mark X. Interestingly, concerns that all the Hercules engines would be snaffled for the gargantuan Stirling heavy bomber led to a Beaufighter Mk II version with Merlin engines. Ironically, in designing the Merlin ‘power egg’ nacelle in 1941, Bristol helped end the clamour for engines for the Short Stirling. Because in yet another instance of perfect timing, the Avro bomber programme immediately adopted the Beaufighter’a Merlin power egg, as it hastily redesigned the disastrous Avro Manchester with its horribly unreliable twinned Vulture engines. The rest is history, and very quickly it was Merlins, not Hercules engines, in short supply as the new Avro Lancaster proved so superior to the Stirling.
6. Claret all over the place
So it was a big plane with nice motors, carrying a bit of weight and hardly shifted like shit off a shovel. So was there anything that made the Beaufighter special? Well, there was one particular distinction. No other plane in World War 2 could match it for fixed forward firing weaponry. Its four 20mm cannon under the nose was pretty formidable, but those slab-thick wings also mounted six 0.303 machine guns. Arguably no standard mark of any other aircraft type packed such a powerful punch. Which meant when the Beaufighter hit the target, the target stayed hit.
A particularly graphic illustration of the Beaufighter’s destructive power was in the Bismarck Sea operation, where RAAF Beaufighters worked in tandem with more conventional USAAF B-25 Mitchells in attacking a Japanese troop-carrying fleet. The plan was devastating in its simplicity and its outcomes, consisting of the Beaufighters strafing the troop carriers before the Mitchells arrived to skip-bomb them. A US B25 pilot, Garrett Middlebrook, observed the mayhem: ‘They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up of the deck of ship; they’d fly all around … and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realised what I was watching was human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they’d fall in the water.’ The convoy was decimated with thousands of casualties.
5. Bouncer and Intruder by night
Like any successful thug, the Beaufighter’s apprenticeship was in the shadows of the night. Its roomy interior was perfect for carrying the nascent AI (airborne interception) radar, which with perfect timing was available at almost exactly the moment that both the Beaufighter rolled off the Production lines and the Luftwaffe started its night-bombing campaign in September 1940. The Beaufighter claimed its first kill on 25th October 1940 and the Beaufighter’s very first AI radar kill was achieved on 19th November – unfortunately four days too late for the devastating Coventry raid, during which nightfighters had been unable to intercept a single bomber.
By early Spring, the Beaufighter was starting to make a real impact on the Luftwaffe’s raiding bomber fleets, wasting valuable aircraft and crew who would be desperately needed in Hitler’s Barbarossa plans. In the space of just a month from April to May, legendary nightfighter John Cunningham destroyed ten Luftwaffe Heinkels. After May the Germans stopped the campaign, primarily due to their nefarious plans in the east, but the sudden increase in casualties at the hands of Beaufighters couldn’t have helped, including the bulk of 24 Luftwaffe losses on May 19 alone. The Beaufighter continued to inflict major casualties on subsequent Luftwaffe raiders until 1944, although it would find itself replaced in many squadrons by the speedier Mosquito.
As radar developed, so too did the Beaufighter, so that in 1943, it got the job of developing the Serrate onboard radar for night intruder missions over Europe. Naturally such nocturnal breaking and entering was right up the Beau’s street. With the discovery that German Lichtenstein onboard radar had the same frequency as the Beaufighter’s onboard radar, it was realised this could be used to detect German nightfighters which had been mauling RAF bomber formations. This led to top Beaufighter ace Bob Braham’s reign of terror over Germany in the summer of 1943. In a matter of just a couple of months he shot down no fewer than four of the Luftwaffe’s top nightfighter aces, killing three (Josef Kraft, Heinz Vinke and August Geiger, who had 122 kills between them). Braham accounted for Kraft and Vinke on the same night, while an escort for the highly successful raid on Peenemunde, which is believed to have set back the German V1 programme by months.
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4. Off to sunnier climes
Naturally as age and gradual obsolescence manifest itself on the home front, hastened with the arrival of the Mosquito, the Beaufighter found itself heading off for a place in the sunshine from 1942, but happily it would find plenty to keep it occupied in both the Mediterranean and in South-East Asia. This was most notably the case in the Mediterranean, where it was based in Malta and Egypt. Here, the Beaufighter’s versatility would be crucial, performing long-range daylight interceptions over the Mediterranean, and deadly air strikes on Axis airfields and convoys, and exacting a steady toll on Luftwaffe bombing raids by night, with 600, 272 and 227 squadrons notably successful. The Beaufighter proved particularly adept at intercepting and destroying Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica transporters criss-crossing the Med, as the noose tightened around the beleaguered Axis forces, first in Libya and Tunisia and then in Sicilly and Italy, in the Spring of 1944. The Med theatre also saw the Beaufighter employed in four nascent USAAF nightfighter squadrons, where it significantly outperformed the home-built Douglas P70 Nighthawk (aka the Havoc).
3. You’re a big plane, but you’re out of shape
Like Joe Pesci squaring up to Andre the Giant, the Beaufighter was notably lethal when it encountered particularly large bombers and transport aircraft. The biggest of the giants brought down by the Beaufighter was the Blohm und Voss Bv 222 Wiking, a huge six-engined flying boat of which a handful were built, it was used as a transport, notably in the Mediterranean theatre. Its total fully loaded take-off weight was just shy of 50 tonnes (twice the gross weight of a Short Sunderland), with a wing span of 150 feet. One sixth of all Wikings including prototypes (i.e. two of twelve) were shot down by Beaufighters, when trying to ply the route from Sicilly to Tunisia. The second of these was misidentified as the smaller (but still big) Dornier Do 24 flying boat and was reported damaged by a 272 Beaufighter pilot. In fact the behemoth crashed and all 56 passengers and crew aboard perished.
The Beaufighter was also single-handedly responsible for ending Italy’s admittedly half-hearted attempt to build a strategic bomber, the Piaggio P.108, only about 45 were built. Despite the bizarre innovation of remote-controlled defensive turrets built into the outer engine nacelles, when Piaggios were used to carry out night raids over Gibraltar, Tunisia and Algeria, they suffered heavy losses, with the Beaufighter the principle culprit.
Other outsized victims of the Beaufighter were the Focke-Wulf Fw200 Condor, encountered over the Bay of Biscay and in the Mediterranean, and the unfortunate Savoia SM82, the lumbering, tubby big brother of the excellent SM79 Sparviero torpedo bomber, which had the unenviable record of whole formations being decimated by nightfighter Beaufighters on three different occasions.
However, possibly the most consequential of the Beaufighter’s battering of big aircraft was in its various altercations with the Heinkel He177, the Luftwaffe’s great white hope as a strategic bomber, but bedevilled by production problems. The He177 failed in its primary role, but as the carrier of Henschel Hs293 remote-control bombs, it still represented a lethal threat to the landings at Salerno and Anzio, with one strike killing over 1,100 US GIs on the HMT Rohna off Salerno. However, the heavy losses inflicted on the He177’s daylight missions over Salerno by Beaufighters and other aircraft saw the Luftwaffe restrict operations to night-time for Anzio and the D-Day landings. This dramatically reduced their effectiveness – while nightfighter Beaus continued to inflict heavy losses on He177s, with Ace-in-a-day Alwyn Downing shooting down two (and a Dornier) in a single evening over Anzio.
2. Seaside interests
While most gangsters liked to be seen beside the sea in places like Margate and Brighton, the Beaufighter was slightly further afield, being based at Portreath and Predannock in Cornwall, Chivenor on the North Devon coast, and with several airbases in northern Scotland, like Banff and Creill.
The played two critical roles with Coastal Command as both a highly effective strike aircraft and a long-range reconnaissance fighter. They took on the role of long-range patrols over the Bay of Biscay and the Western approaches, frequently intercepting Luftwaffe Fw 200 Condors and Junkers Ju 88Cs, the Luftwaffe’s closest equivalent to the Beaufighter. Coastal Command also pressed for the Beaufighter’s development as a strike fighter and the ‘Torbeau’ Mark X torpedo bomber. This would equip the North Coates wing out of Lincolnshire which sank 117 vessels of over 150,000 tons. In the last months of the war, Beaufighters would team up with Mosquitos to form the Banff Strike Wing in eastern Scotland under the command of future Sunday Express editor, MP and scion of the Beaverbrook dynasty, Group Captain Max Aitken. The Banff wing’s mission was to disrupt and destroy one of the last supply lines keeping the Luftwaffe in the war – iron ore convoys off the coast of Norway. Heavily defended by Focke-Wulf Fw190s, this campaign saw some of the last great air battles of the war, as well as more Beaufighter-inflicted destruction. Unfortunately, one of the last of the Banff wing missions, on ‘Black Friday’, February 9th 1945, went badly wrong when 31 Beaufighters tried to attack a heavily armed Kreigsmarine destroyer in a particularly narrow part of a fjord, making them highly vulnerable to anti-aircraft, while Focke-Wulf Fw190s also joined the battle. Nine Beaufighters were shot down (seven by anti-aircraft), although escorting Mustangs shot down four Focke-Wulfs, including 70-kill ace Rudi Linz. An attack down a narrow fjord on a suicide mission with masses of anti-aircraft guns and fighters? Where have I seen that before? Sadly, when Hollywood came calling, the more photogenic Mosquitos got the gig. And of course, 633 Squadron was clearly the inspiration behind the Star Wars attack on the Death Star… A monument to the fallen Beaufighter crews can be found today at Bergen airport.
1. A full house of aces
So, the Beaufighter was a hard bastard, but he was our hard bastard, and what’s more he got results – much more than you might suppose.
Remarkably, only two RAF aircraft types produced more aces than the Beaufighter – no prizes for guessing those are the Spitfire and the Hurricane. Altogether, 69 aces achieved at least five confirmed victories in the Beaufighter – with UK-based nightfighter aces Jon ‘Bob’ Braham (19 victories in the Beau, followed by ten in a Mosquito) and John ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham (16 in the Beau, of 20 altogether leading the rankings. However, behind these two are a gaggle of aces who scored in the Mediterranean at night (like Canadian ‘Moose’ Fumerton and Australian Mervyn Shippard with 13 victories apiece), but also some by day, with the leading ace the stylishly moustachioed John Buchanan, whose 11.17 victories came on maritime patrols. Beaufighters patrolling the Bay of Biscay and western approaches also produced aces, led by the top Barbadian ace of the war, Aubrey Enniss, with eight victories. And there were a handful of aces in the ETO, led by the RAAF’s Reginald Gordon in the Pacific, and the Irishman Patrick Meagher over Burma, who were both credited with six victories.
The Beaufighter also ranks 3rd in the list of destroying enemy aircraft, shooting down at least 975 aircraft, with the Luftwaffe’s two workhorse medium bombers, the Junkers Ju 88 and Heinkel He111 comprising 58% of its victories. Yet, it’s more impressive even than this. Whereas single-engined fighters on all sides invariably and innocently (usually!) overclaimed victories, sometimes by a significant margin, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the Beaufighter pilots might actually have under-claimed, and their overall victory count is even higher.
This is because of the nature of their combat – most victories were scored at night, stealthily hunting down bombers which flew individually. In the darkness, it was usually clear by flames or explosions if a victim was going down. But without ignition, it wasn’t always clear that an aircraft was damaged or worse. On the night of 29/30 April 1943, a lone 600 Squadron Beaufighter flown by the Welsh pilot Flt Sgt Alwyn Downing and his English observer Flt Sgt John Lyon encountered a large flight of Junker Ju52 transports over the Mediterranean Sea near Cagliari.
In just ten minutes, Downing mounted six attacks on the aircraft, and claimed five aircraft shot down – the only time a Beaufighter pilot ‘aced in a day’. No other allied claims were made this night, yet the Luftwaffe didn’t just lose five Junkers Ju52s, but eight, including six reported to be shot down. Two others simply didn’t arrive and were reported missing, one carrying sixteen JG77 ground crew. It seems certain Downing shot down six aircraft, but might his attacks have resulted somehow in two further losses which were unwitnessed? This was by no means an isolated incident, with the Luftwaffe suffering unexplained ‘excess’ losses on no fewer than four nights in three weeks of the Pantellera campaign in May-June 1943.
Add all this aircraft destruction to its considerable success on shipping strikes, and it’s got to be said, the Beaufighter was one hard bastard of a plane.
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Beaufighter aces by geography Aces and Places
Beaufighters – its top ten victims
-Eddie Rippeth
The Beaufighter is far and away my favourite plane of the era. Quite possibly my favourite of all time. It has a stocky pugnacity to it that I adore.
Thank you for singing its praises. It deserves them, and so much more.
If Billy Butcher was an airplane….
This article has given me a better appreciation of this Bruiser/Gunboat though the mis-matched number of guns either side still offends my OCD .
I’m sure that stupid light could go elsewhere.
Do you really need it when you could have had eight machine guns ?
interesting article – especially the closing piece featuring the most successful Beaufighter pilots. The RAAF’s Reginald Gordon is mentioned and there is even more on Google about his role prior to his stint with 31 Squadron and during his stint with 31 Squadron. My father, Sir Charles Read CB AFC DFC was the CO of this squadron and most likely witnessed Reginald’s demise in 1944 when both his engines gave out. All those men were very young and very brave. (Ian G Read June 2024)
A brute indeed. Much respect.