Spitfires: The Kids Who Built Them

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

81 years after the beginning of the Battle of Britain in July 1940, we are looking at the people behind one of the iconic machines which helped the Allies towards victory. It is known that the average age of a pilot flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain was 20 years old, but many of those involved in designing and building the machines were even younger. In this episode Alasdair Cross, a producer from the BBC World Service, speaks to James about these individuals and their stories, and how their creation changed the course of the Second World War. Alasdair’s Sunday Times bestseller is called ‘The Spitfire Kids: The generation who built, supported and flew Britain's most beloved fighter’.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and in this episode we have the brilliant Alistair cross
0:06.7	Here's the author of a new book the Spitfire kids the generation who built supported and flew Britain's most beloved fighter.
0:15.0	We wanted, as we approached the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain on Saturday
0:18.9	to take those few steps back and look at how the Spitfire actually came into existence. Who was it, who invented it,
0:26.3	and who were the geniuses that sorted out all those niggly problems that made it the fighter
0:31.3	aircraft that it came to be to help win the Second World War.
0:35.8	Alister is brilliant, so here he is on the Spitfire kids. And the Hi, Alistair. Thanks for coming on the History Hit Warfare podcast. How you doing today?
0:59.6	Very well, James. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Not a problem at all. Well it's the perfect time to have you on the
1:05.0	podcast as we approach the anniversary of the start of the Battle of Britain on Saturday, July 10th,
1:11.7	when those brave young Spitfire pilots risked and gave their lives
1:16.4	to defend the UK. But in your work you take us a little bit further back to the people
1:22.1	who built the aircraft who were also quite young
1:25.3	in their teens and early 20s. So tell us when did the work on the Spitfire begin?
1:32.2	Well you can actually take the story of the Spitfire begin? Well you can actually take the story of the
1:34.3	Spit fire back quite a long way because it has its kind of origins in the
1:39.2	Schneider Trophy which was this battle between the Great Aviation nations of the Interwar period to build the fastest possible aircraft and at the time sea planes were the fastest possible aircraft and France France, Italy, the states, and the UK battled over 20 years
1:57.8	to build these amazing aircraft which went faster than man had ever gone before.
2:02.8	And the key figure for us in the Spitfire story
2:05.1	is R.J Mitchell, who was the designer of the Spitfire.
2:08.4	And he cut his teeth on the Schneider trophy.
2:11.6	It was set up by a sort of French playboy called Jacques Schneider whose father I think
2:16.4	ran an armaments company and made a fortune so he his son raced speedboats and aircraft
	...

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