On the morning of 12 May 1940, five Fairey Battle bombers of No. 12 Squadron took off to destroy a bridge over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, in Belgium. German troops were pouring across it. The bridge was ringed with anti-aircraft guns and patrolled by Messerschmitts. Everyone involved understood the odds. One of the five aircraft came back.

Out of that near-suicidal mission came the Royal Air Force’s first two Victoria Crosses of the Second World War. And the aircraft that carried those men to their deaths was already, in 1940, hopelessly obsolete — a sleek-looking bomber that had become a death trap.

Obsolete the moment it mattered

The Battle was a child of the early 1930s, when a monoplane with a retractable undercarriage and a Merlin engine looked thoroughly modern. It was, in fact, the first RAF aircraft to enter service with the Rolls-Royce Merlin, beating the Hurricane and Spitfire into squadrons. But it carried a three-man crew and a bomb load on a single engine that also had to haul fighters like the Spitfire — and it paid the price. Fully loaded, it was nearly 100 mph slower than a Messerschmitt Bf 109, and it defended itself with just two rifle-calibre machine guns.

Ten squadrons of Battles were sent to France in September 1939 as the Advanced Air Striking Force. There were flashes of defiance: on 20 September 1939 a Battle gunner, Sergeant F. Letchford, shot down a Bf 109 for the RAF’s first aerial victory of the war. But when the German offensive opened in May 1940, the Battle squadrons were thrown against bridges and columns defended by massed flak and fighters, and they were annihilated.

The bridge at Veldwezelt

On 12 May, five crews of No. 12 Squadron volunteered for the Albert Canal mission. Flying Officer Donald Garland led the attack; Sergeant Thomas Gray was his observer, navigating the aircraft to the target. They pressed home a low-level dive-bombing run through a wall of fire. Four of the five Battles were destroyed. Garland and Gray were killed.

For their leadership and sacrifice, Garland and Gray were awarded the Victoria Cross — the first two given to the RAF in the Second World War, both posthumous. There is a lasting unfairness in the story: the third member of Garland’s crew, wireless operator and gunner Leading Aircraftman Reynolds, who died alongside them, received no award at all.

The losses were staggering. On 14 May 1940, in attacks around Sedan, the RAF lost 40 of 71 aircraft committed, the majority of them Battles. In a matter of days, the Advanced Air Striking Force had been gutted. The people who had built and flown the Battle were brave; the aircraft was simply the wrong tool, sent to do an impossible job.

A quieter second life

Withdrawn from front-line service by the end of 1940, the surviving Battles found a safer purpose. Hundreds were shipped to Canada and Australia, where, as dual-control trainers and target tugs, they taught a generation of Commonwealth aircrew the basics of flying and gunnery, serving into the late 1940s.

The Fairey Battle is remembered less for what it achieved than for what it cost. It is a hard lesson in how quickly aviation moved in the 1930s — and a monument to the men who climbed into an outdated aircraft, knew the odds, and went anyway.

Sources: London Gazette; Imperial War Museums; historyofwar.org; Wikipedia.