Ask which fighter the RAF prized most in the last year of the Second World War and most people will say the Spitfire. They would be wrong. The aircraft that its pilots rated above all others — faster on the deck than a Spitfire, deadlier against the V-1, and one of the very few Allied fighters that could run down a German jet — was the Hawker Tempest. And almost nobody remembers it.

One of its greatest pilots, the French ace Pierre Clostermann, put it more bluntly than any specification sheet ever could.

Born from a flawed brute

The Tempest grew out of the Hawker Typhoon, a powerful but troubled fighter that shook itself to pieces at high speed. Hawker gave the design a new, thin, laminar-flow wing that cured its problems and unlocked its performance. Bolted to a snarling 2,180-horsepower Napier Sabre engine, the Tempest V could reach around 435 mph — and down low, where it mattered, it was the fastest Allied fighter in the sky.

The V-1 killer

The Tempest reached the squadrons in the spring of 1944, just in time for Hitler’s flying-bomb offensive. Its speed at low level made it the ideal V-1 hunter, chasing down the buzz bombs over southern England and tipping or shooting them out of the sky. Tempest pilots destroyed more than 800 V-1s — more than any other aircraft type, working alongside the RAF’s first jet, the Gloster Meteor.

Fast enough to catch a jet

Then came the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter — faster than anything the Allies had. Yet the Tempest was one of the rare piston fighters that could catch and kill a 262, pouncing on the jets at low altitude as they slowed to land. Tempest pilots claimed around twenty of them. Between times, the aircraft ranged across north-west Europe as a devastating ground-attack machine.

The men who loved it

Clostermann, France’s highest-scoring pilot in the RAF, rated the Tempest the finest fighter he flew in the entire war — better even than the Spitfire and the Mustang. The wing that pioneered it was led by Roland “Bee” Beamont, who worked out the tactics that turned the Tempest’s raw speed into a war-winning weapon. To the men who flew it, there was no argument about which fighter they wanted.

Overlooked, but flying again

So why is the Tempest forgotten? Timing and image. It arrived late, served briefly, and was overshadowed forever by the graceful Spitfire that had already won the nation’s heart in 1940. Of the many hundreds built, just one airworthy Tempest exists today — MW763, returned to the sky in 2023 after a 34-year restoration, a rare chance to hear a Napier Sabre sing again.

The Spitfire got the fame. The Tempest got the job — and the quiet, fierce loyalty of the men who took it to war.

Sources: Wikipedia; Military Machine; Pierre Clostermann, “The Big Show”; Key Aero; hawkertempest.se.