Fairey Fulmar: The Fleet Air Arm's Unlikely Hero

The remarkable story of how a make-do fighter proved itself indispensable in the harshest theatres of war Fairey Fulmar The Fleet Air Arm's Unlikely Hero charts, for the first time, the full history of the Fairey Fulmar naval fighter. A hastily converted light bomber, rejected by the RAF and increasingly obsolete against Messerschmitts and Zeroes, somehow the Fulmar became the top-scoring Royal Navy fighter aircraft of World War II. The Fairey Fulmar was the Fleet Air Arm's top-scoring fighter of World War II. However, this simple fact belies the contradictions at the heart of the Fulmar's story how a hastily converted light bomber, rejected by the RAF and increasingly obsolete against Messerschmitts and Zeroes, held the line during the Royal Navy's darkest hour. When it entered service in 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, the Fulmar seemed to put the Navy's aviators on an equal footing with 'The Few', as it was the first naval fighter to share the eight-gun armament and the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of the RAF's Spitfires and Hurricanes. However, the Fulmar was no nimble interceptor. Converted from a failed light bomber to fill a gap in the Fleet Air Arm's hopelessly inadequate armoury, the Fulmar was big, heavy and no match for the best Axis fighters in a dogfight. Even so, it possessed hidden strengths that enabled naval pilots to turn the tables on the enemy when all seemed lost. From the battles of Taranto and Matapan to the cauldron of Malta in the Mediterranean, from the freezing wastes of the Arctic convoy routes to the Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean and, later, making the first, faltering steps towards radar-guided night-fighting, the Fulmar rose above its unpromising origins to play a vital role in the Allied victory. AUTHOR: Matthew Willis is an author and illustrator with a passion for naval aviation that developed during childhood. His first book, published in 2007, explored the little-known Blackburn Skua, a naval dive-bomber and fighter. He has since written widely, especially on the more obscure, authoring both articles and books. In 2012, he was introduced to the family of Duncan Menzies, an important yet almost completely forgotten test pilot from the 1930s and 1940s. This encounter prompted him to drop everything and write a biography of Menzies, Flying to the Edge, which was published in 2017. As Menzies was the lead test pilot for the Fulmar, it is highly fitting that his biography be followed with this comprehensive history of the aircraft itself. Matthew is a Council Member of the Navy Records Society. He has appeared as an expert and consultant on various television documentaries, including PBS's The Last Days of the Battleship and Discovery's Wings of War, and is a frequent contributor to Aeroplane magazine. 100 illustrations