Major General Smedley Butler collected two Medals of Honor, fought across the globe, battled corruption at home, and later claimed powerful businessmen wanted him at the center of an American coup.
American movie icon John Wayne likely would not have been nearly so successful had he gone by his given name of Marion. Public domain.
Before Smedley Butler, Let’s Talk About Names
My name is Willis. I might have preferred William, but I didn’t pick it. Mine is a family name. As such things go, it certainly could be worse.
Many famous individuals, particularly actors, often choose a new name if their original names seem insufficiently photogenic. John Wayne entered the world as Marion Robert Morrison. Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach. Michael Caine was Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Charlie Sheen was Carlos Irwin Estevez. Comedian Jonah Hill was originally Jonah Feldstein. Vin Diesel began life as Mark Sinclair. Diesel changed his name at age seventeen when he became a professional bouncer at a fashionable New York nightclub.
There are countless examples. Famed British actress Helen Mirren was originally Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov. Olivia Wilde was Olivia Jane Cockburn before she became enamored with the playwright Oscar Wilde. Natalie Portman was Natalie Hershlag, but changed her name in a failed effort at protecting her privacy.
Caryn Elaine Johnson had such a problem with passing gas that her coworkers called her “Whoopi Cushion.” When her show business career began to take off, she adopted Whoopi Goldberg because somebody told her that folks with Jewish-sounding names did better in Hollywood. Apparently, it worked. She’s worth $60 million today.
Major General Smedley Darlington Butler had a pretty goofy name, but he was one seriously manly man. Public domain.
The point is simply that some names can make surviving Second Grade pretty tough. Despite having been saddled with an objectively awkward moniker, Smedley Darlington Butler went on to do some pretty amazing things.
Butler was one of only two Marines in American history to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice for two different combat engagements. In 1933, he was also tagged to lead a military coup to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. That effort kind of fizzled, but Smedley Butler was nonetheless a simply fascinating guy.
Smedley Butler Before the Legend: A Quaker Goes to War
Smedley Butler was born on 30 July 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of three sons born to Quaker parents. Butler was an accomplished athlete in High School, serving as captain of his baseball team and quarterback on the gridiron.
He quit school 38 days before his 17th birthday to enlist in the US Marine Corps. His dad was livid, but the young man was terrified he might miss the Spanish-American War. The administrators at his High School had mercy on him and granted him a diploma anyway.
Like so many young men of his generation, Smedley Butler was prepared to do whatever it took to go to war. In this case, the young Quaker just lied about his age. Public domain.
Smedley’s dad served in the US House of Representatives for 31 years. He was chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Having your dad managing the Marine Corps budget likely didn’t hurt the young Jarhead’s career prospects.
The younger Butler lied about his age and was granted a direct commission as a Marine officer. He arrived in Cuba just after the war ended. Butler piddled about the Marine Corps for another year but then mustered out. However, with the Philippine-American War now heating up, the young officer turned around and donned his uniform yet again, this time as a First Lieutenant.
From the Philippines to the Boxer Rebellion
Like many true warriors, Smedley Butler did not handle boredom well. When not in action, he drank excessively. He once got drunk and was relieved of command.
However, in October of 1899, Butler led 300 Marines to seize the town of Noveleta in the Philippines. Though he briefly panicked when his First Sergeant was hit, Butler regained his composure and led his Marines to rout the enemy. Once the carnage abated in the Philippines, Butler headed to China to put down the Boxer Rebellion.
There was a time when America looked to its military rather than Hollywood when it needed heroes. Smedley Butler’s combat exploits eventually made it into the papers. Public domain.
During the Battle of Tientsin in the summer of 1900, Lieutenant Butler was shot through the thigh while rescuing a wounded Marine. Despite the grievous nature of his injury, Butler went on to help evacuate several of his troops under fire.
Four enlisted Marines earned the Medal of Honor in this engagement, but Marine officers were, at that time, not eligible for the award. However, Butler was granted the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, which also included a promotion to Captain. He was one of only twenty Marines in the history of the Corps to be so recognized.
Old Gimlet Eye and the Bloody Banana Wars
Having now tasted proper combat, Captain Butler just couldn’t get enough. He fought across Central America and the Caribbean in what has since come to be called the Banana Wars.
Even though Butler and his Marines were protecting American business interests, they still no doubt faced some profoundly fierce combat. Losing Marines in support of the United Fruit Company and similar corporate concerns made a deep and lasting impression.
Smedley Butler served alongside some legendarily hard men. He is second from the right on the front. Public domain.
In 1903, Butler took a detachment of Marines into Trujillo, Honduras, looking for trouble. Their primary mission was to secure the American consulate there. In a subsequent letter home, he said that he and his Marines were “Prepared to land and shoot everybody and everything that was breaking the peace.”
They landed amidst a 55-hour ongoing firefight between rebels and government forces. They found the American consul hiding in the rafters of the consulate, wrapped in an American flag. Once they got clear of the town with the American diplomat in tow, the opposing forces resumed killing each other.
Here we see Smedley Butler on the far right. He is sitting next to Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune. Perhaps that name sounds familiar. Something in the water, maybe? Public domain.
At some point in all this traipsing about the jungle, Smedley Butler contracted a variety of bizarre tropical diseases. While rescuing the American consul, Butler was feverish with something or other and had sunken red eyes.
His men began calling him “Old Gimlet Eye.” A gimlet is either a cocktail made with gin and lime or a small tool designed to bore holes in wood. This was one of several respectful, though unsettling monikers bestowed upon him by his troops.
Vera Cruz and Smedley Butler’s First Medal of Honor
Butler subsequently fought all over South and Central America. He once led his battalion to relieve a besieged city on the island of Grenada while running a 104-degree fever.
In April of 1914, he led his troops in an assault on Vera Cruz, Mexico. The fight roiled across the city and ultimately cost American forces 17 dead and 63 wounded. Along the way, Smedley Butler earned the Medal of Honor.
His citation reads in part, “For distinguished conduct in battle, engagement of Vera Cruz, 22 April 1914. Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22d and in the final occupation of the city.” The rules had obviously been changed by then to allow officers to earn the rarefied decoration.
Haiti and Smedley Butler’s Second Medal of Honor
Six months later, Smedley Butler invaded Haiti. He first arrived in the lawless area around Fort Dipitie with 44 Marines. They were ambushed by a force of 400 indigenous Cacos and, surrounded, fought them off all night long. The following morning, Butler organized an infantry charge that repelled the enemy forces in disarray.
Now here’s something you don’t see every day. This is Smedley Butler’s chest salad. Note the matching Medal of Honor ribbons on the top. Famed General George Patton once opined, “I’d give my immortal soul for that little blue ribbon.”
On 17 November 1915, Butler led an ad hoc battalion of Marines and sailors in an infiltration of Fort Rivière. The subsequent combat was hand-to-hand and pitiless. When they took the fort, 50 Haitians were dead, and Smedley Butler had earned his second Medal of Honor.
Here’s the citation: “For extraordinary heroism in action as Commanding Officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the Marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Major Butler led the attack on Fort Rivière, Haiti, 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of Marines gradually closed in on the old French bastion fort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the Cacos. Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Major Butler gave the signal to attack, and Marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos, took the bastion, and crushed the Cacos resistance.”
World War I Passed Him By, but Smedley Butler Kept Fighting
Butler was not granted a combat command during World War 1. There were several reasons for this, some political and others practical. Along the way, he had developed a reputation for erratic behavior. Butler subsequently came home to command the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
After he left the military, Smedley Butler occupied himself speaking out against American adventurism. Public domain.
From Marine General to Philadelphia’s Crime Fighter
This was a different time. In 1924, W. Freeland Kendrick had been elected mayor of Philadelphia and faced a city awash in Prohibition-driven corruption.
President Calvin Coolidge therefore released General Butler to serve as the city’s Director of Public Safety in charge of both fire and police forces. Butler reassigned his police officers to unfamiliar precincts to upset the inevitable protection rackets he knew to be active.
In his first two days on the job, Butler’s cops raided 900 illegal liquor clubs. He was quoted as having told his officers, “I don’t believe there is a single bandit notch on a policeman’s gun in this city; go out and get some.” I wonder how that might go over today….
The Business Plot: Smedley Butler’s Strangest Battle
Butler eventually retired and became an outspoken critic of war profiteering. In November of 1934, Butler claimed that there was a plot afoot led by prominent American businessmen to field a 500,000-man army of military veterans and march on Washington, depose FDR, and install MG Butler as dictator.
Along the way, Butler named names. The alleged conspirators dismissed the claims as bluff and bluster, but subsequent evidence came to light that lent credence to the plot. Regardless, Butler’s testimony before a House committee drove those behind it back into the shadows. Historians now call this sordid episode the Business Plot.
Smedley Butler lived hard, and he died hard. He was a legendary Marine. Public domain.
The Fighting Quaker’s Final Years and Legacy
Major General Butler finally retired to Newton Township, Pennsylvania, with his wife. In 1940, he fell ill and was found to be suffering from what was likely stomach cancer. He had a drinking history, and videos I tracked down in preparing this article sounded like he was a smoker as well.
MG Butler also liked his baseball. Public domain.
“The Fighting Quaker,” also known as “Old Gimlet Eye,” succumbed to his disease in June of 1940. He was 58 years old. A real “Break Glass in Case of War” Marine, Smedley Butler was indeed a Leatherneck’s Leatherneck.
Shot three times and still refusing to quit, Dr. Arthur Martin-Leake became one of only three men ever to earn the Victoria Cross twice. His story makes most definitions of courage seem inadequate.
This is Arthur Martin-Leake. He was utterly fearless in combat. Public domain.
There is kind of a weird dichotomy in my world. As a Bible-believing evangelical Christian who served as a combat arms officer, I came to grips with the peaceful tenets of my faith juxtaposed against the prospect of ripping the very life out of our great nation’s enemies. Then I left all of that and entered medical training, eventually formally taking the Hippocratic Oath.
The modern version of that pledge is actually fairly verbose. The last bit reads, “If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.” That honestly seems a bit unduly touchy-feely to me, but you get the gist.
Curiously, the earliest surviving version of the oath of Hippocrates dates back to 43 AD and specifically forbids abortion. Additionally, the concept of “Primum Non Nocere” or “First Do No Harm” isn’t actually in there per se. “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm” typically substitutes today.
I haven’t had a great deal of difficulty reconciling my faith, my profession, and my innate drive for self-reliance.
It is respect for the Hippocratic Oath that typically keeps physicians from participating in state-sponsored executions. It’s pretty tough to “First Do No Harm” if your objective is to institutionally kill somebody. It can therefore seem a bit incongruous that a professional medicine man might pack a gun every day or bear arms in service to his country.
Personally, I never struggled with any of that. I read Christ’s mandate to turn the other cheek as a personal thing. Standing idly by while evil men harm innocent folk never seemed terribly righteous to me. That’s certainly not the way real men like Moses, David, Joshua, or Nehemiah might have done it.
As such, while I do spend my days stamping out disease, I also pack a gun whenever I’m out where the Wild Things Roam and then sleep soundly afterwards. It turns out I am not the only physician to have found such balance.
The Guy
Born in April of 1874, Arthur Martin-Leake was the fifth son of Stephen and Isabel Martin-Leake at Standon outside Ware, Hertfordshire. Arthur also had two sisters. Four of the five male Martin-Leake siblings earned commissions in the British Army. The fifth was a Naval officer who captained the first combat vessel to be torpedoed by the Germans during WW1. One of his Army brothers perished in a ballooning accident over the English Channel while in uniform.
This epically whiskered gentleman is esteemed British physician Joseph Lister. He and Arthur Martin-Leake practiced medicine around the same time. Lister pioneered the sterile prep of surgical instruments and, in so doing, saved countless lives. Listerine antiseptic and the Lister bag (IYKYK) are named after him. Public domain.
Martin-Leake attended Westminster School and then matriculated at University College Hospital. He graduated with his medical degree at age 19 in 1893. That seems a bit young to me, but medicine was not quite the complicated bucket of snakes back then that it is today.
After graduation, Martin-Leake served at Hemel Hempstead District Hospital. In 1899, the young doctor signed on with the 42d (Hertfordshire) Company, Imperial Yeomanry. The British Empire was at war in South Africa, and Arthur wanted to do his bit.
The Boer War was, in a word, complicated. There were several major phases, but the most compelling was the Second Boer War. This bloody counterinsurgency scrap cost the British Empire more than 100,000 casualties. 22,092 of these were KIA.
On the other side of the balance sheet, 51,555 Boer commandos and sundry auxiliaries were rendered hors de combat. Along the way, 26,370 Boer women and children perished in concentration camps alongside an unknown number of indigenous Africans.
Atrocities were committed by both sides. It was a dark time. There were nonetheless extraordinary examples of individual heroism to be found in both camps.
The Warrior Doc
Despite being trained as a physician, Arthur Martin-Leake began his military career as a grunt. Public domain.
Martin-Leake spent a year in combat as a trooper with the Imperial Yeomanry. Afterwards, he remained in South Africa as a civilian surgeon before joining the South African Constabulary.
The SAC was a paramilitary organization established in 1900 by the British Army to pacify areas captured from the Transvaal and the Orange Free State during the preceding unpleasantness. Keeping that mob in check was no mean feat.
At age 27, Arthur Martin-Leake was serving with the 5th Field Ambulance in 1902. The Second Boer War raged, and there was blood aplenty spilt on both sides of the line. In such a gory space, competent medical support was critical.
The Fight
Arthur Martin-Leake earned his combat accolades by saving lives rather than taking them. Public domain.
On 8 February while his unit was engaged at Vlakfontein, Captain Martin-Leake was called upon to tend to British wounded. King Edward VII later awarded the young Army surgeon the Victoria Cross for his actions that bloody day. This was the narrative:
“During the action at Vlakfontein, on the 8th February, 1902, Surgeon-Captain Martin-Leake went up to a wounded man, and attended to him under a heavy fire from about 40 Boers at 100 yards range. He then went to the assistance of a wounded Officer, and, whilst trying to place him in a comfortable position, was shot three times, but would not give in till he rolled over thoroughly exhausted. All the eight men at this point were wounded, and while they were lying on the Veldt, Surgeon-Captain Martin-Leake refused water till everyone else had been served.”
Now appreciate, this was a big deal. The Victoria Cross is the British equivalent to the American Medal of Honor. Since 1854, the VC has been awarded 1,358 times. 295 of those were posthumous. By contrast, since 1863, the MOH has been awarded 3,555 times.
Suffering from three bullet wounds, Martin-Leake was in quite the bad way. He was eventually evacuated back to Britain due to his injuries. The king presented his award on 2 June 1902.
A Warrior Without a War
Despite being a card-carrying war hero, Arthur Martin-Leake just couldn’t seem to sit still. Public domain.
Recovering from combat injuries was and is typically an arduous process. Particularly back in the heady days before antibiotic drugs, getting over a trio of bullet wounds took a minute. To keep himself occupied, Dr. Martin-Leake studied up on his surgery texts while he healed. In 1903, he qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In addition to a quick mind and an almost lethal dose of patriotic fervor, Arthur Martin-Leake was afflicted with a most deplorable wanderlust. Once he healed sufficiently to travel, the certified war hero signed on as Chief Medical Officer with the Bengal-Nagpur Railway. It seemed Dr. Martin-Leake was now headed to India.
Along the way, he made time to get married. Arthur was the only one of the Martin-Leake children to do so. His wife perished shortly thereafter in India under suspicious circumstances. History seems to have forgotten the details.
Well, That Didn’t Take Long…
In 1912, Dr. Martin-Leake volunteered for the British Red Cross and was attached to the Montenegrin Army during the Balkan Wars. Dr. Martin-Leake subsequently tended to the wounded during the Siege of Scutari. At least this time he didn’t get shot.
The Balkans were the early 20th century version of the Middle East. Those lunatics were forever fighting over something or other. In fact, it was in the Balkans that the world’s next proper dustup conflagrated. In 1914 in Sarajevo, a disaffected anarchist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. This kicked over an anthill that ultimately morphed into World War 1. Dr. Martin-Leake got in on the ground floor.
A Serious Scrap
Life in the trenches on the Western Front during World War 1 was indescribably ghastly. Public domain.
Everything Martin-Leake had done up until this point was simply preparation for combat on the Western Front during the First World War. Martin-Leake fell in as a Lieutenant with his old unit, the 5th Field Ambulance of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Late in 1914, the 5th Field Ambulance was in action near Zonnebeke, Belgium. History has come to refer to this bloody fight as the First Battle of Ypres.
This was combat on a whole new scale. Unlike previous wars, this forsaken place saw the widespread use of such diabolical stuff as belt-fed machineguns and poison gas. Over 35 bloody days, a quarter of a million men were either killed or seriously wounded. 55,000 of those were British.
Borderline Unbelievable
Amidst the fetid trench warfare that so characterized humanity’s first truly industrialized war, LT Martin-Leake once again willingly placed himself in the thick of the action to rescue wounded Tommies trapped in No-Man’s Land. Miraculously, he was not himself killed. However, he did earn a second Victoria Cross. Here’s the citation:
“Lieutenant Arthur Martin-Leake, Royal Army Medical Corps, who was awarded the Victoria Cross on 13th May, 1902, is granted a Clasp for conspicuous bravery in the present campaign: — For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty throughout the campaign, especially during the period 29th October to 8th November, 1914, near Zonnebeke, in rescuing, whilst exposed to constant fire, a large number of the wounded who were lying close to the enemy’s trenches.”
In the annals of the British Empire, only three men have earned the Victoria Cross twice. Nineteen Americans can make a comparable claim with the Medal of Honor. In March of 1915, Martin-Leake was promoted to Major and assumed command of the 46th Field Hospital. He ended the war as a Lieutenant Colonel.
The Rest of the Story
Dr. Arthur Martin-Leake has been rightly venerated in the United Kingdom. He was a hero of the highest order. Public domain.
When the guns fell silent, LTC Martin-Leake still couldn’t seem to settle down. He returned to India yet again seeking adventure and eventually retired in 1937. In the late 1930’s he purchased and apparently flew a de Havilland Tiger Moth airplane without bothering to obtain any formal training as a pilot. With the onset of World War 2, the aging warrior physician commanded an ARP post. ARP stood for Air Raid Precautions. These civil defenders helped protect British civilians during the Blitz.
LTC Martin-Leake, two-time recipient of Great Britain’s highest award for gallantry in combat, died at home in 1953 at High Cross near Ware. He was attended at his death by his faithful dog Waif. Waif later found a forever home thanks to a formal appeal by the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Martin-Leake’s Victoria Cross with bar is on display at the Army Medical Services Museum in Aldershot, England today. Arthur Martin-Leake was that rare hybrid warrior/healer. His extraordinary exploits were the stuff of legend.
Islam’s Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a 22 year old Muslim who admired Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and persistently wrote to Hitler to express his admiration and his desire for Hitler’s Nazi Party to collaborate with Islam.
When Hitler rose to power, his Nazis supported al-Banna, a school teacher, to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into its ally in the Middle East; by 1938, the membership of Muslim Brotherhood topped 200,000.
During World War II, members of the Muslim Brotherhood spied for Hitler’s Nazis in the Middle East and fought for Hitler as Nazi troops in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions (see Religion of Peace). ‘Handschar’ is German for scimitar, the curved saber used by the Islamic troops of the Ottoman empire.
Above is Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a close ally of al-Banna, in Berlin, where he lived as Hitler’s VIP guest from 1941 to 1945 before joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946.
Bosnian Muslims of the 13th Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS Handschar at prayer during their training at Neuhammer, 1943.
How a female engineer defied all norms to save England in the Second World War. Beatrice “Tilly” Shilling.
The Supermarine Spitfire is nearly synonymous with Britain in World War II. It was a superb fighter plane, beloved of its pilots for its speed and agility, and by the British public as a bona fide national icon and war winner. That status was in no small part thanks to its elegant elliptical wings and the evocative roar of its Merlin engine.
But it was also fundamentally broken. Its engine would often cut out just when the dogfights of the Battle of Britain got interesting: in diving, a staple defensive and attacking maneuver. Unfortunately for the British, the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt 109s suffered no such shortcoming, giving the 109s a decisive edge in combat against British fighters.
Britain won the Battle of Britain by the narrowest of margins, and so it was imperative that a solution was found if British fighters were to contribute to the liberation of Europe. Found one was, and from the most unlikely of sources: a female engineer named Beatrice Shilling. That a solution came from a woman circa 1940 was improbable enough, but perhaps as improbable was the simplicity of her solution.
Miss Shilling’s orifice, as it came to be known, arrived just in time for the bitterly fought European offensive that paved the way for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. It without question saved the lives of British pilots. Arguably, it helped turn the tide of the war.
The Supermarine Spitfire
The problem with the Spitfire’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was first spotted in 1938 when the first production models of Spitfire rolled off the factory lines at Woolston, Southampton. At the time, it wasn’t seen as much of a problem: diving simply wasn’t something pilots did much before World War II. But by the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940, it was a matter of basic survival.
Also typically glossed over in post-war recollection is the Spitfire’s troubled beginnings. It arrived years later than planned, and at great expense, due to administrative bungling that originated at the top levels of the British government, cascaded down through incompetent captains of industry, before crashing onto factory floors and their chaotic organization of labor. If and when there was any organization of labor, that is.
Despite a prototype Spitfire having first flown in March 1936—the same year that work began on Castle Bromwich for the sole purpose of Spitfire production—things only improved in May 1940 when, upon becoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill appointed Lord Beaverbrook as Minister for Air Production. Beaverbrook immediately transferred ultimate responsibility of Spitfire production to the engineering firm Vickers. Under Vickers, production would eventually ramp up to 300 planes a month.
In July 1940, Alex Dunbar, the newly appointed manager at the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory, wrote, “Incidentally, we are sacking 60 jig and tool draughtsmen next week. We have tried to find out what they are doing but the answer’s not a lemon. In the meantime, we build the odd Spitfire or two.”
But the problems with the Spitfire were only beginning. The Battle of Britain was a success despite a serious flaw in the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine used in both the Spitfire and the Hurricane. The Hurricane was still the workhorse fighter of the Royal Air Force (RAF), thanks in part to production issues with the Spitfire. It was a more than capable machine except for the engine issues it shared with its glamorous sibling.
Hurricane Pilots responding to an air raid during the Battle of Britain
That flaw was a tendency for the engine to falter under so-called negative gravity, when powering into a dive. Negative gravity is a confusing term because the problem wasn’t one of gravity, or even force, but rather of acceleration and inertia. When an aircraft accelerates downward faster than it would in free fall, anything not bolted down, like the blood surging through the pilot’s vessels, will accelerate more slowly due to its own inertia. In relative terms, so far as life aboard the aircraft is concerned, those things are moving upward rather than downward.
Inertia’s a tricky thing, particularly when it comes to liquid fuel. Imagine the skin of a pilot’s face going into a dive, engines at full power. Now imagine the same thing happening to the liquid fuel in the engine, and specifically the chamber of the carburetor designed to regulate the flow of fuel: fuel effectively flows upward. Unfortunately, the fuel outlet holes in Merlin engines were at the bottom of the chamber while, when accelerating into a dive, the fuel was forced to the top, unable to reach the engine. The engines were being starved of fuel, causing what was known as a “weak cut” and resulting in a tendency to stutter, or even to cut out completely, under negative gravity. Either way, the result was loss in power. It was just a question of how long that loss would last.
The trouble could also strike when hitting turbulence. “I opened fire at about three hundred yards, and seemed to hit the one I was aiming at because he pulled up sharply,” Wing Commander Bob Doe later recalled. “At that moment (I must have been down to about a hundred yards), I hit his slipstream and my engine cut—stone dead.” Dogfights are presumably made all the more memorable with the added frisson of engine trouble.
This was problematic for RAF pilots for a number of reasons. First among them was that, by 1940, it was becoming increasingly evident that diving at full tilt was actually rather a good idea, tactically speaking, not to mention an intuitive reaction to being chased down by the fearsome Messerschmitt Bf 109E and Bf 110C fighters of the German Luftwaffe. Diving had the distinct advantage of making it harder to be shot down. Second was that Luftwaffe pilots being tailed by a British fighter did much the same thing to evade their pursuers, and there was really only one way to stay in hot pursuit of a diving fighter plane: dive straight after it. The third was that the Daimler-Benz engines of the Messerschmitts did not share the Merlin’s fuel-system flaw.
Luckily, the British pilots had home-court advantage. The proximity of their fuel supply meant that they could remain in combat for longer than the Luftwaffe, who had to travel some distance to theaters of war across the English Channel, fight, then fly home again.
Overall, then, the sixteen-week-long Battle of Britain was characterized by its numerous narrow margins. Though the battle was over by November 1940, the war in Europe was not. There was still the task of liberating large swathes of mainland Europe, and both the Spitfire and the Hurricane would play vital roles. Quite simply, an answer to the stalling problem needed to be found, and quickly.
The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine
Naturally, the war effort put its finest minds to the task, including Cyril Lovesey of Rolls-Royce and A.D. Fisher of the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Both devised ingenious technical solutions, both of which failed utterly in solving the problem. Their valves and diaphragms may have solved the weak cut, but this was only the start of the trouble. It was swiftly followed by a longer and more dangerous “rich cut”—when the chamber floods with excess fuel, giving a ratio of fuel to air that is too high, or too rich, to actually burn.
It would take an intimate knowledge of engines to identify the more serious problem. So it was remarkable for any number of reasons that, in 1940s Britain, the ultimate solution would come from a woman.
• • •
It was around the time of the first production Spitfire test flights of 1938 that Beatrice “Tilly” Shilling rebuilt and tested her own beloved machine: a 490cc Norton motorcycle. The same machine saw her become the fastest woman ever to ride a motorcycle at Brooklands: the first purpose-built race track in the world, which had opened near Weybridge in Surrey in 1907. Shilling was an exceptional racer, but an even better engineer.
To say that women tended not to be engineers in the early part of the 20th century would be stretching the definition of understatement to its very limits. The same stretch could be made for politicians, doctors, land owners, or indeed any role of influence.
But, even in childhood, there were signs that Beatrice Shilling would not conform to societal norms. When Shilling was still small enough to be known as Baby among the family, she was reported to have had this short exchange with her mother:
Mother: “Baby, you mustn’t bite your sister.”
Beatrice: “Have.”
Mother: “Well, say that you’re sorry.”
Beatrice: “Shan’t.”
Around 1919, the 10-year-old Beatrice grew tired of being left behind by her sisters on cycling trips and began to save for a motorcycle. Aged 12, she built a working Meccano model spinning wheel and promptly won a national competition set by Meccano Magazine.
By the age of 14, she’d achieved her goal, her chosen bike a two-stroke Royal Enfield. When she wasn’t giving her sister Anne pillion rides, she was taking it to bits and putting it back together again, engine and all. Physically speaking, Beatrice was small, which would later prove advantageous.
At 15, she decided engineering was the career for her. The problem was that it was 1924. “The average woman does not possess the same engineering instinct as the average man,” was one opinion recorded in the Daily News at around that time. It belonged to the manager of the Education Research Department at British Westinghouse. “For a woman in the 1920s a career in lion-taming would have been more realistic,” observes Shilling’s biographer, Matthew Freudenberg.
But there was a glimmer of hope in the form of the Women’s Engineering Society. It was borne, in 1919, out of the need to protect the right to work of women who had been allowed to work in arms manufacture and other engineering trades during World War I.
In May 1926, the Society distributed a letter to girls schools throughout the country. Shilling’s mother convinced her to reply. By age 17, she became an apprentice electrical engineer learning the ropes, or more accurately cables, in the new electrical power plant at Bungay, Suffolk.
With support from the Women’s Engineering Society, Shilling joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Victoria University of Manchester in October 1929. She was one of only two women accepted that year; up from the none that had been accepted before. So her student record card didn’t allow for the possibility of female titles or honorifics.
Fortunately, her education afforded her the freedom to attend classes in thermodynamics and mechanical engineering, closer to her true interest: engines. Shilling received her Master of Science in 1933, and promptly joined a lecturer, Dr G.F. Mucklow, in researching fuel consumption, heat loss, and supercharger performance in Rolls-Royce and Napier single cylinder engines.
Young Beatrice Shilling
When Beatrice Shilling turned up at Brooklands Race Track on 24 August 1934, no one thought much of her new 490cc Norton motorcycle. Like the regular riders, Shilling had come for the Hutchinson 100 event and its attractive prize pot.
It takes two things to race at Brooklands: a motor vehicle, and the intestinal fortitude to use it at tremendous velocity. Even in 1906, it was a track built for sheer speed. More or less egg-shaped in plan, it consists of little more than long straights and even longer, steeply banked bends. And by 1934, the track had lost its smooth concrete complexion, having had potholes gouged out of it by decades of hulking racing cars.
Brooklands’ resulting holes were patched, but they still made for a bumpy surface, which was disconcerting at those 100-mph speeds. Worse, a section of the track crosses the river Wey, creating undulations capable of throwing fast racers clear of the track. To complicate matters further, this was on one of the banked turns. Those chasing the fastest lap times would race near the steepest, highest edge of the bank—circumstances under which staying in contact with the ground is, according to conventional wisdom, a good idea.
Having given the Norton the once over, course handicapper “Ebby” Ebblewhite sent Shilling off as one of the first riders in the three-lap race. Because the event saw great power discrepancies between the competing machines, it was Ebby’s job to let the slowest bikes out first, with the most powerful 1,000cc “scratch bikes” starting last. An extract from the contemporary publication Motor Cycling records what happened next:
“A feature of the first handicap was the brilliant riding of Miss B. Shilling on a very standard-looking 490cc Norton. After a slowish first lap, she made up for lost time with a second circuit of 101.02 mph, thus joining the select ranks of Gold Star holders, being the second woman motorcycle racer to do so.”
Evidently impressed, Ebby put her on scratch for the next race, making her the first woman to do so when racing against men. She promptly lapped at 101.85 mph. Shilling was not the first woman to claim a Brooklands Gold Star—that honor was accorded to Fanny Blenkiron in April 1934—but Shilling would go on to set the record for the fastest woman to lap the circuit at 106 mph. Her record stands today.
Shilling was fast for several reasons. Her size was one advantage. At five feet tall, she was short enough to lie more or less flat, reducing drag. And though history doesn’t record all the specifics of the tweaks and modifications Shilling made to her machine, they were numerous. Freudenberg indicates that, in later letters to friends, she experimented with the length of inlet tract. This is the part of the engine that supplies the potent mixture of air and fuel to the cylinders, its length affecting power, torque, and fuel efficiency. Though she wouldn’t have known it at the time, Shilling was gaining the unique understanding that would prove so pivotal in saving the Spitfire and Hurricane in the depths of World War II: the physics of providing fuel to engines.
The following years saw more tweaks, greater speeds, and more impressive wins, including against professional racers, and track record holders like Ben Bickell and Noel Pope. It was 1935 when she set her enduring speed record.
Shilling starting a race at Brooklands Race Track
In 1938 and 1939, the Norton motorbike was rebuilt from scratch with a homemade supercharger, and a new fuel tank where the saddle once was. Unfortunately, Shilling was too short to ride it. By then she was married, and her husband George Naylor, who stood a whole foot taller, took to racing instead. He became an able rider with the help of Shilling’s coaching, which was certainly unique: when they married in 1938, it had been on the condition that Naylor first earn himself a Brooklands Gold Star. It came in the nick of time. Racing at Brooklands ended forever in 1939. World War II had begun.
• • •
By the outbreak of war, Shilling had been working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment for more than three years. She initially wrote technical documentation, work that the hands-on Shilling found tedious. But, Freudenberg writes:
“By then Beatrice’s professional gifts had been recognized. She could identify the physical laws involved in a new problem or requirement, quantify them and design a mechanical solution. She could also design the tests that ensured that the instrument or engine performed as intended, and if not, why not.”
By November 1939, after a series of promotions, she had reached the position of Technical Officer in charge of carburettor research and development work. In other words, she was perfectly positioned to tackle the skittish Merlin engines of the Hurricane and the Spitfire.
In lieu of a fix, pilots had devised their own workarounds: dramatic maneuvers deployed if and when the engine cut out. Peter Brothers, a flight lieutenant with No. 32 Squadron, later recalled his own novel solution:
“When an enemy fighter dived from behind, fired and carried on diving past, one could not immediately dive in pursuit without the engine temporarily cutting and causing one to be left far behind. This could be avoided by rolling upside down, pulling back on the stick into a dive (positive g) then rolling level in the dive. […] Similarly, on sighting a target below, one suffered momentarily if one pushed the nose down to attack, a grave disadvantage.”
Tests ordered and overseen by Shilling identified the true problem: the rich cut that followed the weak cut addressed by Lovesey and Fisher.
Shilling worked out the precise volume and pressure of fuel being pumped into the chamber by the Merlin engine and designed a brass restrictor with a hole precisely the diameter needed to allow maximum flow of fuel, and therefore maximum power, without flooding the engine. Crucially, Shilling’s solution could be fitted without the removal of the carburettor, so the fix could be made in situ at operational airfields. Though it didn’t eliminate engine cut-outs altogether, it did minimize it to an acceptable degree.
This left only the logistical problem of how to get the restrictors to Fighter Command airfields in good time. Shilling organized a small band of engineers to assist, though inevitably she travelled up and down the country solo, and by her preferred mode of travel: her trusty Norton motorcycle. By then she’d made the small concession, perhaps under duress, to detune the Norton somewhat to make it more suitable for public roads.
“Her appearance at airfields with a bag of tools and a brisk manner became something of a legend,” Freudenberg writes. “Thanks to Sir Stanley Hooker, the engineer who led supercharger development at Rolls-Royce at the time, the restrictor became known as Miss Shilling’s orifice to pilots and fitters of the RAF.”
Early versions of the restrictor have been described as cone-shaped, though in her 2018 book Women of Invention: Life-Changing Ideas by Remarkable Women, Charlotte Montague describes the original restrictors as brass thimbles. They were later refined to a flat washer design, though inevitably Shilling and team would go on to eliminate them, and the entire negative gravity problem, by redesigning the carburettor outright.
Her efforts were of inestimable value to Fighter Command. Though the Battle of Britain, which prevented a Nazi invasion of Britain, was doubtless its crowning achievement, the ever-improving Spitfire would go on to perform operations for the rest of the war.
But fighting over mainland Europe, it was the British fighters that suffered from their limited range, and in some operations, losses were catastrophically high. It was due to these ongoing narrow margins in battle that we can be sure Shilling’s innovation saved lives.
Seldom-seen (and barely legible) schematic of the Merlin carburettor
Years later, Keith Maddock, chief engineer at Hangar 42, an RAF base during the war, went so far as to describe the restrictor as a war-winning modification. “Beatrice Shilling helped us to win World War II—of that there is no doubt,” he told the BBC in 2017. Her war efforts weren’t limited to improvements to the Merlin engine. She also contributed to a range of engines to improve starting in freezing conditions, and operation at higher altitudes.
Though she undoubtedly deserved to rise to the top of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, this was prevented by the organization’s leadership, which was entirely male. She disliked formality and bureaucracy, joking after the war that Britain had been on the winning side due to a shortage of paper. Yet Freudenberg records that she was as capable of dealing with senior members of government and industry as successfully as anyone. Her technical knowledge was very possibly unsurpassed. If nothing else, she was eventually awarded the Order of the British Empire for her wartime efforts.
Biographer Montague likewise argues that a case can be made that Shilling helped to win the war. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to quantify her contribution. But at least as significant is the trail Shilling blazed as a pioneering woman in British engineering. She later served on the committee of the Women’s Engineering Society, and actively encouraged young women into engineering careers. She is often described as “a flaming pathfinder of Women’s Lib,” including by her alma mater, now Manchester University. (Though in Spitfire: The Biography, writer Jonathan Glancey attributes the descriptor to a colleague of Shilling’s.)
After the war, Shilling was compelled to work in the burgeoning fields of rocketry, ramjets, and guided weaponry. The war may have been won, but with NATO powers vying with Russia, military and aeronautical supremacy remained high on Britain’s agenda. In 1955, she was promoted to be the Royal Aircraft Establishment’s Senior Principal Scientific Officer. By 1957, she was in charge of heat tests on scale models of the liquid oxygen tanks of what would become the Blue Streak missile: initially developed as part of Britain’s nuclear deterrent and later repurposed as the European Space Agency’s Europa satellite launch system.
Shilling died on 04 November 1990 from cancer of the spine. Her husband George Naylor, who himself had gone on to fly Lancaster bombers during World War II, died six years later. He had always been proud of Shilling, and especially her solution to the problem of negative gravity.
The question remains as to what Shilling herself thought of the dubious term “Miss Shilling’s orifice.” Freudenberg reckons that it “probably amused her, recognising the language of familiarity rather than disrespect.” By the time the words were being bandied about Britain’s airfields she was certainly held in high esteem, and Freudenberg records her dry sense of humor and “unrepentant brevity.”
He has a point. After the war, Shilling had taken to racing cars rather than bikes, but that came to a sudden end in a bad crash on 23 June 1962. Naylor noted at the time that Shilling “was virtually pushed off course by a clot who could not drive and who was determined not to be beaten by a woman.”
Shilling’s take? “He was an ex-RAF pilot, so he was too busy checking the instruments to look where he was going.”
Shot three times and still refusing to quit, Dr. Arthur Martin-Leake became one of only three men ever to earn the Victoria Cross twice. His story makes most definitions of courage seem inadequate.
Beatrice “Tilly” Shilling.
