Handley Page Hampden
The Handley Page Hampden was a British twin-engined medium bomber that entered RAF service in 1938, one of Bomber Command's three modern twin-engined bombers at the outbreak of the Second World War. Its narrow fuselage made it fast but cramped and weakly defended; driven from daylight operations, it bombed by night until Bomber Command withdrew it in September 1942, then served Coastal Command as a torpedo bomber. Production totalled 1,432 aircraft: 502 by Handley Page, 770 by English Electric and 160 built in Canada.
Why It Mattered
The Hampden was one of the three twin-engined bombers in RAF service when the Second World War began, alongside the Whitley and the Wellington. It had been developed to Air Ministry specification B.9/32 of September 1932, which called for a twin-engined bomber of significantly higher performance than anything seen before. By the outbreak of war, Bomber Command had ten squadrons of Hampdens, the whole of No. 5 Group. In all 1,432 Hampdens were built: 502 by Handley Page, 770 by English Electric and 160 in Canada. The Canadian Museum of Flight notes that Canadian production made the Hampden the first mass-produced modern all-metal monoplane built in Canada.
Design Notes
Handley Page's answer to the specification was a stressed-skin mid-wing monoplane powered by two Bristol Pegasus radial engines. Its wing gave a top speed of 265 mph with a landing speed of 73 mph, remarkably low for an aircraft of its size. The fuselage was short, narrow but tall, with a very slender tail, and so cramped that crew members could not change places in flight. That shape earned the nicknames "Flying Suitcase" and "Flying Panhandle". Defensive armament was the lasting weakness: as built, the Hampden carried only four .303in machine guns. Both rear gun positions were soon given a second gun, but the manually operated guns could never match the powered turrets of the Wellington.
Operational History
The prototype first flew on 21 June 1936, and the Hampden entered squadron service with No. 49 Squadron, which received its first aircraft in September 1938. Daylight operations were its undoing: on 29 September 1939, off Heligoland Bight, a formation of eleven Hampdens lost five aircraft to attack by German fighters. The type then joined the night offensive, flying the first attack on German soil, against Sylt on 19/20 March 1940, and taking part in the first raid on Berlin on 25/26 August 1940. It was still in the front line for the 1,000-bomber raids of 1942, making up 79 of the 1,047 aircraft on the first of them. Bomber Command withdrew the Hampden in September 1942, a year earlier than the Wellington, as four-engined heavies including Handley Page's own Halifax took over. The Hampden then had a second career as a torpedo bomber: the bomb bay was deepened to carry the 18-inch torpedo, and in April 1942 No. 144 Squadron transferred with its Hampdens to Coastal Command. In September 1942 the squadron moved to northern Russia to protect the Arctic convoys against German surface attacks; no German warships were encountered in its two months there, and it eventually sailed home without its aircraft. In all, four squadrons flew the Hampden as a torpedo bomber, the last retaining it until December 1943. In Canada, the Hampdens not shipped to Britain equipped No. 32 OTU at Patricia Bay for training, an assignment that cost as many as two or three airframes a month in accidents.
Afterlife
No Hampden was retained for museum display at the end of the war, yet three airframes survive. The Canadian Museum of Flight's P5436, a Canadian-built aircraft, had flown only 100 hours when it crashed into Saanich Inlet near Patricia Bay on 15 November 1942, during torpedo dropping practice. The wreck sank 600 feet to the bottom; salvaged decades later, it was rebuilt using components from two other Canadian Hampden crash sites and is on display at the museum in Langley, British Columbia. The RAF Museum's TB.1 P1344 was shot down over the Kola Peninsula by Bf 109 fighters in September 1942, on the Russia deployment; recovered in 1991, it was acquired by the museum in 1992. Its restoration accelerated from 2014, and in 2025 the aircraft moved from the museum's Midlands site to London for its first public display.