Short Stirling
The Short Stirling was a British four-engined heavy bomber built by Short Brothers for the Royal Air Force. The first of the RAF's three wartime four-engined heavies to enter service, it flew its first operations in February 1941, but the 100-foot wingspan limit and divided bomb bay written into its pre-war specification left it with a low ceiling and a restricted bomb load. Withdrawn from front-line bombing by the end of 1943, it went on as a glider tug, paratroop and supply aircraft and transport. Shorts built 2,371, and no complete example survives.
Why It Mattered
The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF's three famous four-engined heavy bombers to enter service, ahead of the Handley Page Halifax and the Avro Lancaster. Through 1941 it was Bomber Command's only four-engined heavy bomber, and it stayed a mainstay of the force until the two later heavies arrived in numbers. Its career was shaped by the pre-war specification that created it, and History of War judges that its performance suffered from restrictions imposed by unrealistic pre-war requirements. Crews nevertheless valued it: Vintage Aviation News describes the type as popular with its crews for its remarkably good handling. In all, 2,371 Stirlings were built.
Design Notes
Shorts designed the Stirling, company designation S.29, in response to Air Ministry Specification B.12/36, which called for a four-engined heavy bomber. The specification capped the wingspan at 100 feet so that the aircraft would fit into existing hangars, and Shorts' wish for a much wider wing, of 112 feet, was refused. History of War notes that the limit was later blamed for much of the Stirling's poor performance, though its span of 99 feet 1 inch was only three feet smaller than the Lancaster's. The structure drew on the company's Sunderland flying boat, its fuselage adapted from the Sunderland's with the boat hull left off. The bomb bay was divided into three parallel sections, none able to take a bomb over two feet in diameter, so the Stirling could never carry the 4,000 lb blockbusters that became the war's standard bomb. To shorten the take-off run, the undercarriage was lengthened, giving the Stirling its characteristic high cockpit position, with the nose more than twenty feet above the ground. Production Stirlings were powered by four Bristol Hercules radial engines, the Mk I by Hercules XIs and later marks by Hercules XVIs.
Operational History
The first full-scale prototype flew on 14 May 1939, but was destroyed on landing when its light alloy undercarriage gave way. Production aircraft reached No. 7 Squadron at RAF Leeming in August 1940. The squadron flew the type's first operational missions on 10 February 1941, against fuel storage tanks at Vlaardingen, near Rotterdam. Stirlings flew in the first thousand-bomber raid, on Cologne, and the Stirling was the pioneer type when the Pathfinder force was formed in August 1942. Its relatively poor operational ceiling kept it below the other bomber streams, and losses were heavy: Wikipedia records that within five months of the type's introduction, 67 of its 84 aircraft had been lost in action or written off in crashes. By December 1943, Stirlings were being withdrawn from front-line service as bombers, as the more capable Halifax and Lancaster took over the strategic bombing of Germany. The second career was varied: minelaying off German ports, towing gliders and dropping paratroops for the Normandy landings and Operation Market Garden, and dropping supplies to irregular forces in occupied Europe. The later marks were built for that work: the South Australian Aviation Museum's per-mark accounting gives 450 Mk IV glider tugs and transports and 160 Mk V freighters. Transport Command phased its Stirlings out during 1946 in favour of the Avro York, and the type was fully withdrawn from RAF service that year.
Afterlife
No complete Stirling survives today. The largest remaining piece is the battered tail section of Mk III LK488, which crashed on Mickle Fell in October 1944 and was recovered by the RAF in September 1977. In 2023 that tail section went on display at the Royal Air Force Museum London, while another fuselage section from the aircraft is displayed at the museum's Cosford site. Lengths of fuselage survive at Vraux in France and Deelen in the Netherlands, preserved by their post-war use as livestock shelters. In 2020 a Dutch team recovered the shattered remnants of Mk III BK716 from Lake Markermeer, and the salvage also raised identifiable human remains of its crew. The closest thing to a Stirling today is a recreation: the Stirling Aircraft Project, a registered charity in Cambridgeshire, is steadily recreating a Mk III forward fuselage section, piece by piece, using many original parts.