  {| |} the fairey battle was a british single-engine light bomber built by the fairey aviation company in the late 1930s for the royal air force. the battle was powered by the same rolls-royce merlin piston engine that gave contemporary british fighters high performance; however, the battle was weighed down with a three-man crew and a bomb load. despite being a great improvement on the aircraft that preceded it, by the time it saw action it was slow, limited in range and highly vulnerable to both anti-aircraft fire and fighters with its single defensive .303 machine gun.ethell 1995, p. 177. during the "phoney war", the fairey battle recorded the first raf aerial victory of the second world war but by may 1940 was suffering heavy losses of well over 50% per mission. by the end of 1940 the battle had been withdrawn from combat service and relegated to training units overseas. for such prewar promise, the battle was one of the most disappointing of all raf aircraft. ==design and development== the original fairey battle was designed to air ministry specification p.27/32 as a two-seat day bomber, to replace the ageing hawker hart and hind biplane bombers, and to act as an insurance policy in case heavier bombers were banned by the 1932 geneva disarmament conference.air international march 1981, p. 127. at the time, britain expected any future war would see france as its enemy and so the distance to paris was a factor in determining the range it needed.buttler, british secret projects: fighters and bombers 1935-1950 2005 midland. p65 the battle emerged as a single-engine, all-metal, low-wing cantilever monoplane, equipped with a retractable tail wheel landing gear. its clean design with its long and slim fuselage and cockpit for three (pilot, navigator and gunner) seated in tandem with a continuous glazed canopy, was similar to a large fighter rather than a bomber.[http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1937/1937%20-%202301.html "fairey battle - designed for
British_bomber_aircraft_1930a1939 Fairey_aircraft Low-wing_aircraft Single-engined_tractor_aircraft World_War_II_British_bombers