You'll Never Go to Heaven

DESCRIPTION: "You'll never get to heaven in a Hurricane one, you'll stall before your journey's done (x2), I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more." A Spitfire, a Deffy Two, a Martinet, a Master Three, a woman's arms won't get you there; a 190 will
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1967 (Ward-Jackson/Lucas-AirmansSongBook); reportedly from 1942-1943
KEYWORDS: pilot technology derivative
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Ward-Jackson/Lucas-AirmansSongBook, p. 216, "You'll Never Go to Heaven" (1 text, tune referenced)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Ain't Gonna Grieve My Lord No More" (tune)
NOTES [325 words]: This seems to be a catalog of British fighters used early in World War II. The "Hurricane" and the "Spit" (Spitfire) are obvious. The "Deffy Two" is, I think, the Boulton Paul Defiant, which would probably deserve some sort of award for "stupidest fighter concept" if it weren't for the fact that the British were still messing around with biplane fighters at the time. The Defiant was a two-seater fighter with no forward-facing guns; it had a turret behind the pilot with four machine guns. As a result, it was slow and vulnerable (Gunston, pp. 22-24). After disastrous results as a day fighter, it was converted to night fighter and target-towing duties (Munson, p. 179).
The Martinet appears on its face to be the Miles Martinet, a rather slow plane that was deliberately designed to be a target tug and went into service in 1942 (Munson, p. 217). I wonder a little, though, if "Martinet" might be an error or mispronunciation of a famous American plane, the Grumman F4F Wildcat, which in British service was called the Martlet and was in British service by 1941 (Munson, p. 84). It was an actual fighter plane, and it was far more successful for the British, fighting the relatively feeble German fighters, than for the Americans against the nimble Japanese Zero.
The Master Three was the Miles Master, Mark III, a trainer; it was the basis for the Martinet (Munson. p. 217).
The One-Nine-Oh of the final verse isn't a British plane; it's clearly the German Focke-Wulf 190, the most capable German fighter of the war, which went into large-scale use in 1941 (Munson, p. 89).
All of which adds up to some confusion about dates: The Martinet wasn't in use until 1942, by which time the Defiant was effectively gone. (This is one reason why I suggested that the Martinet should be the Martlet.) Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the song originated before Ward-Jackson's proposed 1942 date, but that some later planes were added to it. - RBW
Bibliography

Gunston: Bill Gunston, The Illustrated Directory of Fighting Aircraft of World War II, Salamander Books, 1988, 2002
Munson: Kenneth Munson, Aircraft of World War II, second edition, Doubleday, 1972

Last updated in version 6.8
File: WJL216

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