In the skies over Britain in 1940 the plane turned the tide against the Nazis, but only a handful of people knew that it owed its edge to secrets cribbed from Germany.
In the early spring of 1936, people taking a stroll in the quiet, bucolic lanes of Hampshire, in southern England, would occasionally hear the roar of a powerful airplane overhead and—if lucky—would catch a glimpse of a startling new shape in the sky, a fighter with wings shaped like a...
