Four New Falcons
I
THE best planes in the world are no better than the worst if you can catch them on the ground, as the Germans caught the Polish air force in September 1939 and the French air force in May 1940, and as the Japanese caught us in Honolulu on December 7, 1941. We can take comfort in the fact that, so long as planes were to be smashed on Hickam Field, our best ones were not there, and that the Japanese could destroy only old Curtiss P-40 Tomahawks.
But why did we have obsolete planes in Hawaii and the Philippines? The answer to the criticism implied in that question is that we did and yet we didn’t have obsolete planes. About 80 per cent of the fighters built for our American air force in 1941 are by severe standards obsolete. But that fact does not alarm the Army Air Corps, which has reason to believe that we have some of the best fighter-plane designs in the world. It takes two years to get a new airplane design rolling off the assembly lines in that volume which the Air Corps calls ‘battle production.’ But the war is moving so fast that about every three months discoveries are made which render existing types theoretically obsolete. Hence any plane which is in important production is, in the nature of things, ‘obsolete.’
At the close of 1941, America had only two pursuit planes, the Curtiss P-40 Kittihawk and the Bell P-39 Airacobra, in battle production. The more modern of these, the Bell, had been conceived in 1936 — the Curtiss even earlier. But remember that the British Spitfire is a military adaptation of a racing plane which flew ten years ago, while the basic outline of the present Messerschmitt was laid down shortly after Hitler came to power. Thus, if the basic design of the present Curtiss P-40 is obsolete, it is in respectable company.
Not only are designs changing rapidly, but fighter planes are becoming highly specialized. The German campaign in Poland showed beyond question the effectiveness of the combat plane, which is attached to and coöperates with the army in the field. No combat plane can have everything — super altitude plus super fire-power plus the maximum rate of climb and manœuvrability — and if any company tried to build all these powers of performance into one aircraft, it would produce an unworkable monstrosity. Our American air force will therefore go into battle with many specialized fighter types. In addition to the Bell Airacobra, which is a light, lowaltitude pursuit that can land in a converted cow-pasture and is beautifully adapted for cooperation with ground combat forces, we have a middle-altitude pursuit in the Curtiss P-40 Kittihawk. A pursuit plane’s function is to chase enemy bombers, and in order to chase down the bombers it must have speed and range; it does not need altitude to do its highly specialized job.
The other type of American fighter is the interceptor, which in its purest form is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The interceptor is not designed to go looking for bombers. Its base is near the city or target which it is assigned to defend, and it has a terrific rate of climb, so that it can get up into the sky and bring down the cumbersome bombers before they can make their runs over the target. The Lockheed Lightning is the fastest military airplane in the world today, but it gets its super speed and super rate of climb at the expense of range, which it does not need, and of manœuvrability, which it can spare.
Range and manœuvrability we find in the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. If the Thunderbolt falls a little short of the Lightning’s speed and rate of climb, not only can it intercept bombers but it is also a high-altitude fighter. With a ceiling equal to that of a Flying Fortress, the Thunderbolt on patrol can perch on the stratosphere’s edge and plummet downward like a falcon onto enemy fighters which, escorting their bombers, might outnumber or outmanœuvre the Lockheed Lightning. Or so our Air Corps theorizes; for, while both Lightning and Thunderbolt have hatched out into battle-production volume, neither plane has yet been proved in actual combat.
II
The first of the new American pursuits of revolutionary design to go overseas is the Bell Airacobra. Its original was sketched out in the fall of 1936. The Army Air Corps was looking for an advanced type of plane, but one with no experimental airfoil combinations which could make trouble, and arranged a competition among fighter-plane manufacturers for June 1937, stating only speed, rate of climb, and the fact that tricycle landing gear and a 37 millimeter cannon would be desirable features. Bell submitted two designs and won both first and second place.
And then Bell’s troubles began. The ca.nnon (the mightiest ever to take wings) could not possibly be synchronized to fire through a propeller. The designers had drawn the propeller around the cannon, giving the propeller a hollow hub which contained the muzzle of the gun. But if all this bulky cannon mechanism had to come just behind the propeller, what was to be done with the motor?
The Germans had an answer to this: they were hub-firing a 20 millimeter cannon through the middle of a specially designed V-type Mercedes-Benz motor. Bell had to depend on the American Allison. The Allison could be pushed further back into the fuselage, making room for the cannon and its feedboxes, and be linked with the prop by a drive shaft. Only, with all this, the poor pilot would be pushed so far back into the fuselage that he would be practically squatting among the tail surfaces, with his forward visibility zero. Bell’s designers reasoned that, since they had to have a drive shaft, they might us well lengthen it still more, pushing the motor still farther back into the fuselage to make room for the pilot in front. When it was all done the pilot had a twelve-cylinder Allison motor behind his ears and a cannon just in front of his lap. But he was happy among men, for, perched out there in front of the motor, he had marvelous visibility ahead and below.
The conventional airplane landing gear has two wheels under the wings and a third wheel under the tail. In the tricycle type the two wing wheels remain about where they were, but the tail wheel is removed to the nose of the plane. The biggest problem in rigging a pursuit plane with tricycle gear is finding room, under the motor, to tuck that front wheel away. For Bell it was no problem at all, because, with the motor shoved ten feet back into the rear of the plane, there was plenty of room for the front wheel under the cannon.
The Airacobra is the first modern pursuit plane to have the tricycle landing gear, the most stable landing gear ever designed, which, before the war is over, will save millions of dollars’ worth of airplanes and hundreds of pilots’ lives. For it’s almost impossible to wreck an Airacobra on landing it. With tricycle gear, a pilot simply cannot ground-loop.
Tricycle gear not only cuts training time and saves planes and pilots’ lives, but it vastly extends the wartime usefulness of the Bell plane, letting it land on darkened or uneven fields impossible for any other fighter plane.
With all these new ideas to fit together, it’s small wonder that the first handmade prototype did not take the air until the spring of 1939. After it had been tested and a few more ‘bugs’ squeezed out of its design, the Army gingerly ordered thirteen. In the fall it ordered eighty more but held up production pending war-zone data.
Meanwhile war had broken out in Europe, and French and British experts had arrived to examine American planes. A French test pilot went over the Airacobra, flew it, and discovered for himself that its manœuvrability and speed of more than 400 miles per hour were fact, not fancy. Stepping out of it onto Bolling Field he said, ‘No further selling is necessary.’ After the Norwegian débâcle in April, Paris ordered two hundred.
Now these planes could really go into production, incorporating in the prototype the changes which had come of European battle experience. These were largely in armament; a number of .30 calibre guns were added to the two .50 calibre guns and the big 37 millimeter cannon, giving the Airacobra more types of guns than any other fighter plane in the skies today.
In those agonizing months when France fought on, only to collapse in the end, Bell had a personal worry; who would be left to take delivery and pay for those two hundred planes? But when France fell the answer came promptly: England took over the French order and raised it to eight hundred. A month after Bell’s first production model had dribbled off the line in August 1940, our Air Corps ordered eight hundred more, so Bell could now tool for mass production and prepare to grind out planes in battle volume.
That same summer Noel Monks, the London Daily Mail’s best-known war correspondent, was detached from the RAF to come to America and look at our new planes. He called the Airacobra ‘ the only aircraft in the world capable of dealing with tanks — America’s answer to the panzer division,’ estimating that ‘one squadron could blast a panzer division to chaos’ with the 37 millimeter cannons, since ‘no medium tank yet built could withstand a direct hit — the very thing the British Army needs.’ Also the Australian Wing Commander who tests fighter planes in America for the RAF calls the Airacobra ‘a wizard ship — the most outstanding aircraft ol its type in the war.’
III
While the Bell and other new companies have been piling up gold stars on their report cards for design, we should not forget that it is Curtiss which has been building the bulk of our planes. Since the start of the war, planes in an unbroken stream have been pouring out of the Curtiss-Wright plant at Buffalo. Curtiss has been the backbone and the trunk of American fighter production, and if all the Curtiss P-36’s and P-40’s were subtracted from our American air force its pursuit command would be reduced to a few hundred planes.
Significantly Curtiss had a model, the P-36, in production when the present war broke out, and a substantial number arrived in France in the fall of 1939. It was powered with a Pratt & Whitney radial air-cooled motor, and its top speed was only a little over 300 miles per hour.
The latest Curtiss model is a direct lineal descendant of this P-36. There have been many major changes at one point the firm ripped out the radial motor and installed an 1150 horsepower Allison, gaining many miles per hour in speed and a new serial number, P-40; but the Army Air Corps has never allowed the Curtiss engineers to start with a clean drafting board to design a brand-new plane. It has kept Curtiss’s nose to the grindstone at the prosaic job of turning out planes instead of blueprints.
The war has vastly expanded the Curtiss company, which at the outset employed 10,000 men and now has many times that number. But mass production has increased its problems. In the old days it cost only about $300,000 to retool for a new model, largely because so much of the work was done by hand and so few tools were used. Now it costs several millions, and the task of getting this machinery designed and installed adds months to the delivery time of the first plane of any new series.
The Bell company, which had only a prototype flying when war broke out, could afford to hold back production until the Army decided just what it wanted in the way of leak-proof tanks, pilot armor, additional machine guns, and other items in the rapidly changing styles of military equipment. Curtiss had to slip such innovations into its already moving production line without choking the flow of planes. Those critics who call Curtiss a patchwork forget that ever-moving line, forget that only Curtiss had pursuit planes flying with our American air force last spring. Its rivals had magnificent new designs, but Honolulu and Manila could not have been defended with blueprints and prototypes.
As 1942 opened, Curtiss moved into combat production with its Model F of the P-40 series, which is its biggest advance in design since the P-36 was discontinued. Along with its British motor the P-40F (it’s called the Kittihawk) has taken the Spitfire’s high blower gear to cram air into the carburetor, with the result that the Kittihawk can develop, several miles up in the air, more horsepower than some pursuits can produce at sea level.
The Kittihawk’s increase in fire-power is still more startling. The .30 calibre machine gun, standard with the British at the start of the war, has been dropped, and the Kittihawk now bristles with the larger calibre guns.
Even the older models of the P-40 series outflow and outmanœuvred the carrier-based Japanese planes which bombed and strafed Philippine airdromes, according to the enthusiastic reports of the defending American antiaircraft gunners from the ground. At Pearl Harbor the story was the same: the Japanese victory was entirely one of surprise rather than superior equipment. If we had had half an hour’s warning, Secretary Knox points out, it would have been a different story.
IV
Better still, if at Pearl Harbor we had had only a few squadrons of our new Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, fifteen minutes’ warning would have been ample. For within this time the Lightnings could have zoomed far over the maximum altitude of the more sluggish Nakajima 96 naval biplane torpedo bombers and come crashing down on them, breaking up the first attack and annihilating the second wave, and the Oklahoma probably still would be afloat. Because, when the new Lockheed Lightning takes off to defend its target, it practically stands on its tail, climbing faster than the most powerful express elevator in any New York skyscraper, covering its first vertical mile in about a minute.
The Lightnings did not rise to crash down on the single-motored Nakajima 96’s because it is only recently that they have hatched out of the blueprints, crawled through the tedious process of tooling, and started dribbling off the assembly line at the rate of a few squadrons a month.
When Robert E. Gross bought the Lockheed Company in 1935, it was a struggling concern with about four hundred employees. It is now one of the largest employers in aircraft history. It occupies this position because from the beginning it concentrated on speed. Its fast commercial transports caught the eye of the British purchasing commission in the spring of 1940, and they asked Lockheed to remodel its transport into a reconnaissance bomber which they call the Hudson.
But Lockheed’s achievements in speed had interested our Army Air Corps as early as 1938, when its officers first began talking with Lockheed designers about a fast, high-altitude fighter. Lockheed’s designers emerged with a radical new type powered by two twelve-cylinder Allisons, with the pilot suspended in a gondola between them, the motor nacelles tapering back into a twin tail, and two three-blade propellers revolving in opposite directions. The experimental model, the XP-38, came within seventeen minutes of equaling the transcontinental record of seven hours and twentyeight minutes which had been set by Howard Hughes in his special racer. It had tricycle landing gear, a wing span of fifty-two feet, and a gross weight of about 13,500 pounds. Armed with an initial order from the Air Corps for $52,000,000 worth of them, Lockheed could start tooling for large-scale production.
It was found that the new Allisons, which were designed to deliver 1360 horsepower each, in actual performance burned out above 1020. The present improved Allisons each deliver 1150, and this spring the Lightning will get the still newer 1250 horsepower Allisons. For the present, the Army describes the Lightning’s speed as ‘in excess of 400 miles per hour.’
Equally formidable is the Lockheed plane’s armament. America is the only nation in the world to mount a 37 millimeter cannon on a pursuit plane, and the Lockheed Lightning is the only American plane to carry two of them, plus a number of heavy .50 calibre machine guns.
The Lockheed plane is also one of the two American pursuit planes to be equipped with the turbo-supercharger (another exclusively American development), which makes possible its highaltitude performance. A supercharger may be briefly described as a blast fan to stuff air into a carburetor, so that several miles in the air there will still be just as much oxygen to burn the gasoline as there was at sea level. In the turbosupercharger the force necessary to drive the fan comes, not from the motor by gear, thereby robbing it of power, but from a pinwheel-like turbine installed in the roaring torrent of exhaust gases.
The only other turbo-supercharged fighter in the world is the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, America’s newest highaltitude pursuit. Incidentally, a couple of squadrons of these planes, had they been on patrol over Pearl Harbor, could have changed the picture. For patrolling Republic Thunderbolts would not merely have broken up that first attack; they might have prevented it, blasting the Nakajima 96 torpedo bombers and shooting down or driving off any Nakajima 95 carrier-based fighters which the Japanese had sent to protect their bombers. For the Nakajima 95 fighters are only Japanese copies of our ancient 1928 Boeing P-12’s, a venerable design into which the Japs have stuck their version of a British Bristol motor. These planes will do only 215 miles per hour.
In contrast with this the new Republic Thunderbolt will do well over 400 miles an hour — only slightly less than the Lockheed Lightning. Also like the Lightning, it gets its best performance more than five miles above sea level, and its speed, while slightly less, is still very much over 400 m.p.h. Again like the Lightning, it is one of the world’s largest pursuits, weighing 13,000 pounds.
It is the only one of our four American pursuits now in production to be designed after the war began; it was sketched on the back of an envelope at Wright Field a month after the French collapse, when it had become clear to everyone that the war in the skies was going rapidly up toward the stratosphere.
According to Air Corps gossip, one of the reasons we did not realize this sooner was that Colonel Lindbergh had returned from his pre-war European trip firmly convinced that in the air war nothing of importance was going to happen above 10,000 feet. This view permeated our Air Corps until it was upset by the Messerschmitt over the Low Countries and France.
The Republic Thunderbolt is the first plane to incorporate in an original design all the lessons of the first year of the war. But remember that old rule of thumb; it takes two years to bring a plane from its original design into mass production for battle volume. For Republic, these two years will be up in August 1942. Of course Republic has been hustling; but it can’t be expected to attain battle volume many months short of the standard two years.
The Thunderbolt is the only fighter in the world to carry a turbo-supercharged radial air-cooled motor, just as it is the first plane to have the new fourblade propeller. Republic is proud of the Thunderbolt’s new power plant, the brand-new 2000 horsepower Pratt & Whitney, which runs so cool (160°) that you can almost rest your hand on it.
Which of these two high-altitude American fighter planes is the better? The answer must be, strictly speaking, neither. The Lockheed Lightning is more specialized, slightly ahead of the Thunderbolt on speed and rate of climb, and therefore better considered strictly as an interceptor. The Thunderbolt outpoints it in other fields of performance. It is more manoeuvrable and it has more range; throttling down the big motor, it can cruise several hours on patrol. Lightnings at Hawaii could have rushed up to smash that second Japanese attack, provided, of course, bombs had not crushed them on the field. But a few squadrons of Republic Thunderbolts, taking turns at four-hour patrol duty above Hickam Field, could have dived in to smash utterly that first assault of sluggish Japanese bombers, like eagles swooping down to tear the wings off turkeys.
V
The Thunderbolt, with more of the heavy .50 calibre machine guns than any other plane in the skies, has terrific striking power, as has the Lightning. Thus, in addition to their unique highaltitude performance, both the Thunderbolt and the Lightning arc able to perform at low’ altitudes the same tasks as the Curtiss Kittihawk and the Bell Airacobra. However, using either the big Lightning or the Thunderbolt for lowall itude work which could be done as well by either the little Kittihawk or the Airacobra would be as wasteful as putting razor-tempered blades in a lawnmower, for the Thunderbolt is the equal of two planes in another sense also. It weighs about twice as much as the Airacobra or Kittihawk, and its cost is about double that of the Bell and Curtiss planes since airplanes in quantity production are practically sold by the pound. Money may mean little in a war, but it is an accurate measuring stick of the amount of precious man-hours and raw materials which go into any airplane. These things can’t be printed by the United States mint. So long as high-altitude fourmotor bombers are in the minority and the bulk of the bombs continue to be dropped by medium-altitude two-motor bombers like the Junkers or Heinkel, operating between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, the bulk of the defending fighters should be lowand medium-altitude types like the Airacobra and the Kittihawk, which in their altitude ranges can do just as good a job as either the Lightning or the Thunderbolt at about half the cost per plane.
We have learned far more about fighter planes from the British than they have from us. We may have given them a carburetor which would not strangle in a dive, and also the turbo-supercharger, plus a few ideas about hard-hitting firepower in our .50 calibre machine gun. But the British experience has taught us to discard guns synchronized to fire through propellers (this arrangement cut down the rate of fire) and to provide a long-range, clear radio on a fighter plane (our American set was hopelessly inadequate). We have taken over the carefully worked out British plan for regional ground control of fighters in the air, adapting and, we hope, improving it. We have also adopted the British flamedampening exhaust stacks which not only eliminate fire hazard but help make planes invisible by night. Our old safety belt has been discarded in favor of the British Sutton harness which supports the pilot’s shoulders, so that in making a crash landing his nose and mouth will not be crushed against his gun sight. In the same field of pilot protection the British have also given us armor plate. We have learned from them the vital necessity for high-altitude performance and increased fire-power, and in the field of gadgetry they have given us what they call ‘automatic booster control,’ a safety device which prevents the pilot, in the excitement of combat, from carelessly burning out his motor by pushing it into too great feats of performance.
Army Air Corps officers who have returned from liaison duty in England are quick to acknowledge our debt, pointing out that, while American airplane companies deserve commendation from the standpoint of design and theory, the only real test of any plane is actual combat, and in building our new air force we have had the inestimable advantage of British battle experience.
But our biggest lesson we have learned from the Japanese. They have taught us nothing new in design — as our military observers had already reported, their air force seems to be based on fairly efficient copies of American, German, and British designs, with little original development. The lesson we have learned from Nippon is to strike, even with inferior equipment, before your opponent is ready. Strike when his planes are grounded, when his fleet is anchored, and while his newest designs are still struggling out of the blueprints and through the assembly line. Strike then and you have an advantage which will take him thousands of men, millions of tons of shipping, and maybe years of fighting to overcome.