Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (21 page)

The role of the Spitfire in the Second World War in Europe is legendary. From the closing stages of the Battle of Britain to the dogfights over Malta, from the great daylight sweeps over France to aerial patrols over the D-Day beaches (the Polish Spitfire squadrons were given this honor), the Spitfire became the RAF’s most important single-engine fighter. Its elegant frame and tapering elliptical wings created thousands of devotees, even on the other side: when Goering asked Galland around 1942 what more he needed, the latter replied, “A squadron of Spitfires.”
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Its evolution from the Supermarine seaplane into an urgently needed addition to RAF Fighter Command’s armory has been the subject of movies, books, and documentaries.
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The place of the Merlin-powered Spitfire in this history is, however, that of an intermediary weapons system. By late 1940 it had
proven itself as Britain’s best and fastest fighter, even better than the Bf 109. But the Luftwaffe was constantly upgrading the horsepower, armor, and armaments of its own fighters, as well as bringing newer craft into play, so both the Spitfire itself and the Merlin engine had to be upgraded also. In particular, the development engineers at Rolls-Royce had to create ever more powerful versions of the engine if British fighters were to match the fantastic rate of climb of the Fw 190s. By 1942 they had done just that, with the enormously successful Merlin 61 variant, which more than doubled the engine’s original horsepower.
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Unsurprisingly, everyone wanted the enhanced engine—Bomber Command for its new heavy four-engine Lancasters, Fighter Command for its Spitfires, Reconnaissance and Pathfinder squadrons for the high-flying Mosquitos. Ten thousand engines would not be enough. Even the highly productive Packard factories in the United States (brought in to treble output, as they did so well) could not match the demand. Getting one’s hands on a batch of Merlin 61s was like getting a shipload of East Indian spices in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

The person most responsible for allocating these scarce resources was Air Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, little known to the public then or now, but perhaps the single most influential figure in the Air Ministry—Churchill, for one, regarded Freeman with the greatest respect.
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As air minister for supply in the late 1930s, Freeman had been responsible for pushing ahead with the development of virtually all the RAF’s newer planes—the Hurricane, the Spitfire, the Wellington, the Lancaster and Halifax heavies, and the Mosquito. It was Freeman who realized that the miserably underperforming Avro Manchester bomber of the late 1930s could be transformed by giving it Rolls-Royce engines (Merlins) and turning it into the powerful Lancaster. In the same years, it was Freeman who pushed for the development of the twin-engine Mosquito when everyone else thought the design absurd: how could one invest scarce resources in a plywood-framed, unarmed aircraft and expect it to fly unscathed across Germany and back? Critics called it “Freeman’s Folly.” It turned out to be the most versatile plane of the Second World War—it could be modified (that is, armed) to be a night fighter, submarine killer, high-level reconnaissance plane (in a version
that flew too high for any German fighter to reach it), and bomber (modified, it carried a greater weight in bombs than a B-17). By 1942, Freeman was deeply respected by the British airframe and airplane engine manufacturers, got on fabulously well with his American counterparts, and could go directly to Churchill. If he had a new, sensible idea, he would seek to make it happen. In the spring of that year, he got another one.

There now enters another key figure in this remarkable history, although this one is even less well known. In late April 1942 the RAF liaison test pilot for Rolls-Royce Engines in Derbyshire, Ronnie Harker, received a phone call from the RAF’s Fighting Development Unit, asking if he would come down to the Duxford airfield to test a problematic U.S. plane, designated Pursuit Fighter 51 (P-51). This was not a novel task for Harker, who had flown in the RAF before being hauled back to his current critical job; he methodically tested all new aircraft, including captured variants of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs, to report on their relative performance. The airplane he was asked to fly this time was a single-engine fighter that had been produced by the North American Company—one of the dozens of aircraft types that had been hastily commissioned by the U.S., French, and British air forces after 1938, when the Luftwaffe’s much-touted numerical advantage had become alarmingly clear. The problem was that the Alison-engined P-51 was not a great performer. Its original specifications had called for the design of a low-altitude interceptor, and it actually flew well in that respect, but the USAAF was (understandably) heading toward the much more powerful P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, both of which were a match in the air against a Zero or a Bf 109, and the British were heading toward improved Spitfires, Typhoons, and Beaufighters. Thus, when in early 1942 RAF Fighter Command received its first batch of P-51s, it didn’t quite know what to do with them and was contemplating scrapping the order.

Harker flew the P-51 for the first time on April 30, 1942 (the Rolls-Royce archives have, happily, a photo of that very plane after he brought it back to base). It clearly puzzled him. It turned easily, never stalled, and was fine at low to medium altitudes. Aerodynamically it was superb, that is, it had very low drag, although neither he nor anyone else
at the time could quite figure out why.
^g
Harker’s report finished with a sentence that, though laconic, caught the attention of everyone who read it: “The point which strikes me is that with a powerful and good engine like the Merlin 61, its performance should be outstanding, as it is 35 m.p.h. faster than a Spitfire 5 at roughly the same power.”
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A few days later, a team of Rolls-Royce mechanics pulled out the Alison engine and carefully lowered a Merlin 61 into the front of the machine Harker had flown. As the sharp-eyed test pilot noted, the distance between the front edge of the cockpit and the nose of the P-51 chassis was the same as that on the latest Spitfire, so it was a perfect fit.

At the same time, Rolls-Royce’s outstanding Polish mathematician turned performance engineer, Witold Challier, equipped with the comparative aerodynamic details of both planes, produced a chart suggesting that a Merlin-powered P-51 should be able to outperform the Spitfire at all levels up to 40,000 feet and reach the astounding speed of 432 mph. (All Challier’s calculations proved to be absolutely correct.) Both men, supported by the dynamic general manager of Rolls-Royce, E. W. Hives, began agitating for the new hybrid version as soon as possible.

When this information got to the resourceful Freeman, he responded immediately. Although Fighter Command and Bomber Command wanted all the Merlin engines for their own projects, Freeman ordered the engine conversion on another five P-51s, directing that two of them be sent to Spaatz in the United States as soon as possible for USAAF testing. When Hives shortly afterward proposed the conversion of 250 aircraft, Freeman doubled it to 500. Freeman was swiftly in touch with the managers at Packard (who put one of their Merlins into a P-51, which by now had received its more familiar name, the Mustang); with the influential U.S. ambassador to Britain, John Winant; and with the well-connected assistant air attaché Thomas Hitchcock, a former Lafayette Escadrille flier and a great Rolls-Royce enthusiast who had family links to the White House. Freeman also started nudging Churchill to write to Roosevelt, since everyone in the United Kingdom realized that if this Anglo-American hybrid was to be produced speedily
and in sufficient numbers to alter the aerial balance, it had to be done in American factories. It was like the cavity magnetron story all over again: Britain was industrially overstretched, but the United States still possessed enormous capacity for additional aircraft and engine production.

Then, inexplicably to Freeman, the scheme foundered. Sheer obstructionism on the American side now slowed down the mass production of the Merlin-engine Mustang. In the United States there were genuine rival claims being made on resources, and it was always going to be hard to argue that the output of American aircraft already in production should be curtailed for an unknown and essentially foreign newcomer. There was continuous misunderstanding of Harker and Challier’s point that the P-51 was good at
all
altitudes, and certain area commanders kept insisting that the plane was to be used according to the original specifications as a low-altitude tactical fighter, in which capacity it was just one of many. Then there were USAAF leaders who could not accept any claims of the Mustang’s superiority because they were devoted to the P-38 Lightning and the P-47 Thunderbolts, both of which had well-tried combat records. There were also powerful objections in the air force’s procurement offices and among rival manufacturers. Freeman, who followed American production figures as anxiously as he did Britain’s own, was warned by Roosevelt’s personal and very Anglophilic advisor Harry Hopkins in September 1942 that the USAAF had on order no fewer than 2,500 P-40 Kittyhawks, 8,800 P-39 Airacobras, and 11,000 P-63 Kingcobras, all of them hopeless against the formidable Focke-Wulf 190 fighter that was beginning to dominate the European skies, but each of these underperforming aircraft had its own significant backers.
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Additionally, the Mustang surely needed further testing and improvements.

This was all understandable, if regrettable. What was less understandable was the sheer, relentless anti-Britishness of key members of the all-powerful Air Production Board under the stiff-necked Major General Oliver Echols. Hopkins was only half joking when he told Freeman that many Americans believed they naturally flew better than the British and always built better planes than the British. Since the P-51 had been first ordered by the RAF, it had not gone through the normal American channels of engineering scrutiny, and many officers
devoted to that system fed Echols disparaging details when they inspected some of the early models. Essentially, the attitude was “not invented here.”
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The attaché in London, Hitchcock, was particularly scathing about all this: “Sired by the English out of an American mother, the Mustang has had no parent in the Army Air Corps or at Wright Field to appreciate and push its good points.… [I]t does not satisfy important people on both sides of the Atlantic who seem more interested in pointing with pride to the development of a 100% national product than they are concerned with the very difficult problem of rapidly developing a fighter plane that will be superior to anything the Germans have.” The more restrained official historians merely point out that “the story of the P-51 came close to representing the costliest mistake made by the AAF in World War Two.”
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At this stage, there was little more that Freeman or his business allies at Packard and North American could do. There was little more that even Churchill could do, though he again used every one of the “usual suspects” (Ambassador Winant, special envoy and later Churchill family member Averell Harriman, and Hopkins, plus his private messages to Roosevelt) to have Mustang production given priority. The push had to come from the USAAF itself. Eventually the air force did come around, for two reasons. The first was the Schweinfurt-Regensburg catastrophe of October 1943. Although the Air Force told the press that the lull in bombing Germany was simply due to the winter weather, as well as to a shift to bombing the Reich from newly acquired Italian airfields, both Arnold and Spaatz now privately recognized that their basic operational assumption was faulty: the bombers could not get through without fighter protection, and the existing fighters were too short-legged. By now, Arnold knew that even members of Congress were agitating. In his so-called Christmas address (given December 27, 1943) to air force commanders in Britain and Italy, Arnold gave out his bluntest message: “
OVERLORD
and
ANVIL
[a landing in the south of France] will not be possible unless the German Air Force is destroyed. Therefore my personal message to you—this is a
MUST
—is to ‘Destroy the Enemy Air Force wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground, and in the factories.’ ”
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But only an extremely nimble and long-range fighter, of a design recognized by Harker nineteen months earlier, could do that.

The second reason was the continued pressure exerted by a small and remarkable cluster of individuals in the middle levels of the Allied effort. There was the irrepressible Tommy Hitchcock, who possessed the characteristics of an Ivy League playboy—he was acknowledged to be the world’s best polo player before the war—and, in addition, possessed a great flying record, a fluent pen, and a noted set of connections. Hitchcock was one of the few people who had no fear of browbeating Echols and the Air Production Board, or of privately approaching his neighbor Eleanor Roosevelt about the matter. Then there was the assistant secretary for air, Robert A. Lovett, who had flown in the legendary First Yale Unit in 1917–18 and in the Royal Navy Air Service, and would finally complete his public career as secretary of defense in the early 1950s. Lovett came from a patrician New England family, was not drawing a salary, and was much respected by Arnold. Like Hitchcock, he was not daunted by the Air Production Board and as early as 1940 had regarded the Alison-powered P-51 as a “washout.” Lovett carried out a major inspection of the USAAF bombing campaign during a June 1943 tour in England and made a number of recommendations in his report to Arnold, the two most important of which were (1) the absolute necessity of increasing the production of auxiliary drop tanks as swiftly as possible, to enhance the range of all aircraft in Britain, and (2) the greater urgency that needed to be given to the development of long-range fighter escorts, with the Merlin-powered Mustang being particularly promising in this regard. These were the keys to unlocking the aerial deadlock. When Lovett returned to his office in Washington, by no coincidence right next door to Arnold’s, obstacles began to fall. Four days after reading this report, Arnold composed a memorandum that stressed “the absolute necessity for building a fighter plane that can go in and come out with the bombers.”
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