Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  Given all these constraints, it was natural that the early daylight raids would be tentative and would keep close to home bases; for now, operations would take place over northwestern France and the Low Countries, and rely upon fighter cover. The weather throughout August 1942 was fine, the Luftwaffe noticeable by its absence, and the bombing remarkably accurate. This continued into September, and even when Fw 190s were thrown in, they chiefly tangled with the Spitfires. All this changed with the attack by 108 USAAF bombers upon the heavy industries of Lille on October 9, 1942. Rushing past no fewer than 156 Allied escorts, the German fighters concentrated upon the heavily laden B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. As it happened, the Luftwaffe hadn’t yet figured out its more destructive tactics against tightly packed bombers flying at around 25,000 feet, so the USAAF losses were four destroyed, four seriously damaged, and another forty-two needing repairs. But the bloodletting had begun. More significant was that the constant fighter attack led to a catastrophic falloff of accuracy—only 9 of the 588 high-explosive bombs fell within 1,500 feet of the targets, and many bombers aborted their load before even getting close. In such massive melees, it is not surprising that the gunners wildly overestimated the number of German fighters downed (they claimed fifty-six certain kills and twenty-four probables). Such estimates greatly helped Arnold and Spaatz in the air force’s political campaigns in Washington but also showed how green and nervous these brand-new crews were and how poor the after-action analysis was. (Postwar analysis revealed that the Luftwaffe recorded only one definite loss that day, possibly a second.)

  Even among those who believed that the USAAF’s campaign was proving itself, the last months of 1942 and early months of 1943 brought a widespread slowdown in pace. More and more squadrons of American bombers and fighters were being diverted to support Operation Torch and the follow-up land campaigns in North Africa. The winter weather made daylight precision bombing virtually impossible against any target in northwest Europe. (The same storms that were preventing the U-boats from attacking Allied merchantmen were also stopping the U.S. planes from finding their targets in France.) There was gloom at the publicity about French civilian losses from these aerial attacks, especially when so many of them had occurred quite some way from the intended targets. For a while, therefore, American bombing focused on coastal targets such as German submarine pens. All of this disappointed RAF Bomber Command, which had been hoping for swift reinforcement of its own (mutually) punishing fight against the Luftwaffe over Germany. Most important of all, it gave the German high command time to figure out its aerial and antiaircraft defenses and to switch production more toward fighters.

  The Eighth Air Force made its first raids upon targets in Germany at the end of January 1943, but they were virtually harmless, being much disrupted by bad weather. This dismal and unproductive period lasted well into the year, to Arnold’s great frustration. Only with the coming of early summer, improvements in the weather, and the arrival of more squadrons (in February the Eighth had had a daily average of only seventy-four operating aircraft with crews) did the American offensive get under way again. Yet these improved operational conditions also meant that the new extent of the Luftwaffe’s defensive capacities against daylight raids would be learned in full. In a raid on Kiel on May 14, 8 bombers were lost and 36 damaged, out of 126 dispatched; in a double raid upon Bremen and Kiel on June 13, 26 bombers were lost and 54 damaged, out of a total of 182; from the Ochersleben raid of July 28, only one-third of the 120 bombers returned to base unscathed, for 16 others had been lost and 64 damaged.33 And those were operations where the bomber squadrons could count upon fighter escorts for a greater part of the way. Despite such ominous signs, the momentum was increasing for more longer-range raids.

  Thus came the ghastly Schweinfurt raids and losses with which this chapter began. In addition to the 60 bombers lost during that October 14, 1943, raid, another 138 were damaged, which meant that a mere 14 percent of the 229 aircraft that actually attacked—many turned away early—arrived back at base unscathed. This seems a fantastical figure until one reads the detailed analysis in the official USAAF history’s account of a Luftwaffe performance that, its authors observe, was unprecedented in its magnitude, cleverness, and severity of execution:

  Wave after wave of fighters attacked. Usually a screen of single-engine fighters would fly in from in front, firing normal 20-mm cannon and machine-guns until very close to the formation. Closely following the single-engine fighters, large formations of twin-engine fighters appeared in waves, each firing large numbers of rockets from projectors carried under the wings.… Meanwhile, the single-engine fighters refueled and attacked from all directions. Soon they were followed by re-formed groups of twin-engine rocket carriers. After expending their rockets, these twin-engine fighters frequently came in firing cannon and machine guns. The enemy aircraft concentrated on one formation at a time, breaking it up with rocket attacks … and then finishing off cripples with gunfire. One combat wing of the 1st Bombardment Division, which bore the brunt of the counterattack, was almost completely wiped out by these tactics.34

  Despite these losses, the USAAF’s attacks upon the German aircraft industry in this period did have a considerable impact: the selective targeting strategy, rather like the RAF’s night attacks on the Ruhr, frightened Speer enough to spur him to summon even more of the Reich’s massive resources for the campaign against the Anglo-American bombing offensive. The struggle was only going to get harder. Nevertheless, to the Allied air chiefs, this was a completely unsustainable rate of attrition, higher probably than that of any other aerial campaign in the war, and the offensive simply had to be closed down, with bombing temporarily restricted to short-range targets. The winter weather made all this justifiable, and provided time for efforts to rebuild shattered morale, which could be measured negatively by the growing number of missions aborted or of partly damaged aircraft gliding into neutral havens such as Sweden and Switzerland.e

  It is not possible to better the conclusion drawn in the air force’s own official history on this dismal chapter of the struggle:

  By mid-October 1943 the daylight bombing campaign had reached a crisis. Its cost had risen alarmingly while its successes remained problematical. The assumptions underlying it therefore came up for reconsideration.… The fact was that the Eighth Air Force had for the time being lost air superiority over Germany. And it was obvious that superiority could not be regained until sufficient long-range escort became available.… [C]learly, also, fighter range would have to be extended.35

  Fortunately for the battered Allied bomber crews, there were solutions just around the corner.

  The Merlin and the Mustang

  The Americans’ decision to halt their daylight bombing of the enemy’s industries occurred approximately twenty-six years after the Smuts Report, a fact disregarded in the more teleological accounts of the rise of modern airpower. This offers to the student of war a superb example—perhaps the best we have—of how a novel strategic doctrine was promulgated in theory well before it could be realized in practice. In no other chapter in this book is there such a need to explain in detail how and why it took so long for the Allies to close this critical gap between the concept and the accomplishment of their strategy. This is because the other forms of warfare discussed here (such as convoys, amphibious landings, and mass land battles) had already existed for many centuries. Yet a detailed retelling of this particular story is also justified, surely, by the enormous claims for the efficacy of airpower made by its advocates both before and well after the Second World War.

  The “solution” to the problem of the bomber’s vulnerability, when it emerged, was developed very swiftly indeed, although, as we shall see, it could have arrived in Europe’s skies even faster than it did. What was needed was a technological breakthrough for the military problem succinctly stated by the U.S. official historians: a long-range Allied fighter capable of beating off aerial attacks upon the vulnerable bomber groups.
Mechanically, this could be defined by a set of operational and engineering specifics for a new flying machine. It had to be a single-engine fighter that was faster and more maneuverable than anything the Luftwaffe possessed or would be able to field in the next year or so, and it had to be able to maintain its performance at all altitudes from 5,000 feet to 40,000 feet, something experts thought was aerodynamically impossible given existing aircraft-design assumptions. Most important of all—and equally impossible—this aircraft had to have the fuel capacity to permit it to fly with the USAAF bombers from East Anglia to beyond Berlin and back, and to protect its “convoy” even 600 miles from their bases. These requirements appeared to defy the laws of physics: how could a fighter be capacious enough to carry enough fuel to, say, Prague, yet nimble and fast enough to shoot a locally based Fw 190 out of the air? Yet the aircraft was made. Sir Henry Royce (1863–1933) was one of the greatest inventors and engineers of the Western world since Macadam, Brunel, Stephenson, Bell, and Edison. Royce had only a year of formal education, and survived his youth by selling newspapers. Fascinated by machines, especially the new automobiles, he began building them himself even before the First World War; when he joined with his business partner, Charles Rolls, and the firm expanded, he still insisted on very high quality control. The man had a mania for exactitude. Late in his career, this creator of the finest and most reliable automobiles turned his attention to the novel though related field of airplane engines. It was a logical move: both cars and planes rely upon the inanimate power of gasoline to propel their heavy frames, and their human occupants, along winding country roads or into the wide blue skies above. Both vehicles consist of a solid frame that houses hundreds of moving parts, many of which have to turn and change and ignite with precision hour after hour, day after day. One reason for the “rise of the West” after 1700 was the development of the exact sciences, that is, manufacturing and technological breakthroughs, peaceful and military, that were not occurring in other parts of the world.36 A Rolls-Royce engine was an apotheosis of an astonishing human achievement: the ever-greater conquest of the obstacles to time and speed and space that had always existed in a world of animate and wind energy.

  The late 1920s and early 1930s were an exciting time for all those who were devoted to newer and better airplanes and airplane engines. The American-designed Curtiss V-12 engine was way ahead of its competitors at this time, and Royce and his team had no qualms about buying one in the United States, shipping it over, stripping it down for analysis, and then rebuilding it as, variously, the Rolls-Royce Kestrel, Griffon, and Merlin. Malcolm Campbell used a Rolls-Royce engine in his record-breaking 300-mile-an-hour drive across the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1933. And Supermarine Aviation used these engines to become permanent owner of the famous international Schneider Trophy Race (for seaplanes) after three successive wins; in 1931, the final year of the competition, a Supermarine plane achieved the then astounding speed of over 400 mph.

  In the midst of all this, Royce began to conceive of placing one of his engines in a new type of very fast fighter for the RAF. On a memorable occasion in 1931 near his country house at West Wittering, Sussex, he walked along the sandbars with his chief engineers and sketched out the design in the wet granules. Already the familiar biplane-shaped, canvas-covered planes of the First World War era were giving way to sleeker, aluminum-covered monoplanes carrying a single pilot; also on the drawing board were fast twin-engine (and even some four-engine) longer-range bombers. All would require much greater propulsion. And that meant creating an engine that was of the most exact engineering standards, converting fuel into thrust as efficiently as possible, which was what the firm of Rolls-Royce specialized in. Naturally, they were not alone in this passion. Companies in America, Germany, Italy, Japan, and France were driven by the same motive, each of them seeking to squeeze more and more power out of an elaborate design of pistons, cylinders, spark plugs, wiring, and steel chambers.f 37

  The Rolls-Royce Company had the habit of naming its various airplane engines after the swift raptors of the skies, the hawks, falcons, and eagles. In the case of the engine in question, the designated name was Merlin, which was a reference not to the legendary wizard but to the smallest of the falcons, a fast, aggressive aerial wonder that could attack but not be attacked.

  It should be stressed that the increasingly powerful engines Royce forced ahead could be embedded in a whole array of aircraft; the official Rolls-Royce history of the Merlin, for example, shows it in about forty different planes that ranged from one to four engines.38 Variants also powered hydroplanes, speedboats, racing cars, and, of course, the Rolls and the Bentley. It was not the case, therefore, that the Merlin was designed for the Spitfire, and the Spitfire for its Merlin engine, although popular legend has it that way. Had the Spitfire never been created, the Merlin would have had its place in aviation history. Yet it is not surprising that, just as Rolls-Royce was developing this particular thrust machine, one of its recipients should be a new, single-engine monocoque plane, based upon the great aircraft designer J. R. Mitchell’s elegant racer for Supermarine. And, despite all understandable interwar restrictions and difficulties, the impoverished Air Ministry pushed Vickers (which had bought Supermarine) toward the production of a slim, swift PV-12-powered fighter. The Merlin and the Spitfire had been brought together. But it was a close-run thing: Royce had died in 1933, still working on the newer engine design; he never even saw a prototype Spitfire, though he left an accomplished engineering team behind him. Mitchell, battling cancer, died in 1937 at the age of forty-two, also working until he dropped dead. He, at least, saw the first flying models.

  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.”39 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.40

  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.41

  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.42 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.