Chasing the Demon

by Dan Hampton

  Nineteen thirty-two had some happier news, though, and there were glimpses of financial recovery, though the government numbers were so bad that no official statistical abstract was prepared for the year. On April 19, Robert Goddard launched a rocket that remained stable throughout its short flight by using gyroscopically controlled vanes, and in the fall Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected the thirty-second president of the United States. Inaugurated on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt eloquently calmed the nation by stating, “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  Facing 25 percent unemployment and a disillusioned, largely disoriented public, FDR had a steep hill to climb and began immediately. Within a week of his taking office, the New Deal, a series of initiatives designed to break the country out of the Great Depression, was enacted. One of these, the 1933 Banking Act, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guaranteed $2,500 worth of deposits for each account holder. This, plus the Federal Reserve’s issuing of more money, began to instill confidence once again in the nation’s banks. A young Chuck Yeager, along with three million others, was eventually enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and work projects sprang up all over the country. The CCC took young men, 70 percent of whom were malnourished, with no skills and limited education, and gave them food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. In return for forty hours of work per week they were also paid $30, most of which had to be sent home to their families. These young men signed up for a minimum of six months and built roads and bridges, planted some three billion trees in national parks, and worked in a variety of infrastructure projects.*

  It was a start.

  With the banking system shored up by the Federal Reserve and millions of men back to work making noticeable improvements, confidence began to return. In July 1933 Wiley Post astounded the world again by flying solo around the globe, taking off from Floyd Bennett Field at the mouth of Long Island’s Jamaica Bay. Post returned to a crowd of 50,000 people gathered at the same airfield seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes later: twenty-one hours faster than his previous time. Two months later, over Villacoublay, France, Gustave Lemoine reached 44,819 feet in his open-cockpit Potez 506.

  Roscoe Turner, daredevil and adventurer, set an American coast-to-coast speed record in his stubby little Wedell-Williams racer of ten hours, four minutes, and thirty seconds. A young Bob Hoover had seen Turner perform at Berry Field outside Nashville and recalled that the pilot was “the closest thing to a hero I had ever seen.” He certainly looked the part, always perfectly turned out in a tailored British officer’s uniform complete with riding pants, boots, and a long white scarf. Turner sported an immense, waxed handlebar mustache and toured with a magnificent lion he’d named Gilmore, in honor of the Gilmore Oil Company, his sponsor. Ken Chilstrom agreed. “I’d seen him fly and got to speak with him afterwards. I was awed. I wanted to look like that. I thought that’s how all pilots should look!”

  Yet as the clouds lifted a bit in America, in other places they noticeably thickened. In Germany the 1933 Enabling Act was passed, which permitted the chancellor, Adolf Hitler, to enact laws as he saw fit without using the Reichstag—in effect transforming the Berlin government into a dictatorship. Though Germany ominously pulled out of the League of Nations in October, the year ended well, at least in the United States, as the National Prohibition Act died a welcome and long-overdue death. Roosevelt, keenly aware of the prevailing political wind, knew no other amendment had been repealed in America’s 140-year constitutional history, but he also knew this could be another welcome break with the past, and a further means of improving national morale.

  Shortly after his inauguration the president managed to legalize the sale of beer by redefining the meaning of intoxication, so the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and others of that ilk, were fighting a losing battle. By midsummer fourteen of thirty-six state legislatures had ratified the Twenty-First Amendment repealing Prohibition, with Utah signing last on December 5, 1933. “Booze cruises” were over; speakeasies faded into history, and much of the illicit pleasure in drinking vanished overnight, yet Americans generally rejoiced.

  So did Washington, in fact.

  Besides the reenactment of a slew of federal crime laws, nearly $260 million in alcohol taxes were collected in the year following Prohibition’s demise. So large was this, 9 percent of the federal budget, that Roosevelt gave taxpayers a sweeping income tax cut that not only stimulated the economy, but also boosted his popularity to the point where he was politically unstoppable, an attribute that would pay huge dividends as war clouds once again gathered over Europe. That, and the enormous influx of gold to the United States from European countries who could read the writing on the wall.

  There were portents of this all by the mid-1930s, after Germany’s Night of the Long Knives and the creation of the Dachau concentration camp for political prisoners. Two laws were quickly passed in Nuremberg that stripped Jews of their German citizenship and made intermarriage illegal. There were also increasing signs that aviation would play a significant role in whatever happened next. Deutsche Lufthansa, the German state airline, commenced the first transoceanic airmail service between Stuttgart and Buenos Aires while a Soviet balloon, the Osoaviakhim, soared thirteen miles into the stratosphere. Dr. Rudolph Kühnold detected an aircraft on his primitive radar set and George Welch, halfway through St. Andrew’s in Delaware, was considering a career in engineering. John Chilstrom had sufficiently recovered financially to open a grocery store, “Chilstrom & Burke,” in Elmhurst, and young Ken built a gas-powered aircraft with a five-foot wingspan.

  Over the next few years most of the economy, and the prospects of young Americans, improved dramatically. With blunt financial force, the federal government continued muscling the country from the grip of depression. Bob Hoover, now a teenager, was fascinated with aviation and read voraciously on the subject, picking Jimmy Doolittle as his hero. “He was my true idol,” Hoover later wrote in Forever Flying. “I wanted to be just like him . . . the only thing I ever wanted to do was fly airplanes.” Ken Chilstrom voiced similar sentiments. “He [Doolittle] was a very outgoing guy. A real person. A rare person.”

  Doolittle had been a flight instructor during the Great War and could fly anything with wings. Just as vital, he understood the technical details and engineering aspects as few pilots or engineers did. He recalled, “In the early ’20s, there was not complete support between the flyers and the engineers. The pilots thought the engineers were a group of people who zipped slide rules back and forth, came out with erroneous results and bad aircraft; and the engineers thought the pilots were crazy.”

  But Doolittle was no basic stick-and-rudder pilot. He had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, then went on to get a master’s of science and a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No deskbound academic, Doolittle won the Schneider Cup and Mackay Trophy in 1925 and 1926, respectively. He was the first pilot to successfully fly an outside loop, and the first to make a complete flight, from takeoff to landing, on instruments. Like Lindbergh, Doolittle recognized that aviation had to be freed from weather constraints if it were ever to progress. Resigning his regular army commission in 1930, he went to work for Shell Oil, lending expertise to, among other things, the development of 100 octane fuel. Continuing to fly, Doolittle won the first Bendix Trophy in 1931.

  Through it all the nation marched on and war seemed increasingly imminent, at least in Europe and Asia. Germany formed the Luftwaffe in 1935, and the following year occupied the Rhineland. German physicist Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain had studied under Ludwig Prandtl and earned a PhD in physics and aerodynamics from the University of Göttingen. Von Ohain, who designed the first operational turbojet engine, had independently arrived at many of the same conclusions regarding gas turbines as had a
young pilot named Frank Whittle. The German was as unaware of Whittle as the Englishman was of von Ohain. Interestingly, in 1928 the young British pilot had authored “Future Developments in Aircraft Design,” a thesis he had written while a flight cadet at RAF Cranwell. The astounding aspect of Whittle’s work was that the twenty-one-year-old pilot described what he called a motorjet, essentially a piston engine where compressed air was funneled into a combustion chamber.* “I was thinking in terms of a speed of 500 mph in the stratosphere at heights where the air density was less than one quarter of its seal-level value,” he wrote.

  After graduating from Cranwell, Whittle was briefly posted to No. 111 Fighter Squadron at Hornchurch, then to Wittering in the Flight Instructor’s course. Like Jimmy Doolittle, the young officer possessed the invaluable combination of intuitiveness and formal education, which, when harnessed with considerable flying skills, produced the best type of test. His work initially centered around improving existing technology, utilizing a conventional reciprocating engine to power low-pressure fans rather than propellers by expelling the heated exhaust through a nozzle. But due to the pressure ratios available with internal combustion there was only so much compression available, and Whittle knew there was a better method, something so revolutionary that current speed and altitude restrictions would be meaningless—if only he could find it.

  While assigned to Wittering, his thinking led Whittle beyond conventional solutions and into new territory. It was here, in 1929 and 1930, where he dispensed with the heavy, fuel-eating reciprocating engine altogether and envisioned heated air-driving turbine blades that subsequently powered a compressor: the essence of a turbojet engine. To achieve the power, and therefore flight past 500 mph and above 40,000 feet that he foresaw, Whittle knew air would have to be compressed to a much greater degree than that possible with conventional engines. The simplest way to do this was to increase the velocity of the incoming air, which would subsequently raise its pressure.

  But how?

  The solution, which astonished Whittle, was simplicity itself: in theory. By 1930 there were significant technical and metallurgical hurdles to overcome before an operational, sustainable jet engine could be fielded, but the principle for his engine—for all jet engines—is essentially the same. Air is sucked into a series of bladed fans (compressors) that spin and accelerate it, thus raising the pressure. Each fan is a called a “stage,” and as it passes through each stage the airflow velocity increases. As this occurs the pressure also rises, resulting in a stream of very fast, pressurized air that is forced into a combustor. Smaller than the intake and compressor, this chamber accelerates the air, like a wide river that suddenly narrows, as it bursts into the combustion section. Nozzles spray fuel into the high-pressure air and the mix is ignited.

  The resulting explosion produces extremely hot gas that expands and must escape. The only way out of the combustor is through the exhaust section, or nozzle. It is this hot, high-pressure exhaust blasting backward that thrusts the jet forward. In Frank Whittle’s initial design the gas would turn the shaft, spin the compressors, and expel sufficient exhaust to produce thrust, yet it was impractical because it depended on a conventional piston engine to draw in air for compression. His revolutionary solution, and one that differed from von Ohain and other parallel attempts, was adding together several stages of multiple-bladed fans to create a turbine. The high-pressure exhaust gases spin the turbine that is connected by a shaft to the compressor. By rotating, the turbine sucks in more air to be compressed, combusted, and expelled and will continue doing so as long as there is fuel. The resulting self-contained engine is called a turbojet.

  By the time the market crashed in October 1929, Frank Whittle had refined his original thesis into a largely practical propulsion system. But if he was awed and thrilled by his idea, the scientific and military communities were less excited. William Lang Tweedie from the Directorate of Engine Development was painfully direct. He informed Whittle that the Air Ministry did not look favorably upon gas turbines and cited a 1920 Aeronautical Research Committee Report (No. 54) that damned the entire notion.

  Dr. Alan Arnold Griffith of the Air Ministry’s South Kensington Laboratory also shot Whittle’s design down in short order. Griffith, a renowned mechanical engineer and expert on metal fatigue, opined that the young pilot’s optimism had colored his mathematical calculations; the engine was far too heavy and would produce insufficient thrust to be of any operational use. In Griffith’s case his motivations were fairly obvious; he had been seeking Air Ministry support for his own design, which utilized the gas turbine to power a propeller. To his credit, he overcame a major design issue with existing turbine blades by realizing they were, in fact, small airfoils and needed to be constructed that way. However, to Griffith’s lasting discredit, he would not advocate Whittle’s lighter, cheaper, and better design out of avarice and, quite possibly, professional jealousy. The general conclusion from these prominent experts, and a conclusion that affected government funding, was that gas turbines were too heavy and the power they produced was not enough to justify the extra weight.

  At the time, they were quite correct.

  The gas turbine was powered by an internal combustion engine that was employed to spin a propeller. This was not what Frank Whittle proposed and, discouraged but undaunted, he filed a Provisional Specification for his turbojet on January 16, 1930.* But life, as often happens, was catching up with him and he married his sweetheart, Dorothy May Lee, in May. A son was born the following year, and Whittle began test work on the Royal Navy’s Fairey III aircraft. This necessitated a carrier takeoff and landing qualification, so by July 1932 Whittle had logged seventy-one catapult shots, completed the testing, and been posted to the Officers Engineering Course at RAF Henslow.

  During 1934 the twenty-seven-year-old flight lieutenant was selected to attend Cambridge University and he graduated in 1936, with honors, in mechanical sciences. Immersed in academia, busy with flying and his family, Whittle’s interest in turbojets faded until he received a letter from an old RAF pilot friend who indicated he had discovered a source of private financing for the development of the jet engine.* As a serving officer, Whittle would normally have been excluded from engaging in private business but the Air Ministry, perhaps with an eye on the future, permitted a joint venture, and by mid-1936 his company, Power Jets Limited, was a reality.

  Also a reality was increasing volatility from across the Channel and across the world. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor in 1933 and commenced Germany’s rearmament immediately. Britain, at least the Royal Air Force, had noticed, and with the official creation of the Luftwaffe in February 1935, the Air Ministry redoubled its commitment to modernizing the air force. New monoplane fighters with variable pitch props, enclosed cockpits, and retractable landing gear had been designed and fielded. The Hawker Hurricane first flew in late 1935, with the Supermarine Spitfire following by March 1936—the same time Power Jets was formed.

  In Japan an uprising of military officers had assassinated two former prime ministers and gained brief control over the Ministry of War. Though the insurgency failed, it gave the military an excuse to put active-duty officers in key cabinet posts, thereby giving the military a de facto veto power over the civil government. This permitted unchecked, aggressive expansionism in China, and ultimately full-scale war in the Pacific.

  At the same time the Germans had a breakthrough of their own with jet technology and, realizing the jet’s enormous potential, made rapid progress aerodynamically. While obstacles were overcome, engine technology remained a huge limitation. In Germany’s case this was exacerbated by a shortage of precious metals, especially chromium, nickel, and titanium. These were essential for the production of Tinidur, an alloy utilized for jet turbine blades. More damning was the effect on engine reliability; a Jumo 004 had a life expectancy of 25 to 30 hours compared to 125 hours for Whittle’s W.2/700 turbojet. Even at the engine’s best, metallurgical problems were a constant issue, which w
as puzzling in a nation famous for its engineers.

  Nevertheless, technology begets technology and the quest for speed—to be the fastest—was tantalizing in its murkiness. What would be possible if man could fly past the speed of sound? Did a barrier even exist and, if so, could it be breached? Then what? These were tantalizing thoughts for scientists, engineers, and military men. But such thoughts had to be shelved until it was proven that man and machine could survive. Until it was proven that the demon could be tamed.

  Seven years after Whittle patented his jet, Hans von Ohain constructed a very simple, but workable, turbojet of his own, the HeS 1, at Ernst Heinkel’s factory on Marienehe Airfield. Encouraged by its success, he immediately began improvements for a flight-capable jet engine. Faced with official indifference from the Reich Air Ministry, Heinkel funded the research and development as a private venture. The result was the Heinkel 178, a pretty, all-metal jet with high-mounted, elliptical wings and gear that retracted into the fuselage. On August 24, 1939, Erich Warsitz conducted high-speed taxi trials and, as was common practice, took the plane up a few feet over the runway.

  Three days later, on August 27, the jet age was officially born as Warsitz lifted off from Marienehe and successfully flew ten minutes around the pattern before landing. This outstanding achievement was eclipsed five days later on September 1, at approximately 4:45 in the morning. Oberleutnant Bruno Dilley and a flight of Ju 87 Stukas came screaming out of the clouds and demolished the blockhouses on the Dirschau Bridge over Poland’s Vistula River. Four German divisions simultaneously lunged across the border slamming into the unprepared and underequipped Polish defenders. Case White, the invasion of Poland had been executed, and with it the Second World War had begun.