by Dan Hampton
The next great age had arisen, an age of polarizing ideologies, to be sure, where the world’s fate often hung by a nuclear thread and the awesome, destructive power of weapons conceived during World War II would dictate the pattern of life for the next five decades. Yet through this, humankind managed to come to grips with its own ability to change the world. Men knew now, as never before, that limitations were barriers that could be swept away by those with the brains, guts, and courage to do so.
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Part Three
Hunting the Demon
Flinders and flames, flinders and flames, The names soon forgotten, along with the blames God bless Pratt and Whitney and Wrights’ And pray for doomed ghosts in aluminum kites.
WRIGHT FIELD: THE READY ROOM ANONYMOUS
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Seven
World War to Cold War
By the summer and fall of 1945, strange captured German aircraft appeared in the sky over the Midwest United States, and Ken Chilstrom, now in the Fighter Operations Section of the Flight Test Division at Wright Field, was thrilled. “Everyone knew the jet was the future,” he recalls. “The rocket stuff was interesting in that it was the fastest way to blow through the so-called sound barrier, but it had no practical applicability to tactical operations.” Vast amounts of technical data had been discovered all over the crumbling Reich, and much of it made its way west to Britain and the United States.
In fact, many programs and operations were put into play toward the end of the war precisely to collect advanced technology, and the scientists who created it. One such operation was Lusty (LUftwaffe Secret TechnologY), a U.S. Army Air Force initiative organized by the Exploitation Division at Wright Field, where Ken Chilstrom, Glen Edwards, Gus Lundquist, and other first-rate test pilots were now stationed. Lusty was divided into two main teams; Team Two was to collect documents and round up any scientists while Team One, working from top-secret “black lists,” scooped up any aircraft and weapons they could find.
Colonel Harold Watson, chief of intelligence (T-2) at Wright Field, led Team One into Germany as the war ended. A flamboyant former test pilot with a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he further divided his team into two branches, one to pick up rockets and piston-engined aircraft while the other branch went after any jets. Watson’s Whizzers, as they were called, acquired a veritable treasure trove of Luftwaffe secrets. These included an Arado 234, the world’s first high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and jet bomber; a Dornier 335; some Me 262s; the Me 163 Komet, and even a rare surviving Natter.* Ten Me 262s were flown across Germany and through France to Querqueville Airfield outside Cherbourg, where they were loaded onto HMS Reaper, an escort carrier, and shipped to the United States.
In the meantime, Ken Chilstrom had happily spent his first six months home as the maintenance officer for the Flight Test Division. In this position he got to fly every aircraft that had been in for maintenance, building up his flying time and impressing Major Chris Petrie, the chief of the Fighter Test Section, with his skill and quiet, unassuming demeanor. When there was an opening in the Performance Section, Ken was able to slide right in. It was here that he met Colonel Harold Watson and began flying some of the exotic captured aircraft the Whizzers and others had brought back. These included the Me 262, an A6M “Zero,” the XP-59 Airacomet, and Chilstrom’s favorite, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190.
“It was all stopwatches and knee cards,” Ken recollects. “Nothing fancy and we had no formal training as test pilots because there was no such thing in 1944.” This was a situation soon to be remedied, and in September the Engineering Flight Test School was established at nearby Vandalia airport, graduating the inaugural class in 1945. Ken’s classmates included Dick Bong, America’s highest-scoring ace; Tony LeVier; Fred Ascani; and Glen Edwards, with whom he shared a house.
Edwards had graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in chemical engineering and gotten into the Army Air Corps five months before Pearl Harbor. Like Ken Chilstrom, Edwards fought in North Africa, Tunisia, and Sicily, though the Canadian native flew the A-20 Havoc light bomber. Coming home with four Distinguished Flying Crosses in December 1943, Edwards would meet up with Chilstrom in 1944 at Wright Field. “Glen was my best friend,” Ken recalls wistfully. “He was a wonderful pilot and all-around great guy.”
It became apparent to everyone that the advanced German aviation programs were far ahead of the Allies in terms of aerodynamics; there were swept wings, including a forward-swept wing, vertical tails, and a host of other innovative applications backed by stacks of wind tunnel data and practical flying test experience. The Germans were incorporating bubble canopies, ejection seats, and pressurized cockpits into their aircraft. Though scores of designs were captured, two in particular bear discussion for the impact they had on postwar development and the quest for supersonic flight.
Messerschmitt’s P.1101 arose from the 1944 Emergency Fighter Program and was designed around the smallest, lightest airframe possible paired with the most powerful engine available: the Heinkel HeS 011 turbojet. With its tricycle landing gear and high tailplane, the P.1101 was intended as a sleek, deadly successor to the Me 262. The swept, shoulder-mounted wings were ground adjustable between 35 and 45 degrees, which the Germans considered vital for raising the critical Mach number and reducing the effects of transonic shock waves—another breakthrough as yet unrealized in America or Britain. With its blunt, nose-mounted intake and bubble canopy the Messerschmitt looked like a stouter, older brother to North American’s premier jet fighter: the North American Sabre. In fact, a nearly completed P.1101 prototype was discovered at Messerschmitt’s project facility in Oberammergau, and much of the German data would be used to refine the Sabre’s design.
The other aircraft of note was Focke-Wulf’s Ta 183. Designed by Hans Multhopp as a single-seat, single-engine fighter, the 183 was intended, from its inception, to operate in the transonic region. Multhopp calculated that this not only necessitated a pronounced sweep, but also very thin wings that would focus the shock wave outboard away from the aircraft. Control would be more stable this way and was further enhanced by a high tailplane that kept the rear surfaces above the burbling transonic wake. The vertical fin was swept back 60 degrees and topped by a dihedral (upward angle) tailplane.* It also incorporated elevons, a relatively large control surface on the wing’s trailing edge that combined the functions of elevator and aileron.
Stubbier than the P.1101, the 183 was heavier and faster with a top design speed of 593 miles per hour. Its thin wings could not support interior armament so, like the Messerschmitt (and the Sabre), cannons were to be nose mounted on either side of the intake. One can see shades of the future Soviet MiG-15 in its design, and this is hardly surprising as the Russians also took whatever advanced technology they could, including most of the V-2 rocket program. Given the scope of available technology, German ingeniousness was futuristic and a decade ahead of its time. No less impressive was that even faced with constant bombing, a chronic shortage of materials, and, for those realistic enough to admit it, a lost war, these various programs endured until the very end.
But German limitations, namely their jet engine manufacturing issues, were as staggering as their successes and in this area the Allies were well ahead. Engines like the Rolls-Royce Derwent V, basically a powerful, polished derivative of Frank Whittle’s W.2B, used Nimonic 80, a high-temperature resistant alloy, for its turbine blades and mated the engine with Gloster’s Meteor. Rolls-Royce also utilized the Lockheed YP-80 as a test bed for its improved Nene engine, then sold it under license to Pratt & Whitney for use in the U.S. Navy’s Grumman F9F Panther.
Britain, however, under a new government, was determined to cut budgets and fell rapidly behind after the war. The Miles M.52 supersonic program was scrapped and the Americans, specifically Bell Aircraft, were able to use the British data to complete its X-1 rocket plane. What truly spurred U.S. development from 1945 onward was the synthesis of German aerodynamics with initial Br
itish test data and American government financial backing. The impact of German technology and design would be immediately felt within both Eastern and Western aerodynamic spheres. Interestingly, some innovations, like the swept wing, were independently discovered, albeit a decade late.
American Bob Jones of the NACA had paralleled German research and, in early 1945, was convinced he had discovered the solution to tame transonic airflow: the swept wing. That summer a team of American engineers under the auspices of Operation Paperclip rounded up every German scientist and technician possible. One group, which included Hugh Dryden and Boeing’s George Schairer, was led by Theodore von Kármán himself, who, due to his fluency in German, education in Germany, and personal contacts with many scientists, was an immense asset. Reunited with Adolf Busemann, whom he had not seen since the 1935 Volta Conference, the Hungarian asked, “What is all this about wing sweep?” and Busemann’s face lit up as he replied, “Oh, you remember, I read a paper on it at the Volta Congress in 1935.”
In fact, no one did remember until Busemann’s original work surfaced and that, along with the German’s hard, practical data, expedited his transfer from the British sphere to the Americans. He, like Alexander Lippisch and hundreds of others, found a new life in the United States while those much less fortunate ended up in Soviet hands. In the end, both sides would rapidly overtake the German lead, yet it cannot be denied that the war, and subsequent Allied victory, opened the door into a new age.
It was an age, almost immediately, of great promise and hope mixed with tremendous suspicions and fears. The war was over and the men who fought it came back, physically at least, but, like all combat veterans, each man mentally returned whenever he could. Some, like Ken Chilstrom and George Welch, were in combat early so they were able to begin picking up the pieces before the end of the war. Ed Virgin, chief of Engineering Flight Test and the chief test pilot at North American Aviation, had hired George Welch away from the Army, so by 1945 he and Jan were in Los Angeles with George deep into P-51 follow-on programs.
In Ohio, Ken Chilstrom was working directly under Gus Lundquist, who was liberated from Stalag Luft 1 during May 1945 and had taken over the Fighter Test Section in June. Lundquist, whom Ken considered “the finest test pilot I ever knew,” was succeeded by Francis “Gabby” Gabreski, who had also survived Stalag Luft 1 and took over the section in September.
Chuck Yeager came home in early 1945 and went straight to California to propose to Glennis Dickhouse. They were married on February 26, at his childhood home in Hamlin, West Virginia.
Following a brief stint as an instructor pilot, Yeager arrived at Wright Field in July just weeks before the end of the war. He had chosen the base because Glennis was pregnant and Ohio was as close as he could get to West Virginia. One fall day while circling the field in an Airacomet, a P-38 appeared and a mock dogfight ensued. Neither could gain an advantage and Yeager called a “knock-it-off” to end the fight. Both landed. Yeager had been astounded to see a Lightning flown that way and went out of his way to meet the pilot. “Man . . . I didn’t know the 38 could swap ends like that,” he said as he shook the other officer’s hand. Bob Hoover, ever pugnacious, snapped back with, “Those eyes of yours were bigger than a stripper’s knockers.”
Hoover had been through a particularly nasty time and was just happy to have survived the war. During his sixteen months as a POW, he had absorbed everything Gus Lundquist told him about enemy fighters. Hearing the Germans planned to murder the 10,000 prisoners in Stalag Luft 1, he escaped in April 1945, right before the war ended. Recaptured by the Russians, Hoover again escaped while his captors were trying to figure out how to use an indoor flush toilet, something none of them had ever seen.
So it came to be that during 1945 all these pilots, different in many ways but linked together by combat and flying, found themselves together at Wright Field. It was the age of the jet, and possibilities seemed endless. On October 24, 1945, within weeks of Japan’s surrender, the United Nations was founded with the aim of avoiding another such world war. Forty-six nations were initially part of this effort, plus the five Allied powers who composed the Security Council: China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The opening lines of the UN Charter expressed its lofty goals thus:
“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . .”
High-minded and admirable, to be sure, but most of the world, and particularly America, wanted to live a little and make up for time lost during the dark years. Solo artists, who traveled easier and far cheaper than the extravagant prewar big bands, were now the rage. Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, and, above everyone else, Frank Sinatra, came to symbolize the postwar era. At one concert over 10,000 fans lined Times Square, and the singer was pelted with bras and panties when he took the stage.
American boys sporting crew cuts and cuffed pants were hanging around drugstores or soda fountains looking, of course, for girls. The girls still favored sweaters and skirts, mostly of fairly drab material due to wartime shortages, but that was changing fast. Americans were undeniably becoming more casual, for a variety of reasons. As with most who have passed through a great upheaval, the survivors felt they deserved to relax a bit, and who could blame them? Men returning home were understandably tired of uniformity and wanted to loosen up. They wanted color, and they got it in a variety of suits and especially neckties. Jackets were often worn with no tie, or not at all, and men often favored the loose, untucked shirts they had seen in Hawaii or California. With no material rationing, pants were cut fuller with wide cuffs, and suit jackets much longer than during the war. Quickly discarding their military-style haircuts, men began wearing their hair longer with pomade or gel.
Girls kept the shortened sleeves and knee-length hems imposed by war shortages, but a variety of colorful fabrics were again available, and the bobby-soxer made her debut. Pleated skirts worn with socks rolled down over saddle shoes became a symbol of the “American look,” as Life magazine called it. Older women wore hats of all kinds, accompanied with cotton gloves since they had not been rationed and could be dyed. Inspired by military uniforms, women wore shoulder pads with knee-length skirts, though pants, which they had worn by necessity in wartime factories, were becoming more common.
In general, women emerged from the Second World War as their mothers had from the Great War, more independent and less willing to submit to what many believed were outdated societal demands. The marriage and birth rate had increased by 50 percent from prewar levels, though a surprising number of these unions were encouraged by “Allotment Annies”; women who married multiple soldiers to receive the extra $50 per month allotment or, if they were “fortunate,” the $10,000 death benefit paid to combat widows. “Dear John” letters became more common as women, for different reasons, decided not to wait for soldier husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends, and at least 650,000 American children were born out of wedlock during the war years. Yet many American females were extremely patriotic, very proud of their country and their fighting men, and waited faithfully until the soldiers came home and life went on.
By 1945 over nineteen million women made up 36 percent of the civilian workforce—and they liked it. “They put me into a training program for about two months,” one Connecticut woman recalled. “Oh, I was so pleased with myself; it was for the war effort.” Understandably, many women were not pleased with the postwar mass firings that occurred so returning soldiers could have jobs. “I know the pride I had felt during the war,” one woman later wrote. “I just felt 10 feet tall. Here I was doing an important job, and doing it well, and then all at once here comes V-J day [Victory in Japan] and I’m back making homemade bread.”
At one point in 1946, 35,00
0 military personnel were being discharged every day, but Washington had actually given some thought to this. To avoid the riots and recession that followed the Great War, the government instituted several phenomenally successful programs, most notably the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act. Anyone, including women and minorities, who had served at least ninety days and was discharged honorably, could receive the benefits. Zero money down, low-interest mortgages got veterans out of the cities into newly constructed suburbs where 1.4 million houses were built each year after 1946. Additionally, the 52-20 provision provided $20 per week for a year in unemployment payments, though less than one-fifth of veterans ever claimed it. For a generation born in the turmoil of the 1920s, raised during the Great Depression, and having won the world war, nothing seemed to fulfill life better than an education, a job, and a house.
However, it was the educational benefits that provided far-reaching impacts for the nation. Tuition and a housing allowance were paid for veterans to finish high school, learn a trade, or, if they could be accepted, enter a university. Nearly eight million men and women took advantage of this, including two million who were now able to attend college. In 1940 there were 109,000 bachelor degrees awarded to men, and 77,000 to women nationwide, but by end of the decade this had increased to 328,000 and 103,000, respectively. Not only did these measures prevent a repeat of the 1920s, but they created a responsible, largely stable, and educated middle class that propelled the United States into the global leadership position it still enjoys today.