October 2, 2007
The Plane That Didn’t Win the War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST Yesterday was the anniversary of the first flight of an American jet aircraft, the Bell P-59 Airacomet. The event took place, amidst great secrecy, on October 1, 1942, and the event is as good as a secret now, because almost no one has ever heard of it. The Airacomet was an experimental jet fighter, although not a very good one—it had poor engine response and reliability, as did all early turbojets, and with a top speed of only 413 mph, while the world’s first deployed jet fighter, the German Me 262, had a top speed of 541 mph. The P-59 never saw combat, nor did any American jet during the Second World War. The United States did not undertake a crash program to develop a jet fighter, whereas the Germans did, and they managed to build a considerable number of Me 262s (more than 1,400, of which perhaps 200 saw combat). We won the war anyway, and thereby hangs a tale. One of the most common World War II counterfactuals asks what would have happened had Hitler not inhibited the development of the Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter, by insisting that it be redesigned as a bomber. The implications appear suitably vast: Hitler’s Europe has been described as “a fortress without a roof,” but with more jet fighters, wouldn’t the Luftwaffe have swept the B17s and Lancasters from the skies, then savagely contested the air over Normandy, letting Rommel drive the Allies into the sea? The answer is no, because while the Allies didn’t always have the most advanced military technology, they often had the most cost-effective technology. Germany was the first state to develop and in some cases deploy a number of novel military technologies; these included ballistic missiles with inertial guidance systems, cruise missiles, wire-guided missiles, and jet aircraft. In addition to the Me 262, there were prototypes for other hypermodern warplanes, including one, the Go229, that looked like a flying wing, and might have functioned (if inadvertently) as a stealth fighter. The Me 262 was appreciably faster than any allied aircraft in level flight, and as the terse maxim of air-to-air combat has it, “speed kills”: A much faster aircraft fights at its own discretion. Had the Me 262s wrested command of the air from the Allies, this would have cancelled what is often said to have been the greatest American and British military advantage in the fight against Hitler. The German army and its admirers have often insisted that superior German combat skills would have crushed the soft and clumsy Western Allies, had the latter been denied their hordes of unopposed fighter-bombers. So what went wrong? Not what a lot of people have claimed, because it is not true that Hitler first ordered the Me 262 to be redesigned as a bomber, thereby appreciably slowing its development, then insisted that it be deployed in the role of fighter-bomber, seriously delaying its appearance in fighter units. The “redesign” of the Me262 simply attached pylons to the airframe to allow it to carry a few bombs. This required no great design work and was completed while the engineers went about the very arduous task of debugging the Jumo 004, the turbojet engine that would power the Me 262. As for deployment, Hitler issued his edict in May 1944 and rescinded it the following September—at about the same time as the Jumo 004 entered mass production. Since the effective operational debut of the aircraft depended on the availability of production engines with a reasonable running life, it is doubtful whether Hitler’s edict delayed that debut by more than a few days. Shortages of nickel and chromium to make high-temperature alloys for the Jumo 004 seriously delayed, and finally crippled, the Me 262. The turbine blades, which were exposed to temperatures over 700 degrees Celsius combined with tensile stresses of up to 15 tons per square inch, developed “creep”—the metal deformed and the blades lengthened—and the flame tubes slowly buckled out of shape. As a result, the preproduction Jumo 004 had a running life of 10 hours. When the engine went into mass production, the engine life had been extended only to 25 hours. Also, given constraints on industrial capacity, more Me 262s would have meant a lot fewer conventional fighters, so the Luftwaffe would still have been in bad trouble somewhere. Had the Me 262s shown up earlier, and in greater numbers, the Allies would almost inevitably have accelerated development of their own jets, the Meteors, Vampires, and Shooting Stars—and British jet engine technology was superior to the German. But they didn’t have to, in part because the Me 262s had to survive the tactics evolved by Allied pilots flying excellent conventionally powered aircraft. Allied pilots hit the German jets on the way up, before they reached their top speed, and smashed up their airfields. Germany also had problems producing jet fuel in large quantities, very serious maintenance difficulties, and more problems training large numbers of pilots, ground crew, and mechanics for a radically new aircraft. Germany had no natural rubber, the jets landed at speeds of 150 mph, and synthetic rubber tires were not up to the stresses. Leaving aside the difficulties of the new technology, the questions of opportunity cost, cost-effectiveness at the margins, and potential Allied responses were intricate and, from the German point of view, not encouraging. Why, then, does the Me 262 haunt the alternate histories? Perhaps the legend spread because Allied domination of the skies over Western Europe has remained an invaluable sop to German military self-esteem. More comforting to recite that the numberless Jabos (fighter-bombers) doomed the German army, no matter how skillfully it fought, than face the interesting fact that American, Soviet, and British troops got steadily better over the course of the war, and Germans worse (in the Vosges and the Ardennes in 1944, United States troops stymied German offensives without benefit of vast airpower or numerical superiority). For Americans, among whom the myth of the Me 262 as a potential war-winner has had a very hardy life, the Me 262’s aura may have a culturally determined plangency. We imagine that our own technological superiority, especially in aircraft, still the most glamorous and “modern” military machines, is part of the natural order, an extension of the muskets that routed the Iroquois or the revolvers that won the West. We enjoy imagining ourselves as Edison’s heirs, the nation of tinkerers, Connecticut Yankees who vanquish cruel and proficient warrior foes with irresistible science. A world where our enemies had the better warplanes may look like the world turned upside down, macabre and perversely fascinating. So we should remember that we tested a jet fighter relatively early in the war, found it wanting, and designed a number of devastating propeller fighters. When we did build the military technologies of the future—atomic bombs are the most famous—we made terrifying weapons, but a lot of what we designed and built, and of what our allies designed and built, was the logical development of existing technologies. As the historian Richard Overy once put it, Germany tried to fight a 1940s war with what would become the technologies of the 1950s, and that was a very bad idea. The P-59, correctly identified as an idea whose time had not quite come, is only an obscure footnote to history—which is a tribute to the wisdoma of the American planners who decided to scrap the plane.
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