July 19, 2007
“Man’s Best Friend” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Yesterday’s lead piece on this website——“Isn’t It Ionic?”—describes a failed experimental aircraft designed by Alexander de Seversky, a Czarist émigré and aviation pioneer. The piece notes that the Ionocraft worked, after a fashion, but explains why predictions that ion drives would soon propel aircraft the size of city blocks at great speeds and altitudes of 300,000 feet didn’t pan out. The piece is nonetheless, and properly, respectful about Seversky, noting that he designed a number of things that did work, one of them being the P-47 Thunderbolt. I hadn’t known that, and as I read it wondered how many readers had ever heard of a P-47. Probably not too many, which if true, seems unfair. I once heard someone make an interesting case that the P-47 was the most efficient and effective Allied fighter of the Second World War. It was not as good an air-superiority or escort fighter as a P-51 Mustang, nor as deadly a fighter-bomber as an RAF Typhoon, but it did everything a fighter or fighter-bomber could do very effectively—it was, this man claimed, second best at everything, which is no mean feat. In some cases, trying to do everything is a mistake, since a machine designed for so many disparate purposes does nothing well enough; the classic case of a World War II–era aircraft designed to do everything but doing nothing very well was the French Potez 63. But the P-47 did everything well enough. It was a clumsy dogfighter below 8,000 feet, but since it escorted heavy bombers, Luftwaffe fighters had to engage P-47s at higher altitudes, where it did just fine: P-47s made 3,752 air-to-air kills, and in the first three months of 1944, the period in which the Allies more or less destroyed the Luftwaffe, P-47s shot down more German fighters than did P-51s. After those three months, P-47s flying below 8,000 feet didn’t have too many Luftwaffe fighters to worry about. You could even make a claim that it was the plane that won the war. In Europe the Thunderbolt flew more sorties than P-51s, P-38s, and P-40s combined. Seversky designed the P-47 with another Georgian refugee (the European kind of Georgian, not the sort Sherman chased into the Carolinas), Alexander Kartveli. It was the largest Allied fighter built during the war, perhaps twice the size of a Spitfire, and it was a very rugged aircraft. It carried 500-pound bombs, its eight machine guns could inflict heavy damage on lightly armored targets, and for harder targets it carried various rockets, which could be devastatingly effective; I have met Americans who saw P-47s destroy a panzer regiment in less than 20 minutes. That was probably not a unique event; between June 6, 1944 and V-E Day (May 7, 1945), P-47s destroyed 86,000 railway cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks. As far as I know, it is the only American aircraft to have inspired a work of classical music (Bohuslav Martinu’s P-47 Thunderbolt Scherzo for Orchestra). A few years ago, I heard it receive a more jocular tribute, although not, I think, a less respectful or less sincere one. Following some former World War II infantrymen, at that time in their early eighties, through the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, I saw one of them nudge another as they passed a P-47, and point a thumb at the plane. “Man’s best friend,” he murmured. The other grunted assent. It had the air of an old joke, except that as far as I could tell, neither one was wholly joking.
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