What RAF Pilots Said When They First Flew The American P-51 Mustang
Wing Commander Ian Campbell Ord, the commanding officer of the Air Fighting Development Unit, has invited Harker out from the Rolls-Royce Flight Test Establishment at Hucknall to evaluate the machine personally. Campbell Ord has a problem. His unit has been testing the new American fighter for several weeks and the official verdict is that above 18,000 ft it falls off badly.
At 20,000 ft it is slower than the Spitfire Mark V and the Spitfire Mark V is already being shot down in increasing numbers by a German fighter, the Focke-Wulf 190, that the Royal Air Force has not yet found an answer to. By every official measurement, the American airplane is a disappointment. It cannot do what Fighter Command needs a fighter to do.
It cannot climb high enough to fight the Luftwaffe over France. The British have already decided to relegate it to a low-level role, tactical reconnaissance and ground attack, work the Curtiss Tomahawk could do almost as well. The aircraft Harker is about to fly is, on paper, a failure.
Campbell Ord does not believe the paper. He has watched this machine in the air and what he has watched does not match the official verdict. He cannot explain it and he wants Harker, a senior Rolls-Royce service liaison test pilot with one of the broadest catalogs of fighter experience in the country, to fly it and tell him what he thinks.
Harker climbs into the cockpit. The harness is unfamiliar. The instrument layout is not where his hands expect it to be. The throttle moves the wrong way for a British pilot and he has to stop himself from jerking it back when he means to push it forward. He starts the engine. It is a 12-cylinder Allison V-1710, a workmanlike American power plant designed for low-altitude performance with a single-stage, single-speed supercharger that has already been the source of every complaint anyone has filed about this aircraft. He taxies
out, lines up, and pushes the throttle forward. What happens in the next 30 minutes is the question this entire story turns on because when Harker came back down at Duxford that afternoon, climbed out of the cockpit, and walked across the apron to find Campbell Ord, he did not say what every other senior Royal Air Force test pilot had been saying about the Mustang for the last 6 weeks.
He said something else, something that, the very next day, he would put on paper in a short report that would alter the course of the air war in Europe and, by every honest reckoning, shorten the war itself by a measurable margin. He had flown an American airplane that the British had already decided was a disappointment and he had stepped out of it convinced that he had just sat in the finest fighter airframe in the world.
The only thing wrong with it, he was about to argue, was the engine and he knew exactly which engine should be in there instead. To understand why a Rolls-Royce test pilot in a Cambridgeshire field could change a war by writing a short memo about an American fighter, we have to go back not to 1942, not even to the start of the Second World War.
We have to go back to a meeting in New York City in the spring of 1940 where a desperate British civil servant asked an American aircraft executive to build copies of an airplane that, even then, both men knew was already obsolete. This is the story of how the Royal Air Force, looking for a stopgap, ended up with a war winner.
And of how the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang did not invent the airframe, did not design the engine, and did not even fly the resulting aircraft into combat himself, but who, in 30 minutes over Cambridgeshire, saw something every other senior figure on two continents had missed. In the spring of 1940, Britain was running out of fighters.
France was about to fall. The Royal Air Force was burning through Hurricanes and Spitfires faster than the British factories could replace them. Sir Henry Self, who led the aircraft procurement side of the British Purchasing Commission in New York, had been given a job almost beyond reckoning.
He was to find American aircraft, any American aircraft, that could fight in European skies and he was to find them in months, not years. The American fighter situation in 1940 was bleak by European standards. There was the Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk, an adequate low-altitude fighter that could not match a Messerschmitt 109 above 15,000 ft.
There was the Bell P-39 Airacobra, a strange mid-engine design that performed even worse at altitude than the P-40. There was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a twin-engined fighter that was promising but not yet in production. And there was nothing else. Self had asked the Curtiss-Wright Corporation if they could build more P-40s and Curtiss-Wright had told him their factories were already at capacity.
The British were stuck. Then, in late April of 1940, the president of North American Aviation, a hard-nosed executive named James Howard Kindleberger, who was known to everyone as Dutch, made Self a counterproposal. Self had asked North American to build P-40s under license. Dutch Kindleberger said no.
North American, he said, could design a better fighter from scratch in less time than it would take to set up a license production line for somebody else’s aircraft. He gave Self a number. 120 days from contract signing to a flying prototype. Self thought about it for a moment and then he agreed. There were conditions. The British insisted that North American buy the wind tunnel data from the Curtiss XP-46, a fighter project Curtiss had been working on, to make sure no American test resources were being duplicated.
North American paid Curtiss $56,000 for the data. Edward Hawkey and Edgar Schmued, the senior engineers on the new project, looked at the data when it arrived and concluded that almost none of it was useful. The Curtiss design was conventional. What North American had in mind was not.
The man who led the design was Edgar Schmued, a German-born American who had emigrated as a young man and worked his way through the small American aviation companies of the 1920s and 30s. He now ran the preliminary design office at North American under chief engineer Raymond Rice. Schmued was a quiet, methodical man who drew with a draftsman’s discipline.
The team he led was small. They worked late into every night and went home, by the recollection of one of them, only on Sunday at 6:00 in the evening. The airframe was rolled out 102 days after contract signing on September 9th, 1940. It had no engine yet. The Allison V-1710, when it arrived 18 days later, came with electrical fittings that did not match the existing motor mounts.
North American built a new motor mount. On October 26, 1940, a freelance test pilot named Vance Breese took the prototype, registered NX-19998, into the air at Mines Field in Los Angeles, the airport that is now Los Angeles International. The first hop lasted 5 minutes. Later that same day, Breese took her up again, this time for 10 minutes.
Over the next several flights, he was, by his own remarks, deeply impressed. The British Purchasing Commission, in a contract amendment dated December 9th, 1940, gave the new aircraft a name. They called it the Mustang. The first production Mustang Mark I, serial number AG345, was test flown by a North American pilot named Louis Wait on April 23, 1941.
The first deliveries to Britain began later that year and in January of 1942, the first Mustangs reached number 26 Squadron at Royal Air Force Gatwick, replacing the Curtiss Tomahawks the squadron had been flying. And here, almost immediately, came the disappointment. The Allison engine in the Mustang Mark I had a single-stage, single-speed supercharger.
The single-stage, single-speed supercharger had been chosen for one specific reason. The United States War Department had reserved its turbo supercharger production for four-engined bombers and was unwilling to release the technology for fighter export. The engine that resulted was a perfectly good power plant up to 15,000 ft.
Above that, it ran out of breath. At 20,000 ft, the Mustang’s maximum speed dropped to 357 mph, slower than both the Spitfire Mark V and the Messerschmitt 109F. Its rate of climb to 20,000 ft was 11 minutes. The Spitfire Mark V did the same climb in seven. By every measurement that mattered for the air war over occupied Europe, the Mustang was a second-tier aircraft.
Royal Air Force Fighter Command did not want it. The Mustangs were sent instead to Army Cooperation Command, a backwater outfit responsible for low-level reconnaissance, photo roams, and ground attack. They flew their first operational sortie on May 10, 1942, when Flying Officer G. N. Dawson of No. 26 Squadron took off from Gatwick and shot up a goods train near Berck on the French coast.
It was, by any honest reckoning, exactly the kind of mission a Tomahawk could have flown, and a Tomahawk had been flying. The Royal Air Force had ordered an airplane to win a war, and what it had got was an airplane to strafe trucks. What no one in the official chain of command yet understood was that the airframe under that Allison engine was a generational leap.
It was not just incrementally better than the Tomahawk. It was the first fighter in history to use a laminar flow wing, an airfoil section developed jointly by North American and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The laminar flow wing produced dramatically less drag at high speed than any conventional wing then flying.
The fuselage was lofted using mathematical conic sections, one of the first aircraft in the world to be designed that way, and the resulting shape was so smooth that air slid over it almost without resistance. The radiator was tucked under the belly in a duct that, by a piece of unintentional genius, exploited what aerodynamicists call the Meredith effect.
The heated air leaving the radiator actually produced a small amount of jet thrust. The Mustang carried roughly 180 US gallons of fuel internally in two wing tanks, where the Spitfire carried less than 100 Imperial gallons. By every aerodynamic measure that did not depend on the engine, the Mustang was years ahead of every other piston fighter in the world.
The Royal Air Force was using it to shoot at trains. In April of 1942, the Air Fighting Development Unit at Duxford received a Mustang Mark I, serial AG422, for high-altitude evaluation. Wing Commander Ian Campbell Ord, the unit’s commanding officer, watched the test reports come in and saw exactly what every other Royal Air Force officer had seen.
Above 18,000 ft, the aircraft was disappointing. Below 15,000 ft, it was extraordinary. At 5,000 ft, it was 30 mph faster than a Spitfire Mark V C. At 15,000 ft, it was 35 mph faster than the same Spitfire, despite the Spitfire having a more powerful engine. There was something fundamental about the airframe that no one at the Air Ministry seemed to be paying attention to.
Campbell Ord had been a fighter pilot in his earlier career, and he had a feel for an airplane that paper engineers do not always have. He looked at the Mustang sitting on his apron at Duxford, and what he saw was not a failed fighter, but a magnificent aircraft with the wrong engine. He picked up the telephone and called Hucknall, the Rolls-Royce Flight Test Establishment, and asked for Ronnie Harker.
Ronnie Harker was 32 years old of 1942. He had been flying for Rolls-Royce since the early 1930s, and he had spent the previous 3 years as a senior service liaison test pilot, the man Rolls-Royce sent out to Royal Air Force squadrons to evaluate new aircraft and decide whether the company’s engines could improve them. He had flown almost every front-line fighter in the Royal Air Force inventory.
He had flown the Hurricane and the Spitfire and the Westland Whirlwind and the Hawker Tornado, and he had a quiet, methodical way of describing what he found in each one. He arrived at Duxford on April 30, 1942. Campbell Ord walked him out to the dispersal, showed him the Mustang, and told him to take it up and form his own opinion. Harker climbed in.
He flew for 30 minutes. When he came back down, he sat with Campbell Ord for a long time without saying very much, and then he drove back to Hucknall and went straight to his desk. The next morning, May 1, 1942, he wrote his report. In it, Harker wrote that the Mustang appeared to him to be a formidable low and medium-altitude fighter, and that with a powerful engine, specifically the Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 then being prepared for the new Spitfire Mark IX, its performance could be outstanding.
He noted, on the basis of his own flight, that the Mustang was 35 mph faster than the Spitfire Mark V at roughly the same engine power. And he made one factual error in the report. He ascribed the design to a former Messerschmitt engineer, when in fact Edgar Schmued had never worked for Messerschmitt. Schmued had spent his early career with Fokker and General Aviation in the United States, and had never set foot in a German fighter design office in his life.
The error did not matter. What mattered was the recommendation. Harker, having flown the aircraft for 30 minutes, was telling Rolls-Royce that an American airframe currently being used to strafe trains in northern France could, with the right engine, become the finest fighter in the world. Harker was not a senior figure.
He had no formal authority to recommend anything to anyone. He was a test pilot writing an internal company memo. But he had picked up the telephone before he wrote that memo, and he had called a man named Ray Dorey, the head of the Rolls-Royce Experimental Flight Test Division at Hucknall, and asked him a simple question.
How quickly could a Merlin 61 be fitted into a Mustang airframe? Dorey, within 48 hours, had taken the question to Ernest Hives, the head of Rolls-Royce, who took it to Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, then serving as Vice Chief of the Air Staff. By May 13, less than 2 weeks after Harker’s flight, an Air Ministry meeting had authorized the conversion.
Five Mustang airframes were to be sent to Hucknall. Rolls-Royce was to fit them with Merlin engines. The whole project, for security reasons, was given the unrevealing designation Mustang X. If you served, or if your father or grandfather served in the Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, or in any of the Commonwealth flying services during the Second World War, I would be honored if you left their unit and station in the comments.
The men who flew these machines, the ground crews who kept them running through Cambridgeshire winters, the riggers and the armorers and the radio mechanics, they are the people whose hands actually wrote this history. The records preserve some of them. Many more are remembered only by their families.
Every comment that names one of them keeps a piece of that record alive a little longer. Rolls-Royce, in the spring of 1942, had every reason to say no. The Merlin engine was the most strategically important piece of British industrial output of the entire war. Every Merlin that came off the production lines was already promised to a Spitfire, a Lancaster bomber, a Mosquito, a Beaufighter, a Halifax.
There was quite literally no spare engine capacity. The Air Ministry’s first instinct, when Harker’s recommendation reached it, was to refuse. The Merlin 61s were earmarked for the new Spitfire Mark IX, which was urgently needed to deal with the Focke-Wulf 190. Diverting Merlins to an American airframe seemed at first like robbing the home defense to subsidize a foreign experiment.
What overcame the Air Ministry’s resistance was a combination of two things. First, Sir Wilfrid Freeman, who had championed the de Havilland Mosquito against Air Ministry resistance and is by some serious historians regarded as the most consequential British air official of the entire war, threw his political weight behind the project.
Second, an American military attaché in London, Colonel Thomas Hitchcock, heard about the proposal and saw immediately what it meant for the United States Army Air Forces. He sent word back to Washington. General Henry Arnold, the commander of the United States Army Air Forces, became personally interested.
The British project to put a British engine in an American airframe acquired American sponsors, which made it politically impossible to kill quietly. The conversion work began at Hucknall in June of 1942. Serials Juneau Juneau AB, Juneau AM203, AM208, AL963, and AM121 were earmarked for the work. The Rolls-Royce engineers, led by Chief Aerodynamic Engineer Witold Chalier, calculated on paper that a Mustang fitted with a Merlin 61 should reach 441 mph at 25,600 ft.
This was a stunning number. It was 40 mph faster than the current Spitfire Mark IX with vastly greater range. The first conversion, AL975, was actually fitted with a Merlin 65 rather than the high-altitude Merlin 61, partly because the Merlin 65 was identical to the engine going into the Spitfire Mark IX and would allow a closer comparison.
A four-bladed Rotol propeller was fitted in place of the original three-bladed Curtiss Electric. A new chin radiator was added to handle the extra cooling load of the two-stage two-speed supercharger. The aircraft, with Rolls-Royce’s chief test pilot Captain Ronald Shepherd at the controls, took to the air on October 13, 1942.
The results were almost beyond belief. By November, the Mustang XA-208 was reaching 433 mph at 22,000 ft. AL975 reached an absolute ceiling of 40,600 ft, an altitude no Mustang Mark One had ever come close to. The high-altitude performance, the thing the Allison-engined Mustang had been mocked for, was now better than the Spitfire’s.
The aircraft could to 20,000 ft in roughly half the time Mark One had needed. Pilots who flew the converted aircraft came down speaking the way Ronnie Harker had spoken in April, with a kind of stunned restraint, as if the words for what they had just experienced were not quite available to them. The Royal Air Force test reports from Hucknall and from Boscombe Down, the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment, used dry, careful, professional language, but the numbers were unmistakable. The Mustang, with a
Merlin in it, was the fastest piston-engined fighter in the world. It was faster than anything the Germans had. It was faster than anything the Americans had. It was, by a measurable margin, faster than the Spitfire whose engine it was now sharing. And here is where the second piece of the story has to be understood.
The British did not have the industrial capacity to mass-produce Merlin-powered Mustangs. Rolls-Royce’s Merlin lines were saturated. Even after the conversion proved itself, only 25 Mustang Xs were ever built in Britain. The breakthrough that Harker had identified, that Campbell Orde had championed, that Sir Wilfrid Freeman had pushed through the Air Ministry, was going to have to be built somewhere else, by someone else, on a different scale entirely.
That somewhere else was the Packard Motor Car Company in Detroit, Michigan. Packard had been licensed to build the Merlin in the United States since September of 1940, originally to supply British orders. The American-built Merlin, designated V-1650 by the United States Army Air Forces, was already in production.
North American Aviation, alerted to the British conversion through Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock’s reports, had begun parallel work on its own Merlin Mustang in the summer of 1942. On July 25, 1942, North American was authorized to convert two airframes from the existing P-51 Mustang line to take Packard-built Merlins.
The conversion was given the company designation NA-101, and the Army designation, originally XP-78, was changed to XP-51B by mid-October. On November 30, 1942, just over a month after the British prototype had flown, North American test pilot Robert Chilton took the first XP-51B into the air at Mines Field in Los Angeles. Chilton, on his first flight, did not bother with the usual sequence of low-speed handling checks.
He climbed straight up. At 20,000 ft, the supercharger gear shifted automatically into high speed, and the Merlin kept pulling. Chilton went on past 30,000 ft, higher than any Mustang had ever been, and the aeroplane was still climbing strongly. His flight reports from that day are not the elaborate prose of a man composing for posterity.
They are the abbreviated technical notes of a working test pilot. But the numbers they describe are extraordinary. The XP-51B reached a level top speed of 441 mph at 29,800 ft, more than 100 mph faster than the Allison-engined Mustang at the same altitude. Its rate of climb at every altitude had roughly doubled. In August of 1942, even before any Merlin-powered Mustang had flown, the United States Army Air Forces had ordered 400 P-51Bs on the strength of North American’s projected performance figures.
After Chilton’s flight, the order was expanded to 2,200. By 1944, the Mustang was being built at two plants, Inglewood in California and a new facility at Dallas in Texas, on a scale that no British factory could have matched. The first Merlin Mustangs to reach a combat unit went not to the Eighth Air Force, the heavy bomber force, but to the Ninth Air Force, the tactical air force.
They were issued to the 354th Fighter Group, which arrived at Royal Air Force Boxted in November of 1943, and flew its first combat mission on December 1, 1943, under the operational control of Eighth Fighter Command. The Royal Air Force, designating the new aircraft the Mustang Mark Three, received its first deliveries in late December of that year, with number 65 Squadron at Gravesend the initial recipient.
Number 19 and number 12 two squadrons followed in early ’44, the three squadrons forming 122 Wing of Fighter Command. The Mustang’s primary mission, almost from the moment it became available in numbers, was long-range bomber escort. Until the Merlin Mustang appeared, the Eighth Air Force’s daylight bombing campaign over Germany had been crippled by losses.
The Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 bombers, which had been advertised as capable of defending themselves against fighters with their massed defensive guns, had proved unable to do anything of the sort. Unescorted raids on the German aircraft industry, in particular the costly attacks on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, had laid the doctrine bare.
On August 17, 1943, the combined Schweinfurt-Regensburg strike sent 376 bombers into Germany and lost 60 of them outright, roughly 16% of the force. On October 14, 1943, the second Schweinfurt raid, the day American crews would call Black Thursday, sent 291 bombers and lost 60 more in the air, with another 17 written off after they returned.
Effective losses on Black Thursday approached one in four. No air force in history had been able to absorb such losses for long. The bombers needed escorts, and no existing fighter, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the British Spitfire, had the range to escort them all the way to a target deep inside Germany and back.
The Merlin Mustang did. With external drop tanks, it could fly to Berlin, fight, and return. With the addition of an extra 85-gallon fuel tank fitted behind the pilot’s seat, and with the larger 108-gallon drop tanks that came in alongside it, the combat radius pushed past 800 miles. By the spring of 1944, Eighth Air Force bombers were being escorted all the way to the most distant German targets and back.
The German fighter force, which had been the principal threat to the daylight bombing campaign, began to take losses it could not replace. The men who flew the Mustang in this role have left some of the most direct and unguarded testimony in the entire literature of air combat. Brigadier General Tommy Hayes, then a fighter pilot with the 357th Fighter Group, said the Merlin Mustang had the three qualities you needed if you were going to escort bombers to Berlin, range, range, and range.
Colonel Clarence Bud Anderson, one of the highest-scoring American Mustang aces, wrote in his memoirs that the aeroplane went, in his exact word, like hell, because the Merlin had what he called great gobs of power and was equally at home high or low, thanks to its two-stage, two-speed supercharger. The Royal Air Force pilots who transitioned from Spitfires to Mustangs in 1944 gave it the particular kind of compliment that British fighter pilots reserved for aircraft they actually trusted. They said it was honest. They
said it told you what it was going to do before it did it. They said you could ride it through maneuvers that the Spitfire would not survive, and that it would still be there underneath you when you came out the other side. But the question that opened this story has not yet been answered. Why was it Ronnie Harker, in a single 30-minute flight, who saw what no one else had seen? The answer is that other people had seen pieces of it.
Royal Air Force pilots who flew the Allison Mustang knew it was a remarkable aeroplane below 15,000 ft. Engineers at North American Aviation knew the airframe was years ahead of its competition. Even within the United States Army Air Forces, the idea of pairing the Mustang airframe with a higher-altitude engine had been discussed before the British conversion flew.
The idea that the Mustang might benefit from a better engine was not unique to Harker. What Harker did that no one else did in the spring of 1942 was to act on it within 48 hours, to telephone the head of the Rolls-Royce Experimental Division before he had even finished writing his report, and to push a recommendation through political resistance that could easily have killed it.
He was not the first person to think it. He was the first person to make it happen. His report did not contain a single new idea. It contained a single old idea, expressed with sufficient urgency that the institutional friction that usually stops good ideas from becoming hardware was, in this one case, overcome.
This is also the reason why a great deal of the official British post-war literature on the Mustang understates Harker’s role. He was not a senior officer. He did not write a doctrinal treatise. He flew a borrowed aeroplane for 30 minutes and wrote a short report. By the standards of military bureaucracies, this is not the kind of contribution that generates monuments.
He received an OBE late in his career. He retired to New Zealand, where he spent his remaining years fishing and flying. He took his last flight in a Mustang in New Zealand in 1997 at the age of 88. He died, by the obituaries, content with what he had done, and he did not, by the recollection of those who knew him, feel that he had been overlooked.
He was not the kind of man who needed his name on the airplane. There is, in the Rolls-Royce internal correspondence from the second half of 1942, a curious subcurrent that historians of the period have noted. The conversion program at Hucknall was being run as if the war depended on it, but the urgency was not entirely shared by the Air Ministry, which continued, well into the autumn, to express reservations about diverting Merlin production from established British aircraft.
The decision to proceed at scale required, as nearly all such decisions did in wartime Britain, a particular kind of senior official willing to take the political risk of being wrong. Sir Wilfrid Freeman was, by every account, that kind of official. He had championed the Mosquito against similar resistance, and he was prepared to do the same for the Mustang.
Without him, the conversion might have remained a curiosity. With him, it became the basis of an industrial program. Across the Atlantic, the American end of the story had its own quiet politics. The United States Army Air Forces had, in the early years of the war, regarded the Mustang as a peripheral aircraft.
It had been built for the British. It used a British engine after the conversion that the Army had no enthusiasm for. The American services were heavily invested in two other fighters, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and there was institutional resistance to admitting that an aircraft they had not asked for was about to outperform the aircraft they had.
The man who broke through that resistance, on the American side, was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hitchcock, the assistant air attaché in London during the period he wrote the reports that mattered. Hitchcock was an unusual figure, even by the standards of wartime military attachés. He had been the greatest polo player of the interwar years, holding a 10-goal handicap for 18 of the 19 seasons he played, and he had social access at the highest levels of the United States government.
He used that access in the spring of 1942 to send word back to Washington about what the British were doing at Hucknall. His reports reached General Arnold, who pushed the United States Army Air Forces to begin its own Merlin Mustang conversions in parallel. Hitchcock himself did not live to see the airplane prove itself in operational service.
By 1944, he had been transferred from the embassy and assigned as deputy chief of staff for the Ninth Air Support Command, where one of his ongoing concerns was the longitudinal stability problem the P-51B had developed once the 85-gallon fuselage tank was filled. On April 18, 1944, Hitchcock was personally test driving a P-51B near Salisbury in Wiltshire when the aircraft suffered a catastrophic structural failure and broke up. He was 44 years old.
The Mustang program owed him a debt that the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces both quietly recognized at the time, and that the official histories have, again, tended to underplay. The technical chain that connected Harker’s flight to the eventual operational success of the Mustang ran through a succession of small institutional decisions, almost none of them dramatic in themselves.
The decision to fit a Merlin 65 rather than a Merlin 61 to the first Mustang X was made because the 65 was identical to the engine in the Spitfire Mark IX and would allow a closer comparison. The decision to use a four-bladed Rotol propeller was made because the additional power of the two-stage Merlin needed more blade area to convert efficiently into thrust.
The decision to add a chin radiator was made because the two-stage supercharger ran hotter than the single-stage Allison and required additional cooling capacity that the original belly radiator could not provide alone. Each of these decisions was made by engineers working under deadline pressure, often without formal authorization, on the assumption that if the resulting airplane proved itself, the paperwork could be reconciled afterward.
The story of the Mustang’s transformation is, viewed from inside the engineering culture that produced it, a story of dozens of unauthorized small initiatives that, in the aggregate, became the war winner. This is the way major industrial breakthroughs almost always happen in wartime. They do not come down from the top in fully formed plans.
They emerge from the middle, from the engineers and the test pilots and the production foremen, and they are gradually ratified, after the fact, by the senior officials whose names eventually appear on the official histories. There is a smaller piece of the operational history that deserves its own mention because it has been almost entirely buried under the more famous escort missions of 1944.
On August 19, 1942, the disastrous Combined Operations raid on the French port of Dieppe, code-named Operation Jubilee, took place. The raid itself was a costly failure, with the Canadian and British landing force suffering catastrophic casualties. But high above the beaches that morning, four squadrons of Allison-engined Mustangs from Royal Air Force Gatwick and adjoining airfields flew tactical reconnaissance for the operation.
Of the 72 sorties they flew that day, nine aircraft were shot down, including five from Number 26 Squadron alone. And in the smoke over Dieppe, an American volunteer flying with Number 414 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Pilot Officer Hollis Hills, fired on a Focke-Wulf 190 and saw it go down. It was the first enemy aircraft credited to a P-51 Mustang in air-to-air combat.
Hills, an American who had joined the Canadian Air Force before his own country entered the war, did not know at the time that he had just opened a chapter that would, 3 years later, end with Mustangs strafing aircraft on the runways outside Berlin. He was simply a young pilot in an airplane he had been told was second rate, doing what the situation in front of him required.
It is also worth noting that on October 21, 1942, four Mustangs of Number 268 Squadron, led by Wing Commander A. F. Anderson, flew the first single-engined fighter mission from the United Kingdom to cross the German border, attacking targets near the Dortmund-Ems Canal. The mission caused, by intelligence reports later captured, considerable consternation in the German Air Defense Command.
Until that morning, the Germans had assumed that single-engined fighters based in Britain could not reach German territory at all. The Mustang had quietly demonstrated that this was no longer true. None of the four Mustangs that day was carrying a Merlin engine. They were Allison-engined Mark Ones, the original disappointment, flying at low level under the German radar.
The airplane was already capable of more than the Royal Air Force had originally believed. The Merlin would, 18 months later, multiply the capability by an order of magnitude, but the seed of the long-range fighter mission, of the ability to take the war to the German heartland in daylight at low cost, was already present in the airframe before the engine was changed.
The German reaction to the Merlin Mustang has been recorded in considerable detail, both in operational documents captured at the end of the war, and in the postwar interrogations of senior Luftwaffe officers. The most useful sources are the United States Strategic Bombing Survey interviews conducted in the summer of 1945, in which men like Adolf Galland and Hermann Göring were questioned at length about why the German day fighter force had collapsed.
The popular version of Göring’s reaction, the line about seeing American fighters over Berlin and knowing the war was lost, is widely repeated in books and television programs, but cannot be located word for word in the surviving transcripts, and is best treated as a paraphrase rather than a quotation. What can be confirmed is that Galland, the general of the fighter arm, told his American interrogators directly that the appearance of long-range escorts had been the decisive turning point in the air war over Germany. Galland’s own
internal reports, as the campaign was unfolding, put the same point in numerical terms. In the 4 months from January to April of 1944, the Luftwaffe lost something on the order of 1,000 single-engined fighter pilots killed, missing, or wounded, a level of attrition the German training pipeline could not replace.
The reason this happened was not, in the end, just the Mustang itself. It was a deliberate doctrinal change. In January of 1944, when General James Doolittle took over as commander of the Eighth Air Force, he walked into the office of his fighter chief, Major General William Kepner, and asked him what the sign on the wall said.
The sign said the duty of the fighter force was to bring the bombers home. Doolittle told Kepner to take the sign down. The new sign, he said, was to read that the duty of the fighter force was to destroy the German Air Force. The Mustangs were no longer to fly fixed escort, tied to the bomber boxes and forbidden to leave them.
They were to roam ahead and to the flanks and behind, and to pursue the German fighters wherever they went, including down to the airfields where the Germans were taking off and landing. By D-Day, on June 6, 1944, the air over Normandy belonged almost completely to the Allies. The Mustang did not win that battle by itself.
The Spitfire, the Thunderbolt, the Lightning, the typhoon all played their parts, but the Mustang was the airplane that made the daylight bombing campaign survivable, and the daylight bombing campaign, more than any other single instrument, was what bled the Luftwaffe pilot core dry. The deeper irony of the story is one that Harker himself, in his quiet way, used to remark on in the years afterward.
The airplane was American. The engine was British. The wing was a joint product of an American manufacturer and an American government research body, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA. The Packard engines that powered the production aircraft were licensed from Rolls-Royce and built in Detroit by an American car company that had, before the war, made luxury sedans for wealthy Americans.
The propellers on the early Merlin Mustangs in American service were Hamilton Standard. The propellers on the British Mustang X conversions were Rotol. The drop tanks that gave the aircraft its escort range were a joint Anglo-American development. There was no single national contribution that made the Mustang what it became.
There was a long chain of decisions taken by men in two countries who, in most cases, never met one another, and whose contributions were each individually small, and whose combination was the finest piston-engined fighter aircraft of the war. The Mustang was not, in any pure sense, an American airplane. It was not a British airplane.
It was the airplane that two industrial nations, working in parallel and very rarely in coordination, accidentally produced together because each one supplied something the other did not have. What Ronnie Harker said when he stepped out of the cockpit at Duxford on April 30, 1942, varies slightly by source. Some accounts have him saying simply that he had just flown the most promising fighter of the war.
Others have him remarking, in his usual understated way, that the airframe deserved a better engine than it had got. The most reliable record of his reaction is the report he wrote the next day, the report that survives in the Rolls-Royce archives at Derby, and that has been quoted in the official histories. In that report, Harker did not use the language of revelation.
He used the language of a working test pilot reporting on a flight. He listed the aircraft’s strengths. He listed its weaknesses. He proposed, in plain technical terms, what should be done about the weaknesses. There was no exclamation. There was no summons to history. There was a 30-year-old man sitting at a desk in Hucknall in May of 1942, writing down what he had seen and what he thought should be done about it in the unembellished prose of a professional.
The report has, by virtue of what followed it, become one of the most quoted documents in the history of military aviation. It is worth remembering that the British Purchasing Commission in 1940 did not ask North American Aviation to build the war winner. They asked for a stopgap. They wanted airplanes for the gap before British production caught up.
The Mustang was not designed to be the finest fighter of the war. It was designed to be available. The fact that it became something more than its specification, that it became the instrument that broke the Luftwaffe’s day fighter arm and brought daylight bombing to Berlin and back, is the kind of historical accident that no committee can plan for and no doctrine can predict.
It happened because Edgar Schmued and his small team in Inglewood designed an airframe that was, by accident or by intuition, the right airframe. It happened because Rolls-Royce engineers in Derby and Hucknall, working on engines for a quite different aircraft, produced a powerplant that was, by accident or by parallel evolution, the right engine.
And it happened because a 32-year-old test pilot, on loan from Rolls-Royce, was invited to fly a borrowed American fighter on a damp Cambridgeshire morning and chose, in the 30 minutes available to him, to see what was actually there rather than what the official reports said was there.
There is one more thing worth saying before this account ends about the nature of what Harker actually did. The popular version of the story, the one repeated in airshow programs and in television documentaries, often presents him as a lone genius who saw what no one else could see. That version is not quite accurate, and it is unfair both to him and to the others involved.
Harker was not alone. Campbell Orde had already noticed that the airframe was extraordinary. The Americans, through Hitchcock and Arnold, were already moving toward the same conclusion. Sir Wilfrid Freeman had the political instinct to push the project through. W.E. Petter Shaliar had the engineering competence to calculate what the resulting aircraft would actually do.
Captain Ronald Shepherd had the test pilot’s nerve to take the first conversion into the air. Robert Chilton flew the first American conversion just weeks later. The Mustang was not the work of one person. It was the work of perhaps two dozen, almost none of whom ever shared a room together. What Harker provided, in that one document on May 1, 1942, was the spark that connected the dispersed pieces.
He was the conductive element. Without him, the pieces remained scattered. With him, they joined. If this account gave you something to think about, the small acknowledgement of a like helps the algorithm carry it forward to the next viewer. These are the stories that get drowned out by the more familiar names, by the great commanders and the great engagements.
The men who designed the engines, the test pilots who flew the borrowed prototypes, the engineers who recalculated the supercharger gear ratios at 3:00 in the morning in a cold drawing office in Derby, they do not have their names on the museum aircraft. The airplanes carry the names of the manufacturers and the units that flew them, not the people who quietly, in offices and hangars on both sides of the Atlantic, made them what they were.
To remember those people by name where the records remember them and by acknowledgement where the records do not is the only kind of preservation we can still offer. If you would like more of these stories, the ones about the men whose decisions actually moved the war, told with the names and the dates and the inconvenient details intact, then this channel is built for that.
Subscribe if you want the next installment. There are more of them. There always are. The history of the air war is full of moments like Harker’s, where one person in one room on one ordinary afternoon made a decision that everyone afterward has had to live with. Most of them are not famous. Most of them died as quietly as they had lived.
They flew, they wrote, they argued, they pushed an idea through, and then they went home and made tea and read the paper, and never once told the story afterward as though they had been important. They were important. We just have to do the work of remembering it for them.