A fine new book from a husband and wife team salutes the finest American fighter plane of the second world war
Photograph: Scott Mitchell/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/ShutterstockPhotograph: Scott Mitchell/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstockne of the secrets to writing a great book is to deliver more than you promise. Wings of War presents itself as the story of a single fighter plane, the P-51 Mustang, whose introduction in early 1944 turned the air war around for the Allies after months of horrific losses inflicted by the faster and nimbler planes of the Nazis’ Luftwaffe.
The book opens with a reminder of what a close call the European war was in 1943 – an account of Black Thursday, a disastrous raid on a ball bearing factory deep inside Germany by more than 200 B-17 Flying Fortresses, at a time when the Allies lacked fighters to protect the bombers all the way. Of the 229 planes that reached their target, “60 were shot down and 17 more were lost on the way home … 642 men were lost out of a force of 2,900 or 22% killed in action”.
The crucial breakthrough came in April 1942, when an RAF officer realized that if he replaced the Mustang’s American engine with a Merlin 61 built by Rolls Royce, the plane could outperform the Germans’ newest and fastest plane, the Focke-Wulf 190. Even though every type of British-American collaboration was crucial, the authors report the remarkable fact that apart from radar, no other important weapon “had been developed by two nations in partnership during the war”.
A chart at the end of the Whites’ book records Hitchcock’s success. In 1943 the US Army Air Force had accepted just 1,710 Mustangs. The next year the number jumped to 6,904, with another 5,435 in 1945.
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