Chasing the Demon

by Dan Hampton

  During the war, America produced twice the matériel of Germany, Italy, and Japan combined, so when the conflict ended, those vast industries turned back to manufacturing civilian products. Car companies once again made cars instead of tanks, half-tracks, or jeeps; shipyards and aircraft makers expanded rapidly into peacetime, commercial markets; and, in several cases, chemical companies turned their products into fertilizers and pesticides. Aided by government subsidies and farm loans, agriculture once again became a viable business. High-yield crops were developed and, when paired with new tractors and combine harvesters, provided enough food for America and a good part of the world. From the summer of 1945 through June 1946, American farmers produced enough surplus to export 17 million tons of wheat to Japan and Europe, thus staving off a postwar disaster and giving recovery a chance—a recovery that would hopefully prevent a descent into chaos similar to that of the 1920s, and quite possibly sow the seeds of another global conflict.

  To this end George C. Marshall, former Army chief of staff and secretary of state under President Truman, proposed the European Recovery Program, later known simply as the Marshall Plan. Over 70 percent of Europe’s infrastructure had been destroyed, millions of homes lost, and at least twelve million refugees were flooding into the west from the east. Industrial production was barely half of prewar levels, and food was a real problem. Worse still was the economy. Britain, though victorious, was broke. Germany and Italy essentially had no economy and both needed new currencies. There were those who, somewhat understandably, wanted the former Axis powers to suffer because, after all, their folly and aggression had killed off 3 to 4 percent of the world’s population; over sixty million human lives. Franklin Roosevelt himself stated:

  Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazis are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.

  But there were also those who realized that the only chance for life without another world war lay in removing the causes that would instigate such a catastrophe, and in the end this view prevailed. Some $12 billion was sent overseas in the forms of loans and grants to provide food, fuel, and reconstruction; and not just to former enemies. The United Kingdom actually received the largest percentage of aid, approximately 26 percent, followed by France with 18 percent. American goods were then purchased with American money. The idea was very similar to that attempted during the 1920s, but this time it worked. Europe was spared a haphazard, plodding recovery, so within a few years industrial production was back above prewar levels, standards of living were up, and discontent largely contained.

  This was not an altogether altruistic act on behalf of the United States. Decency and humanity certainly did play a part, but the overriding motives were based on national security. It was reasoned that the safest future for America lay in not fighting another world war, and if Europe or Asia were permitted to languish, then they would be easy prey to alternative ideologies. A familiarization with, and increasing dependency on, U.S. goods was stronger than a military alliance, and much cheaper. America was no longer isolationist in nature, but now truly globalist and her presence was felt in places never encountered before the war. Also, nearly 5 percent of Marshall Plan aid went to the CIA and “other” government funding abroad in an increasing effort to contain the next threat—a very real and diametrically opposed system of government: communism.

  Theoretically, this was a system where ownership of everything—property, resources, land—belonged to the “community,” or the people. An extreme derivative of socialism, Russian communism along the Lenin-Stalin model went far beyond economics into the political and ideological realm. In both systems, the vital means of production and distribution are controlled by the state, yet socialists reallocated these resources based on an individual’s input and efforts, while a communist distributes based on needs. The fatal flaw in both methods is that someone, or some group, has to determine who is allocated what, and how it is done. This cuts pure communist/socialist doctrine off at the knees and negates its adherents’ very argument against capitalism, which they oppose due to the perception that a small elite controls a society. In fact, a communist society is much worse off than its capitalist equivalent because there are no checks and balances against an all-powerful state. There are no incentives for working harder. Innovation and motivation are severely limited and few, if any, alternatives exist save revolution.

  It was no wonder that the Western powers abhorred the Soviet Union as a political system and were equally despised in turn. Communists saw order and discipline in their system versus chaos and confusion in the West. They prided themselves on self-sacrifice for the good of all, while disdaining what was promoted as the selfish narcissism of the West. It all came down to control: whether humans have the right of self-determination or should subordinate their own interests for the common good—whatever that is determined to be by those who take charge.

  The West, and especially the United States, was tumultuous; Communists pointed triumphantly to the Great Depression as the consequences of capitalism and the failure of a weak government to protect its people. But they were also embarrassingly wrong as billions of dollars’ worth of Lend-Lease vehicles, aircraft, planes, trucks, clothing, food, and ten million pairs of boots indisputably proved.* Messy as the capitalist West was, the strength of free peoples determining their own destiny proved stronger—both militarily, technically, and creatively—than a gray, oppressive dictatorship disguised as socialism.

  So it is no wonder that once the necessity of war against a shared enemy ended, the gaping ideological differences between East and West, capitalism and socialism, could no longer be ignored. The Soviet Union was immense; it possessed nearly unlimited manpower and, straddling Europe and Asia, initially had a tremendous geographical advantage. The reality of an immensely powerful United States facing an expansionist, unified Soviet Union quickly frayed the wartime alliance, and Communist antipathy toward the United States (and vice versa) rapidly resurfaced. Correct or not, these deep suspicions and fears became a rallying cry every bit as evocative as “Remember Pearl Harbor,” with an anti-Communist strategy shaping America, and indeed the world, for nearly fifty years.

  The USSR believed itself to be a global power and, through the spread of communism, sought to bring as much of the world under its sway as possible. Winston Churchill, eloquent and direct, phrased the situation thus: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”* Yet there was a wariness of the West, or at least its technology, that made Stalin hesitate. Fully 12 percent of the Red Air Force consisted of Western-supplied fighters; Spitfire Mk. Vs and Hurricanes from the British; P-40 Kittyhawks, A-20s, Airacobras, and Kingcobras from the Americans. The average Russian might believe that they alone had defeated Hitler, but Soviet leadership knew the truth, and also knew the USSR could not risk open war with the United States—at least not yet. So the slow spread of communism began and would be especially attractive to countries that had been colonized by the West, and whose people could not or would not distinguish between capitalism and colonialism. For these nations, communism seemed a viable alternative, an expression of nationalism and independence. Moscow encouraged this fallacy as much as Washington sought to contain it, and what soon became known as the Cold War began in earnest.

  Military priorities and development closely follow civilian goals or diplomatic failures, and certainly the first few postwar years were no exception. The impetus to expand their sphere of influence was certainly political, but it was equally certain that this would be backed by the threat of military action, if not directly then through surrogates. On the ground the Soviets were not unduly concerned, and by the war’s end the Red Army could field 500 infantry divisions,
at least fifty tank brigades, and thousands of aircraft all at a time when the U.S. military was discharging thousands of men per day. Yet the Russians had learned the value of airpower from the Luftwaffe, nor would they forget that the Americans had flown over two million combat sorties from deployed locations far from home while the Red Army was still using horses and wagons.*

  Recognizing both the potential of German advanced technology and the Soviets’ own lagging position in that area, Moscow resolved to do everything possible to equalize the situation so their political agenda could progress. As the war ended, the Soviets also had teams gathering up scientists, documents, and physical technology wherever possible. In May 1945, when the Third Shock Army entered Berlin, they captured reams of DVL (German Aviation Research Establishment) information on high-speed aerodynamics, swept wings, the Focke-Wulf Ta 183, and other programs.

  Never forgetting that the atomic bombs, which Russia still did not possess, had been dropped by B-29 Superfortresses capable of high-altitude, deep penetrations, Stalin ordered the creation of a simple, tough interceptor capable of stopping American bombers. Using the captured German data as a point of departure, the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) Experimental Design Bureau produced the MiG-9 jet fighter, which flew in April 1946 and greatly resembled the Focke-Wulf Ta 183. It featured a straight wing, high tailplane, and nose-mounted German BMW 003 engines, which suffered from frequent failures like all wartime engines. However, the Russians learned quickly and were adept at modification, if not innovation.

  Yet by 1946 the United States had two jet fighters: the P-59 Airacomet, relegated now to maintenance and pilot training; and Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star. Both were assigned to the 412th Fighter Group and over forty Shooting Stars had been flying over the high desert since July 1945. A rash of P-80 fatalities, including Major Dick Bong’s death in the late summer, brought jet safety to the forefront and threatened all future jet programs. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Force, directed that the test and evaluation shortcuts accomplished for wartime expediency be rectified immediately. Arnold, who had been taught to fly by the Wright brothers and was one of the original three Army pilots, was also a visionary who understood both the promise of jet technology and the value of public relations.

  The issues were solved, and just in time. There were rumors that the Russians had made good use of German scientists and data and were building a swept-wing fighter of their own that would obviate America’s technical lead. North American Aviation and George Welch, in the meantime, had been working on the XP-86, a next-generation, swept-wing fighter that was intended to ensure air dominance over anything built by the Soviet Union. The other tine on the strategic fork aimed at Moscow was the ability to pass the speed of sound in a manned aircraft. This capability would defeat any type of current air defense system and, when designed into a bomber, could deliver atomic weapons anywhere in the world with impunity. Such a breakthrough, whether done with a jet or a rocket, would alter the balance of power in the world, just as the threat of it would hopefully keep the peace.

  Eight

  The Final Stage

  Yes . . . I said it is quite practical to build a plane that can fly at a thousand miles an hour.” Theodore von Kármán stated this unequivocally when the question was posed in 1943 by General Frank Carroll, chief of the Army’s Engineering Division. The Hungarian was the head of Caltech’s rocketry program, the only one in the United States, and an internationally recognized expert in applied mechanics. At the height of the war, he had been invited to Wright Field for a discussion of the practical aspects of such a plane in light of German advances and Frank Whittle’s jet engine. John Stack and Bob Gilruth of the NACA had recorded supersonic airflow over areas of a NACA XP-51 wing, and they verified speeds exceeding Mach 1.3 with rockets fired from Wallops Island off the Virginia coast. Knowing it was possible for a craft to exceed the Mach, and now well aware that such flying represented no insurmountable barrier to future development, American technology came to a crossroads.

  A major issue was that of data. Pistons and props were of no use in transonic evaluation because conventional aircraft only got to this point if they had exceeded their design limits, and there was no hard information for this flight region. Test flight data was largely anecdotal and, even when the pilot survived, it was uninstrumented and therefore not verifiable. North American Aviation’s Mustang was the exception, as recording equipment had been placed in the wing’s gun bay.

  In fact, it was with this very XP-51 that the shock wave phenomena was first observed. When an object (for our purposes an aircraft) moves, it disturbs the air and this disturbance spreads, or propagates, ahead of the aircraft. The “wave,” or pressure field, caused by this pushes the air ahead out of the way and will continue to do so as long as the plane remains in the low-speed, subsonic region. Also, as an aircraft exceeds approximately 0.7 Mach it enters the transonic region and is traveling nearly as fast as the wave itself. There is no longer a pressure field out front to move the air aside, so all the pressure and velocity changes occur suddenly and unpredictably. Air molecules now cannot be moved until the aircraft itself moves them, and the result is called a compression, or shock wave, which forms at the aircraft’s leading edge.

  Such a wave creates an area of high pressure directly behind it, and with this greater pressure comes a drastic increase in drag. The effects of supersonic wave drag generate the most significant differences between subsonic aerodynamics and those of an aircraft flying faster than sound. Current wind tunnels were next to useless because as the model became transonic, the generated shock waves bounced off the walls and back onto the model, which negated any meaningful measurements. This problem would eventually be solved by Ray Wright of the NACA, who added slots, like horizontal vents, into the tunnel, thereby allowing the shock wave to disperse. Meanwhile, the only way to obtain accurate data was with an instrumented test aircraft flown by a test pilot, and, significantly, NAA had the head start.

  John Stack wanted to build a turbojet to study sustained transonic flight and solve those unknowns. He, and others like him, reasoned that while a rocket could punch through the Mach, as they had done from Wallops Island, there was very little practical use for such aircraft. Rocketry had a future for defense systems and perhaps for blasting beyond Earth’s atmosphere one day, but, as the Germans had discovered, military applications were severely limited. Frank Carroll and Ezra Kotcher, one of his trusted engineers, wanted the rocket precisely because it could muscle its way through the transonic region and into supersonic flight. Kotcher had been a proponent of this after attending a lecture given by Hermann Zornig, a ballistics expert, who authored an influential paper on the subject.*

  The Army, who ultimately held the purse strings for funding, agreed with Carroll. During the war there was no time for nonmilitary research and resources were too valuable to expend this way. Bell’s XP-59 was receiving lukewarm reviews, at best, so the jet was not necessarily the answer and was likely the safest option. A rocket would also provide a higher thrust-to-weight ratio as it was lighter than a jet, and this meant the chance of punching through Mach 1 was probably better.

  They went with the rocket.

  And, somewhat surprisingly, with Bell Aircraft, though with hindsight the decision seemed logical. General Hap Arnold was pleased with what the Airacomet represented, and he personally liked Larry Bell, who had the only real experience manufacturing advanced technology with the XP-59. Also, the other companies and their subcontractors were stretched thin enough building workable combat aircraft while Bell was not. So while the Germans tried to blitz through the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge reached its climax, the Air Corps, Bell Aircraft, and the NACA formally agreed to the draft specification for a manned, single-seat research aircraft capable of stable flight up to 0.8 Mach. It would be fully instrumented and able to withstand forces eight times greater than gravity. In March 1945 while Chuck Yeager was on his honeymoon and Ken Chilstrom, now
operations officer for the Fighter Test Section at Wright, was testing Bell’s Airacomet, official contract W33-038-ac-9183 was signed for the Experimental (X) Supersonic (S) aircraft number One: the XS-1.*

  Captains Fred D. Orazio and G. W. Bailey of Wright Field’s Design Branch drew up the initial plans under Ezra Kotcher’s close supervision. Bell’s ballistics research on the .50-caliber bullet had shown stability in both the transonic and supersonic regimes (otherwise, bullets would be hopelessly inaccurate) so this provided the basic fuselage design. Its wings were straight since the German swept data had not yet been captured and Larry Greene, Bell’s chief designer, placed the horizontal tail surface on the craft’s vertical tail, not the empennage. He also added a method by which the angle of the horizontal tail could be manually adjusted from the cockpit by the pilot—very similar to the system employed by the Me 262.

  One of the issues worked out in 1945 was whether the X-1 would perform a conventional takeoff or be air-dropped from a mother ship. Looking ahead toward future development options as an interceptor, Bell’s initial position was to make the plane capable of a normal takeoff, but the fuel consumption numbers did not add up. The extra weight for larger tanks and more fuel would have precluded the aircraft from getting to its test altitude. Additionally, a turbopump was required to move the rocket propellant from its storage tanks to the combustion chambers, and this pump never quite functioned correctly. The only immediate solution was using nitrogen to force the propellant transfer, and once these additional tanks were installed the loss in fuel capacity, and extra weight, ruled out any other option than an airdrop.

  Bell delivered its first full-scale mock-up in October and there were no issues, so on December 27, 1945, X-1 #46-062 emerged from the company facility in Wheatfield, New York. Flown by a B-29 bomber to Pinecastle Field near Orlando on January 19, 1946, the rocket plane completed preliminary low-speed testing and was ready to fly six days later. Jack Woolams, a former Army Air Corps pilot and now Bell’s chief test pilot, was dropped from a B-29 at 27,000 feet over central Florida on January 25, 1946. Its short, four-minute glide flight was uneventful and Woolams later wrote that “the airplane felt as solid as a rock, experiencing absolutely no vibration or noise. Longitudinal stability is quite positive . . . and lateral stability is about neutral.” During the next five weeks, Woolams completed ten glide flights with the X-1, and small modifications were made before the aircraft moved west to Muroc for the final phase of the program: intentional, manned flight beyond the speed of sound.