Secret Weapons (6 page)

On 12 April 1937 the Whittle jet engine ran for the first time. It was a stunning success. There was a growing sense that the jet engine had immense promise, but not until March 1938 did the Air Ministry offer any funding. This funding proved to be a mixed blessing, for the project was now subject to Ministerial bureaucracy and the Official Secrets Act made it impossible to discuss the developments as widely as before. From being a topic of growing interest, it suddenly became a matter of the utmost secrecy. Nonetheless, work proceeded on constructing a prototype jet plane, the Gloster-Whittle E 28/39, and on 7 April 1941 near Gloucester the first few hops into the air were made. Whittle himself was at the controls, but had in fact been specifically ordered not to fly the plane as the Ministry did not wish to risk both the aircraft and its designer if anything went wrong. Whittle told the senior officers that he would just take out the plane for some taxi runs, which would warm up the engine; but he accelerated along the runway and (as he later said) ‘it just took off’. The next month, on 15 May, the first formal test flight took off from Cranwell at 7.40pm. The plane flew for 17 minutes at speeds of up to 340mph (545km/h). Days later, it was flying at 370mph (600km/h) up to 25,000ft (7,600m) which was better than anything a conventional fighter could achieve.

Meanwhile, under conditions of top secrecy, jet planes were already taking shape in Germany. In 1936, the gifted young engineer Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain had taken out a patent for the use of the exhaust thrust from a gas turbine as a means of propulsion. This was six years behind Whittle’s original patent. Ohain presented his ideas to Heinkel, who agreed to help develop the concept. The prototype was speedily developed and built, and Ohain successfully demonstrated his first engine in 1937. It was powered by hydrogen gas which quickly burned through the components, and was extremely simple in design, but it proved that a jet turbine could run just five months after Whittle’s prototype engine. It is remarkable to think of these two gifted young men, each constructing and testing the first jet engines in the world, separately in England and Germany, and at the same time. Although Whittle had been unable to find finance for a year, plans were quickly made in Germany to construct one of these engines to power an aircraft.

Ohain had joined the staff of the Heinkel Company as a designer, and subsequent developments were rapid – in complete contrast to the lack of interest shown by the British authorities in Whittle’s earlier design. As Ohain’s first experimental jet engine had used hydrogen as fuel, it burned with too much heat and produced too little thrust to be operationally viable, so his designs for a more compact version were intended to burn conventional liquid fuels instead. The He-178 jet plane, the first to be designed in the world, was based on Ohain’s third design, the HeS-3, which now burned diesel fuel. All the flight tests were carried out under conditions of total secrecy and on 27 August 1939 the first flight of the Heinkel He-178, with Erich Warsitz at the controls, was successfully completed. The entire project had been privately conducted at the expense of Heinkels, and the test flight of the German plane was two years ahead of the British.

The aircraft was a small plane with a metal fuselage of conventional configuration and construction. The jet intake was in the nose, and the plane was fitted with a tail-wheel undercarriage. The main landing gear was intended to be made retractable eventually, but was fixed in the down position throughout the flight trials. The plane proved the principle, but had a combat duration time of only 10 minutes so it was never going to be a production-line success. It inspired the design of the twin-jet He-280 which became the first prototype jet fighter in history. These remarkable designs were privately financed by Heinkels, as the German authorities were, much like the British, slow to be convinced of the merits of jet-propelled aircraft.

Although the fact is usually forgotten, the Russians were also developing a jet engine at this time. This was the brainchild of a relatively unknown engineering pioneer named Arkhip Lyulka from Kiev Oblast in Ukraine. Lyulka’s first interests were in turbofans as superchargers of piston engines on the Petlyakov Pe-8 bomber. Between 1939 and 1941 Lyulka worked on what was to become the first double-jet turbofan engine in the world, which he patented in April 1941. Work began on building a prototype fighter aircraft, but as the Nazis invaded Russia, Lyulka stopped his work and evacuated to the Ural mountains.

Heinkel realized that the time had come to convince the German High Command of the importance of the jet plane, and so in 1941 a contest flight was organized in Germany between a jet-powered He-280 and a propeller-driven Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighter. The He-280 completed four laps of the course in less time than the Fw-190 could finish three. The jet plane was designed to be light, in order to match the relatively low thrust of the jet engines, it burned kerosene, instead of the more costly aviation spirit, and it had shown jet fighters to be a success. Yet the Nazis put their weight behind a rival design for a jet aircraft designed by Messerschmitt, the Me-262
Schwalbe
(Swallow) or
Sturmvogel
(Stormbird). In July 1944 the Me-262 came into service. It is heralded as the world’s first jet fighter. In the same month the Gloster Meteor came into use, too; some people believe that the Meteor may have been in service several days before the Messerschmitt, in which case the British would take the claim. What is remarkable, however, is the astonishing synchronicity of the dates. We have seen that the German and British jet engines were being developed at exactly the same time and each nation had the first jet fighters ready at the same time. The ideas had progressed in Germany and in Britain at exactly the same rate. Which was the better plane? There is no question about that. The Me-262 was faster and better armed than the Gloster Meteor. The new British jet could fly at 410mph (660km/h) whereas the German Me-262 flew at 560mph (900km/h). The German jet fighters were an unquestionable success, and the German pilots would claim a total of over 500 Allied aircraft shot down for the loss of 100 Me-262 fighters. In contrast, the British jets were forbidden to fly near continental Europe, in case they were brought down and revealed design secrets to the enemy. Although they helped to intercept V-1 drones heading for London, they had little military impact. The Meteor did set a world airspeed record in November 1945 at Herne Bay in the UK, when Group Captain H. J. Wilson set the world’s first airspeed record by a jet aircraft. He flew a Meteor F Mk 4 at 606mph (975km/h). Macari’s Café, near the beach in Herne Bay, still has a small plaque on the wall to commemorate the event. The next year the record was raised to 616mph (991km/h), also by a Gloster Meteor.

Meanwhile, engineers from the United States and Canada had been to visit Whittle. The Americans designed their own jet, based on the British research, the Bell P-59 Airacomet but it was an unsuccessful aircraft and lacked the power of the Gloster Meteor. Development work also went ahead with the National Research Council of Canada. In May 1943 their findings were published in a top-secret report entitled
Report on Development of Jet Propulsion in the United Kingdom
, which reached two important conclusions. One was the need to establish a group to study jet engines in cold conditions (this was an area of research nobody else had thought to embrace); the other was the importance of forming a Canadian jet company as quickly as possible. In March 1944 Turbo Research was formed in Toronto. At first they developed the Whittle centrifugal-flow jet engine, but they soon progressed to their own design for a new axial-flow design, the Chinook. As the war was reaching its end they began to manufacture their Orenda jet engine which had many crucial advantages: its longer combustion chambers and increased power meant that it was, at its time, the most powerful jet engine in the world. The engines sold were worth a quarter of a million Canadian dollars.

Canadian researchers went further than anyone else among the Allies in investigating the protection of pilots at high altitude, and they constructed the first experimental decompression chamber in North America to study the effects of low air pressure on pilots. The result was the first anti-G suit to prevent pilots blacking out. It was invented by Wilbur Franks and became known as the Franks Suit. It was first used in 1942 by the Royal Navy pilots covering the Allied landings in North Africa.

In Germany, meanwhile, during the closing months of the war, the Arado Company manufactured the first jet bomber, the Ar-234
Blitz
(Lightning). It had twin engines and a single pilot, and was flown mostly for reconnaissance at altitudes around 36,000ft (11,000m) where it was impossible for it to be shadowed or intercepted. The project began late in 1940, when Arado proposed their design for a jet bomber with the designation E-370 designed by Professor Walter Blume. It was a jet-engined aircraft with a Junkers Jumo-004 engine fitted beneath each of the wings. The design weight of the aircraft was 17,600lb (8,000kg) and, to keep the weight down, there were no landing wheels. The plane ran on a three-wheeled trolley which was jettisoned after take-off, and it landed later on skids. The plane had a maximum design speed of 490mph (789km/h) with an operating altitude of 36,100ft (11,000m) and a range of 1,240 miles (1,995km). In April 1945 this became the last German warplane ever to fly over British soil during World War II. The Ar-234 was nicknamed the
Hecht
(Pike) and was described as a ‘blitz-bomber’ though in fact it never flew carrying a payload.

British fighter pilots saw a remarkable jet fighter in the closing months of the war, though there are no records of any engaging in combat. This was the Heinkel He-162
Volksjäger
(People’s Fighter), a single-seater aircraft with an H-shaped tail fin. It was built of glued wood and constructed by semi-skilled labour, and could achieve a top speed of 562mph (905km/h) at 19,690ft (6,000m). What makes this so remarkable is that it went from conception to test flight in just 90 days.

Allied aircraft responded to the arrival of these amazing new jet aircraft by bombing the runways and factories where the planes were evident, and it was this relentless barrage coupled with a shortage of fuel that ensured that the Me-262, for all its technological sophistication and success in use, had limited impact on the course of the war. Nonetheless, the German designs went on to influence developments in the United States, notably the design of the Boeing B-47 and the North American F-86, better known as the Sabre jet, which was developed with the extensive involvement of German data from the war.

In Russia, work on jet engines had revived in the closing months of the war. From 1944 the Soviets had evidence of the British and German developments in jet engine design, and Lyulka was encouraged to try to improve them for use in Soviet aircraft. Starting in 1945 he constructed the first Soviet jet engine, the TR-1, which passed all the required tests successfully and went on to give rise to the engines which powered the highly successful MiG fighters. They were built by a company established in December 1939 by Artem Mikoyan, a young aviation designer from Sanahin, Armenia. Many of these Russian engines were copied from Junkers and BMW jet engines brought to Russia from Germany after the war. Then, in 1946, the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee – keen to cement cordial relationships with the Soviet Union – arranged for an export of 40 Rolls-Royce Nene turbojet engines. It was hoped that further orders would follow, but instead the Russians simply copied the British design and constructed a pirated copy of the engine for use in the MiG-15. Rolls-Royce, with Government encouragement, sought to reclaim £207 million in license fees, but did not succeed.

These MiG-15 fighters, used later in the Korean War, proved to be superior to anything in the West. The MiG-29 is the fourth-generation MiG fighter aircraft designed in the Soviet Union and was developed from the earlier designs during the 1970s by the Mikoyan Company. This aircraft entered service with the Soviet Air Force in 1983 and it remains in use to the present day by the Russian Air Force and also in several other countries.

Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain was brought to the United States in 1947 under the top-secret Operation
Paperclip
(see
chapter 4
). He joined the staff at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and in 1956 became Director of the Aeronautical Research Laboratory. In 1975 he was appointed to the role of Chief Scientist at the Aero Propulsion Laboratory. Ohain made innumerable contributions to American fuel technology and won many awards, including the United States Citation of Honor. Ohain eventually retired to Florida, where he died in 1998.

Meanwhile, in 1976, Whittle had divorced from his British wife Dorothy and he married an American woman, Hazel S. Hall. He emigrated to the United States and became the NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) Research Professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He later wrote a book entitled
Gas Turbine Aero-Thermodynamics: With Special Reference to Aircraft Propulsion
which appeared in 1981. He came to know Ohain, and the two often gave talks together. Ohain reportedly said that if the RAF had taken Whittle’s design seriously when it was originally submitted, there would have been no World War II at all. Sir Frank Whittle died in 1996 at his home in Columbia, Maryland.

Not all the secret aircraft were fast, large or impressive. Small and discreet aeroplanes also played their part. The Arado Ar-231 was an extremely lightweight seaplane that the Germans designed as a spotter plane and it was intended to be carried aboard the U-boat Type XI B. The plane was designed with light parasol wings and was powered by a 160hp (119kW) Hirth HM 501 inline engine. The plane weighed 2,200lb (1,000kg) and had a wingspan of just 33ft (10m). It could be folded down within 6 minutes and fitted inside a tubular casing measuring 6.7ft (2m) across. Although it was an ingenious little portable aircraft, it proved to be seriously underpowered, too light to handle and unstable in flight, even when the weather was calm. With small waves causing unsteadiness in the mother submarine, it proved near-impossible to fold up the wings and store the plane away. Six prototypes were built for testing purposes, but it was never used in the war.