I was in the RAF Museum archives department a few years
ago when I came across a report by
a senior RAF officer who toured the American aircraft industry in June 1938.
This
officer visited a number of establishments, travelling across the continent by
rail, that had carriages equipped with something called ‘atmosphere control’
something that was unheard of in Europe: ‘….By an ingenious and very expensive
mechanism a pallid populace achieves wholesale and whole-time asphyxiation in a
damp, tropical, fume-laden atmosphere in an air-conditioned railway car with,
apparently, a dead skunk inextricably entangled in the plant”.
The report was full of humour, interest and insight and, as
with many researchers I got sidetracked into reading it in detail. This officer
wrote of the Martin B-10 bomber: ‘…One pilot is in the nose and the other at
the extreme opposite end of the crew space about ten feet away. The
navigator/gunner/bomber has not even so much as a pigeonhole through which he
can communicate with the front pilot. The wireless operator is located in the
centre of the aircraft, out of touch with either pilot. At the Glenn Martin
works I found it difficult to hide my astonishment at the crazy layout - and in
the end the works manager remarked to me a trifle peevishly that they sold a
lot of them to the Chinese. I concluded that the Americans did not understand
the use or inflection of my response, ‘Quite!’ ”
Showing foresight, affection for the American people, and
frank recognition of their boundless capacity, he reported that ‘…They have the
money, enthusiasm, enormous potential, industrial resources, together with a
vast reservoir of efficient personnel. The also have ideas, although their
major obsession is that all their geese are swans and that everyone else’s are
at best ducks. They could certainly have a magnificent Air Force if they
decided to.”
On arriving in Seattle, the officer commented after he had
inspected a Y1B-17 that the nose glazing with its strangely-shaped ‘turret’ for
the single Browning machine gun was deemed impractical. He thought that this
device would seem to be ‘... More appropriately located in an amusement park
than a war aeroplane’. There was also a need for better high-altitude
performance and internal changes to give the navigator and other crew members
an ergonomically better working environment.
And who was the author of this report? None other than Air
Commodore Arthur Travis Harris GCB, OBE, AFC, later to become Air Officer
Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) RAF Bomber Command during the latter half of the
Second World War.
Harris was not the only one to
have ‘problems’ with the early B-17s. There is some confusion as to wether the
nickname of ‘Flying Fortress’ in this article referred to the number of machine
guns the aircraft carried, or did it refer to the design concept of the
aircraft intended for defensive use? The common belief that has become
entrenched over the years is that it refers to the armament, but there are
reasons for doubting this. After all, the Model 299 was designed at a time when
the Army air forces had assumed the role for coastal defence, as explained in
an agreement between General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of
Staff of the Army and Admiral William V Pratt, Chief of Naval Operations which
stated:
‘The
Army air forces will be land based and employed as an element of the Army in
carrying out its missions of defending the coast, both in the homeland and in
overseas possessions. Through this arrangement the fleet is assured absolute
freedom of action with no responsibility for coast defence...’
In
essence therefore, the bombers would serve to extend the vision of the
ground-based coastal batteries through aerial reconnaissance and also function
as artillery of extreme range, operating to attack an invading fleet beyond the
point where the big guns of the coastal fortresses could reach. They would
literally be airborne fortresses. It is claimed, and there is certainly
evidence to suggest that it is correct, that it was this defensive mission -
not the defensive armament of the B-17 - which brought about the name ‘Flying
Fortress’.
Whatever
the reasons, this was, however, by no means the first time the phrase ‘Flying
Fortess’ had been applied to things aeronautic. A 1915 dispatch to The Morning
Post in London from Petrograd, Russia, reported that the Russians had recently
brought down three aeroplanes, including one that was called ‘Germany’s new
Flying Fortress’. The machine was armoured, had twin engines and carried nearly
a ton of bombs, a quick-firing machine gun and two Maxim machine guns. The crew
consisted of the pilot, a mechanic, an observation officer and three gunners.
The Russians stated that the machine proved to be little more than a German
version of the Russian Sikorsky design. From the description, it was almost
certainly a Gotha G.1. A year earlier - on November 25 1914, under the headline
‘Newest Zeppelins Flying Fortresses’ the New York Times reported stories from Amsterdam that the Germans
were turning out Zeppelins with feverish haste. It was reported that the new
Zeppelins were being fitted with a new kind of torpedo, 30 or 40 of which would
be carried by each airship.
Not
everyone was happy with the phrase being applied to the new Boeing. The
wonderfully acerbic Charles G Grey, editor of the British magazine Aeroplane,
stated that the name ‘Flying Fortress’ was ill-chosen, for it implied that it
was so heavily constructed that it would be ‘... Proof against all engines of
war,’ Grey observed that the Boeing bomber was constructed of such thin Alclad
sheet, it could be ‘... Slit with a knife’.
No comments:
Post a Comment