The Rabbit in the Hat — The Innovation Story Of The “War Winning” Mustang!
In August 1943, the cloudy skies over Europe were a place of death and lost dreams. In the thin air over 25,000 feet, the most vicious air battle in history was unfolding. Massive air armadas of hundreds of U.S. Army Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers, shimmering silver with gaudy colours, were pitted against swarms of German fighter pilots determined to defend the Fatherland.
At stake was the outcome of World War II. Failing to sweep the Luftwaffe — the Nazi air force — from the skies and bomb Germany’s war factories would make the D-Day landings a doubtful affair.
For the American air commanders, things were not going to plan. Deep raids into Germany to attack vital strategic targets had been costly failures. On August 17th, The U.S. Eight Forces sent 376 bombers to strike the ball bearings factories at Schweinfurt and Regensburg, in Germany. Fog over the U.S. airbases in East Anglia disrupted the mission, leading to the final wave taking-off late.
Once the allied fighters escorting the bombers were forced to turn for home because they lacked fuel, the German fighters pounced. The slashing attacks were remorseless against the unprotected bomber stream. Many of the German pilots were able to land, rearm and continue the onslaught as the bombers turned for home. Despite inflicting severe damage on the arms factories, the U.S. bomber losses were savage.
In total, sixty bombers did not make it home, shot down by fighters and flak. Ninety-five planes were severely damaged, and seventeen were so bad they were later scrapped. Of the 2,200 American airmen that set out that morning, 552 were dead or captured. It took almost two years to train the ten-men bomber crew, and now a quarter of the Eighth Air Force was gone in an afternoon.
A second Schweinfurt raid on October 14th, 1943, repeated the disaster. Another 77 B-17s lost and a further 121 damaged. Such losses were not only devastating but unsustainable.
Big Dreams Faded & Cold Realities
What had gone wrong? The bravery of the U.S. aircrews was not in doubt. These young men had attacked targets again and again. Daily, the losses mounted. But even their morale had limits. Lying in their bunks on rainy English bases, empty cots of their friends around them. These young men, aged between 18–25, could do the math. The U.S. combat tour was 25 bomber missions. With losses between 15 to 25 percent, the chances of surviving a tour were near impossible.
If the young men had not failed, their leaders had. In the 1930s, politicians were scared witless by experts and top brass who had been purveyors of doom. The air force generals — and a horde of armchair strategists- had created a doctrine of the bomber’s supremacy. They believed the “bomber would always get through.”
Aircraft designers had turned that doctrine into weapons of war. America had designed, tested and built giant four-engine bombers sprouting upto a dozen heavy machine guns. Thousands of B-17 and B-24 Liberators were streaming off production lines in Tulsa, Long Beach (C.A.), Seattle, Detroit and Forth Worth (TX). The air generals believed that equipped with these magnificent planes flying high, in formation and prodigiously armed, their bomber streams could plough a swath through enemy air defenses, devastate his arms factories and shorten the war.
The mangled U.S. Eight Forces had paid the price for that fallacy. The solution was obvious. The bombers would need fighter escorts deep into Germany and on the way home. The problem was that most single-engine fighters of the day were short-range interceptors.
The famous British Spitfire might have won the Battle of Britain but had short legs with only a 1,100-mile range. Flying from its bases, it could barely reach halfway into occupied France. The U.S. had its modern fighters, but none fit the bill. The twin-engine P-38 fighter had the range but proven to be a combat disappointment, unable to best the German Me-109 and Fw-190s. At the same time, the “Jug” P-47 Thunderbolt was a massive, sturdy and heavily armed fighter with a withering eight .50 caliber machine guns. However, the “Jug” only had the range to escort the bombers to the German border and no further. Even when fitted with “drop tanks” — disposable gasoline fuel tanks — it could not make it beyond Bremen or Frankfurt.
For the bomber crews the pattern was to familiar. They would watch helplessly as their “little friends,” fighter escorts, reached the limit of their fuel and turned for home. Prowling in the distance were the Nazi fighters waiting ready to pounce like wolves.
What was needed was a miracle “bird,” a light, fast and maneuverable fighter, able to sweep the enemy’s skies but had the legs for long-range escort to Hitler’s Berlin and back. The deliverance would come in an unwanted plane, hurriedly designed and built, twice rejected by both the U.S. and British, and then relegated to a subordinate role. Designed by a German but known to history as the P-51 Mustang, the most iconic American aircraft ever made.
The German Immigrant Who Designed the Mustang
Born in 1899 in a small town outside Zweibruken near the French border, Edgar Schmued immigrated to America in the inter-war years. Fleeing the chaotic Weimar Republic, with its hyperinflation and political turmoil, he first emigrated to Brazil and landed in New York in 1930. A gifted airplane engineer, he worked at the Fokker, then the General Motors aircraft plant in New Jersey.
Edgar endeavored to learn English, even though most of his fellow designers were Germans and Dutch speakers. Years later, his English proficiency exam was his most prized award. Although hard-working, inventive and technically superb, Edgar faced dim prospects in depression era America. His saving grace came in a move to California to work for the new North American Aviation company.
In the 1930s, the Californian aviation industry was the Silicon Valley of its day. The Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk had mesmerized an entire generation. The best engineers wanted to build faster, sleeker, and longer-range planes. The boldest men and women sought to pilot them. Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Richard E. Byrd were icons akin to fabled explorers.
Consolidated, Douglas, Northrop, North American -all to become household names in the coming war — were tiny companies but magnets for young, talented engineers captivated by the dream of flight and the burning desire to build the latest planes. All based in Southern California, they had come for the cheap real-estate and sunny weather, which made for excellent test flying.
James Kindelberger was the President of North American Aviation. Known to his friends as “Dutch.” He was a maverick in an industry of originals. Suave, larger than life, he was a gifted engineer and a superb influencer able to sway decisions in the byzantine pre-war U.S. military procurement world. Most importantly, “Dutch” was also an aviation visionary.
He started his career building flimsy biplanes and drove aviation innovation hard into sleek, all-metal monoplanes. He advocated for jet technology and ended his career on the edge of spaceflight with the hypersonic X15 rocket plane.
His Vice President was Lee Atwood, his second in command. Quieter and less flashy, he was an engineer and a company builder. He ensured what they designed could be built and even mass-produced. Together, they were a winning team.
Edgar Schmued thrived as a designer under this inspired partnership. Leading teams of aeronautical engineers in the 1930s, they designed and built several fighters, trainers and bombers. The Harvard T-6 Trainer was most famous, an advanced trainer in service until the 1970s with over 15,000 built.
102 Days To Build A War Winner!
Over in Europe, the war clouds loomed. By the late thirties, Hitler possessed the most formidable air force in the world, with over 3,000 modern aircraft. He would use his new Luftwaffe to smash Poland, France, Norway and Low Countries in weeks. Soon Britain stood alone against the Nazi tide. In desperation, Churchill looked to neutral America to build modern fighters he urgently needed.
In April 1940, the Americans offered the British the Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk, a proven design but already dated and no match for German fighters. With nothing else on offer and production of P-40s already stretched, the RAF asked “Dutch” Kindelberger if he could build more Tomahawks to fight the Nazis. Dutch had a different idea. An idea that had been brewing in North American Aviation.
He asked Edgar, “Ed, do we want to build P-40s here?”
“Well, Dutch, don’t let us build an obsolete airplane. Let’s build a new one. We can design a better one.” Edgar said.
Edgar later wrote that he had been driven by “a burning ambition to build the best fighter…(in the world).”
Edgar had been making many sketches of the ideal plane for years, including its cockpit, engine, gun installations and layout. All that was missing were performance wings, fuselage and tail section.
“When the time came, we were ready,” he said.
However, there was a snag; the new aircraft would have to take its maiden flight in 100 days — a punishing schedule. From drawing board to a flying fighter, in three months was unheard of in aviation.
Everyone knew every day mattered. In June 1940, France surrendered. It was only a matter of time before Hitler turned his Luftwaffe against Britain.
The task was immense. A revolutionary, new aircraft would require 2,800 drawings — all painstakingly hand-drawn- and 41,880 hours to manufacture the parts and build the prototype. Working seven days a week, Schmued’s team had already fabricated a full-size wooden mock-up of the war-winning fighter in just two weeks. Based on the initial plans and the wooden model, the British agreed to buy 400 planes based on a paper promise of superior performance.
Like all great innovations, the Mustang is a mixture of borrowed, new and bold, pulled off under a stringent deadline. The tail section was a scaled-up version of the Harvard T-6 and NA-35 trainers, which also inspired the simple instrumentation layout. The cockpit was designed around the pilot, what we would call today “human-centered design,” where Dutch insisted that the P-51 must be “the fastest plane you can build around a man that is 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 140 pounds.”
Dutch also understood the plane would have to operate from rough airstrips and insisted the team insisted design a wide 11-foot landing gear. In an era when more pilots and aircraft were lost to accidents than combat, the wide undercarriage would make landing less hazardous and saving pilot lives.
The key to making the Mustang fast was its sleek aerodynamic fuselage. The plane had to slice through the air, with the least drag possible. As Edgar said years later, “An airplane has to be designed in such a manner that the air can flow evenly around the body…(using)…smooth curves.”
Besides the wing and tail section, the plane’s entire fuselage was designed as conical sections, flawlessly aerodynamic with only the thinnest aluminum skins (about 1mm thick), further reducing drag and making it more fuel-efficient. Even the belly radiator used in the air intake was fashioned around the Meredith effect. A first on an airplane, the cooling duct, rather than creating drag, actually made thrust pushing the Mustang forward.
The most revolutionary technology on the plane was the wing. Since the Wright brothers, all aircraft had a traditional shape: chunkier at the front, raised slightly in the middle and tapering off to a thin trailing edge. This design creates lift as the air flows slower on the underside than on the upper surface.
This layout is ideal when you build a slow canvas and wooden biplane, making the aircraft climb into the air. However, as you fly faster than 300 mph, this shape recreates turbulence and drag. The solution is a laminar flow: a flattened symmetrical teardrop design, with the thickest part in the middle of the wing, making the airflow less uninterrupted over the wing’s contour.
Today, laminar flow wings are standard on high-performance jets and airliners. In 1940, it was still untested. The Mustang was the first production aircraft in the world to use this radical design. Schmued choice of using a laminar flow wing was a bold one. However, after 6,000 hours, various configurations, and numerous tests at the California Institute of Technology’s wind tunnel at Pasadena and Seattle, they had perfected a laminar flow wing. The bird had wings.
After 102 days, the team of fifty engineers, fabricators and draftsmen had built a plane — just two more than planned. However, there was a problem: it had no engine. The makers of the Allison 1,150-hp engine used on the Tomahawk did not believe anyone could build a new plane from scratch in 100 days, and so did not deliver one. Eighteen days later, the engine arrived, and on October 26th, the Mustang first took to the air.
The Hobbled Thoroughbred: Allison Engine
The Allison engine was a poor choice. Old, lackluster at attitude, it would hobble this thoroughbred for three more years. When delivered to the RAF, pilots were impressed but had deep concerns.
The Mustang was faster than the British Mk Vb Spitfire, had twice the range (990 miles) and was more maneuverable. It had a top speed of 387 m.p.h. when German Messerschmitt Bf 109 could do 355 m.p.h. However, its performance tailed off above 20,000 feet, Europe’s combat attitudes because of the Allison engine. This ceiling on its performance meant the early Mustangs could not be effective fighter aircraft and was relegated to low-level reconnaissance missions.
The U.S. Army Airforce was also busy with a host of new fighters and saw the Mustang only as low-level ground attack aircraft, ordering it in limited numbers. The Mustang seemed doomed to a minor role, one of the hundreds of planes built during World War II.
Enter the Polo Player & Test Pilot!
Stand forward; the next hero is this tale: Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy was the all-star American, Polo champion, Harvard and Oxford Graduate, and World War I Fighter pilot. Swave, sophisticated and monied, Tommy was even rumored to be the inspiration for Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, in Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.
In the summer of 1942, Tommy was posted to London as an air force attaché to the Eighth Force bombing squadrons being formed. The war had begun to shift from the defensive, where the short-range Spitfire dominated, to a bomber offensive over Germany.
New thinking was required. As the Mustang was heavier and sturdier with a more extended range than Spitfire IX, it might still be a winner except for the Allison engine. Having flown both fighters, Tommy suggested, “A cross-breeding of the Mustang with the Merlin 61 engine (fitted the Spitfire IX) would produce the best fighter plane in the Western Front.”
After much persuading, Tommy managed to convince the Rolls Royce plant, makers of the Merlin, in Nottingham to build four experimental Merlin-Mustangs hybrids. He flew one after the test pilot and described it as “hot stuff.” A legend was born.
The marriage between the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine -arguably the war’s best aero powerplant- and Edgar’s streamlined design unleashed Mustang’s power. At last, a high-altitude, long-range fighter escort could protect the bombers and take them deep into Germany.
Battling the Bureaucracy: A Legend is Born.
But not quite. Bureaucracies are potent things. In the U.S., Tommy launched a campaign to get the Merlin-Mustangs into production. He faced an uphill battle against proponents of the Allison engine. He lobbied General Hap Arnold, commander of the air force, but he was unmoved. The Allison engine was American-made. It was mass production. The general said his experts told him the Allison engine was good enough.
The impressions of a pilot would not sway wartime bureaucracies. Tommy needed more data to prove that Merlin-Mustang was a war winner. Frustrated, Tommy was depressed, he knew it was the solution to the bomber crisis. Hardly sleeping, he waited for the performance figures to arrive from England.
In the meantime, he contacted everyone he knew in Washington. One old friend and World War I veteran flier was Robert Lovett. Now the undersecretary of war for air. Having flown with the British, he knew Rolls-Royce engines to be reliable and that Packard could manufacture the Merlin 61 under license.
Years later, Lovett remembered, “We could not fool around with an inferior product when a superior one was available.”
So high up did the lobbying go that President Roosevelt sent a memo to General Arnold inquiring about the Merlin-Mustang hybrid? Days later, Arnold was pleased to report to the President that 2,200 of the newly christened P-51 B Mustangs had been ordered.
Just In Time: The Miracle Plane “To Berlin and Back!”
In Europe, things went from bad to worse for the American air force. Bomber losses were mounting with the giant flying “box” formations of up to 300 B-17s and B-24s bombers being torn to ribbons by German fighters piloted by veterans of the Battle of Britain, Russia and the Mediterranean.
In desperation, the Americans tried to “super-size” the defensive armament by adding more machine guns to the bombers, but it did not work. The resulting planes were even more unwieldy, slower and better targets for the enemy. Success now hinged on the need for a long-range fighter escort, and here again, the Californian team worked their magic.
Schmued and his team had already coaxed a 4.75-hour endurance out of the P-51 B. A Spitfire could fly for less than three hours. They achieved this feat by adding more onboard fuel tanks carrying 184 gallons with another 150 gallons in drop tanks under each wing. However, more than five hours still was not good enough.
“This (P-51 B) was an airplane destined to fly escort missions to Berlin,” Edgar wrote, and he was determined to find a way. The solution was to install an 85-gallon fuel tank directly behind the pilot. His original conical fuselage design paid off again. The fuselage shape meant he could squeeze the tank behind the amour plate. This tank made the handling of the aircraft sloppy on take-off. Yet after thirty gallons were used, the plane regained its light handling.
Critically, the magic flight endurance had been accomplished: a superior fighter plane that could fly for seven and a half hours. Long enough to escort the bombers deep into Germany.
On March 4th, 1944, 121 Mustang protected the bombers to Berlin and back for the first time. With a top speed of 437 mph at 25,000 feet and a magnificent performance, the German day fighters became the hunted, not the hunters. Luftwaffe losses mounted; bomber losses declined.
In May, P-51 D -the definitive model- with a clear bubble canopy appeared at squadrons. Elegant, silver and smooth, with dark paint in front of the pilot, the Mustang became the finest piston-engine fighter of the war.
As Reichmarschall Hermann Goering, head of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe, said, “When I saw those Mustangs over Berlin, I knew that the war was lost.”
When the guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945, Edgar Schmued’s design surpassed all expectations. Mustangs shot down 4,950 of the 10,720 enemy planes felled by Americans in Europe. They had also destroyed 4,131 Nazi aircraft on the ground. Mustangs also shot down 230 V-1 “buzz bombs,” the modern cruise missile’s ancestor and several of Germany’s revolutionary jet fighters. Although used in the pacific war against Japan, it is in Europe where the Mustang earned its fame.
All this was made possible by an innovator who sketched, doodled and knew the world would need a rabbit in the hat when times darkened.
About the Author
Simon Trevarthen is the Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Elevate Your Greatness (EYG). EYG helps individuals, teams, and organizations unpack the secrets of success by becoming even better versions of themselves through dynamic keynotes, seminars, and workshops on innovation, inspiration and presentation excellence.
