History, Politics And Current Affairs

Postwar RAF Part One - Bottoming Out
The June 19, 1940 Halifax-Butler coup was, predictably, a body-blow form which the British aviation industry never really recovered. The fall of the industry took place in two stages, the first being the period of uneasy armistice that lasted from June 20, 1940 through to The Great Escape in 1942. During this period, an appearance of normality acted as a cover under which critical parts of the industry were dispersed, hidden or simply destroyed while key industrial research and engineering personnel quietly departed the country. Among the key people who left in this matter were Frank Whittle who followed the route trodden by so many others - train to Liverpool, ferry over the Irish Sea to Belfast, car south to Dublin then by Pan-American Clipper to the United States. At the time this route was so well established that it became known as “The Brain Drain”. People asking after a colleague who was suddenly no longer at his desk were told “He’s probably a little unwell, last time I saw him he looked a bit flushed.”

This period had two effects. One was that the cream of British aircraft design and engine technology left the country and reassembled to set up shop elsewhere. Their first destination was Canada, but later, many of these key staff members went on to Australia and India and helped found the aviation industries there. Canada retained the Hawker/Gloster group along with Avro and Fairey. Eventually, Bristol, Westland and Short ended up in Australia while India pulled of a major coup by attracting de Havilland. In the fullness of time, much of the Canadian industry moved to Australia, forming much of the backbone of Australia’s Commonwealth Aircraft Industries and the multinational Alliance Aviation. De Havilland and a newcomer, Folland, became the basis of Hindustan Aviation in India. Of all the companies that left the UK between 1940 and 1942, only Fairey were to return.

The other effect was that essentially research and development in the UK came to a complete halt. Technology was frozen at the 1940 level and remained there. In 1942, when the Germans seized the Supermarine Woolston plant, the Luftwaffe was hoping to put the much-vaunted Spitfire into Luftwaffe service. They found the factory was still building Spitfire Mark Ia aircraft, essentially identical to those being produced in 1938/39. They were, of course, long obsolete by that time. Thus, when the German seized the British aircraft industry in 1942, their hopes of a sudden and dramatic increase in aircraft production capacity proved to be thwarted. Any advanced work, whether basic research or engineering, had long left the country along with the people who were capable of such developments. The British had carefully, and very efficiently denied their aircraft production capacity to the Germans.

The occupation years finished the work in question. The Germans adopted a double-pronged policy towards their captured aviation production assets. One was to identify which components were useful to them and the other was to convert what wasn’t useful into producing things that were. It turned out that there wasn’t much in the first category. German engineers were appalled to find out that there was virtually no level of commonality between British and German tools or machinery. British aircraft engines could, for example, use metric, imperial or whitworth spanners for their bolts - and frequently used all three in the same engine. To use British engines in German aircraft, or indeed British aircraft in German service, meant accepting a nightmarish supply situation. The Germans did use Merlin and Hercules engines for some niche applications but by and large they simply weren’t worth the trouble.

The obvious thing was to convert the factories over to produce German engines and aircraft. This was done but the results fell short of German expectations. British production rates were low, quality was appalling and the reliability of the products was abysmal. The Germans also didn’t understand the bloody-minded relations between British management and workers. On at least one occasion, they tried to put an end to what they considered to be sabotage by shooting the management of one engineering company - only to find the workers at that company were cheering the firing squads on. It is even rumored that several other local workforces stepped up their non-cooperation in the hope the Germans would come along and shoot their management as well. While there is little doubt that the British trade unions raised non-cooperation to new heights of industrial immobility, that wasn’t the real problem. The truth was that German equipment was designed to be produced by a German industrial system and it just didn’t match up with the industrial methods used in Britain. Thus, the Germans half-converted factories, half tried to carry on with what they had and ended up by crippling the asset they most prized.

Even if they hadn’t, a terrible blow was about to descend on the struggling British aviation industry in the form of the swarm of dark blue American Navy fighter-bombers. When the carrier air raids started in late 1944, they quickly proved to be devastating. The carriers would lurk out to sea, out of sight of land based reconnaissance, then run in, usually at night, and launch massive air strikes that would swamp a given area with hundreds, later thousands of aircraft. By the time the German Air Force could respond and move reinforcements to that area, the carriers would have recovered their planes and be gone. The Americans had excellent target intelligence from the British aviation personnel who had escaped and their bombers, striking from rooftop level, proved to be deadly efficient. Their accuracy was far from perfect of course and some of their weapons, especially the big 12.75 inch rockets, were inherently inaccurate but they were far more precise than the medium and high-level bombers pre-war planning had envisaged. The trouble was that they not only devastated their targets but they flattened most of the surrounding areas as well - and that was where the skilled workers lived. The raids in 1944/45 were bad enough; after the destruction of the German Navy in the Battle of the Orkneys in late 1945, the carriers had little else to do and their efforts in 1946/47 were truly cataclysmic.

Post-war, the British government faced two questions. Should they rebuild an aircraft industry and if so, could they? Neither question was easy to answer. Britain in 1947 was a defeated power, like the rest of Europe it had suffered the disaster of being defeated by the Germans but did not reap the benefits of the American victory. Its industry and infrastructure shattered, its people ground down by five years of occupation, its treasury empty and its international assets gone, the obvious question that anybody proposing the re-institution of an aircraft industry had to answer was, why? Britain faced no obvious enemy. Nobody in Europe could threaten them and the Americans had made it very clear they would not tolerate the resumption of hostilities in Europe by anybody. Britain’s every resource was needed simply to provide its people with enough food to eat and to give them homes to live in. Why build military aircraft the country did not need?

Why indeed. The simple truth was that Britain didn’t need significant armed forces; indeed the return of what forces she had left (the Free British Army, the Royal Navy and the vestiges of the Royal Air Force) were more military power than she could afford. The one major asset, the Royal Navy, was quickly dispersed between the major Commonwealth powers as the “Imperial Gift”. The Royal Air Force (in reality, a few British-crewed squadrons of the Royal Canadian Air Force) consisted essentially of a handful of long-range patrol aircraft. While useful it was hardly a balanced or independent force. The army was a mixture of special forces group that had performed valuable service in preparing for the invasion of Europe and some infantry formations that had been equally valuable in the Kola Peninsula. This, at least, was a formation that had some immediate discernible value.

As 1947 moved into 1948, the chaos of post-war Europe appeared to be immovable. The Great Famine was already biting hard and only massive food aid from Italy, Spain, the U.S. and the rest of the world was preventing a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. In Britain, the shape of the Commonwealth was already beginning to emerge and, for traditional Britons, it was not a reassuring picture. India and South Africa had already quietly intimated that they planned to leave the Commonwealth (South Africa did so at the end of 1949, India in 1951). Australia eventually stayed in, but its membership was purely nominal and was very much secondary to its role as a founder of the Triple Alliance. The Commonwealth, in reality, became a UK-Canadian organization with a few African countries as dependencies and a scattering of bases around the world. This was the new basis of British policy and, ironically, it was actually quite a good one. It offered an opportunity for the British to punch above their weight in political terms without offering much in the way of force requirements.

The UK itself was only threatened in a very limited sense. The most probable cause of an attack was seen as being a dispute over food supplies, particularly offshore fisheries. The Baltic herring fisheries were destroyed and/or inedible and most of the North Sea fisheries had shared the same fate. By a quirk of geography and oceanography, the fishing grounds close to the UK had been spared that fate and were, with caution, usable. It was easy to imagine another European country, desperate for food, trying to seize or at least exploit, those grounds. If unpoliced, those fishing grounds could be either taken or over-fished to extinction. They had to be patrolled and protected, a task best done from the air. So there was a need for an Air Force after all.

From an air force point of view, the requirements quickly distilled down to a few simple objectives. One was to provide some form of limited air defense of the United Kingdom. This was eased by the fact that all of the countries within striking range of the UK were in as bad, if not worse, condition than Britain itself. A second task was to provide a maritime patrol capability to protect British offshore resources and the shipping needed to keep the UK supplied with essential goods. Another was to provide an air transport capability to link what was left of the Commonwealth and to provide the ability to move troops around in case threats to Commonwealth members developed.

So, a rationale for the re-founding of the Royal Air Force was established and the roles of that force were defined. This answered the first question. Now the second took over the thoughts of strategic planners. Could a new Royal Air Force be founded? The first step was to survey what assets were available and determine how best they could be used. In terms of aircraft, the answer was essentially none. The squadrons returning from Canada had been equipped with largely American aircraft supplied under MAP. These aircraft had to be returned once the war was over and those the Canadians were keeping, they needed for their own purposes. Canadian built aircraft were also needed by Canada. So, the RAF returning from Canada offered trained and experienced personnel but little else.

A second source of assets were the aircraft available in the UK after the German collapse. These were actually quite numerous and modern. As might be expected, they were primarily German types with Ta-152, He-162 and Me-262 fighters being the most common. There were a handful of ground attack aircraft, some modern Arado bombers and some old, obsolete Ju-88s plus a variety of British types used in secondary roles. This, at least, offered a foundation for an interim force.

The third source of assets was the British aircraft industry itself and here, the analysts had a very pleasant and welcome surprise. While the first-line British aircraft companies were gone, and given the state of Europe were unlikely to return, there was a second tier of small companies who had remained in place. Companies like Miles Aviation, Martin-Baker, Bolton-Paul and Airpseed had survived by “flying under the radar”, not drawing attention to themselves, going out of their way to present themselves as capable and reliable but essentially insignificant sub-contractors. Their design staffs had been carefully hidden but had continued work. This discovery was a godsend; the Government swiftly reorganized the small companies as a single, state-owned corporation called the British Aircraft Corporation or BAC.

The aircraft engine factories were a mess, mostly devastated by bombing and most of their key workers killed but they had survived and offered a source of powerplant production. Best of all, the remainder of their design staff had continued work and designed, in secret, a new liquid-cooled piston engine that offered much more power than the old Merlin. With the German occupation over, work on this engine could be accelerated. This gave rise to the first question. Was the new RAF to adopt piston-engined aircraft or go straight to jets?

On the surface, the answer was obvious. The piston-engined aircraft, with the sole exception of the high-altitude bomber, was obsolete. Keeping them in service, or indeed building more, was folly. Only, as is so often the case, the “obvious” answer was over-simplified. Jet aircraft were demonstrably more effective but they were also much more expensive to maintain, to operate and they had technical problems all of their own. In addition, they used kerosene fuel and the explosion of jet engined aircraft development had put severe strains on the supply of this commodity. Kerosene was very expensive and hard to come by. In the final analysis, most of it came from American refineries and the US made certain that its own needs were satisfied first. It would be over a decade before this situation would change.

Another factor bore heavily here. The British jet engine industry had gone to America between 1940 and 1942 and its records had either gone with it or been destroyed. Starting again would mean starting from a 1940 level of technology and that was hardly acceptable. The German jets were underpowered, the most powerful of them delivering barely 2,500 pounds of thrust and had critically short service lives, as little as 20 - 30 hours. By way of comparison, equivalent American engines were delivering more than 6,000 pounds of thrusts and had service lives measured in hundreds of hours. There were new German jets being developed that offered more power and longer service lives but development of these had proved extremely troublesome. Rolls Royce and Bristol looked at the three engines in question, the HeS-011, the Jumo-012 and the BMW-018 but quickly realized that the basic design of these engines was so faulty that they not only could not work, they could never be made to work. Initially at least, if the RAF went for jets, the engines would have to be imported and that was economically impossible.

Operating economics made the choice of a piston-engined interim generation inevitable. At first, it seemed like this requirement could be filled by the left-over Luftwaffe aircraft on British airfields. By far the most numerous fighter was the piston-engined Ta-152, an ‘advanced’ version of the old FW-190D. Most of the aircraft available were the low-altitude Ta-152C model but some of the high-altitude rated Ta-152H models were also present. There were enough of the former to equip several squadrons and at least sufficient of the latter for a single specialized interceptor squadron. By the middle of 1949, this had been done and Ta-152s in British colors were to be seen flying over the UK.

This situation was hardly satisfactory but it would serve. The next question was the coastal surveillance and maritime reconnaissance role. The interim solution to this problem could also be found on British airfields although, in this case it was a British-built solution. Just before the war, the RAF had introduced the Airpseed Oxford into service as their basic navigational and gunnery trainer. The type had remained in production throughout the war as a utility and general purpose “hack” for Luftwaffe units and, indeed had been steadily improved. Even better, its engines were still in production. It’s armament might be weak (a single light machine gun, either British .303 or German 7.92 depending on what was available and up to 250 pounds of bombs) but that was perfectly adequate for its mission. Its range was unexciting, 960 miles, but that was no problem for an aircraft intended to operate within a few miles of the coast. Critically important was the fact that it was economical and inexpensive to fly, required only minimal base facilities and was docile enough to be operable in bad weather. The Airspeed Oxford became the RAF’s coastal patrol, crew trainer and general utility aircraft.

The third category, that or transport, was far less tractable. There were simply no suitable German aircraft available. Transports had never been the German’s string suite and their inventory, a mixture of ancient Ju-52s, flimsy FW-200s or the outstandingly mediocre Ju-352. Attrition had been savage and the parts of the fleet that had survived, most having been shot up beyond redemption, were worn out and unsafe to fly. The stockpile of aircraft on Britain’s battered airfields was of little help in fulfilling this requirement.

The solution to the problem came from Canada. Back in 1940, Avro engineers escaping from the UK had taken with them plans for a new “heavy bomber”, the Manchester. To call this a heavy bomber was risible by the standards of 1947 but, at the time, it was a fairly spectacular aircraft - on paper. It was a twin-engined aircraft designed to use a very powerful liquid-cooled engine, the 1,700 horsepower Vulture and to carry a 10,000 pound bombload for a tactical radius of 600 miles. Unfortunately the Vulture engine was not available in Canada and no tooling existed to build it. The Manchester, in its original form, was abandoned and it is the subject of much speculation amongst aviation enthusiasts as to what great successes this bold attempt to build a twin-engined heavy bomber might have lead.

However, the lower-powered Merlin engine was available in Canada, being built under license by Carr Foundry. Avro Canada therefore redesigned the Manchester to use four Merlins rather than two Vultures. In fact, they designed two aircraft in parallel. The first was the Lancaster, a straightforward heavy bomber adaptation of the Manchester to four engines. This design proceeded fitfully through to 1944 when it was apparent that it stood little chance of penetrating German defenses and was quietly abandoned.

The second design was considerably more successful. The Avro Canada engineers designed a large, box-shaped fuselage to which the married the four-Merlin adaptation of the Manchester’s wings. This aircraft became the Avro York and went into production as a military transport. The first examples flew in April 1943 and the type entered Canadian Air Force service in May 1944. By the end of the way, more than 250 had been built and they played an important role in keeping units fighting in the Kola Peninsula supplied. While hardly and ideal or economical transport, its total personnel capacity was five crew and 24 passengers or the equivalent in freight, it was tough, reliable, relatively easy to fly and apparently indestructible. One York, on a airdrop supply flight from Murmansk to the Karelian Front became a very rare item - a transport credited with an enemy fighter kill. I-Ink was about to start its drop run when it was ambushed by a pair of Me-109K fighters. One was driven off the Russian fighter escort but the other, apparently badly damaged, deliberately rammed the lumbering York. And bounced off. As the stricken Me-109 disintegrated in mid-air, the York, although badly damaged completed its supply drop and returned to Murmansk where it was repaired and resumed its duties - with a cross painted under the Pilot’s cockpit.

After prolonged negotiations, the Canadians agreed to “donate” the surviving York transports, approximately 150 aircraft, to the British along with the plans, jigs, tooling and other production necessities. In truth, the Canadians were hardly being generous, For all its virtues, the York was obsolete and with the flood of surplus Lockheed Constellations, Douglas Skymasters and Convair Cloudliners hitting the market, there was no hope of selling any more. Getting rid of any future claims with this act of “generosity” was probably a shrewd deal. Nevertheless, for the British, the York, especially free Yorks, were exactly what they needed. They were supportable, usable and filled the requirements without placing too much of a burden on the nation’s resources. They even made reasonable airliners, especially when it is remembered that British legislation at the time forbade Britons from riding on anything other than British airliners.

So, by late 1949, the RAF was refounded and was a superficially quite adequate force. It had seven squadrons of Ta-152 fighters (six with Ta-152Cs, one with Ta-152Hs), ten squadrons of Airspeed Oxfords fulfilling a variety of roles and five of Avro Yorks. More Yorks were flying with the newly-founded British Overseas Airlines Company (BOAC) . This was a force that certainly stood comparison with anything in Western Europe.

The RAF commands, though, were not deceived by their undoubted (and highly commendable) success in raising a viable force out of dust and ashes. The present situation was not stable and could not be long-lasting. The major concern was the fighter arm. German propaganda had always presented the Ta-152 as a “wonder weapon”, a piston engined fighter second to none. In fact, as was so often the case with German wonder weapons, reality fell far short of the myth. The “secret” of the Ta-152 was a twin fuel injection system, MW-50 that injected a methanol-water mixture into the fuel mix and GM-1 that did the same with nitrous oxide. The effect of MW-50 was to significantly increase power at low altitudes, giving improved speed and acceleration. Nitrous oxide injection did the same at high altitude, when used at its maximum rate giving an extra 360 horsepower that, in theory, gave the Ta-152H a service ceiling of 48,550 feet. Unfortunately, the MW-50/GM-1 system had two problems. The capacity for the chemicals was limited, restricting boosted power to 10 minutes for MW-40 and five minutes for GM-1. After this point, the weight of the system actually resulted in performance significantly worse than the FW-190D-14. The other problem was that both injectants thoroughly wrecked the engine, causing excessive wear and premature failure. All the RAF Ta-152s had serious engine problems but the Ta-152Hs were by far the worst.

Nor was their performance all that it seemed. For some unknown reason (probably no more that youthful exuberance) an RAF Ta-152H, flown by one Pilot Officer Prune, attempted to intercept a brand new B-36P, Age of Aquarius in transit from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana to Sheremetevo AFB in Russia. High in the sky over Leeds, Prune had the experience shared by so many of his contemporaries in that era of having his aircraft hanging on its prop at around 48,000 feet while Age of Aquarius sailed serenely past, at least 3,000 feet over his head. As his GM-1 tank emptied and the power boost faded, the Ta-152H stalled went into a flat spin from which it did not recover. Prune bailed out safely at 30,000 feet and was able to report that the last thing he’d seen before his aircraft stalled was Age of Aquarius’s tail guns unerring tracking his Ta-152H. The incident caused a minor diplomatic spat that was resolved when the British government apologized for attempting to intercept a SAC bomber.

By then, it was already obvious that the Ta-152 would have to be replaced and, in fact, a replacement was already in the works.

Postwar RAF Part Two - Phoenix Rising
If the Royal Air Force found difficulty in justifying its existence and in finding a mission, the Royal Navy had a more serious problem. It had the advantage of much greater assets, even after the Imperial Gift had depleted its numbers of ships to a shadow of its previous self. It also had the advantages of an enviable if shadowy war record and a pre-existing number of trained men and bases. What it didn't have was a mission. When asked what the role of the Royal Navy was in the post-war age, the answer was an introspective silence.

There was another problem. The remaining ships were capital assets, expensive to own, expensive to run. However, they were also sources of income. They could be sold, preferably as warships (because that fetched more income) but always as scrap. By the end of 1947 and early 1948 the government was selling ships for scrap on a weekly basis to pay the wages of its civil servants and other employees. On this basis, it could not even afford to provide crews for the ships it had and most of the fleet was laid up. By mid-1948, the operational Royal Navy had been reduced to four destroyers and six submarines - and was still the most powerful Navy in Northern Europe. By the middle of 1949 the situation had not improved and there was a very real possibility that the Royal Navy would completely cease to exist as an operational force.

At this point, the new First Sea Lord, Lord Louis Mountbatten, cemented his reputation as the greatest Sea Lord of the 19th and 20th centuries combined. A charismatic figure he had first gained major public notice when his destroyer, HMS Kelly had been involved in some daring operations during the Norwegian Campaign. Kelly was under repair for many months and, by the time of the Great Escape, she was in port remedying boiler defects. It was considered unlikely that she would be ready for sea and Mountbatten’s orders were, if he couldn’t get her out, to blow her up. This, he refused to consider. When German troops broke through the port defenses, they saw the inert and apparently derelict Kelly and raced towards her to take possession. At the last minute, the destroyer opened up with her full armament in a terrible blast of gunfire that swept the wharves clean of German troops (and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that a British 4.7 inch semi-armor-piercing shell fired at a range of less than 50 feet would penetrate the frontal armor of a German Panzer Mark IV). Kelly then got under way, spraying the German invaders with gunfire as she made her way down the harbor ways. Halfway out she came under attack from four Henschel Hs-123 close support aircraft. Despite the restricted waters, she outmaneuvered their attacks and shot down all four. Then, having finally gained the open sea, Mountbatten heard that a group of British soldiers that had formed part of the rearguard were trapped in another part of the port and were running out of ammunition. Mountbatten did not hesitate, he turned Kelly around, went back into the port, found the desperate soldiers and rescued them. Then, Kelly broke out again, inflicting more carnage on the way. Several days later and running out of fuel, Kelly met the American Navy tanker Monongahela and overcame some critical differences in fueling rig to take on enough oil to get to Churchill. It is a matter of record that he insisted on paying for the US Navy’s fuel oil with his personal cheque (which was presented and honored). Such was the man who took over the Royal Navy at its moment of greatest crisis.

Mountbatten’s message was simple. The old days were gone, forget about them. The old Navy is gone, forget about it. The old rules are gone, forget about them too. The Navy had to start with a clean sheet of paper and define what it could do and why it could do it. It took three months but eventually the Royal Navy strategic staff under Mountbatten came up with a plan that specified three primary objectives. One was to work with the Royal Air Force in protecting the British Isles and its surrounding waters. That alone, the suggestion the Navy should work with another service, was revolutionary. The second role was to protect shipping, again by collaborating with the Royal Air Force. The third was more revolutionary still. Mountbatten had pointed out that the Commonwealth now consisted of a lot of small properties scattered all over the world. These were all vulnerable to an attack by a local power. They could either be defended by an Army garrison at each (requiring large numbers of troops) or by mobile task forces that could deploy themselves as required. This, of course, would require good intelligence and expenditure of large sums on the Secret Intelligence Service. In an act of amazing prescience, Mountbatten identified the primary risk as being the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The Navy presentation was a political master-stroke, gaining the Navy the support of the RAF and the Whitehall intelligence battalions.

The Royal Navy plan identified ships that would be needed. Coastal patrol craft to protect the waters around the UK, frigates to provide trade protection capability and aircraft carriers plus their screen and fast troop transports to support the Commonwealth. Everything else should be scrapped, immediately or at the government’s convenience, whichever came sooner. Land establishments were slashed back so that what money there was could be diverted to naval construction. After some anguished Cabinet debate, the Navy’s long-term reconstruction plan was approved and the Royal Navy was saved.

The first priority was to get the carriers back in service. On their return at the end of 1947, they’d been left “in reserve” and not maintained for over two years. Predictably, Formidable and Indomitable were in appalling condition and it was questionable if they could be saved. Not impossible; technically, any ship can be saved even if the repairs amount to lifting up the name plate and sliding a new ship under it. The question was, could they be saved given the resources available? More importantly, could they be modernized to handle the latest naval aircraft. The answer in the first case was yes, just, but it would take time. The answer in the second was no. The design of armored carriers precluded radical modernization except at exorbitant cost.

Oddly, this was actually a quite acceptable set of answers. A lengthy refit and partial modernization would allow the reconstruction of the Fleet Air Arm while the limitations on the carriers would prevent them gold-plating their aircraft to financial destruction. The question was, what aircraft? The RAF expedient of searching through the UKs bombed-out airfields for salvage, successful as it had been, was not an option for the Navy. As Mountbatten remarked “The German is not an aquatic beast, there is no point in searching for his water wings.” The Americans were approached for second-hand naval aircraft, only to be rebuffed with a withering “Are you kidding us?” Nobody else was in a position to supply the aircraft. The solution would have to come from within the UK

It came from the Blackburn Division of the newly founded BAC Group. In 1940 the group had started to design a heavy naval fighter powered by the Napier Sabre engine. The first prototype Firebrands had been rolled out in 1942 but had been destroyed when all hell broke loose. However, behind the scenes, Blackburn had continued to work on the design, refining it and widening the fuselage so that the aircraft could carry a torpedo. Aware that the Sabre engine would not survive the occupation, they redesigned it to use the 2,520 horsepower Centaurus radial engine. By the time of The Big One, the design was ready to go. Mountbatten gave the word and construction of the Firebrand TF.4 prototypes started at the end of 1949.

Flight trials in starting in July 1950 showed the aircraft to have some remarkable capabilities. The aircraft had a sea-level maximum speed of 350 miles per hour, almost 20 miles per hour faster than the RAF’s Ta-152C. Incredibly, a Firebrand carrying a torpedo could match a clean, unloaded Ta-152C for speed. The Firebrand’s speed dropped off with altitude but that was a lesser consideration for a naval aircraft. In mock dogfights, the Firebrand could easily escape a Ta-152 simply by using its much greater weight to dive away, and then use its superior speed to extend and escape. Finally, the offensive warload of the Firebrand put the Ta-152 into the second-league. The big Blackburn could comfortably carry a torpedo and eight underwing rockets or up to four thousand pounds of bombs. The Firebrand may not have been the peak of aviation modernity but solid, reliable, and durable it was just what the Royal Navy needed. In June 1952, HMS Indomitable put to sea carrying a group of 30 Firebrand TF. IVA multi-role fighter-attack aircraft. The renaissance of the Royal Navy had started.

The early success of the Firebrand TF.IV might have suggested that the aircraft would serve as the RAF’s much-needed replacement for the Ta-152. By 1950, this was approaching crisis point, spares for the aircraft were running out and they were becoming progressively less safe to fly. Indeed, the Firebrand might have been adopted by the RAF had it not been for the fact that they had already found a more suitable aircraft for their purpose.

This aircraft had been turned up by the same process that had resulted in the discovery of the Firebrand. The Martin-Baker Company had been investigating fighter designs and had produced the Martin Maker MB.3. The prototype of this aircraft had first flown in August 1942, just prior to the German take-over in the UK It had crashed when its Sabre engine had failed and the design had apparently been abandoned. In reality, the Martin-Baker designers had continued to refine the aircraft and produced the Martin Baker MB.5. In 1948, the RAF had ordered this aircraft developed as a Ta-152 replacement, using the new Griffon engine coming out of Rolls Royce. The prototype Martin Baker MB.5 first flew in May 1949 and proved to be a major advance over the Ta-152.

In a series of combat trials carried our during the winter of 1949-50, the new MB.5 proved to be a stunning 60 mph faster than the Ta-152C at sea level and 35 miles per hour faster at best-speed altitude. The use of MW-50 and GM-1 boost reduced the MB.5s speed advantage to 20mph at sea level and gave the Ta-152 a marginal 12 miles per hour superiority at its best altitude. In other words, even with chemical boost, the Ta-152C was at best equal and usually inferior across most of the speed spectrum - and the MB-5 wasn’t wrecking its engine in the process. In terms of rate of climb, the MB.5 showed a 25 percent superiority over the German aircraft, almost 1,000 feet per minute better and it sustained that higher climb rate to greater altitudes. The MB.5 had a better roll rate, could turn tighter and its greater weight allowed it to out-accelerate the Ta-152 in a dive. Only in terms of service ceiling did the MB.5 not surpass the German fighter by a handsome margin.

As a result of these trials, the MB.5 was immediately ordered into production as the BAC Bandit F.1. Putting a new piston-engined fighter into service in the early 1950s was anachronistic to put it mildly and probably, under other circumstances the MB.5 would have remained one of the designs that was good but not quite good enough. However, the Bandit F.1 turned out to be one of the designs that was the right aircraft at the right time. A number of European countries were looking for replacements for their 1930s vintage fighters but cost, maintenance and fuel shortage issues spoke against the adoption of jets. Spain lead the way with an order for 100 Bandit F.51 aircraft to replace their old Messerschmitt 109s. These were identical to the RAF aircraft except for different radios and the use of MG-151 cannon in place of the Hispano guns used by the RAF.

The Spanish order opened the floodgates. Italy also needed a new fighter to replace its obsolescent Fiat G56 Centauros and signed up for 120 Bandit F.52s, identical to the Spanish variant. These were followed by a repeat order for 80 Bandit F.52As that were fitted with an improved radio navigation system, suiting them for operations over the sea and in Italy’s North African colonies. Switzerland joined the pack with an order for 150 Bandit F.61s, these having uprated Griffon engines modified for increased high-altitude power.


The most significant order came from France. The French had tried to jump the advanced piston engined fighter stage and go direct for jet-engined fighters. In the end, this policy would pay off with the Mystere and Mirage series fighters but their development was delayed by technical problems and inadequate resources. The French discovered that the Germans hadn’t been aware of any of the problems involved in building transonic jets and these had to be solved before the Mystere could be built. As an interim, the French Air Force swallowed their pride ordered more than 200 Bandit F.53 aircraft.

The downside of this stream of orders was that deliveries for the RAF suffered as production bottlenecks had to be cleared. Nevertheless, by the end of 1951, the Ta-152 had vanished from RAF service, lamented by nobody, and the RAF fighter squadrons had standardized on the Bandit F.1 and the slightly-modified F.2. In 1953, the Bandit T.3, a twin seat fighter conversion trainer entered production and prompted another stream of export orders from the users of the single seat fighter, now in service with an astonishing twelve countries. In its turn, the Bandit T.3 gave rise to the Bandit NF.4, a radar-equipped nightfighter. The weight of an airborne intercept radar took away some of the Bandit’s sparkling performance but the aircraft still remained a viable performer.

The last major production version of the Bandit was the Bandit F.5 that featured a new, uprated Griffon engine that delivered 2,650 horsepower. This, plus some minor airframe refinements and the use of thrust-enhancing exhaust stubs boosted the Bandit’s best speed to 525 miles per hour at 20,000 feet, a speed that the designers were quick to point out was comparable to the early generation jets. This claim (not entirely justifiable) was picked up in the 1970s when General Sir John Hackett wrote a rather unlikely alternative history story called “Britain Fights On”. This postulated that the Halifax-Butler Coup in 1940 failed, that Churchill remained Prime Minister and continued the war against Germany. The story suggested that a great air battle in 1940 ended any hope of Germany driving the UK out of the war and that, after many rather strained tribulations and unlikely set-backs in North Africa and Italy, a UK-American alliance invaded France in 1944 leading to a German collapse and surrender in April 1945. In an addendum to the novel, Hackett suggested that the appearance of German jet fighters in October 1944 could have lead to the accelerated production of the Martin Baker MB.5 and its use in the last few days of the fighting.

It’s fictional appearances apart, time was running out for the Bandit. By 1957/58, the program of oil refinery reconstruction and modernization had ended the kerosene shortage and the price of jet fuel worldwide plummeted. At the same time, the slow conversion of the world’s airline fleets to jet aircraft demanded the development of more reliable and economical engines and this was reflected in military aircraft propulsion. Jet fighters ceased to be expensive luxuries affordable only to the extremely-rich or desperately-fighting and became a practical operational option for all the world’s powers. That eliminated the whole reason for the Bandit’s success and the aircraft quickly vanished from front line service. The fighter versions went first but the trainer remained in service. In fact, demand for the trainer actually increased, the type proving an excellent conversion aircraft from basic trainers to jets. The late 1950s saw many surplus single-seat Bandit fighters converted to twin seaters to fill this role.

The success of the Bandit probably saved the UK aircraft industry, in the short term at least. For a while it became a major British hard currency earner and opened official eyes to the possibility offered by a successful export fighter. Less obvious was the fact that it owed that success to an unusual convergence of historical and technical trends that was unlikely to be repeated. It opened official eyes, certainly but also gave rise to excessive expectations that were to have serious implications later on.


The availability of the Griffon engine directed British eyes at their York transport fleet. Surely, that extra power could produce a more viable and economical transport? A York was fitted with four Griffon engines in place of its Merlins and trialled as the York T.4. The results were not as successful as hoped; the aircraft did have improved cargo capacity (30 rather than 24 passengers) but speed was barely increased and range actually fell due to the Griffin’s higher fuel consumption. It was the aerodynamics of the fuselage that limited performance and correcting that required an entirely new design.

That new design emerged but not as a transport aircraft. The Airpseed Oxfords used for coastal patrol were a rough and ready solution, the best that could be done with what was available. A larger, more effective, preferably four-engined aircraft was needed. The Miles division of BAC designed a new aircraft that mated the wings of the York T.4 with a new fuselage that was optimized for maritime patrol duties. The aircraft was armed with six 20mm guns, two in the nose, two in a dorsal turret and two in the tail. A large bomb-bay occupied the middle of the aircraft and was organized to handle depth charges, homing torpedoes, sonobuoys and the other paraphernalia of anti-submarine warfare. During testing the nose guns were deleted in favor of a search radar and the tail guns in favor of a MAD stinger. In this form, the aircraft was type-classified as the BAC Shackleton MR.1.

The Shackleton was hardly an impressive aircraft in the military sense. It was inferior to comparable aircraft being produced in America and Russia. This was hardly surprising, the design traced its lineage back over twenty years and its wing structure was still identical to the Manchester bomber. Despite efforts to sell the type worldwide, there were no export orders for the Shackleton and the aircraft remained restricted to British service. On the other hand, it survived in the UK into the mid 1980s and was still giving effective service up to its retirement. Sometimes modernity does not equate to effectiveness.

Despite its successful adoption of an advanced generation of piston engined fighters, the British knew they had to transit to the jet age. The problem was that no headway was being made in designing a viable jet engine. The Shackleton provided one driver to the ultimate solution. Operating far from home, the lumbering “Shack” needed long-range all-weather fighters to provide cover. The Bandit NF.4 was barely a stopgap solution let alone a viable one. US interceptors were already turning into heavy nuclear-armed fighters, blindingly expensive and designed to operate within the environment of a complex and comprehensive air defense system. The solution was a Canadian aircraft, the CF-100 Canuck. A twin jet, twin seat aircraft, this was designed to operate over the trackless wastes of Canada’s far north. It was ideally suited to Britain’s requirements.

Also, in 1953, the Labor Government that had been elected in 1948 was defeated in a General Election, returning Winston Churchill and the Conservatives to power. They started a rapid reconstruction of the economy that slowly but surely brought the country out of the pit of despair it had been wallowing in since 1947. By 1955 there was actually money available to import things. The RAF got its share with the order for 50 CF-100 Mark 6 aircraft, these being essentially the RCAF’s Mark 4 but with a belly pack of 20mm Hispano guns replacing the wingtip rocket pods. In May 1956, the first CF-100 arrived in the UK, whereupon it was taxied into a hangar and was never seen again. Its engines were stripped out and one each delivered to Rolls Royce and Armstrong Whitworth who proceeded to dismantle them and reverse-engineer their components. Britain was back in the jet engine business after almost 15 years.



The same improving economy allowed the Royal Navy to look at replacing its two old carriers. Two new ships were approved, the same size as the older ships at 22,000 tons standard, 27,000 tons full load but were completely unarmored, allowing them to be significantly larger. They were equipped with two catapults and two elevators, one centerline, one deck edge. They were armed with four 4 inch guns and four twin 40mm weapons. Their quadruple screws drove them at a respectable 33 knots. Courageous and Glorious were ordered in 1955 and entered the fleet in 1960 and 1961 respectively. To the astonishment of all, a third member of the class, Furious, was ordered in 1958 and was completed in 1964.

The new carriers were designed to carry 36 aircraft, nominally the same as the older Formidable and Indomitable. There was, however, a critical difference. The older carriers were designed for pre WW2 aircraft and were severely restricted in the numbers of modern aircraft they could really carry (20 and 24 respectively). The Glorious class were designed to carry 36 aircraft that were 50 percent larger than anything currently flying, allowing great room for future aircraft growth. The question was, what aircraft.

The Firebrand had served the Navy well but was undoubtedly obsolete. Blackburn had designed a turboprop version of the aircraft that offered much better performance. However, Blackburn’s design staff were heavily involved in a project secretively described as “something rather special” which would eventually emerge as the BAC Buccaneer S.1. They therefore handed the turbo-Firebrand over to Airspeed who built it as the BAC Wyvern S.1. that was the strike part of the group seen to, but what about fighters? Eventually, the Royal navy swallowed its pride and went back to the Americans, hoping perhaps for some F9F Panthers or F2H Banshees. After all, a new administration was in power.

Why the decision was made, nobody knows. President LeMay was not a man known for kindness or sentimentality and his administration reflected that mind-set. However, when the stunned British delegation left Washington they had been given - not sold - sixty F11F-2 Tigers, a transonic fighter that was only just entering US Navy service. The F11F was just capable of exceeding the speed of sound in level flight, it was short ranged and a handful to fly but it was modern and could stand against pretty much anything in the world at the time. Even more stunningly, the British had been able to purchase the new Sidewinder air-to-air missile to go with their new fighter. They were back in the naval aviation game with a vengeance.

All this left the transport aircraft situation unsolved. The British issued three requirements for transports. The first was for a civil airliner/troop transport that could carry 100 passengers of 130 troops for 4,000 miles at 450 miles per hour. The second was for an aircraft that could carry 100 troops and their equipment, drop them by parachute over a radius of 800 miles. The third, tossed in as an afterthought was for a tactical transport that could carry a platoon of men and their equipment for a radius of 250 miles at 150 miles per hour. That last requirement would destroy the British military aviation industry. (To be continued)

Post War RAF Part Three - Flying High
RAF Bomber Command was the last of the major commands to be founded, following a couple of years after the formation of Fighter, Coastal and Transport Commands. It’s foundation was controversial, both on operational grounds, it not being entirely clear who the British planned to bomb, and on political grounds in that the expense of Bomber Command in the 1930s had resulted in Britain’s weak military standing in 1940 and thus its disastrous armistice with Germany. In the end, the undeniable efficiency of strategic bombing was accepted and Bomber Command was refounded in late 1950.

If the other commands were shadows of their former selves though, Bomber Command did not even rise to that status. When refounded, it deployed but a single squadron equipped with Airspeed Oxfords. Other options had been examined but a design developed in secret by Vickers for an improved Wellington, the Warwick, was considered too obsolescent to even consider building. There were a number of Arado 234s on British airfields but the experiences of the Ta-152 had prejudiced the British against using captured aircraft. In any case, the 234s were in very poor repair and represented more of a liability than anything else. The Oxford was, quite literally, the only bomb carrying aircraft available.

The Oxfords, of course, only lasted for a few months in service. They were replaced by Yorks, hastily converted to drop bombs through a hatch cut in the floor. The bomb aiming equipment was even cruder, a slaved sight mounted to view through a glazed hole cut under the nose. In some ways, the sight of the lumbering Yorks pretending to be bombers symbolized the whole state of Britain in the grim days of 1951-52; a country trying its best but woefully short of even the most basic necessities of life. A potential threat to what was left of the Commonwealth needed a defense had to be mounted and an offensive arm was part of a good defense but how was this to be achieved?

The Yorks soldiered on until 1955 when they were replaced by a small production run of Shackletons. These were built more or less to the original prototype configuration with mid-upper and tail 20mm guns and a manned bomb-aiming station in the nose. The bomb bay was modified to handle an 8,000 pound bombload. The Bombshacks as they were quickly dubbed were an improvement on the Yorks but by how much was debatable. Neither aircraft stood any chance of penetrating defended airspace, both were totally vulnerable to any form of modern air defense.

At best, this inventory of aircraft was good for training purposes only. The problem was that there were no options available. There were two interlinked difficulties at this point, both potentially fatal in their own right but together apparently presenting an insuperable obstacle. One was, of course, the lack of financial and material resources that had been plaguing the rebirth of the aviation industry since the end of the war.
The other difficulty was much more subtle. The success of the Martin-Baker MB.5 and Firebrand had primarily been due to their designs being carefully refined and designed in the years while they were being kept from prying German eyes. In the final analysis, they represented capital, credit that had been carefully accumulated and then expended. What the success of these aircraft had hidden was that the companies that had produced them were the second-rate members of the pre-war aviation industry, the ones it hadn’t been considered worth evacuating to Canada. This is not to say that their designers weren’t talented, they were, in some cases very much so and, in the normal scheme of things, those designers would have moved to one of the larger companies and become the giants of the profession. No, the problem was that the companies were all desperately short of middle men, the technicians who took the work of the giants and did the painstaking detail work. The small companies were small companies because they lacked enough such technicians and, of those they had had, all too many had been killed in the American air raids.
As the Bombshacks entered service, RAF Bomber Command assessed this gloomy picture and made some grim decisions. They could build the required aircraft given time but the shortage of skilled manpower meant that a lot of time would be needed. Development of the next generation of aircraft would be lengthy. The specification had to be right, it had to be timely and it would have to produce an aircraft that would be modern when it entered service at the end of lengthy development. Above all, it was going to be a gamble. The aircraft designers would have to assume that, somehow, the material resources would be found. To make matters worse inadequate resources existed for a competitive design process. The correct proposal would have to be selected right from the start, and developed at the expense of any insurance policy. Bomber Command drew a deep breath and went for it. This was, to put it mildly, a courageous decision.

Bomber Command defined two aircraft for development. One was a long-range strategic bomber. The proposal selected was an outline drawing from the Airspeed Division named the Airspeed AS-730. This was a remarkable aircraft indeed. It was an unswept canard aircraft, fabricated throughout in stainless steel/brazed honeycomb sandwich. It was powered by four Armstrong-Siddeley P.159 Cobra jet engines stacked in pairs at the wingtips. It would have a crew of three, a pilot, bombardier-navigator and observer-navigator. The aircraft was 163.5 feet long and had a wingspan of 59.75 feet, giving it a takeoff weight of 158,000 pounds. The aircraft would cruise at Mach 2.6, at an altitude of 66,400 feet for a range of 4,740 miles. The British Aircraft Corporation stated that, provided the engines could be made available, the first prototype could fly in November 1959 and the tenth pre-production aircraft by December 1961. Service entry would be ten years after the date of contract signing. Bomber Command signed the development contract in May 1955 and the aircraft, now the BAC-730, started its design process.

The second aircraft was a shorter range tactical bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. This requirement became known as the TSR.2., TSR standing for Tactical Strike Reconnaissance. The selected design was a Miles design, the P.17A This was a high-wing, twin jet aircraft with a crew of two and represented a fundamentally different philosophy form the American bombers and the BAC-730. Those aircraft had been designed to fly too high and too fast to be intercepted. The TSR.2 was designed to fly low and fast, going under the radar rather than over it This concept had been examined by the Americans in the mid-1950s and rejected on the very sensible grounds that, while there was no known limit on how high an aircraft could fly, there was a very solid and unchallengable limit on how low it could go. Low-altitude penetration had been dismissed as a developmental dead end. The TSR.2 was to challenge that assumption. The TSR.2 was designed to cruise out to its target at Mach 2.05 then make a low altitude run under the radar at Mach 1.1. Its radius of action in that configuration was 1,000 miles. The development contract was signed in December 1955 with it being hoped the aircraft would fly in 1961 and enter service in 1965.

Neither of these projects was, of course, an immediate short-term solution. There was, however, an interim solution for the tactical bomber requirement. Blackburn had been developing a new, twin-jet naval strike aircraft, the Blackburn Buccaneer. This aircraft had actually been ordered in 1952 but work had been stalled by the lack of available engines. In 1956, a pair of Orenda engines, stripped out of a CF-100 were installed in the airframe. This allowed the aircraft to fly for the first time in May 1956. The results were nothing short of sensational. The aircraft appeared to be faster and more agile than hoped and it possessed the legendary strength of Blackburn airframes. The Royal Navy placed an immediate order for 100 aircraft designated the BAC Buccaneer S.1 powered by the Bristol Gyron Junior engine. The fact that the Gyron Junior owed so much to the Orenda that it was once described as “howling with a Canadian accent” was tactfully neglected.

Rolls Royce were the ones who made the great difference. They applied the materials technology inherited from the Orenda to one of three engines they had under development. The new engine, the Avon, offered 11,100 pounds of thrust as opposed to the 7,500 of the “Gyron Junior” and that turned the sensational into the spectacular. The new engines consumed less fuel, increasing range from 1,700 to 2,300 miles. It could carry an 8,000 pound bombload in an internal bomb bay and could manage Mach 0.85 at sea level. After some inter-service negotiations, the Royal Navy agreed to accept a one-year slippage in their deliveries by re-ordering their aircraft as the Avon-powered Buccaneer S.2 and Bomber Command ordered 100 Buccaneers of its own, equipping its six new tactical bomber squadrons. The two services agreed that the deliveries would be one-for-one with aircraft being delivered alternately to Bomber Command and the Fleet Air Arm. Despite the disruptions of 1957/58, the first Buccaneers were delivered in 1959. In less that a decade, Bomber Command had gone from the Airspeed Oxford that could carry a 250 pound bombload for a couple of hundred miles at speeds of less than 200 miles per hour to a state-of-the-art near-supersonic tactical bomber.

The provision of an interim and a long-term solution to Bomber Command’s tactical requirement did not solve the interim strategic bomber problem. The BAC-730 would not be ready for at least a decade and probably 15 years. There was no way that Bomber Command could continue using the Bombshack for that period. To understand what happened next, it is necessary to revisit the state of mind that prevailed in 1955/56. Today, the ascendancy of the manned bomber is so complete that it is hard to believe that the proponents of using ballistic missiles for strategic attack seriously believed in the integrity of their case. With hindsight, we can see that their claims missiles represented a less expensive and more certain way of delivering nuclear warheads to distant targets than manned bombers were facile and insupportable. However, this was not the case back then. In 1955, the bomber versus missile wars were reaching their maximum level of noise and fury. It would be two years before the United States would cancel every one of its strategic ballistic missile programs in the famous 1957 “Missile Massacre”. It would be four years before thunderous explosions in the skies over Nevada once and for all laid the myth of missile invulnerability into its grave as missile after missile was blasted out of the sky by Zeus interceptors.

During the last two years of the Second World War, the Germans had become convinced that the American invasion, when it occurred would take place in the UK. They believed that cultural, political and strategic considerations made this inevitable. They thought that the close historical links between the UK and US would make the British Isles the primary target for the invasion armada they knew was concentrating in East Coast ports. Above all, they knew that strategically, the British Isles were the great fortress that guarded Europe’s west. No invasion beachhead on the European mainland could be secure, or even viable, as long as Britain was occupied by German forces. For that reason, the Germans had poured armed forces into Britain during 1946/47. Since they could not know where the Americans would strike, those forces contained substantial numbers of the Fi-103 cruise missile and the A-4 ballistic rocket. These were the German Army’s corps and army level artillery and they could use them to cover any potential invasion site. In fact, by 1947, the United Kingdom probably had the greatest density of rocket artillery anywhere in the bloated Third Reich. Not only were there more rockets than anywhere else, the UK also had the technical experts assigned to maintain, repair and service the rockets. When the experimental establishment at Peenemunde vanished in a ball of atomic fury, these were also the most skilled and knowledgeable rocket experts in the world.

It is hardly surprising that there was a concerted effort to exploit this core of expertise. The German rocket artillerymen had no home to go to and the only skill they had was their ability to make the A-4 rocket fly. For the British, they held another advantage, they were cheap. People who had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do would work for coffee and cakes and, in Britain, the German rocket engineers did. In addition, the sheer volume of rockets that had been deployed to the UK meant that the engineering teams had plenty of samples to work with; capital expenditures would be low. Finally, the British lucked out. The men who stayed in the UK were not the scientists and engineers who had designed and built the A-4. The A-4 was the product of men who desired a perfect solution and cherished good engineering. The German rocket engineers were artillerymen who desired a workable and efficient weapon and cherished explosives arriving on target.

Throughout the early years of the 1950s, the German rocket men fired off dozes of A-4s loaded with various types of experimental package. They were employed by Vickers Engineering, becoming the foundation of a new division of that company, Vickers Dynamics Ltd and working under the chairmanship of a newly-returned scientist, Dr Barnes Wallis. Their first task was to simplify the A-4 and turn it from a finicky, unreliable and relatively short-ranged trinket into a reliable weapon of war. They abandoned the carefully-shaped ballistic shell for a simple cylinder topped with a cone, they simplified the engine, the fuel system, indeed almost every individual component of the system. By the time they had finished, the new rocket took an order of magnitude fewer man hours to build. It was also lighter, longer-ranged, more reliable and more accurate. The first test launch took place in late 1953 and was a success. Barnes Wallis, seeing the rocket soaring upwards across the Irish Sea, was heard to remark “Well, we sent that one scudding across the sky didn’t we.” And the new rocket was immediately dubbed the Scud.

The first success was atypical of course. Rockets were still unreliable and as many blew up on the launching pad as made successful flights. However, slowly, the faults were found and rectified. In addition, the Vickers Dynamics design team made two very important changes, they lengthened the Scud by 50 percent and switched to integral fuel tanks. These changes doubled the range of the missile, the Scud Mk.2 having a maximum radius of almost 375 miles. Barnes Wallis became an enthusiastic convert to missile technology and conceived a grand plan by which a British strategic bombardment force could be built around missiles rather than manned bombers. He pushed his design team hard and, by 1955, they had produced a further improved version of the basic Scud. This, the Scud Mk.3, had a range of no less than 750 miles. A missile-based bomber force seemed to be, at the very least, plausible.

At this point, Sir Barnes Wallis went to the RAF with an interesting proposal. He and his German artillerymen had designed a new rocket, a breakaway from the German A-4 technology. It had two further changes in basic design, a new fuel system that was much lighter yet more efficient than the A-4s gas pressurization system. Also, the new rocket was radio-controlled and could be steered by the means of four vanes in the rocket exhaust. The new rocket would have a range of 1,250 miles, something beginning to edge into a useful operational range. Wallis made the pitch that would become familiar to the supporters of Missile Madness. The new weapons would be too fast to be intercepted, they would be cheaper than manned bombers and they would not put air crew at risk. The problem was, developing the new rocket would cost more than Vickers Dynamics could afford as a simple corporate venture. They had to have a government contract.

Hearing the proposal, the leaders of Bomber Command were appalled. Instinctively they knew that something was wrong with the picture being painted but they lacked the technical knowledge to argue with the distinguished scientist. They angrily referred to themselves as being saddled with the new missile, from whence came the new missile’s name, Saddler B.1. In the end, a compromise was reached. The Saddler B.1 would become the interim strategic bombardment solution and would fill the gap between the already-obsolete Bombshack and the new BAC-730. However, the 730 wouldn’t be ready for a decade or more and development could continue on both bombers and missiles. When both were mature, a decision could be taken between the intercontinental range strategic bomber and the intercontinental range missile. It was, all things being equal, a wise and diplomatic decision. It squared the circle, it gave Britain a choice of options that had previously been ruled out.

Only one problem was left and it was a major one. Other than the imported Canadian CF-100 “Clunks” Fighter Command was still flying the piston-engined Bandit F.5. It had to go, even allowing for all the non-military considerations that had made it a success, it was still obsolete. The problem was replacing it and there weren’t that many candidates. Hindustan Aviation in India had put a small jet into production, the Vampire, but its performance was already passe by the standards of late 1956. The Russians produced some very good fighters but they weren’t available; the Russians needed all they could get for their efforts to cleanse their territory of the remaining German warlord states. The MiG-19 was just what the RAF needed, only they stood no chance of getting it. There was one other option, one the British looked at with great reluctance. France made jet fighters.

France had skipped the advanced piston-engined fighter and gone straight for jets. In the beginning they’d paid for that decision. Their first jet, the Ouragan was delivered in 1953 but was something of a disappointment. It was fast enough, almost 60 miles per hour faster than the Bandit F.5 but was a fuel-guzzler of monumental proportions. Ouragan pilots would joke that they would take off, enter the landing pattern and touch down - and run out of fuel on the runway. It was only mildly an exaggeration. The Ouragan was also lacking in maneuverability but it was pleasant and stable to fly. It may not have been the best jetfighter around but it was a good way of introducing piston-engined pilots to the world of the jet.

The Ouragan was followed by the Mystere. The Mystere I was basically an Ouragan with mildly swept wings and tail and a more powerful engine. It never went beyond the prototype stage but was replaced by the Mystere IIC that featured a new 30mm cannon and a thinner wing. In 1955, the Mystere IIC became the first European aircraft to break the sound barrier in a dive and it seemed as if the type was destined for great success. This was not to be; the early examples started breaking up in the air; like the Germans before them, the French had completely underestimated the problems of swept wings and it was found that flutter was tearing the wings apart. The Mystere IIC was grounded and withdrawn from service less than three months after the first examples had been taken into service.

Fortunately, Dassault Aviation had a solution waiting. In parallel with the Mystere IIC, they had developed a heavier and more powerful aircraft, one that featured a new fuselage and wing structure. Thus aircraft, the Mystere IVA was ordered by the French Air Force and the first examples were delivered in mid-1956. It wasn’t quite cutting edge but it was certainly good enough. It was capable of 695 miles per hour and could climb to 51,000 feet - putting America’s B-36s within its reach. Of course, the B-36 was already considered obsolete and being withdrawn in favor of the B-52 and B-60 but it was the principle of the thing that really counted.

The French focused their attention on Britain and made a very tempting offer. BAC could license built the Mystere IVA for the RAF. A successor to the Mystere IVA, the Super Mystere, was already in the works and it was proposed that BAC and Dassault team on this project to make the new aircraft a joint project suited to both French and British requirements. The Super Mystere was seen as being a strengthened and afterburning version of the Mystere IVA capable of 745 miles per hour and of reaching an altitude of 55,000 feet. French plans were for it to be delivered in 1961 but with British help and funding, it could be ready in 1959.


Tempting indeed and too good to pass up. Throughout late 1956 and into 1957, British teams spent more and more time in France, finalizing the details of the agreement. A first batch of twelve Mystere IVAs arrived in the UK to start the process of converting the RAF fighter squadrons to the new aircraft. It seemed like a perfectly workable and mutually beneficial agreement had been reached, and despite reservations on both sides of the channel, the multinational agreement was working just fine.

It was the calm before the storm.

Post War RAF Part Four - Scandal!
Fairey Aviation were one of the few British aircraft companies that made even a token attempt to return to the UK after the war was over. The company had evacuated to Canada during 1941 and had become established as a major supplier of components and equipment to the US aircraft industry. In doing so, it had become involved in the developing helicopter technology, supplying gearing and other essentials to the Sikorsky and Piasecki groups. In doing so, its design staff had become disillusioned with the approach being adopted by those groups. The concept of an engine driving a rotor that was used both for lift and propulsion seemed to be grossly inefficient. The weight of the gearing was excessive and its mechanics were complex to the point where Fairey doubted whether they could ever be made practical. In addition, the system generated great amounts of torque, to the point where a second rotor, at the tail, was needed to prevent the craft spinning hopelessly out of control.

Fairey engineers came up with what they believed was a much better solution. Instead of using the engine to drive the rotor directly, they used it as a gas generator, feeding the product out along the rotor blades to rotor-tip jets. The great advantages of this system was that it was mechanically much simpler and was also torque-free, eliminating the need for a tail rotor. The disadvantage was that it provided little or no forward propulsion and additional machinery would be necessary to propel the aircraft. By 1952, Fairey had designed a system (based on American automobile transmission technology) where two wing-mounted engines would act both as gas generators for the tip-jets and as forward propulsion. In vertical take-off mode, all the engine power would be used to power the tip jets but as the aircraft transitioned to horizontal flight, power would be smoothly transferred to driving forward flight. To increase safety, Fairey designed the system using a four-bladed rotor, each engine driving an opposed pair of blades.

In planning their move back to the UK, Fairey decided to leave their aircraft components and gearing industries in Canada and the US. The aircraft production side of the operation would move to Britain and concentrate on exploiting their new design as a civil airliner. In effect, the US and Canadian operations would act as a cash cow, funding the development of the vertical takeoff airliner. By 1955, they had re-occupied their facilities in the UK, modernized them to an acceptable standard and flown their first prototype airliner, now called the Rotodyne. The first public appearance of the Rotodyne was spectacular. A group of ‘businessmen’ departed their offices in the City of London, took a coach to Heathrow Airport where they boarded a BEA Avro Jetliner for Birmingham. Arriving at Birmingham, they took another coach to a hotel in the center of the city for lunch. Only to find that somebody else had eaten all the food for at the same time as they had departed their ‘offices’ in London, another group had taken a five minute ride to an area of cleared rubble in London’s Docklands. A Rotodyne Y was waiting for them and had flown them straight to the center of Birmingham, landing only five minutes from their destination. They had beaten the jetliner by more than two hours.

The Rotodyne Y used for this publicity stunt (for, in truth, it was little else) was a technology demonstrator, using a pair of Eland turboprops for power. By Fairey standards, it was undersized and underpowered, too slow and too short-ranged. A new aircraft, the Rotodyne Z, was already being built. Powered by two new Rolls Royce Tyne turboprops, it was sized for a passenger load of sixty people, could cruise at 225 miles per hour and had a range of 675 miles. Even more significantly, Fairey had entered into a joint sales and marketing agreement with Kaman Helicopters in Connecticut. Of the two prototype Rotodyne Zs, one stayed in the UK for demonstrations while the other was shipped to Kaman, who proceeded to do something quite unprecedented. The USAF’s NORAD command had issued a requirement for a helicopter to evacuate the President and key members of staff from Washington in the case of nuclear attack. Kaman offered the Rotodyne Z, pointing out that it had the bulk and space to provide a complete flying emergency headquarters that would allow the President to remain in command of American nuclear forces while the evacuation was in progress, a facility quite impossible for a conventional helicopter.

Kaman invited President LeMay to visit the Rotodyne Z made up to simulate the proposed bid. The President spent all morning going over the mock-up and discussing technical details with Kaman and Fairey engineers. At the end of the meeting, he left the Kaman headquarters building and made a brief statement “I can find no cause for complaint.” The staff of Kaman, assembled outside the building burst into thunderous cheering at this unprecedented vote of confidence in the Rotodyne Z. With a week, the USAF had placed an order for 18 Rotodyne Z aircraft with Kaman to equip the Presidential and Executive squadron.

With this order in place, the Fairey Rotodyne moved into high gear. If ever there was a case of the right aircraft at the right time this was it. The availability of the C-99 Cloudliners had revolutionized air travel. The civilianized derivative of the transport version of the B-36, the Cloudliner was capable of lifting 400 people at a time, they had reduced per seat-mile costs to unprecedently low figures, making air travel a routine daily event for all but the poorest Americans. The Cloudliner had been followed by the Skyliner, essentially a stretched C-99 fuselage married to the wings and tail of the B-60. The Skyliner, entering service in 1956, could carry six hundred people. Boeing had built the Jumbojet, a transport derivative of its B-52 that was capable of lifting 650 people and was significantly faster than the Skyliner. Douglas had followed with a 600-seat airliner derivative of its C-133 transport that was slower than the jets but was cheaper to buy and operate.

All these aircraft had one disadvantage, they were so big that finding enough passengers to fill them meant operating between large central transport hubs. People would have to get to those hubs to take their flight and it quickly became apparent that it was taking longer to get to and from the transport hubs than to make the flight. This was a severe cramp on air transport development. Small feederliners didn’t solve the problem, they just dispersed it a bit. The Rotodyne solved it. The aircraft could act as a flying bus, stopping in city centers and rural communities, picking up its passengers and taking them direct to the hubs. The Rotodyne Z was the ancestor of the modern metro-airliner. Today, almost every airline passenger starts and ends his journey riding on a Rotodyne.

With American orders and options flowing in, Fairey in the UK set about emulating the success. On paper at least, Europe was perfect Rotodyne territory. Most major population centers were within the range of the Rotodyne Z and were spaced so that the aircraft had a major time and economic advantage over conventional airliners. Fairey started, naturally enough, with BEA - and had a shock. BEA management were cold to the aircraft, refusing to commit themselves to any purchase. They then demanded that the size of the Rotodyne Z be reduced so that it could carry a maximum of 20 passengers. This was highly disturbing; there was no economic rationale for such a reduction since the downsized aircraft would cost the same amount to fly as the larger type. In effect, the extra seats came free. So what was going on? Matters became worse when rumors started to spread that the Rotodyne was too noisy to fly from city centers, that it suffered from vibration and was difficult to control. All untrue; tests showed that the Rotodyne generated less noise than a London Underground train and that was only when taking off.

It is an odd thing, but corruption has a smell to it, a very distinctive smell indeed and by the middle of 1957, there was a lot of that smell around. One distinguished British aviation journalist visiting the Ministry of Aviation said that he got the distinct impression there were dead rats in the building. It was a Ministry of Aviation requirement that was to set the whole disaster in motion.

The MoA had issued a requirement for, amongst other things, a tactical transport that could carry a platoon of men and their equipment for a radius of 250 miles at 150 miles per hour. They had in mind a replacement for the DC-3/C-47 type aircraft and, from most companies, that’s what they got. Fairey offered them a militarized version of the Rotodyne Z that could carry a fully-equipped platoon of infantry for radius of 350 miles at 250 miles per hour. The RAF took one look and bit as did the Royal Navy, seeing application for the aircraft for the Royal Marines. However, hopes of a quick (and large) sale started to fade as meetings dragged on without coming to a conclusion.

In September 1957, things came to an unexpected and catastrophic head. Fairey Aviation were doing a sales pitch to Swissair when they were informed that a French company, Sud Aviation, were offering a Rotodyne also, identical to the Fairey design but at roughly 70 percent of the cost. This was obviously a very major blow. That could well kill any hopes of selling Fairey Rotodynes in Europe. Sud Aviation had made a bad mistake though; the Fairey bid was being underwritten by a Swiss bank and, in Switzerland, damaging the interests of a Swiss bank isn’t tantamount to treason, it is treason. One of Switzerland’s unofficial but very real government investigation groups took an interest and staged a late night raid on the Geneva offices of Sud Aviation, seizing all the documents and blueprints for their bid. Amongst those documents were plans of the Sud Aviation Rotodyne - and they were Fairey documents, the measurements even being in Imperial units rather than Metric. When Fairey were shown the documents they did a double take - they were of the military version of the Rotodyne Z, not the civilian version. And those documents were supposed to be highly classified and restricted to the British Ministry of Aviation.

It did not take long for the Swiss Police to unravel the affair. They intercepted a senior civil servant from the Ministry of Aviation, a rather sad and bedraggled figure called Kim Philby, in the act of delivering classified Fairey Rotodyne documents to Sud Aviation. On vigorous interrogation, he broke down and implicated a group of other civil servants in the Ministry of Aviation including Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Donald Maclean as being part of a large-scale commercial espionage ring working out of the Ministry of Aviation. It subsequently turned out the group had been involved in various forms of spying for many years, initially working for the Soviet Union before being abandoned when the USSR reverted to being Russia.

For all its UK location, Fairey was a highly Americanized corporation and there was a saying. “When in trouble, American citizens look to their guns, American Governments to their bombers and American companies to their lawyers”. Fairey promptly sued Sud Aviation and the Ministry of Aviation for damages. The British case was placed in British courts but, rightly perceiving taking an action in French courts would be futile, Fairey took Sud Aviation to the International Court. Sud Aviation was a state-owned company and that meant the French Government was being hauled before the courts. The case was complex but went quickly; both sets of court found in Fairey’s favor and awarded damages that were eye-watering even for a sovereign state.

Again, it is necessary to look at the events with the eyes of the times to understand why the French and British Governments were seized with what seemed to be a death-wish. Today we take the virtues of free enterprise and commercial competition so much for granted that we find it hard to believe anybody else could see things differently. In the mid-1950s, though, they did. A strong body of economic opinion still favored the idea of a single centralized company in each sector that would ‘avoid wasteful duplication’ and ‘put people before profits’. There was still a strong body of opinion that such single companies were best state-run and nowhere was that belief stronger than in the British and French civil services. Both governments simply refused to pay the court awards to Fairey and there were even noises made about nationalizing the group.

With some discrete prodding from Kaman, that woke the Americans up. Fairey were suppliers of a number of sub-systems to American bomber programs and the threat to the company suddenly became a matter of interest to the United States. The American Eagle woke, directed a sleepy eye on Europe and started irritatedly tapping its perch with a razor-sharp talon. In the UK, the Rotodyne was a matter of pride and the Government’s action was universally reviled. In France, the opposition saw its chance and tabled a motion of no confidence. The British opposition did the same. What had started as a dirty, sordid bit of industrial espionage had suddenly grown into an international crisis. The spiral down continued when the French Government lost the motion and collapsed. The British government survived - by one vote despite having a theoretical majority of 56. Even that humiliating victory was only achieved by the Government promising a full, independent judicial inquiry into the conduct and actions of the Ministry of Aviation.

As 1957 ground into 1958, the situation got worse. The French, ever pragmatic, were the first to cave. They were completely isolated in Europe; at the negotiations intended to establish the North European Free Trade Zone, the other delegates rose and walked out when the French delegation entered the room. The new French Government approached the British Government with an urgent request for a summit meeting to resolve the problem. Only, the Judicial Inquiry had revealed there was a lot more going on than had been realized.

The Ministry of Aviation civil service had decided there was only room for one aviation company in the UK. There were two, the privately-owned Fairey Aviation and the state-owned British Aircraft Corporation. One had to go, and in the spirit of the time and place, that one, they had decided, was to be Fairey. It turned out that the stories leaked about Rotodyne shortcomings, the delays in placing orders and the leakage of confidential documents were all aimed at forcing Fairey to merge with BAC. Philby and his rather pathetic crew hadn’t been acting on their own; they’d been implementing the Civil Service’s privately-decided policy.

The implications ran far and deep. BEA were shown to have cooperated in the scheme, attempting to cripple the Rotodyne project by demanding unrealistic and uneconomic design changes. BAC were, of course, deeply involved and in their case the scandal reached more serious proportions. It was shown that they had systematically understated the design costs of the new generation of aircraft; the individual design groups were presenting data honestly enough but at the senior civil service level these figures were being buried and replaced by much more optimistic ones. The reality was that the combination of BAC-730 and TSR-2 aircraft development costs were far beyond British means. In addition, they would not be available for years after the scheduled dates.

In the end, the BAC-730 was beyond saving; the project was canceled and the uncompleted prototype broken up. This, of course, meant that the ballistic missile development teams at Vickers Dynamics were now the only source for a British strategic force. For want of any alternative, Bomber Command would become a strategic missile force. The fate of TSR-2 hung in the balance and was eventually decided by the intervention of the Triple Alliance who bought the program, the companies, factories and everything else and shipped it to Australia. This was the formation of Alliance Aviation. The TSR-2 survived, the first aircraft entering service with the Royal Thai Air Force in 1968 and with the Australian and Indian Air Forces a year later. The type never saw service with the country for which it was originally designed. The amount received for the program just about paid the damages to Fairey Aviation.


These two designs out of the way, the British Aircraft Corporation was wound up. The British government decided that supporting both civil and military aviation industries was beyond its resources and one had to go. Events had meant that it was the military aviation industry that was terminated and from now on British resources and investment would be concentrated in the civil sector, headed by privately-owned Fairey Aviation. This was undoubtedly a wise and far-sighted decision, one that lead directly to the 600 mph, 200 seat Rotodynes familiar to us today. In fact, military aviation didn’t die completely. The Rotodyne proved an amazingly versatile shipboard aircraft. Troop-carrying, ASW and radar picket versions have all been developed and are in widespread service.

Despite their opposition, the French Government also settled their debts with Fairey. In their case they transferred the assets of Sud Aviation to Fairey in full payment of the outstanding award. This effectively represented the French dropping out of the civilian aircraft industry to concentrate on military aviation. In the final analysis, the rationalization of the European aircraft industry was a sound one; instead of two weak industries each trying to do everything, the British concentrated on civilian aircraft and the French on military.

This left a few issues flying in the breeze. One was Blackburn Aircraft and the Buccaneer. This was too important (and too successful) a program to be abandoned. In the end, Blackburn was sold to the French Dassault Group, the payment being in the form of Super-Mystere B2 fighters for the Royal Air Force. The French had their own carrier strike aircraft under development, the Etendard, and this was re-ordered as a shipboard fighter. Thus, the Royal Navy had its air groups of Tigers and Buccaneers and the French Navy of Etendards and Buccaneers. All in all, not a bad solution and one that was to provide some interesting aircraft designs in future years.

And so the great scandal of 1957/58 reached its conclusion. In retrospect, the solutions arrived at were workable and effective. The decision to cancel the BAC-730 was sad but correct; with much greater resources, the Americans were unable to get the B-70 Valkyrie into service before 1970 and it is unlikely the British could have done better. The TSR-2 has served its new owners much more effectively than it would have done in Northern Europe.

Only the decision by the British to concentrate on ballistic missiles for their strategic force proved to be wrong. They were fine missiles, probably the best on the world at their time. The problem was that the decision was based on the presumption that missiles could not be shot down and that presumption was horribly wrong. NORAD quickly proved that shooting down missiles was much easier than shooting down bombers; Britain’s strategic missile deterrent was obsolete before it ever saw service.

Not that it mattered; in 1959, the world changed. (To be continued).
[calder] Or not [/calder]

Interesting tale