by Chris Oakley

Part 12

Summary: In the first eleven chapters of this series we chronicled British inventor William Samuel Henson’s development of the world’s first practical airplane; the establishment of his partnership with Cornelius Vanderbilt; the introduction of airplanes to modern Warfare; the role played by air power in the Union’s victory in the American Civil War; the postwar breakup of the Vanderbilt-Henson Alliance; the birth of commercial flight in America; how the Civil War affected military aviation technology and doctrine in the late 1860s and early 1870s; the birth of the famous Merlin engine; Henson’s experiments with trans-Atlantic flight in the final days of his life; the first successful trans-oceanic crossings by air; the wave of bankruptcies that overwhelmed the aviation industry near the end of the 19^th century; the Wright brothers’ creation of the first practical all-metal monoplane; and the critical role of airpower in the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution. In this segment we’ll examine the Gotha Elefant bombing raids on England in the final days of World War I and chart the first steps in the evolution of the jet engine.

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The Elefant’s baptism of fire came on March 15^th, 1918 when twelve of the new planes attacked the English Channel port of Dover; five of the bombers were downed by RAF fighters while a sixth had to ditch in the Channel due to engine trouble, but the attack succeeded in shaking the British government deeply and spurring the RAF general staff to temporarily recall some of its fighters from the Western Front to shore up air defenses over British cities. The Luftstreitkräfte could have exploited the resulting gaps in Allied air cover along the Western Front if it had moved swiftly enough, but shortly after the British fighters were recalled these gaps were filled by squadrons from the US Aerial Corps and French Armee de’l’Air deployed to man the patrol routes previously handled by the RAF.

It was around this time that EACC’s JN-4 "Jenny" fighter made its operational debut; the Jenny, EACC’s first all-metal combat aircraft, was the brainchild of Glenn H. Curtiss, who at the time was the company’s leading military aviation engineer and in the postwar years would be a major player in the aircraft industry in his own right. Although the First World War ended before the Jenny’s potential could be fully exploited, it did manage to leave its mark on the annals of military aviation as a lethal foe of the Gotha Elefant-- one out of every three Elefants lost to Allied fire between the time of the plane’s introduction in March 1918 and the end of the war eight months later were shot down by Jenny squadrons posted in northern France. Richtofen’s wingman Hermann Goering, who two decades later would serve as C-in-C for the Nazi-era German air force, the Luftwaffe, is alleged to have quipped that any Elefant crewmen who had the misfortune to see a JN-4 coming near their plane should consider themselves dead the second they laid eyes on it.

When World War I ended in November of 1918, Germany had to dismantle her surviving Elefants as part of the peace terms the Allies imposed on the German government. However, many of the men from the original Elefant design team found new work in civilian life creating commercial airliners for the official German state air passenger service Lufthansa; after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he tapped these men to secretly draft blueprints for a new generation of bombers for his air force.

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In the 1920s the commercial aviation industry experienced a boom fueled by tourists’ desire to resume the kind of pleasure travel that had been interrupted by the First World War. New air passenger transport companies were born and existing firms began expanding to handle the increasing flow of passenger air traffic from city to city and nation to nation. Simultaneously, aircraft manufacturers augmented their production capacity so they could turn out greater numbers of passenger planes to meet the needs of the world’s airlines during this period.

As usual, EACC-- soon to be renamed North American Aviation Incorporated --was in the thick of things. In 1921 alone the now 68-year-old company opened two new factories in California and upgraded its Dayton manufacturing plant to produce an additional 20,000 commerical aircraft per year to fill orders from cargo and passenger air services in the United States and Canada. Nor were EACC’s competitors idle either: that same year found the Wright Brothers breaking ground on a commercial aircraft manufacturing facility in Texas and the venerable Canadian-based Deschamps & Sons opening its first US aircraft plant in Pennsylvania just a few miles from where Allegheny Flying Machines’ main factory had once stood.

In short order private planes gained new cachet as a "must have" item for the rich and famous; newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, actress Clara Bow, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, baseball slugging legend Babe Ruth, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, and author F. Scott Fitzgerald were just some of the celebrities who embraced aircraft not only as a means of getting around but also as a status symbol. Ernest Hemingway, whose classic novel The Sun Also Rises had been inspired by his experiences with a US Aerial Corps medical detachment during the First World War, was one of the keenest amateur flying buffs of his day and a regular at air races in North America and Europe.

While air travel had been used as a political tool for years in many parts of the world, it was during the 1920s that the practice truly became a science. In the 1920 US presidential election Republican candidate Warren Harding and his Democratic challenger James Cox logged a combined total of 15,000 air miles campaigning across the country; four years later Calvin Coolidge and his opponent, John W. Davis, would rack up close to 22,000 air miles traveling to various campaign events. Canadian prime minister W.L. Mackenzie King made heavy use of air travel during his two terms in office as a means of promoting his ideas to his fellow countrymen. In his notorious "March on Rome" in 1922, Italy’s Benito Mussolini made dramatic headlines for his Fascist movement and for himself by personally leading the marchers into the city from the cockpit of his Fiat biplane. Australian prime minister Stanley M. Bruce became a folk legend in his homeland as a result of his jaunts from one campaign stop to the next in his ubiquitous Kookaburra¹ personal plane. Joseph Stalin, after succeeding the late Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union, commissioned massive civil aviation projects as a way to enhance Soviet prestige abroad and strengthen the Soviet industrial base at home.

The enactment of Prohibition in the US in 1920 saw the airplane’s role in the war on crime expand as both sides employed it to achieve their ends: bootleggers like Dutch Schultz and Al Capone smuggled illegal liquor in specially modified transport planes while law enforcement authorities used scout aircraft to look for evidence of such smuggling and deliver agents to arrest the smugglers. Treasury Department special agent Eliott Ness, whose exploits would one day inspire a hit TV series along with a blockbuster movie, was a master of the use of air power as a tool for fighting crime; his team, known as "the Untouchables" because gangsters could never seem to catch its planes no matter how hard they tried, made life miserable for gang bosses everywhere.

Airplanes even made a new splash as a form of entertainment. Since the 1890s so-called "flying circuses", teams of pilots specially trained to execute risky but spectacular aerial stunt maneuvers, had been an integral part of fairs and carnivals all over the world, but this art had fallen into decline as many of its practitioners were drafted to serve on the front lines in the First World War; however, once the war ended, the flying circus began to enjoy a revival as some of the old such circuses were reunited and new ones established. Perhaps the most famous such example of the revitalization of the flying circus came in 1925, when a group of black ex-US Aerial Corps World War I vets looking to raise funds to help a comrade who’d fallen on hard times met at an old cow pasture near Tuskeegee, Alabama to start their own aerial demonstration squad. Officially founded as the American Colored Airmen’s Exhibition Flying Club, the new team would be better known by the nickname "the Tuskeegee Airmen"² and spend the next three decades dazzing crowds throughout the US air show circuit.

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Next to the commercial air travel boom, the most important aviation phenomenon of the 1920s was the introduction of jet  propulsion as a method for powering aircraft. There were quite literally hundreds if not thousands of people who contributed to  this milestone, but three men would play an especially critical role in the process: RAF cadet Frank Whittle in Great Britain, engineer and aircraft company CEO Ernst Heinkel in Germany, and wealthy flying aficianado Howard Hughes in the United States.

Whittle got the ball rolling in 1921 when he patented a jet turbine engine design based on the theories of fellow Englishman and aviation research scientist A.A. Griffith. Six years earlier Griffith had published an article in a leading British aviation magazine outlining his ideas in regard to gas turbine propulsion systems; Whittle had happened to read the article one day on a train ride to London and been inspired to start sketching a rough draft of a blueprint for a turbojet modeled on Griffith’s engine concepts. The finished product caught the attention of executives at the Gloster Aviation Company, and shortly after receiving his patent Whittle was recruited as a test pilot by Gloster to help them in their efforts to develop a working jet plane.

Around this same time Heinkel, who’d started his own aircraft company after leaving the defunct firm Caspar-Werke in the wake of a feud over ownership of one of Caspar-Werke’s plane designs, commissioned his research and development team to begin a study on the potential of turbine engines as a means of propulsion for aircraft. Heinkel’s firm is today best-known as a manufacturer of warplanes, but at the time he commissioned the study he was much more interested in the possibilities of jet propulsion as a means of powering commercial aircraft; after reading a German-language translation of Griffith’s article, Heinkel had become a believer in the promise of the jet turbine engine as a tool for enhancing the speed of commercial planes and thus allowing both passengers and cargo to be carried to their destinations faster than was possible with the conventional propeller-engined transport planes of that era.

By 1924 the world’s first jet combat aircraft, the Gloster Goshawk, was entering into service with the RAF and the first commercial jet plane, the Heinkel He-172, was at the prototype stage conducting short-range trial runs between Berlin and the Heinkel company’s main test field near Potsdam.

Hughes wouldn’t get into the aviation business until about 1925, but when he finally did he would tackle it the same way he approached all his other endeavors: with gusto and out-of-the-box thinking that would astonish his peers and rivals. Using part of the fortune he’d inherited from his father Howard Sr., he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in August of 1925 and quickly put its engineering staff to work developing their own turbine engine; a year earlier he’d read an abridged version of Griffith’s theories in Scientific American, and upon establishing Hughes Aircraft the Texas millionaire had pledged he would create the first American jet plane.

Hughes’ initial experiments in jet propulsion took place at a rented hangar complex in Burbank, California. His test platform for these experiments was a small monoplane that he built himself and dubbed the H-1 Racer; its design suggested a cross between the Gloster Goshawk and the old Wright Flyer, and indeed Hughes was substantially influenced by both planes during the creation of the Racer.

The H-1 took its maiden flight on May 18^th, 1926; using the turbine engine Hughes’ engineering team had created, the Racer soared above the California desert at an average speed of roughly 614 miles per hour, then an American aviation speed record.³ The results of this flight inspired Hughes to modify the H-1’s wings so that they had straighter edges. He believed this modification would boost the plane’s velocity by between 10 and 20 mph, and he was soon proven right-- on its next test run the Racer flew at about 631 mph, just eleven shy of the existing world air speed record.

Other than Hughes’ own fortune, the primary funding for the H-1 test program came from the profits Hughes Aircraft made selling commercial airplanes to passenger airlines and air cargo companies throughout North America and Europe. By virtue of his innovative approach to plane design and his dynamic personality, Hughes had in an amazingly short time made his company a full- fledged rival to North American and Deschamps in the commercial aviation industry; before long, it would also be competing with these older firms for supremacy in the North American police and military aerospace market.

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On July 13^th, 1927 residents of the English town of Croydon in Surrey were awakened by the sharp crackle of an unexplained boom through the morning sky. Some people thought it might be the start of a thunderstorm, while others feared it might be echoes of the detonation of an unexploded German bomb left over from the Elefant raids of the last days of the Great War. But the true source of the rumble, it turned out, was neither-- it was merely Frank Whittle making aviation history as the first human being to fly at the speed of sound.

Wearing a specially adapted flight suit and piloting a modified Gloster Goshawk appropriately dubbed "Meteor", Whittle was carried aloft by a specially equipped Handley-Page Cyclone; Gloster engineers had previously calculated that achieving the velocity required to break the sound barrier would be next to impossible using conventional takeoff methods. At a predetermined altitude the Meteor was released and Whittle fired up his plane’s engines. Within a matter of minutes he was soaring above the Surrey countryside at 700 miles per hour, the speed that Ernst Mach had calculated years earlier was the precise velocity at which sound travels through the air.

In a post-flight debriefing with Gloster engineers, Whittle reported that as he got closer to the speed of sound both he and his plane had been subjected to increasingly intense G forces; in fact, in the last few seconds before he reached the 700 mph mark he’d felt the sensation of being crushed against his seat as if a giant hand was packing him into a sardine tin, and he had nearly lost control of his plane to boot. His statements, coupled with a number of previous instances in which Goshawk pilots had gotten killed when high Gs made them lose control of their planes and crash, prompted the Air Ministry to mandate a thorough overhaul of the Goshawk’s tail section-- with special attention paid to the tailflaps --to enable both the plane and its pilots to better cope with the strain of flying at or above the speed of sound. All subsequent jet fighters would include similar modifications in their basic configuration, as would the first jet bombers and commercial supersonic planes.

Since Ernst Mach’s research had helped pave the way for Frank Whittle’s precedent-setting flight, the new system being adopted for measuring supersonic speed was named the Mach scale in honor of the Austrian physicist. According to this scale, the Meteor’s test run had clocked in at Mach 1; in September of 1927 a young mail transport pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh became the first American to achieve this velocity when he flew an experimental jet christened "The Spirit of St. Louis" at Mach 1 above a test field in Long Island, New York. And a place in aviation history wouldn’t be his only reward; a New York City hotel magnate gave him a prize check for $500,000 for having fulfilled the magnate’s challenge to be the first US citizen to break the sound barrier.

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Once the sound barrier had been overcome, it was just a matter of time before humanity started turning its eyes toward the stars. Not even the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 could deter those who truly wanted to make artificial satellites and manned space travel a reality-- indeed, in some circles the quest to achieve a practical spaceflight capability was seen as a possible means of economic salvation given the vast numbers of scientists, technicians, engineers, and laborers who would be put to work in this endeavor.

Just about all the world’s major industrial and political powers were pursuing the development of artificial satellites in the early 1930s, but few did so more enthusiastically or with more sinister intentions than Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Though at first Hitler had been skeptical about the value of satellites to his regime, he’d become a believer after a 1934 meeting with top German aerospace theorist and rocket designer Wernher von Braun. Von Braun made a highly convincing case to the Führer that the Reich’s prestige would be greatly enhanced if Germany were to succeed in placing the first man-made satellite in orbit around the earth; he also pointed out that if properly developed and engineered, artificial satellites could be used to extend the reach of radio signals-- a useful capability to have when it came to co-ordinating military operations or transmitting propaganda.

Impressed by von Braun’s analysis, Hitler placed him in charge of the Reich’s rocket and satellite development program in October of 1934 and gave him free reign to do whatever needed to be done in order to accomplish his goals. Since the satellite project, code-named Fall Walküre(Case Valkyrie), would involve multiple sections of the German government, a liaison committee was formed to keep the Reichschancellery abreast of von Braun’s progress; the committee was chaired by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and included labor minister Fritz Todt, Kriegsmarine C-in-C Admiral Erich Raeder,⁴ war minister Werner von Blomberg, and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Goering.

After inspecting several potential sites for a launch facility, von Braun’s committee chose a plot of land near the Baltic seaport of Peenemunde; construction on the facility began in December of 1934 and was completed nine months later. In order to discourage the overly curious from probing too deeply into what was going on, the SS posted armed guards around the launch site and warned residents of Peenemunde on penalty of death not to ask questions about Case Valkyrie.

Under von Braun’s supervision, the Case Valkyrie team started high-altitude launch experiments in March of 1936; as each test rocket reached successively greater heights von Braun and his people set to work in earnest on planning their first attempt to orbit an artificial satellite around the earth. The satellite, designated der Reisende("Traveller"), would carry a small radio transmitter on board and-- if all went well --circle the globe for 36 hours beaming down radio signals before burning up in the atmosphere.

Assembly of der Reisende was completed in late September of 1937; the experimental satellite was then mounted on top of an A- 6 rocket⁵. At 11:30 AM Berlin time on the morning of October 4^th, 1937 Hitler and his inner circle were escorted by SS detachments to the Peenemunde launch site. Years later, in his autobiography Inside The Third Reich, Hitler’s architect Albert Speer⁶ would distinctly recall two things about that day above all else-- one, the hot and musty atmosphere of the control room, and two, the growing tension felt by the men inside that room as von Braun’s engineers counted off the final seconds until launch: "Zehn.... neun... acht.... sieben... sechs... funf.... vier... drei.... zwei.... eins....zero!"

To Be Continued...