by Chris Oakley

Part 13

Summary: In the first twelve 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; the critical role of airpower in the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution; the birth of the jet engine; and Nazi Germany’s quest to place the first artificial satellite in earth orbit. In this installment we’ll review how the world reacted to the launch of Reisende Eins¹ and explore the various ways that the jet shaped air combat doctrine at the start of World War II.

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For Adolf Hitler, the launch of der Reisende was one of the most exciting moments of his life; as the A-6 rocket carrying the experimental satellite climbed ever higher into the Baltic sky, he experienced the kind of primal thrill he hadn’t felt since the days of the Nazi Party’s street battles with its political foes in the 1920s. Germany was about to achieve the greatest aviation feat of the 20^th century, a feat that would help gain the Reich what he saw as its rightful place among the great powers of the world.

At 11:40 AM Reisende Eins’ launch vehicle left the upper atmophsere; minutes later, the Peenemunde launch center’s radio communications staff heard the telltale beep-beep-beep of the satellite’s onboard transmitter over their speakers-- a faint but distinct signal that gave von Braun’s team the final confirmation their brainchild had successfully reached earth orbit.

That afternoon Joseph Goebbels broke the news of Reisende Eins’ successful placement into earth orbit to the German people with the joyful boast "Der Führer habt uns die Sternen gibt!(The Führer has given us the heavens!)" When Hitler returned from the Peenemunde launch center to make his official report to the Reichstag about the Reisende experimental flight, the deputies interrupted him at least a dozen times with applause and shouts of "Sieg Heil!". Wernher von Braun took considerable pride in what he and his team had done, and well he might-- the satellite stayed in orbit even longer than originally expected, circling the earth for 41 hours and 12 minutes before it finally crumbled in the upper atmosphere somewhere over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

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Foreign reaction to the flight of Reisende Eins fell along predictable geopolitical lines. Germany’s allies echoed Joseph Goebbels’ enthusiastic praise of the Case Valkyrie team and their historic feat; Italy’s Benito Mussolini in particular gushed that von Braun would be remembered as "the new Christopher Columbus." In Japan, which already had strong trade and diplomatic ties with Germany and within a few years would also form a military pact with her, the state-controlled press quoted at length from Joseph Goebbels’ official announcement of the launch.

Neutral countries like Sweden were more cautious in their public statements on the Reisende mission, trying to praise the technical achievement of the mission without appearing to too overtly endorse the totalitarian ideology that had spurred it. At the Vatican Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical urging the nations of the world to reserve outer space for strictly peaceful uses; the League of Nations, almost moribund by now and less than a decade away from its final dissolution, endlessly debated one proposal after another for a space co-operation treaty but never took action on any of these proposals.

Opponents of the Nazis greeted Reisende Eins with outright alarm. Informed scientific opinion in many countries held that the same rocket technology which made it possible to launch artificial satellites into earth orbit could just as easily be applied to lob high-explosive bombs or poison gas canisters at unsuspecting military and civilian targets; for that matter, once satellites reached a certain level of sophistication they could be used by one country to spy on another country’s troop movements or radio communications.

Winston Churchill, who at the time of Reisende’s launch was serving with a British Parliament advisory committee on rocket science issues, understood the threat better than most. Two weeks after the German satellite was sent into earth orbit he drafted a confidential memo to then-prime minister Neville Chamberlain in which he urged Chamberlain to make it a priority to develop means of protecting British civilians against enemy rocket attacks and early warning systems for alerting the British military to such attacks; he also bluntly said that Great Britain should redouble its efforts to attain its own satellite and rocket capability. He closed his memo with the warning that if nothing were done to address the German rocket threat, British cities would one day be blasted to rubble by rocket strikes in the first hours of what the ex-Lord of the Admiralty increasingly saw as an inevitable war between Britain and Germany in the near future.

If Chamberlain needed incentive to follow Churchill’s advice, he got it precisely a month after the launch of Reisende Eins: on November 4^th, 1937 von Braun’s team at Peenemunde sent the world’s first living space traveler, a Berlin Zoo-raised chimpanzee named Klaus,² into orbit on board Reisende Zwei³. Realizing that Britain was falling dangerously behind Germany in rocket technology, the prime minister went before Parliament the next day to seek a 50 percent budget increase for Britain’s rocket development program.

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By the time Reisende Zwei was launched, Howard Hughes had made enough profit from his aircraft company to be able to move out of the rented hangar in Burbank and set up his own hangar facilities. He’d also started indulging one of his other great life’s passions, moviemaking; though just five years old at the time of the Reisende Zwei mission, his Republic Pictures studio was positioning itself to be a major player in Hollywood, giving older studios like Fox and Paramount a run for their money at the box office.

In November of 1936, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt won re-election as President of the United States, Hughes commissioned Republic’s documentary section to make a short film touting the commercial benefits of satellite technology. Decades before XM or Sirius were even a gleam in anyone’s eye, Hughes coined the term "satellite radio" as a summary of his vision for how satellites could extend radio’s reach into American homes; it was a subject dear to his heart, especially given that Hughes Aircraft had what was then considered America’s preeminent corporate research and development program in the field of rocket science.

Hughes’ documentary also touched at length on the scientific gains to be had from a serious investment by the White House in satellite and rocket technology; unfortunately no negatives or prints of the film survive today, but it’s probably safe to say it made quite an impression on FDR, because one of the first official acts of his second term was to sign, in early February of 1937, an executive order establishing a new federal bureau called the National Aerospace Sciences Agency(NASA) specifically chartered to promote the development of satellites, rockets, and manned spacecraft.

The American rocket development program prior to World War II was unique in many aspects. For starters, unlike in Europe, where the majority of rocket science research was mainly or even entirely directed by government, most American R&D efforts in this field were under the control of private industry, at least until 1938. Furthermore, US government efforts in rocket science were much less centralized than those in European countries; for example, unlike Germany, where just about everything in rocketry from drawing blueprints to producing films about rocket science was concentrated at Peenemunde, American rocket science activity was spread out over a variety of locations. Engine tests, for  instance, took place near the town of White Sands, New Mexico; the primary US government launch complex, on the other hand, was situated thousands of miles away at the edge of the Florida swamp in a spot known as Cape Canaveral.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, a team of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians under the direction of pioneer American rocket scientist Robert Goddard worked day and night on finding a means of sending living beings into space and safely returning them to earth. Despite the Nazis’ best efforts to keep a lid on it, news of Klaus the chimp’s death during the Reisende Zwei mission had leaked to the outside world, and Goddard’s team wanted be sure any living thing traveling in an American spacecraft didn’t meet the same grim fate.⁴

For all the ways the American rocket science program differed from its European counterparts, it had a lot of similarities with them too. One of these was the aspiration to someday put a man in space; accordingly, in early January of 1938 FDR’s vice-president John Nance Garner surveyed at least two dozen locations in the southern United States with an eye toward designating one of them as the future site for a special academy specifically intended to train a new breed of pilots-- "astronauts", to use a term Garner himself coined by combining the Greek words astro(star) and naut (sailor).

One of the places Garner surveyed was located near Houston and owned by his fellow Texan, Howard Hughes. It was here that NASA, after negotiating a deal with Hughes to buy the property in February of 1938, ultimately chose to establish what later became known as the Garner Space Training Institute. The groundbreaking ceremonies were held in April of 1938; the Institute would open its doors eleven months later. The NASA-Hughes land deal was of benefit to all parties involved; NASA got a facility located in a warm climate where men could be trained for spaceflight year- round, Hughes further increased his already considerable fortune, and the state of Texas got a much-needed infusion of new jobs. As a bonus, Vice-President Garner earned major political points back home for his role in making the deal possible.

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Shortly before Hughes closed his land sale deal with NASA, Great Britain finally succeeded in placing its own artificial satellite in orbit around the earth after a string of spectacular failures. The satellite, designated Vanguard⁵, was launched into space on January 30^th, 1938 from the RAF’s Woomera launch complex in Australia. For Chamberlain Vanguard’s success came just in the nick of time: a small but highly vocal group of Parliament backbenchers opposed to Britain’s rocket and satellite research program had started calling for it to be scrapped. Even some of the program’s advocates, like Chamberlain’s air minister Kingsley Wood, had privately admitted to the prime minister they feared it might not survive another major malfunction.

But Vanguard’s triumph quieted many of the critics and gave Chamberlain renewed hope for the rocket and satellite program’s continued progress; the program got another welcome boost in early April when Vanguard 2 carried a beagle named Frankie⁶ into orbit and back to earth again-- the first time in history that a living passenger had safely returned home from a  space flight. After his brief sojourn in the heavens Frankie became an international celebrity, gracing hundreds of magazine covers and having reams of newspaper pages devoted to his flight into space. When he visited the United States on a goodwill tour in the summer of 1938, tickets for the tour’s debut in New York City sold out less than 36 hours after the tour was announced.

Around the same time that Frankie was making the rounds in America, two new makes of combat fighter jet were competing for the privilege of serving as Germany’s main front-line fighter aircraft. One was the Heinkel He-205, a twin-engined plane with a conventional wing design; the other was the Messerschmitt Bf-257, a single-engined craft which was the first example of an innovative wing configuration named the "delta wing"(so-called because its sharp angular lines resembled the letter delta in the ancient Greek alphabet). Both planes were highly manuverable, and both possessed lethal firepower: the He-205 had two 30 mm wing cannons and a 20 mm nose-mounted gun⁷, and the Bf-257 boasted four 25 mm cannons in its forward fuselage. Both had substantial maximum flight ranges-- in fact, Willi Messerschmitt made global headlines in late July of 1938 when he flew a Bf-257 prototype from Berlin to Geneva nonstop, then the longest such flight made by a single-seat plane.

Two factors ultimately tipped the scales in the Bf-257’s favor when Hitler and Goering made their choice of first-line fighter jet. One of these was speed: the 257 was at least twenty miles per hour faster than the He-205, helping the Messerschmitt plane to consistently outperform its Heinkel counterpart in a series of simulated dogfights in August and September of 1938. The second factor was a change in the German aviation industry hierarchy that had been quietly unfolding over the past decade; by the time the Bf-257 prototype made its maiden test flight, Willi Messerschmitt had eclipsed Ernst Heinkel in Hitler’s favor as a designer-- a fact Heinkel couldn’t ignore or tolerate. The triumph of the He-172 passenger plane had faded to a distant memory as many of the Heinkel design team’s subsequent projects turned out to be mediocrities and a few proved outright failures.

The Bf-257 entered into active service with the Luftwaffe’s first-line fighter wings in March of 1939, while the He-205 was relegated largely to second-line and reserve units. Less than six months later, both fighters would be in the thick of the action when the Second World War broke out.

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The relationship between war and technology is an almost symbiotic one: each changes the other with the passage of time. This was certainly true where the jet aircraft was concerned: as the world’s major powers were designing, testing, and building a new generation of combat jet planes, air warfare doctrine was changing to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of these planes. One example was a strategy the Germans called blitzkrieg, or "lightning war", which advocated the use of tactical jet raids in close coordination with swift mass armor and infantry attacks to penetrate and then crush an enemy’s defenses. This principle, first broached by British general Percy Hobart in the early 1930s and later expounded on by Wehrmacht colonel Heinz Guiderian and Luftwaffe fighter combat specialist Adolf Galland in their 1935 book Achtung Flugzeug!, would forever alter the course of history  when it was put into practical use in the September 1939 invasion of Poland.

The Polish air force was severely outmatched when the German assault came. Its flyers, inadequately trained and in many cases flying obsolescent planes, were easy pickings for the Luftwaffe’s highly skilled fighter pilots and their advanced combat aircraft. And that was when the Poles were able to get their machines up in the air-- more often Polish planes fell victim to Luftwaffe bombs while they were still on the ground. By the time Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3^rd, just two days after the German invasion of Poland began, the Polish air force had for all practical purposes ceased to exist; from that day on, the Luftwaffe’s bombers hit Polish cities and military bases at will, scorching them off the face of the earth before the Polish campaign was over.

The fiercest blows were saved for the Polish capital Warsaw, which from the Anglo-French declaration of war on September 3^rd until the Polish government’s final surrender on September 21^st was the target of hourly bombing raids by the massive Junkers Ju-100s and Heinkel He-213s that made up the backbone of the German bomber force in those days⁸. While the twin-engined Ju-100 and the four-engined He-213 attacked strategic targets in Warsaw, like the city’s main power plant and telephone exchange, the Ju-100’s little cousin-- the Ju-97 Stuka⁹ --went after important tactical targets like the command post for the Polish capital’s anti-aircraft batteries.

This punishing combination of high-altitude raids by the multi-engine jets and low-level strikes by the single-engined Stukas reduced Warsaw to rubble and gave air force general staffs throughout continental Europe cause for fear. They knew that what the Luftwaffe had done to Poland could be repeated in their own countries if Hitler put his mind to it; Goering knew it too, and in a speech to the Reichstag two weeks after the Polish campaign ended he bragged no enemy bomb would ever hit German soil. If one did, he said, "you can call me Meier."¹⁰

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Shortly after Reichsmarschall Goering’s infamous boast, the world got a reminder of what British airpower could do when Royal Navy carrier jets stalked, pursued, and eventually crippled the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. This operation was one of the great masterpieces of co-ordination and timing in naval history: catching Spee and separating her from her supporting task force at exactly the moment when her crew thought she was safe, the RN carrier flotilla assigned to destroy the German battlewagon then hounded Spee the full length of the Atlantic, pausing just long enough to let RN fuel tenders re-supply the carriers before they cornered Graf Spee just a few nautical miles short of Uruguayan territorial waters.

In the air strikes that followed, British carrier jets fired repeated volleys of bombs, rockets, and torpedoes at the doomed German warship. These attacks so thoroughly damaged Spee that her captain, Hans Langsdorff, was forced to order his vessel scuttled and his crew to abandon ship; he then committed suicide with his sidearm pistol. Upon their return to Britain the men of the Royal Navy carrier group were issued a host of commendations by Winston Churchill, who at the start of the war had returned to his former post as Lord of the Admiralty.

If all British air combat operations in the early days of the Second World War had been so well-executed, the Nazi empire might well have collapsed by 1941. But it was not to be-- the glorious triumph of the carrier strikes on Graf Spee would be followed in April of 1940 by the hideous fiasco that was the RAF campaign in Scandanavia. A combination of adverse weather, infighting between the British and French high commands, and the swift collapse of Danish and Norwegian resistance to the Nazis minimized the RAF’s effectiveness in the Allied fight for Scandanavia. In fact, in one tragic instance a Royal Navy torpedo boat was a victim of a "friendly fire" accident during the battle for Narvik when an RAF rocket strike aimed at sinking a German frigate went astray and blew up the torpedo boat instead.

But the Luftwaffe’s jets weren’t entirely immune to the vagaries of the Scandanavian climate either. One out of every six German aircraft lost during the occupation of Norway and Denmark were victims of weather-related accidents. One particularly well- known example of such a mishap occurred on May 2^nd, 1940 when a Bf-257 collided with a Ju-116 transport plane¹¹ in heavy fog off the Norwegian coast; the crash killed eleven people, among them a Reichskommissar named Josef Terboven who was en route to Oslo to take up leadership of the civil administration for the German occupation authorities in Norway.¹²

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Eight days after the collision tragedy gave way to triumph for the Nazi war machine as Luftwaffe jets attacked France and the Low Countries in the first phase of the German invasion of western Europe. Like their infantry and armor counterparts in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe’s fighter and bomber jets smashed Dutch, Belgian, and Luxembourger defensive positions with ease and made solid inroads against the French. Transport planes carried hordes of parachute troops deep into enemy territory and inaugurated a new era in warfare.

One of the first casualties of the German assault was Neville Chamberlain’s political career. Less than two hours after the first wave of Luftwaffe jet strikes on French soil, the House of Commons issued an overwhelming vote of no confidence against him and he had to resign as British prime minister; his last official act was to see King George VI at Buckingham Palace and recommend his Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, as his successor. In his famous "blood, sweat, and tears" speech Churchill dashed any hopes Hitler might have had for British capitulation; instead he made it plain that while he was at 10 Downing Street Britain would fight the Germans tooth and nail. Nowhere would that fight be more intense than in Britain’s skies.

Within two weeks after Churchill took office the French army and government were both on the verge of collapse. He promised to send French president Paul Reynaud new squadrons of fighter jets to shore up the French air force’s crumbling defenses; however, Churchill’s top fighter commander, RAF Air Vice Marshal Hugh T. ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, refused to honor that request on the grounds that every fighter sent over to France would mean one less at the RAF’s disposal to defend Britain’s cities against German bomber attack. Though Dowding’s actions caused some friction between the French and British governments as the war progressed, his choice to withhold the fighters would ultimately prove the correct one: even as Hitler was making what he called "appeals to reason" in the vain hope of persuading Churchill to change his mind, he had secretly given Hermann Goering his blessing to prepare a bombing offensive against strategic targets in southern England.

The French government capitulated to Hitler on June 13^th, 1940; three weeks later the Luftwaffe began transferring some of its bomber squadrons to French airbases. Within a month after those transfers started, German reconnaissance jets were scouting military and industrial targets in southern England and Wales. As these recon flights were taking place, the Wehrmacht high command was drafting plans for an amphibious invasion of Great Britain; if the British still refused to make peace with Germany after the coming bomber raids, the amphibious assault, code-named Operation Sealion, was tentatively scheduled to take place in late August or early September.

RAF reconnaissance jets were also busy around this time, photographing the staging areas where the barges and troops for the invasion were being assembled. These photos were then passed on to RAF Bomber Command to be used in preparing air strikes on the German landing forces; simultaneously, the British Army artillery corps placed its rocket launchers in southern England on full alert in anticipation of orders from Churchill to fire on Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht bases along France’s Normandy coast.

But it would be the Germans who landed the first punch in what history now remembers as the Battle of Britain. On August 10^th, 1940 the RAF bases at Dover and Hawkinge were struck without warning by multiple waves of Luftwaffe jet bombers and heavily damaged; no sooner had the British started picking up the pieces from those attacks than similar waves of bombers, in some cases preceded by rocket strikes out of Normandy, hit the RAF airfields at Manston, Kenley, Middle Wallop, and Biggin Hill. To frustrate RAF radar operators and make it harder for British fighter pilots to intercept them, the German bomber jets flew at treetop height as fast as their engines could push them; this, combined with the RAF high command’s own uncertainty about where the bombers would hit, seriously curtailed the amount of time RAF air defense units had to respond to the German jets’ approach.

The Luftwaffe wouldn’t enjoy quite such easy pickings in southern England again; as the Battle of Britain wore on, radar technology and RAF pilot reaction times both steadily improved, and with this improvement came a corresponding rise in German casualties. And as another ex-corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte, had learned to his dismay at Waterloo, Hitler soon found out that the British could give as good as they got-- the day after the first German air and rocket strikes on Britain, Churchill gave his own air and rocket forces the green light to start hitting Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe outposts in German-occupied northern France.

During the Battle of Britain the Bf-257 finally encountered an adversary capable of meeting it on equal terms-- the Supermarine Spitfire, a swept-wing bullet of a plane that could match the 257 turn for turn and had firepower every ounce as lethal as that of its German counterpart. Luftwaffe pilots soon learned to respect, and dread, the Spit; Stuka crews feared the Spitfire most of all, since the Ju-97 was somewhat bulky and thus easy pickings for any RAF pilot who could get on its tail long enough to open fire on it. While the Spits took care of the Stukas and 257s, the twin- engined Hawker Hurricane feasted on Goering’s bomber jets like a lion devouring an antelope; the Hurricane, though slower than the Spitfire, had the range and endurance necessary to chase down and destroy the bombers.

In desperation Goering ordered his jets to switch from raiding airfields to attacking civilian population centers, hoping this would break the will of the British people. In practice, however, that tactic only succeeded in reinforcing Britain’s determination to fight on and giving RAF bases more of a chance to recover from the blows inflicted on them by German air and rocket strikes; it also meant the Luftwaffe’s already massive casualties would climb that much higher as RAF fighter squadrons pounced on the bombers and their escorts en route to the cities those bombers were sent to attack.

In mid-September, Hitler formally ordered Operation Sealion to be postponed until the spring of 1941. But though neither he nor the British knew it at the time, the RAF had already shut and locked the window of opportunity for the Germans to invade Great Britain. The men of the RAF’s fighter jet units would receive a host of tributes to their valor, but perhaps none was so fitting as this simple yet eloquent line from Winston Churchill: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."¹³

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In November of 1940, the Royal Navy’s carrier aviation branch pulled off a spectacular coup against the Italian navy, sinking three Italian battleships and crippling or otherwise damaging a dozen other vessels with a surprise air strike on the naval base at Taranto. What made this accomplishment all the more remarkable was that the strike had been arranged on rather short notice; the British hadn’t even confirmed the three battleships were actually in Taranto’s harbor until four days before the RN air strike took place.

The Taranto air strike made headlines around the world; the military attaché at the Japanese embassy in Rome sent a detailed cable report on the strike to Imperial Navy Ministry headquarters in Tokyo, correctly believing that the lessons of the British jet raid would be of great interest to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s own jet aviation corps.

To Be Continued....