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Where does hunting fit in the modern world? To many, it can seem outdated or even cruel, but as On Hunting affirms, hunting is holistic, honest, and continually relevant. Authors Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Linda K. Miller, and Capt. Keith A. Cunningham dive deep into the ancient past of hunting and examine its position today, demonstrating that we cannot understand humanity without first understanding hunting.
Readers will…
• discover how hunting formed us,
• examine hunting ethics and their adaptation to modernity,
• understand the challenges, traditions, and reverence of today’s hunter,
• identify hunting skills and their many applications outside the field,
• learn why hunting is critical to ecological restoration and preservation, and
• gain inspiration to share hunting with others.
Drawing from ecology, philosophy, and anthropology and sprinkled with campfire stories, this wide-ranging examination has rich depths for both nonhunters and hunters alike.
On Hunting shows that we need hunting still—and so does the wild earth we inhabit.
“All true hunters ‘feel’ the truth, but few are able to ‘articulate’ that truth. Now, thankfully, we have On Hunting to be our champion of the wild!”
—JIM SHOCKEY, Naturalist, Outfitter, TV Producer and HostFEATURES
26 DESTINATION: SWEDEN
American aircrews who couldn’t make it back to England in World War II had a Scandinavian option.
34 THE DOLE DISASTER
Participants in a 1927 air race learned the hard way that Hawaii is a long way from California.
BY STEPHAN WILKINSON44 A SUNDAY WITH LILIENTHAL
One week before a pioneering aviator’s tragic death, an American watched him at work.
52 IGO ETRICH’S DOVES
These once-ubiquitous airplanes may have looked like birds, but they were based on a seed.
BY JON GUTTMAN SUMMER 2023 26 1860 COMPROMISED ARROW
What did the Soviets know about Canada’s new interceptor, and when did they know it?
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What a superb issue [Spring 2023]! It is really hard to pick a favorite article—but Stephan Wilkinson’s “Second Best” sure stands out to me with its fresh perspective on the Boeing 247. The depth of history in only 10 pages is terrific. It even has an ad for the ill-fated UAL 247 NC13304, blown out of the sky by a bomb over Chesterton, Indiana.
John D. Bybee, Vermont, IllinoisWe plan to include more about the mysterious bombing of the UAL Boeing 247. Stay tuned.
In his article about the Boeing 247, author Stephen Wilkinson is in error when he states, “By 1929, Boeing had acquired a number of aviation-industry companies” to form the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. In fact, William Boeing and Frederick Rentschler merged their companies to form the corporation. It was a merger of equals to create a vertically integrated aviation holding company. The companies it owned were those noted by Wilkinson. In 1934, the government stepped in and forced a breakup. Boeing kept everything west of the Mississippi and Rentschler kept everything east, forming United Aircraft, which later became United Technologies and now is called Raytheon Technologies, while United Airlines became an independent company.
Herb Reutter, Escondido, CaliforniaIt’s great to see E. Royce Williams getting the recognition he deserves for an amazing feat of airmanship [“The Secret Dogfight,” Winter 2023]. I’ve discussed this mission several times with Royce and according to Royce, there was weather down south, but the aerial combat in which he downed four MiGs was clear (contrary to the way this event is shown in most depictions). He did head south and dive into the clouds to avoid the MiG that accosted him from behind after the downings. I’ve included a picture of me with Royce at Tailhook 2021 (with a first preliminary sketch of art I was developing).
Hank Caruso, California, MarylandOn January 18, 2023, I awoke to a story about Royce Williams, the Navy pilot who shot down four MiG-15s on November 18, 1952, but could not talk about it because of the tensions of the Cold War. I wasn’t only happy to hear he would receive credit and the Navy Cross but felt I got the “inside scoop” by reading your article. Sometimes these articles and books help people receive credit for their accomplishments. I wonder how many other people out there still can’t talk about their stories because of security issues. I hope one day we will find out.
In December 2022, Royce Williams was approved for an upgrade from the Silver Star to the Navy Cross. He received it in a ceremony at the San Diego Air & Space Museum on January 20, 2023.
I just wanted to point out that in the great article “The Secret Dogfight,” the image caption on page 56 showing a Grumman Panther states it is taking off, but the location and height suggest that the image is either of a missed approach or a planned fly-by. During the Korean War F9Fs were usually catapulted off the forward end. The height above the deck of this Panther makes a take-off image rather unlikely.
Jerry O’Neill, Cheshire, ConnecticutI can identify well with 2nd Lt. Carter Harman’s “jumping off” a Sikorsky YR-4B in the Burmese jungle at high temps, as described by Steve Wartenberg in “Send the Eggbeater to Taro” [Spring 2023]. On April 12, 1957, I flew a similar rescue mission in an Army OH-23C Raven to rescue a hiker who had set out to walk a trail in Panama. An Army Ranger unit found him exhausted and severely dehydrated. A helicopter rescue was necessary. There was enough room at the pickup point to get both skids on the ground, but I kept the engine running because I didn’t want to risk a no-start. Everything went well until the hiker wanted to bring his pack along. The ship was already heavy, so I told him to leave the pack with the Rangers. He refused. I relented and let him stow his pack. The humidity and altitude were so bad, I could not bring the Raven to a hover.
Normal engine operating RPM was 3,200. I revved it to 3,400, jumped it off and dived down into the valley below, desperately trying to reach flying speed before ending up in the trees. Luckily, my airspeed built up enough to get into level flight without sharing the cockpit with tree branches. Slowly I began climbing out of the valley. Needless to say, the engine overspeed did not make it into the flight record that day.
John Ottley Jr., Alpharetta, GeorgiaAs of late March 2023, the Dakota Territory Air Museum, in Minot, North Dakota, is preparing for the first flight of its impeccably restored Republic P-47D-23 Thunderbolt. It is encouraging to see any P-47 restoration, much less one as compulsively complete and airworthy as this one. The chubby fighter was recovered from Papua New Guinea, where it had been abandoned by the Army Air Forces in September 1944 as worn out and obsolescent. AirCorps Aviation of Bemidji, Minnesota, started the restoration in 2015. The tape-like stripes visible on the airframe in the photo above are the brushed-on evidence of acid wash in preparation for spot welding, a 1940s technique that AirCorps Aviation revived for authenticity. The restorers also reproduced the assembly-line workers’ hidden scribblings inside the structure—none of them important but all of them original. The airplane will eventually be repainted in a color scheme that is yet to be determined.
When it’s done, this will be the only Republic-built Razorback that still flies. The earliest D models were Razorbacks, but later ones had bubble canopies. The bubble canopies offered better visibility, but the straight dorsal fairing—the “razorback”—behind the cockpit created less drag and provided more longitudinal stability. This would have made the Razorback a slightly better gun platform.
And the P-47 was an effective gun platform. In fact, you can make the case that the Pratt & Whitney propelled Thunderbolt was the most effective fighter, Allied or Axis, of World War II. It had eight guns, carried 65 percent more ammunition than its smaller Merlin-engined mates, and could lift more than a ton of bombs. The P-47N was faster and had a longer range than the North American P-51 Mustang. The Thunderbolt’s feats as a low-level fighter-bomber were never equaled,
and at 30,000 feet, with its dishwasher-size turbocharger wailing, there simply was no other 2,000-boosted-horsepower single-engine fighter flying. The P-47 owned the sky.
Back then, there was an adage, “If you want to impress the girls back home, fly a Mustang. If you want to see them again, fly a P-47.” In the words of the warbird website Hush-Kit, “Its biggest asset was its survivability, which meant the most important weapon the Air Force had—its experienced pilots—were kept alive.” Every single P-47 ace survived the war, something that cannot be said of any other fighter, friendly or foreign. Now another P-47 will not only survive but remain flying. —Stephan
WilkinsonRead more about the P-47 at historynet.com/ p47-thunderbolt
An era of aviation history truly ended on December 6, 2022, when the last Boeing 747 jumbo jet to be manufactured rolled out of the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington. The airplane, a 747-8, was the last 747 of 1,574 the company had built since the first one emerged from the same factory in 1968.
“For more than half a century, tens of thousands of dedicated Boeing employees have designed and built this magnificent airplane that has truly changed the world,” Kim Smith, the vice president and general manager of the 747 and 767 programs, said in a press release. “We are proud that this plane will continue to fly across the globe for years to come.” A freighter (not a passenger plane), the last 747 was delivered to its owner, Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, on January 31 of this year.
Designed under the direction of Boeing’s Joe Sutter, the 747 was, noted author Simon Winchester, “the most remarkable aircraft of its time” and “the largest financial and technological gamble in the history of aviation.” Committing to it brought huge risks—to Boeing, which would be designing an unprecedentedly large and expensive airliner; to Pan American World Airways, whose president, Juan Trippe, ensured the 747 would happen by pre-ordering 25 of them; and to Pratt & Whitney, which took on the challenging task of creating engines to power the jumbo jet.
The Boeing 747 has been forced to step down as “queen of the skies” in favor of newer and more cost-efficient jets, but 747s will continue to fly for years to come, mainly as cargo haulers (only a handful of the jumbo jets still fly passengers). But the rollout of the final specimen means that no one will every again experience that “new 747 smell.” —Tom
There’s a lot more about the 747 at historynet. com/jumbo-boeing-747
In other 747 news, NASA’s flying telescope, a converted Boeing 747 called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), departed Palmdale, California, on December 13, 2022, on its final flight. It landed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, before being moved to its new home at the Pima Air & Space Museum next to the base. SOFIA was towed to the museum in January and NASA technicians completed a “save list” of items that can be repurposed before the observatory goes on public display, probably in May.
SOFIA began life as Pan Am’s Clipper Lindbergh, making its first flight on April 25, 1977. Charles Lindbergh’s widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, christened the jetliner on May 20, 1977, the 50th anniversary of her husband’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. United Air Lines purchased Pan Am’s Pacific fleet in 1986, and NASA acquired the airplane in October 1997. NASA had the jetliner modified in Waco, Texas, and SOFIA made its first post-modification flight on April 26, 2007, and its first science flight on December 1, 2010.
An international astrophysics collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), SOFIA carried a telescope with a 106-inch (2.7 meter) diameter telescope and a suite of six instruments to study the universe at mid- and far-infrared wavelengths. Its observations focused on planets, planetary nebulae, astrochemistry, comets, supernovae, star formation and the galactic center. Science missions lasted 10 hours and were flown at altitudes between 38,000 and 45,000 feet to avoid interference from the atmosphere. The airborne observatory became noted for its discovery of helium hydride, thought to be the first type of molecule to form after the Big Bang. Its observations also revealed that the nearby planetary system surrounding the star Epsilon Eridani is very similar to our solar system, and it studied the role magnetic fields play in the behavior of black holes. You can find a top 10 list of SOFIA’s most influential discoveries on the NASA.gov website. And now you can visit SOFIA for yourself in Arizona.
—Nicholas A. VeronicoIn January, Mecum Auctions put rocker Elvis Presley’s 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar on the block. The winning bid was $260,000, but when the bidder backed out, businessman/ entrepreneur James “Jimmy” Webb stepped in and made the purchase for $234,000. Webb, who operates the YouTube site Jimmy’s World, had the airplane disassembled and trucked to Florida, where he has plans for the jet’s next incarnation. “The short version is I’m going to convert the fuselage into an RV so it can travel around the country for the rest of the world to enjoy,” he says. Webb’s analysis indicated it could cost nearly $6 million to get the JetStar airworthy again.
The King of Rock and Roll had purchased the four-engine craft in December 1976 for $840,000 and sold it shortly before this death on August 16, 1977. Its last owner was a Saudi Arabian company. The plane had suffered from weathering during the nearly four decades it spent parked outside at the Roswell International Air Center in Roswell, New Mexico, and its engines and some of its cockpit instrumentation had been removed. It still boasted some unique features, including a red velvet interior and a working cassette deck and VCR player. Also included in the sale was a copy of the airplane’s aircraft security agreement, signed by Presley and his father, Vernon.
The swept-wing JetStar made its first flight in 1957 and entered service in 1961, establishing itself as one of the world’s premier business jets. The earlier versions were powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT-12 engines, with two each in pods mounted at the rear of the fuselage. (Later versions acquired quieter Garrett TFE731 turbofans.) Presley actually owned two of the airplanes. He purchased the first, a 1960 version, in 1975, the same year he bought a Convair 880 that he named Lisa Marie after his daughter. Both those airplanes are on display at Graceland, Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.
Webb estimates it will take about a year to convert the fuselage into an
RV. In the meantime, he plans to take metal from the wings and other parts of the airplane and fashion it into memorabilia that he will sell to fund the project, and he will donate any surplus revenue to two of Elvis’s favorite charities, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep his legacy alive and to do what he would have wanted done,” Webb says. In the meantime, he will post about his progress on the Jimmy’s World YouTube channel. —Tom Huntington
You can see our interview with Jimmy Webb at historynet.com/elvis-jetstar
Not much remains of the Avro Arrow, the Canadian supersonic interceptor that was intended to counter the threat of Soviet bombers at the height of the Cold War (see the feature that starts on page 60). When Canada canceled the program in 1959, all five of the completed jets were ordered destroyed, along with engines and parts. Today the largest piece of the Arrow in existence is this nose section, which is on display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. The nose had been removed so it could be used as a pressure chamber by the Royal Canadian Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine in Toronto; the institute donated it to the museum in 1965. The museum has a few other Arrow components, including an Iroquois engine, the Canadian-built powerplant that was intended to propel the Arrow through the sky, but never got the opportunity.
As World War II ground to a close, the Allied-occupied German capital of Berlin became a flashpoint for the simmering rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. The two powers cooperated well enough at first, as American and Red Army troops, along with the British and French, withdrew to four pre-assigned city sectors agreed upon before the end of hostilities. Since Berlin was isolated 100 miles deep inside the larger Soviet zone of occupation, further negotiations afforded the U.S. the use of one rail line, one highway and three air corridors 20 miles wide to supply American troops in the city.
As the Iron Curtain began to descend, the Soviets started reneging on the right of access. By the end of June 1948, niggling Soviet restrictions turned into a full-on blockade as the Russians tried to starve the city and its two million inhabitants. The U.S., Britain and France remained determined to keep Berlin out of Soviet hands and launched an all-out aerial resupply campaign that became known as the Berlin Airlift.
The operation, run by U.S. Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, a veteran of Hump missions to China, called into service more than 100 Douglas C-47 Skytrains, each with a three-ton cargo capacity, and two larger C-54 Skymasters, which could haul ten tons of goods each, along with several British aircraft types. Over the next 15 months, Allied aircraft delivered more than 2.3 million tons of supplies to the beleaguered city. American aircrews conducted about three-quarters of the missions—more than 189,000 flights that logged 92 million miles—and, at the Airlift’s peak, a plane landed with supplies in Berlin every three minutes. Thirty American servicemen and one civilian lost their lives in 12 crashes, a remarkably low number given the wide-ranging scope of the operation.
While Gail Halvorsen, the Candy Bomber, captured popular imagination with his airborne delivery of sweets for Berlin’s children, critical life-sustaining cargo like coal and potatoes was more the norm.
The Soviets agreed to lift their blockade on May 12, 1949, but the Airlift continued through September, as the Allies continued to stock the city with supplies. Western suspicion of the Soviets paved the way for the formation of NATO that same year.
The program was a huge public relations triumph for the Allies and made many Berliners forever grateful. As Wolfgang Samuel, a 13-yearold German who later immigrated to America, joined the Air Force and rose to the rank of colonel, said, “You inspired at least one German boy to want to be just like you when he grew up.”
It all began 75 years ago this summer. —Larry Porges
Learn more about the Berlin Airlift at historynet.com/the-berlin-airlift
No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.
—OTTO LILIENTHAL, LATE 19TH CENTURY
Many Hollywood actors promote causes—social justice, animal welfare and so forth—but Robert “Bob” Cummings was a popular film and television star who used his celebrity to endorse general aviation.
Cummings played aviators in many of his productions and flew his own airplanes to shooting locations and while touring to promote his films. He was often photographed alongside his airplanes, all of which he named Spinach , although no one seems to know why.
Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings was born June 9, 1910, in Joplin, Missouri, and learned to fly while in high school, soloing in March 1927. Cummings studied aeronautical engineering at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh but was forced to withdraw from school when his family’s finances were severely reduced by the stock market crash of 1929. He had become interested in acting while still at Carnegie and landed his first roles on Broadway and found work as a Hollywood extra during the early 1930s, sometimes working under different stage names. After signing a contract with Universal Pictures, he began to appear in better films, including It Started with Eve and The Devil and Miss Jones (both 1941) and Kings Row and Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (both 1942).
Cummings joined the Civil Air Patrol after the attack on Pearl Harbor, flying search and rescue missions, courier flights and border patrols with the Glendale, California, squadron. He used his own airplane, the first Spinach , a 1936 Porterfield. Later he owned a Cessna Airmaster, which he named Spinach II. In 1942, Cummings was inducted into the U.S. Army Air Forces as a flight instructor.
After the war, Cummings took on numerous roles, beginning with You Came Along, in which he portrayed a U.S. Army Air Forces officer during World War II. He starred in his first TV
series, the comedy My Hero, from 1952 to 1953, and in 1954 he won an Emmy award for his performance in “Twelve Angry Men” on the Westinghouse Studio One show. In 1954, Cummings starred alongside Ray Milland and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s film Dial M for Murder. From 1955 to 1959, he starred in his own TV sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show. He played Bob Collins (the same name he had in You Came Along), a former World War II pilot who becomes a Hollywood photographer. The New Bob Cummings Show began airing in 1961, with Cummings playing Bob Carson, a charter pilot and amateur detective who owned two airplanes, a 1960 Taylor Aerocar and a twin-engine Beech Super 18. The Aerocar, introduced in 1949 by designer Moulton Taylor, was a vehicle that could fly like an airplane or drive like an automobile. Cummings’s Aerocar was one of only six ever built and it could be seen taking off in the show’s opening credits. That wasn’t enough to save the show, which lasted for only 22 episodes.
Cummings also appeared in “King Nine Will Not Return,” a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone in which he played the captain of a North American B-25 Mitchell bomber that crashed in the North African desert.
Throughout his life, Cummings was an avid pilot and enthusiastic supporter of general aviation. He also told some stories about his connections with aviation history that don’t withstand close scrutiny. For instance, he said that his father, a doctor, once treated Orville Wright and as a result gave his son the middle name Orville. The story appeared in a March 1960 article in Flying magazine, which said, “His father, the late Dr. Charles C. Cummings, a physician and surgeon, had treated Orville Wright for barber’s itch, a facial fungus which the pioneer airman picked up in a Kansas City tonsorial parlor while enroute to Joplin with brother Wilbur. One of the first practitioners to employ ultraviolet rays in treating skin diseases, Dr. Cummings quickly cured Orville’s infection and the two men became good friends.” Nonetheless, no known historical records mention a visit by the Wrights to Joplin or anything about Orville’s “barber’s itch” or treatment by Dr. Cummings. At other times Cummings apparently claimed that Orville Wright was his godfather and had taught him how to fly, although he told Flying that his teacher was a plumber named Cooper. One of the actor’s middle names was Orville, but it’s most likely that Cummings—or his publicist— invented the stories about a connection with Orville Wright.
Another story Cummings told is that when the government began licensing flight instructors, Cummings received certificate number one, making him the first official flight instructor in the United States. The Flying article said that “in 1938 the CAA [Civil Aeronautics Authority], aware that many people who could fly were actually incapable of teaching the art, created the rating of flight instructor. Bob applied for the rating even before Washington had prepared an examination. As a result, the Los Angeles CAA inspector, Gene Scroggy, drafted a tough 10-hour written, which Bob passed. After a thorough flight test, he qualified for Flight Instructor Certificate number ‘one’ by virtue of the fact he had been the first pilot in the country to apply!”
The Flying article also noted that “to Bob Cummings flying is an indispensable ‘way of life.’” That, at least, seems indisputable.
Cummings appeared in many other shows and movies throughout the years—his Internet Movie Database listing includes 105 appearances as an actor—before his death on December 2, 1990, at the age of 80. He was interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. His Aerocar, owned by Ed Sweeney, had been on display at the Kissimmee Air Museum in Florida until the museum closed in 2021.
The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, known to the world as the “Stealth Fighter,” entered operational service in 1989 with a limited role in the invasion of Panama, but the public became more aware of the aircraft when it saw widespread use in combat during the first Gulf War in 199091. The airplane employed faceted angles across its entire surface and consequently had a remarkably small radar cross section, making it extremely difficult to detect while in flight. The F-117 was also coated in plates lined with radar-absorbing material (RAM) held in place with a special adhesive. Details about the composition of the F-117’s RAM remain classified to this day, but analysts believe it is made of ferromagnetic particles embedded in neoprene sheets, which absorbs radar energy.
Until recently, the public had, essentially, no way to view an F-117 up close. That’s been changing as a small number of F-117s have been released to museums for the first time since Congress passed legislation in 2017 ending a requirement that the aircraft “be maintained in a condition that would allow recall of those aircraft to future service.”
Hill Aerospace Museum near Ogden, Utah, received its F-117 in August 2020, and the aircraft is currently nearing completion of an extensive restoration. The museum’s Nighthawk, serial number 82-0799, rolled off the assembly line in 1982 at Lockheed’s fabrication plant in Burbank, California. It first flew in combat during Operation Desert Storm and eventually amassed 54 combat sorties across Operations Desert Storm, Allied Force and Iraqi Freedom. Over its operational lifetime, 82-0799 flew as part of the 4450th Tactical Group and was based out of Tonopah Test Range in Nevada. The 4450th was the de facto home to the first F-117 squadrons and where much of the developmental work on the aircraft and the training of its pilots took place. It is worth noting that all F-117 flights out of Nevada took place at night to keep the secret craft out of sight of Soviet spy satellites. Aircraft 82-0799 also flew out of Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico as part of the 49th Fighter Wing when that unit handled F-117 operations.
The museum at Hill was chosen to receive its Nighthawk because of its institutional knowledge of the airplane. In December of 1998, Hill Air Force Base’s Air Logistics Center became responsible for repairing battle and crash damage to F-117s through the 649th Combat Logistics Support Squadron. This role required teams of Hill personnel to deploy around the world as needed to work on F-117s. The 649th performed this mission until 2008, when the F-117 retired from operational service. All of this translated to a deep familiarity with the care and handling of F-117s among personnel associated with Hill AFB.
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Top and center: When the F-117 reached Hill Aerospace Museum, it had been stripped of its top-secret outer coating and radar-absorbing material (RAM). The airplane did retain its full cockpit, however. Above: Today the F-117 sits back-to-back with a Lockheed SR-71 at the museum as its restoration nears completion.
The restoration team, including restoration lead Brandon Hedges and key team members Tim Randolph, George Burkey, Brandon Neagle and Dave Mitchell, have devoted an enormous number of man-hours to the restoration.
Randolph, who was an F-117 crew chief during Desert Storm, recalled that the Nighthawk was a “tricky airplane” from a maintenance point of view, as it included parts from various other aircraft, including the main landing gear from the A-10, heads-up display from the F-15, ejection seat from the F-15/16, engines from the F/A-18 (minus the afterburner) and avionics and fly-bywire system from the F-16.
The aircraft arrived at the museum in a bare-
bones condition, stripped clean and with wings and tail removed. The plane was also lacking all fluids and both engines. Still, the restoration team received a few lucky breaks: 82-0799 arrived with a complete cockpit and, perhaps more importantly, a full tail assembly. The tail had been removed, but the museum had not expected it at all and believed it would need to be fabricated. Nonetheless, 82-0799 has tested the restoration team’s skills. Fully deprived of its classified outer coating, RAM and all of its leading edges, the aircraft on arrival looked very little like the F-117s that the public has come to know. The team had to replicate the appearance of a fully functional F-117 using only off-theshelf materials.
The restoration has been accomplished on an extremely limited budget, made possible by the hard work of a dedicated (and unpaid) team that make use of a significant amount of donated material. Per Hedges, the entire restoration has only cost $4,000, a staggeringly small number compared to the typical investment required for most aircraft restorations; paint alone can often cost more than $10,000 for fighter aircraft restorations and far more for bombers.
An industrial supplier of automobile paint donated appropriate overlay material. In addition to paint, the restoration team further simulated RAM with Platinum Patch compound purchased in bulk at home improvement retailers. Perhaps the greatest challenge was recreating all the various leading edges of the entire airframe from scratch. The restoration team tried many different materials and construction methods to find a solution that looked just right. They ended up constructing most of the leading edges from a mixture of sheet metal and fiberglass panels. As of this writing, the restoration is approximately 85% complete and the aircraft is currently on display even as work continues.
Up close, and even though incomplete, 82-0799 is still a wonder to behold. Perched next to an SR-71C Blackbird (its spiritual forerunner), the F-117 appears much larger in person than it looks in photographs; in fact, it is actually about the same size as an F-15. The interior of the port bomb bay door is, surprisingly, graced by a handmade painting of the comic book character the Silver Surfer perched atop an F-117, a nod to the airplane’s nickname of “Midnight Rider.” Visitors to the museum now have the opportunity to see, up close and in person, an aircraft previously protected from public view that changed the history of military aviation in a lasting and meaningful way.
It was a perfect late autumn day in the northern Rockies. Not a cloud in the sky, and just enough cool in the air to stir up nostalgic memories of my trip into the backwoods. is year, though, was di erent. I was going it solo. My two buddies, pleading work responsibilities, backed out at the last minute. So, armed with my trusty knife, I set out for adventure.
Well, what I found was a whole lot of trouble. As in 8 feet and 800-pounds of trouble in the form of a grizzly bear. Seems this grumpy fella was out looking for some adventure too. Mr. Grizzly saw me, stood up to his entire 8 feet of ferocity and let out a roar that made my blood turn to ice and my hair stand up. Unsnapping my leather sheath, I felt for my hefty, trusty knife and felt emboldened. I then showed the massive grizzly over 6 inches of 420 surgical grade stainless steel, raised my hands and yelled, “Whoa bear! Whoa bear!” I must have made my point, as he gave me an almost admiring grunt before turning tail and heading back into the woods.
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When World War II ended, many aircraft manufacturers anticipated an increased demand for new commercial airliners. The Beech Aircraft Company of Wichita, Kansas, was no exception. Walter Beech, the company’s co-founder and president, had been producing outstanding aircraft since 1925 when he, along with Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna, founded the Travel Air Manufacturing Company. Travel Air proved so successful that the Curtiss-Wright Corporation merged with it in 1930. Relegated to a desk job, Beech resigned two years later to start his own company with his wife, Olive Ann. In the years before WWII, it produced two outstanding Beechcraft airplanes, the Model 17 “Staggerwing” cabin biplane and a small twin-engine airliner, the Model 18. During the war the company produced thousands of light transports and trainers.
With the war over, Beech turned his attention toward two new projects. One was a small single-engine cabin monoplane to succeed the prewar Staggerwing; the other a 14- to 20-seat airliner, larger than the pre-war Model 18, that would be suitable for short-haul feeder services. The result of that dual effort ended up 50 percent successful. The small cabin monoplane became the famous V-tailed Beechcraft Model 35 Bonanza, one of the most popular general aviation craft of all time. On the other hand, the prospective airliner, known as the Model 34 Twin Quad, never advanced beyond a single prototype.
Like the Bonanza, the Model 34 sported the distinctive Beechcraft V-tail configuration. It also featured a strengthened fuselage underside that included integral landing skids to protect the occupants in case of
Top: Although an innovative design, the Twin Quad never advanced beyond the prototype stage. Above: The man behind the airplane was Walter Beech, shown here in 1925. Beech had started his own airplane business in 1932 after a stint at the Travel Air Manufacturing Company.
a forced landing. The Model 34 was originally built for 14 passengers in “coach seats,” but the cabin interior was later redesigned to hold 20, with the option of folding up the seats to accommodate cargo that could be loaded via a hatch behind the pilot’s compartment. The new airplane’s most unique feature, however, was the
arrangement of its power plants.
Although the Model 34 looked like a conventional twin-engine, high-winged monoplane, it actually had four engines. Two 380-hp Lycoming GSO-580 air-cooled flat-8 piston engines were buried sideways within the leading edge of each wing, facing each other. A system of clutches and bevel gears linked their drive shafts to a single tractor propeller—hence the “GSO” designator, which stood for “geared, supercharged and opposed.” The system was designed so that in the event of an engine failure the dead engine could automatically de-clutch and the other engine could keep powering the propeller. Because of the airplane’s unusual power system, Beechcraft painted “Twin Quad” on the nose.
The Beechcraft Model 34 had a wingspan of 70 feet and was 53 feet long and 17 feet high. With a gross weight of 19,500 pounds, it had a maximum speed of 230 mph, a range of 1,450 miles and a ceiling of 23,000 feet.
Beechcraft’s chief test pilot, Vern L. Carstens, flew the Twin Quad’s first and totally uneventful flight on October 1, 1947. Carstens summed up his impression by declaring, “We have another outstanding Beechcraft.” The prototype went on to accumulate more than 200 hours of flight time by the time disaster struck on January 17, 1949. The airplane experienced an electrical fire in flight, a situation exacerbated when a crewman cut off an emergency master switch while fighting the blaze. The resulting wheels-up landing killed the copilot and injured the pilot and the two engineer-observers who were onboard.
The incident did prove the value of the aircraft’s reinforced belly, but otherwise everything went wrong for the Twin Quad after that.
The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board delayed licensing, but even worse was the fact that the feeder airliner business, which didn’t require cutting-edge performance like intercontinental airliners did, had little need for a new, innovative air transport when there were so many war-surplus Douglas DC-3s, C-47s and Beech 18s available at rock-bottom prices. Consequently, Beechcraft never completed the two other Twin Quads under construction (one of which was just for ground testing) and canceled the whole project. Walter Beech died on November 29, 1950, but his wife continued to run the company.
It is a shame that the Model 34 has been all but forgotten. It was a unique and intriguing design that deserves to be better remembered, even if it proved to be the wrong innovation at the wrong time.
Center: The Model 35 included a strengthened belly, which proved its worth when a fire led to a crash of the prototype on January 17, 1949. The copilot was killed and the pilot injured. Above: The Twin Quad’s nickname was derived from the two linked 380-hp Lycoming engines that made up each of the airplane’s dual powerplants. The idea was that if one of the engines in the pair quit, the other one could de-clutch and continue running.
During World War II, 6.5 million American women entered the workforce, filling jobs that opened when men joined the military. Women workers were essential as America ramped up to become the arsenal of democracy, cranking out munitions, ships, tanks, landing craft—and airplanes.
Some women started working out of patriotism, others for economic reasons and some from a combination of both. “Suddenly, the standard idea of seeing women as fragile creatures, ill-suited for work outside the home, much less for hard labor, seemed like a peacetime luxury,” wrote Emily Yellin in her 2004 book, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. “Like never before America asked women to take up the slack—to join in producing the vital machinery of war.” In the aircraft industry, around 40% of the workforce was women.
The enduring symbol of these women is Rosie the Riveter, a character from a song made iconic on a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell and in the government-issued “We Can Do It!” poster. One government agency charged with encouraging women to work was the Office of War Information. Among its ranks was photographer Alfred Palmer, who took the images here.
When men returned from the war, women began leaving work. Some left voluntarily; others were forced out. But things were different. In her book, Yellin quotes a worker named Katherine O’Grady, who said, “After the war, things changed, because women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own.”
At the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942, women work on the tail section of a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress. Women became an essential part of the war effort, especially in the aircraft industry. Left: Photographer Alfred Palmer created indelible images like these of real-life “Rosies” while working for the U.S. Office of War Information.
A B-25 Mitchell medium bombers were built at the North American Aviation factory in Inglewood, California. Here a worker puts some finishing touches to part of the cowling for one of a B-25’s twin engines.
B Another worker for North American Aviation labors over an engine.
C At North American’s control surface department, an employee uses a hand drill to assemble a section of the leading edge of a horizontal stabilizer.
D An assembly-line worker gets a well-earned lunch break at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach. Behind her are parts of bomber nacelles. This Douglas facility assembled Boeing’s B-17 heavy bomber as well as Douglas’s own A-20 Havoc assault bomber and C-47 Skytrain transport airplane.
E This Palmer photograph was used for a poster promoting the need for more women in the work force. The woman in the image, described as the “girl in a glass house,” is a Douglas employee working on the plexiglass nose of a Flying Fortress.
F Wartime demands provided opportunities for African American women as well. Here a woman at the Vultee Aircraft plant in Nashville, Tennessee, uses a hand drill on a Vultee A-35 Vengeance dive bomber. The plant also assembled Lockheed P-38 Lightings and the Stinson 0-49 observation airplane.
G Douglas employee Annette del Sur publicizes a salvage campaign at the company’s plant in Long Beach. She is looking over lathe turnings in the metal salvage pile, while sporting a tiara made out of the scrap. Scrap metal as fashion accessory did not really catch on.
H Inspectors at the Douglas factory check wing sections that will be assembled for C-47s. Despite their indispensable contributions to the war effort, women workers could not avoid sexist labeling. The original caption for this image described these employees as “girl inspectors.” G H
Find more of Alfred Palmer's wartime photographs at historynet.com/womenat-work
Last issue we ran a feature by Barry Levine about the C-119s that snatched spy satellite photos from the sky back in the early 1960s. That feature included a sidebar about how the United States attached cameras to balloons that were set adrift over the Iron Curtain to photograph things that the Soviets wanted to keep hidden. When we were preparing that sidebar, using balloons seemed like a pretty quaint way to collect intelligence.
And then spy balloons re-entered the news on January 28, 2023, when one launched by China was detected drifting over the United States. Amid much international uproar, the lighter-than-air interloper was shot down by U.S. Air Force F-22s Raptors off the South Carolina coast on February 4. I guess there is nothing new under the sun (or above the earth).
The pilot of an Air Force U-2S spyplane captured the selfie shown here as he soared above the balloon before the Raptors swept in to do their job. Like balloon spies, U-2s are nothing new: the long-winged Lockheed jets have been making their high-altitude flights (and doing some spying of their own) since the first U-2 took to the skies in 1955. Cover stories get recycled too: The Chinese government claimed their spy-in-the-sky was just a weather balloon that had been blown off course. The Eisenhower administration said that about the U.S. balloon spies, too, and after the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR on May 1, 1960, the U.S. claimed
that Powers had been studying the weather when he strayed into Soviet airspace.
It’s pretty amazing to realize that the U-2 has been flying for almost 70 years now, although the type has been consistently updated (the U-2S is the latest version) and the Air Force is talking about phasing it out by 2026. In 1955 the U-2 was on the cutting edge of technology. Created by Kelly Johnson and the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works, it could fly higher than 70,000 feet, above the ceiling of potential interceptors, and take pictures with its specially designed cameras. Richard Bissell, who oversaw the project for the CIA, was giddy when the first photos arrived. “From seventy thousand feet you could not only count the airplanes lined up on the ramps, but tell what they were without a magnifying glass,” he said. “We were astounded. We had finally pried open the oyster shell of Russian secrecy and discovered a giant pearl.”
That’s what spies do—pry open the oysters of secrecy. That’s what the Soviets were doing in Canada in the 1950s as the Canadians were developing their own supersonic interceptor, the Avro Arrow. You can read about that in this issue.
Spies! They’re everywhere!
Osce V. Jones, a 26-year-old first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, was a war-tested pilot by the summer of 1943. Born in the small Georgia town of Camilla on August 6, 1916, Jones attended Louisiana State University and enlisted in the U.S. Army National Guard in the fall of 1940. He entered flight school a few months later, graduating in early December 1942, and was assigned as the pilot of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. The next May he and his crew flew their airplane from Dow Army Airfield in Maine to RAF Ridgewell airfield in southeastern England, the eventual home of the Eighth Air Force’s 381st Bombardment Group. After they arrived, the crew named their bomber, tail number 42-3217, Georgia Rebel.
Jones had completed five missions over Europe, but his luck ran out on July 24, 1943. On that day, Georgia Rebel was one of the 324 bombers that Brig. Gen. Ira C. Eaker, commanding general of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, sent out on what was the Eighth’s first operation against targets in Nazioccupied Norway. Georgia Rebel ’s target was an aluminum, nitrate and magnesium manufacturing complex at Herøya, just south of Oslo.
After releasing its bombs, the aircraft was hit by a barrage of antiaircraft fire at 2:18 p.m. and was last seen by its group as it left the formation. One engine was smoking, another was out of commission, and fuel was leaking through a hole in the port wing. Jones and his navigator, 2nd Lt. Arthur L. Guertin, agreed that a safe return to England was unlikely, so the young pilot swung the crippled aircraft northeast from Herøya toward neutral Sweden. Once over the Swedish town of Årjäng, Jones turned north and flew low over rolling, wooded hills for about 15 miles until he saw a long, open field just south of the village of Vännacka. Local residents looked up as the plane passed over the field and circled back to make a perfect belly-landing.
Among the first to reach the plane was farmer Olof Persson. “I understood immediately that it was a British or American bomber because it said ‘Georgia Rebel’ on the fuselage, and I saw a five-pointed star and the colors of the flag,” Persson told a reporter from the Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet . “So I hurried to the bog where the plane had crashed.” Persson greeted the pilot in English. “Well, how do you do?” he said.
By the time Persson reached the B-17, the Swedish military had also arrived and began to surround the wreck. “I asked the pilot if anybody had been injured,” Persson recalled. “[The pilot] said that he and his nine buddies were [safe and] happy to have landed in Sweden…and he asked me to tell the Swedish military that they had machine guns on board and that they were all loaded, but there were no bombs. They had been released over Norway.”
Jones and his men were the first American aircrew to land in Sweden during the war. They were not the last.
As a neutral country, Sweden was required by the Hague Convention of 1907 to intern any military personnel from belligerent nations who arrived within its borders. Sweden ended up accommodating many Americans. By war’s end, more than 150 crippled American warplanes followed the Georgia Rebel to land or crash land in Sweden, leading to the internment of 1,218 airmen, including Jones and his crew. The vast majority of the internees reached Sweden during a hectic 48-hour period in mid-June 1944 when no fewer than 34 B-17s and B-24 Liberators landed safely or crashed on Swedish soil. A Swedish newspaper, Trelleborgs Allehanda, reported that on June 20—after the Eighth Air Force had deployed 1,965 “heavies” across Europe in one of the largest such opera-
A Consolidated B-24 Liberator passes over the Swedish city of Malmö on its way to a landing at the Bulltofta airfield on June 20, 1944. This was the busiest day for emergency landings in Sweden, with a total of 21 bombers arriving.
One airplane interned in Sweden eventually made its way back to the United States. A Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress named after a song by the Andrews Sisters, Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby landed safely in Sweden after suffering multiple engine failures over Poland on May 29, 1944, during its 24th and last bombing mission. After the war the B-17 flew as a passenger plane in Sweden before being sold to a Danish airline. Following later stints in the Danish army and navy, the airplane was purchased by a French aerial mapping company that used it until 1961. In 1972 France gave the airplane to the United States and it was disassembled and flown to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, for restoration. The restored B-17 was flown to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in 1988 and put on display. The well-traveled Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby is currently in storage prior to an eventual transfer to the National Air and Space Museum.
tions to date—there was “literally a queue” of American bombers waiting to land at Bulltofta airfield in Malmö. A total of 21 bombers made forced landings in Sweden that day, by far the largest single-day influx of American aircraft in the country since the beginning of the war.
After the planes were on the ground at Bulltofta, according to Trelleborgs Allehanda, “it was hard to find an empty spot” at the airfield. “What’s going to happen during the next few days if a similar invasion continues?” the paper asked. But the invasion continued the next day, June 21, with another 13 American bombers arriving.
One American airplane to reach Sweden that June was a Consolidated B-24 Liberator with the tail number 42-51125 piloted by 1st Lt. Leander Page Jr. Page had been interned in Sweden once before, after his B-24 Queen of Peace had landed there on January 4, 1944. Page was released and he returned to combat, and his plane was hit by flak over Pölitz, Germany, on June 20, damaging the right stabilizer, the rear bomb bay, the fuselage and the two engines on the right wing. “After being hit…the ship dived straight down,” a U.S. intelligence officer later reported after interviewing the copilot, 2nd Lt.
Collier’s magazine ran a feature about the Americans in Sweden in its August 26, 1944, issue. Such coverage did not please Hap Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He ordered an investigation into the “stopovers.”
F. Leroy Qualey. “The manual controls were found to be inoperative, so the pilot turned the auto-pilot on. The plane went on its back, then recovered. They flew for about twenty minutes more, and No. 2 engine failed. A few minutes later the auto-pilot ceased to work, and they went into a tight spin.
The order for bail-out was given.” By this time the airplane was over Swedish territory. Qualey said that after bailing out he landed on a greenhouse and sustained cuts and bruises, while pilot Page hit the side of the bomb bay as he bailed out but suffered only minor injuries.
The unmanned airplane crash-landed in a field near the village of Röstånga and burned for some time. Eight of the 10 crew members were safe, although shaken and slightly injured. The body of Tech Sgt. Robert B. Kellerman, the engineer, was found some distance from the aircraft. According to reports, the body of the tail gunner, Sergeant Glenn A. Deck, was found either in the wreck or nearby. Page said later that both men had been “paralyzed with fear.” Another survivor said that Kellerman may have bailed out too late for his parachute to open fully and that Deck was too frightened to bail out and may have waited too long to make the attempt, or he may have been prevented from exciting by the overwhelming centrifugal force. Page said that his own escape from the aircraft had been due to “great luck,” explaining that he had been literally thrown from the plane when it inverted and went into a spin. Page became the only American airman to be interned in Sweden twice.
After landing, the surviving members of the crew were taken to a local inn and served a hot meal before being sent the next day to an internment camp at Fornäs, near Falun. On July 3, the remains of Kellerman and Deck were interred at a cemetery in Malmö. Copilot Qualey attended the funeral on behalf of the surviving members of the crew, along with representatives of the Swedish government, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Some of the airplanes heading for Sweden never made it. On May 24, 1944, a B-17 with the tail number 42-107178 plunged into the sea off the southern coast of Sweden following a bombing raid on Berlin. According to the ball turret gunner, Tech Sgt. Leonard A. Bielawski, the airplane’s pilot, 1st Lt. William F. Nee, along with two other crew members, 2nd Lt. Reginald Aragona, the copilot, and Tech Sgt. Gaetano A. Scida, the top turret gunner, bailed out after the plane was hit by enemy aircraft fire or flak over Berlin. Apparently, the other members of the crew did not hear the order to exit the plane because the wiring on the back of the pilot’s seat had caught fire, cutting off inter-aircraft communications.
Frederic T. Neel, the 2nd lieutenant who was serving as navigator, managed to extinguish the fire and jumped into the pilot’s seat, telling Tech Sgt. Donald E. Spaulding, the tail gunner, to fly as copilot. Close to the Swedish coast near the village of Örnahusen, the rest of the crew, except for Neel, bailed out. Sgt. Robert Heimbach, the waist gunner, went out first and drowned. Spaulding was killed when he hit the water.
Bielawski and Tech Sgt. Philip J. Branner, the radio operator, both landed uninjured. The bombardier, 2nd Lt. Richard Markley, landed in the water and was rescued by Swedish fishermen. As for Neel, he “went down with the ship,” according to Bielawski, who spoke with investigators after the
Top: These internees were able to roam while in Sweden. Above: Two Americans clearly enjoy Swedish hospitality during their internment. Perhaps surprisingly, most men surveyed said they were ready to return to war before too long.
incident. On July 1, several months later, Neel’s body was recovered near the coastal village of Gislöv, about three miles from where the plane had crashed.
The survivors of Nee’s B-17 joined the growing population of internees in Sweden. The numbers continued to rise, particularly in the first six months of 1944, until there were about 900 by the end of June. As the numbers swelled, so did concerns that some the airmen had diverted to Sweden simply to avoid further combat. In May 1944 The New York Times wrote that the interned airmen were being held in “one of Sweden’s most picturesque regions”—the province of Dalecarlia— and that they were playing “all sorts of games,” reading and enjoying “great freedom of movement.” In August, a multi-page photo essay in Collier’s magazine showed U.S. airmen in tuxedos laughing and drinking at a Stockholm restaurant surrounded by beautiful Swedish
women. Others were photographed skiing, riding bicycles and enjoying a dip in a heated indoor swimming pool.
General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was not pleased by the coverage and he ordered an investigation. He even sent an uncommonly unfriendly memo to his long-time friend, Brig. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the newly formed U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), noting that an increasing number of aircraft were landing in neutral countries, like Sweden and Switzerland, “without indication of serious battle damage or mechanical failure, or shortage of fuel.” He wondered whether the landings were “intentional evasions of further combat service.”
Spaatz blew up over the implication that the crews were cowards or lacked the will to fight. “Such is a base slander against the most courageous group of fighting men in this war,” he wrote back, adding that the number of interned airmen amounted to only a small fraction of the crews dispatched.
Nevertheless, Spaatz followed up on Arnold’s concerns. Maj. Gen. David N.W. Grant, the air surgeon for the USSTAF, wrote to Brig. Gen. Malcolm C. Grow, director of medical services at
USSTAF headquarters in Washington, D.C., saying that Arnold believed— “and I agree with him”—that the “best survey” of crew morale should be carried out by flight surgeons. One flight surgeon who was selected for the task was Major John D. Young Jr., who had been a passenger on the Liberator Mistah Chick that had made a forced landing in Sweden on June 20. As a “non-combatant,” he was not interned with the crew but was attached to the American Legation in Stockholm to provide medical care to Americans. While in Sweden Young interviewed about 500 internees and concluded that the general feeling among them was one of “great thankfulness” to have survived and that they would “not like to repeat this experience.” But after a week or two, the more harrowing aspects of the experience tended to fade, Young said, and the men would begin to feel restless and want “to get back to flying again.”
There were five main internment camps in Sweden—Falun, Rättvik,
Loka Brunn, Gränna and Mullsjö—and Young visited all of them. He said that the internees were free to leave the camps and mix with Swedish civilians and that the men were able to “freely date” Swedish women. “I think it has been remarkable that they have gotten on as well as they have,” Young said.
Queried by an Air Forces intelligence officer, Lt. Col. R.E. Stone, Young said that the internees had not force-landed in Sweden to evade further military service. “There are aircraft reports to substantiate that their planes were badly damaged and that it was foolhardy to attempt to return [to England],” Young said, adding that, beyond any doubt, they had used their “good judgment” in deciding to head for Sweden.
In addition, the USSTAF’s Office of the Surgeon sent out a questionnaire to every squadron surgeon serving in the Eighth Air Force at the time, and representatives of the office made personal visits to units that were suspected of having low morale or whose personnel had made force-landings in Sweden.
At the end of the process, Grow concluded that five crews “may” have landed in Sweden “for the purpose of avoiding further combat.” But his report emphasized that the number of crews that had done so was “so low that it is not considered to be of any particular significance.”
As the winds of war began to shift inexorably toward the Allies, the Swedes saw fit to release the internees at a relatively rapid pace— as quickly as they could be flown out of the country. By the end of November 1944, in fact, the number of internees had fallen to about 200— down from a near-high of 1,076 in mid-October. By mid-January 1945, the number was just 25.
Herschel V. Johnson, the American Minister in Stockholm, wrote to Acting Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius on November 24, 1944, expressing relief and praising the Swedes for the way they had treated the Americans. “The treatment in every respect which the Swedes have accorded our aviators has been humane and understanding to a high degree and beyond the bounds of what are their obligations under international law and custom,” Johnson said.
After their release from internment—sometimes following protracted negotiations between American and Swedish officials over, for example, the sale of North American P-51 Mustangs to the Swedish Air Force— most of the American “bomber boys” were returned to England and further combat. Some released internees were shot down a second time. Arthur Guertin, the navigator on Georgia Rebel, was killed on April 28, 1944, in Georgia Rebel II. Osce V. Jones of Georgia Rebel was also aboard Georgia Rebel II. He survived but spent the rest of the war in a Nazi prison camp.
After the war, Jones continued to serve in the Air Force and flew B-52s and KC-135 tankers as commander of the Strategic Air Command’s 4241st Strategic Wing at Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. But Jones never forgot the American airmen who had lost their lives in service to their country in World War II, including the 40-plus men who were killed when their planes force-landed or crashed in neutral Sweden.
Gary G. Yerkey is an author and journalist based in Washington, D.C. He previously spent more than a decade in Europe reporting for TIME-LIFE, ABC News, the Christian Science Monitor and other U.S. news outlets. For further reading he recommends Making for Sweden: Part 2, The United States Army Air Force, The Story of the Allied Airmen Who Took Sanctuary in Neutral Sweden by Bo Widfeldt and Rolph Wegmann.
On June 20, 1959, the 15th anniversary of the crash landing in Sweden of Leander Page Jr.’s B-24, local resident Ernest Göransson erected a simple stone monument near the field where the Liberator had come down.
Göransson paid for the monument himself to honor the memory of the two American airmen who had been killed.
In 1984, on the fortieth anniversary of the incident, a number of Swedish dignitaries and officials from the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm attended a remembrance ceremony near the monument. Captain Charles A. Meyer, assistant air attaché at the embassy, addressed the audience, saying that “those courageous flyers…fought and died in a great battle against the forces of totalitarianism.
“Standing here today, forty years later, after that terrible battle, our memories of that time have begun to fade, the vision of that moment may dim,” Meyer said. “I hope that this fine ceremony, though it began as a memorial to the past, can continue to serve as a guidepost for the future. This is not a monument to the horrors of war. This is a monument to our sincere hope for peace, democracy and human dignity, for our generation and for all the generations to come.” —G.Y.
IN 1927 A PINEAPPLE MAGNATE SPONSORED AN AIR RACE TO HAWAII. IT DID NOT GO WELL BY STEPHAN WILKINSON
The Pabco Pacific Flyer, with Livingston Irving at the controls, lifts off from Oakland on August 16, 1927, at the start of the ill-fated contest known as the Dole Derby. Like most of the contestants, Irving did not reach the race’s end point in Hawaii. He crashed his specially designed Breese-Wilde 5 after a flight that traversed less than two miles. Unlike some race participants, Irving survived. So did Norman Goddard, whose wrecked El Encanto is visible in the background to the left of the photo’s center.
It is said that the first automobile race took place the moment the second car was built, but motorsport took a bit longer to appear in aviation. The first air race was flown in 1909, in France, more than five years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. There were four entrants. Two started the race and none finished. The rules had foreseen that. They specified that the winner would be the competitor who had traveled farthest.
Things hadn’t progressed much by August 1927, when the Dole Derby, a heavily promoted race between California and Hawaii, limped to an unfortunate start. Eleven racers entered the contest, six actually flew and two finished. Ten people—pilots, navigators and one unfortunate passenger—died before the race was over. Two entrants later died while searching for survivors.
Call it the Dole Disaster and blame it on the pineapple.
In 1899, 22-year-old James Dole moved to Honolulu with a Harvard degree in agriculture in his suitcase, and he began canning pineapple. In 1907, Dole set about advertising his exotic product throughout the U.S. mainland and soon had a hit on his hands. By 1922, Dole pineapples were so popular that young James bought the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai as a 20,000acre pineapple plantation.
In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, and aviation suddenly became the hottest game in town. Airports and airlines sprang up everywhere; aviators set and
James Dole made a fortune in Hawaii selling canned pineapple. A pair of newspaper reporters convinced him that an air contest from the continental U.S. to Hawaii would result in a publicity bonanza for Dole’s product.
broke records weekly. The months after Lindbergh’s flight were called the Summer of Eagles, and some people were seeking a Pacific Eagle. Hollywood theater mogul Sid Grauman offered $30,000 for the first flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Dallas stockbroker William Easterwood put up $25,000 for anyone who could make the first flight from Dallas to Hong Kong in less than 300 hours, with no more than three refueling stops. And immediately after James Dole announced plans for what would become the infamous California-to-Hawaii Dole Derby, the San Francisco Citizen’s Flight Committee promised an additional $50,000 prize to extend the route all the way to Australia.
The idea for a Hawaii-bound air race didn’t originate with James Dole. It took a pair of Honolulu newspaper reporters, Riley Allen and Joseph Farrington, to light the fuse. Just two days after Lindbergh’s flight, they sent Dole a telegram—simultaneously printed in the Honolulu Advertiser—pointing out that the post-Lindberghian swoon made the times ripe for someone to offer a substantial prize for a nonstop flight to Hawaii. If Dole ponied up, the reporters said, his reward would be “all the press coverage he could stomach.”
Dole bit. He assumed he would be promoting the first such flight and thus a significant world record. He offered $25,000 and $10,000 (about $426,000 and $170,000 in today’s dollars) for the first- and second-place finishers in a “Derby” in which the only requirement was the aviators had to fly from the continental U.S. to the Territory of Hawaii—no specific takeoff or landing points were named, although Oakland did become the starting point—and that the race would start on August 12, 1927.
Perhaps he should have said the Dole Derby would start the next morning, for two months before the date that Dole set, two Army Air Corps lieutenants in an Atlantic-Fokker C-2 trimotor named Bird of Paradise quietly and professionally flew from Oakland, California, to Honolulu in just under 26 hours. Their airplane was a military version of the Fokker F.VIIa, built in Fokker’s Teterboro, New Jersey, factory. It had been modified for the Hawaii flight—the longest overwater flight ever attempted anywhere—with a larger wing and extra fuel tanks that gave it a range of just over 2,500 miles. Which was cutting it close, since the distance from Oakland to Hawaii was 2,418 miles.
The USAAC had been planning such a trip since 1919. One of the flight crew, MIT-degreed Lieutenant Albert Hegenberger, was a prime mover in the development of long-distance navigation for the Air Corps and had been in charge of developing the service’s radio navigation instruments and equipment. Hegenberger’s pilot was Lester Maitland, an aide to General Billy Mitchell who had spent much of his Air Service and then Air Corps career setting records and winning air races that accrued publicity for the military. He was unofficially the first American pilot to fly faster than 200 mph, and in October 1923 he set an absolute world speed record of just a bit under 245 mph, flying the Curtiss R-6 biplane racer in which he’d finished second in that year’s Pulitzer Trophy race.
Hegenberger’s radio skills turned out to be moot, since the Bird of Paradise ’s radio compass and directional receiver both failed soon after
takeoff, leaving the crew to rely on a whiskey compass, a drift meter and some celestial navigation to dead reckon their course. Had Hegenberger been more than 3.5 degrees off after 2,400 miles, they would have missed Hawaii. The flight was 900 miles shorter than Lindbergh’s, but all 2,400 miles of it was over water; Lindbergh spent about 2,000 miles feet wet from Newfoundland to Ireland.
Unfortunately, few of the actual Dole Derby contestants were as profes-
sional or well-prepared as either Lindbergh or this Army crew.
One dismayed spectator at the Army Fokker’s takeoff was civilian airmail pilot Ernest Smith, who had decided to forego Dole’s prize money by flying the Pacific well before the official race and thus make it irrelevant. But Smith hadn’t planned on the Army making him irrelevant. Smith and his navigator, Charles Carter, took off two hours after the Fokker in their single-engine Travel Air, but a metal wind deflector for the navigator’s observation hatch came loose soon after takeoff. Smith returned to Oakland, where Carter decided he’d had enough and quit. During the two weeks that it took to fix the wind deflector, Smith found another navigator, Emory Bronte, and with his help became the first civilian pilot to cross from the U.S. to Hawaii. They had intended to land at Honolulu but went tanks dry over the leper-colony island of Molokai, 50 miles short of their destination. Smith deadsticked the Travel Air down into a grove of long-thorned mesquite trees, more concerned about his belief that the island was entirely populated by lepers than he was by the forced landing.
Four aviators had successfully made the transpacific flight, and none them had been a
Dole Derby contestant. Their premature accomplishments turned the Derby from a viable attempt to set an important world record into a half-assed dash for money. The racers would, however, still accrue controversial publicity for Hawaii
and James Dole at a time when Lindbergh had primed the pump for newspapers to flood the country with news about notable aviation accomplishments. The Dole race also offered the ultimate risk/reward equation: failure meant death. Even though every race plane was required to carry at least a rubber raft, finding floating survivors in the vast Pacific would prove to be fruitless.
To his credit, James Dole was determined that his race would be overseen by professionals who could weed out unqualified crews and ground airplanes that had no chance of success. He enlisted the help of the new aviation branch of the Department of Commerce, which would eventually become the Federal Aviation Administration. Its inspectors demanded that participants have auxiliary fuel tanks that could carry a 15-percent safety margin, and that they carry life rafts and emergency rations, and they added the proviso that nobody could fly without a certified navigator. (One navigator was disqualified after becoming lost during a local flight over Oakland.)
Unfortunately, the Feds did a lousy job of
enforcing their requirements.
In the end, 15 pilots paid the $100 fee to enter the Dole Derby. One didn’t even have access to an airplane. Three crashed before they could reach Oakland. One was unable to get qualified before the race. One withdrew before the start. The day before the race, one more entry, an Air King named City of Peoria, was disqualified for not carrying enough fuel to reach Hawaii. “The owner [of the entry] was furious,” read one account of the race, “but the two men recruited to do the actual flight were reportedly relieved.” You have to wonder what kind of pilots would require a regulatory judgment to keep them from taking off on a death trip.
Dole had hoped Lindbergh would enter the Derby, but the stoic Minnesotan wanted nothing to do with the stunt. He realized that putting the compass on E and heading toward a continent—though his own navigation was vastly more precise—was nothing like leaving a continent behind while aiming for a few islands.
The City of Oakland had been considering construction of an airport as early as 1925, and the announcement of the Dole Derby prodded it into action. In just 21 days, Oakland built a 7,020-foot dirt-andcrushed-oyster-shell runway—the longest in the world at the time—and opened the Bay Farm Island airstrip to traffic. It soon became Oakland Municipal Airport (today Oakland
THE RACE OFFERED THE ULTIMATE RISK/ REWARD EQUATION: FAILURE MEANT DEATH.
International), but it was as Bay Farm Island that it served as the race’s starting point.
Dole Derby fatalities began before the race even started. Navy Lieutenants George Covell and R.S. Waggener died on August 10 when their Tremaine Hummingbird flew into a fogbank and hit a 400-foot-high coastal cliff at Point Loma, soon after takeoff on their way from San Diego to Oakland. The Covell/ Waggener entry was Tremaine’s second (and last) design—a large, remarkably ugly, low-wing monoplane with the dihedral of a pool table. Sunk behind a graceless forward fuselage, its cockpit had only side windows and a periscope. One wonders if it would have collided with Point Loma regardless of fog.
One notable thing about the Tremaine was its name: Spirit of John Rodgers . In 1925 Navy pilot John Rodgers had commanded the very first airplane, a twin-engine Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 biplane flying boat, to make it (in a fashion) from California to Hawaii. Rodgers and his crew ran out of fuel short of their destination and spent nine days yachting toward Hawaii with a sail made from fabric stripped from a wing. Thirsty, hungry and sunburned, they were finally sighted by a submarine and towed to Kauai.
Angel of Los Angeles was next to go. World
War I Royal Flying Corps aviator Arthur Rogers died while parachuting from his Bryant M-1 monoplane while testing it near Los Angeles. It would have been one of the most unusual ships to contest the Derby, with a twinboom tail and a push-pull twin-engine pod between the booms.
Pride of Los Angeles was a twin-engine Catron & Fisk CF-10 triplane that landed short of the broad Bay Farm Island runway while arriving for the race start. The prominent Pride ended up half awash in San Francisco Bay, a particular embarrassment for one of its sponsors, cowboy movie star Hoot Gibson, whose name was writ large on the bright orange fuselage. The three-man crew swam ashore safely. The CF-10 had already earned its share of notoriety thanks to its substantial sandwich of wings, which earned it a derisive nickname, “the Incredible Stack o’ Wheats”—a
reference to a popular breakfast meal, a pile of shredded wheat cakes. Gibson was not amused. Things didn’t go much better once the race actually began. A Travel Air 5000 named Oklahoma, piloted by Bennett Griffin and navigated by Al Henley, had to turn back after a half hour due to mechanical problems. Norman Goddard and Kenneth Hawkins in the “Goddard Special” El Encanto crashed on takeoff. Pabco Pacific Flyer, the only Dole entrant to attempt the race solo, was flown by a former 103rd Aero Squadron pilot, Livingston Irving. His BreeseWilde 5, designed specifically for the race, flew about a mile and a half before settling into a marsh, terminally overloaded. Irving walked away muddy but unhurt.
Dallas Spirit was flown by another World War I veteran, William “Lonestar Bill” Erwin, who had been credited with eight aerial victories as pilot of two-seater reconnaissance airplanes. His pregnant 20-year-old wife, Constance, was originally scheduled to be his navigator—she was skilled in astronavigation and radio use— but was disqualified for not meeting the age-21
criterion. She was replaced by Alvin Eichwaldt, a former Navy seaman. Dallas Spirit, a Swallow Dole Racer built specifically for the event, was forced to return to Oakland after experiencing engine trouble.
The Lockheed Vega Golden Eagle, flown by Jack Frost with navigator Gordon Scott, was lost at sea, despite having a radio receiver, a variety of safety equipment and flotation gear, thanks to the sponsorship of William Randolph Hearst’s son George and his San Francisco Examiner newspaper. Some optimists said the Vega could float for a month; we’ll never know if it did.
Though Lindbergh shunned the Dole Derby, the race did have its pseudo-Earhart contestant—a 22-year-old fifthgrade teacher from Flint, Michigan, named Mildred Doran. She flew in the Derby as a passenger aboard a Buhl CA-5 Airsedan christened the Miss Doran
The Buhl was a sesquiplane, a biplane with an atrophied lower wing of less than half the area of the upper wing. Its engine was a reliable nine-cylinder Wright J5 Whirlwind, and the ugly CA-5 had a cabin below and behind an enclosed cockpit. Airsedans would go on to collect an odd bag of distinctions: first airplane to fly a pope (Pius XII); first to make a nonstop round-trip crossing of the continental U.S., using a primitive form of air-to-air refueling; and holder of the record for regularly flying the shortest airline route in the world, across a river in Mexico (the one kilometer flight required two minutes flying time).
The press lost no time in finding Doran more appealing than the male pilots and navigators. She had begun her aviation dalliance under the mentorship of a flamboyant entrepreneur, Bill Malloska, who owned a string of gas stations called Lincoln Oil. Though not a pilot himself, Malloska built an airstrip just outside Flint as publicity for his stations, and Doran became a regular at the field. A flying circus from Nebraska set up shop at the Lincoln Oil runway as their Midwest base and gave $5 rides and put on weekend air shows replete with wing-walking and parachute jumps. Their airplanes all bore the Lincoln Oil logo, and in return they burned free fuel and oil provided by Malloska.
When Doran heard of the cash prizes that James Dole was offering, she urged Malloska to enter the Dole Derby for the publicity assured by making her a passenger. Malloska, ever the entrepreneur, couldn’t resist. He bought the Buhl and turned to two of his air-circus pilots,
MILDRED DORAN’S FUN FLIGHT TO HAWAII HAD SUDDENLY TURNED DEADLY SERIOUS.
John August Pedlar and Eyir Sloniger, to decide who would race it to Hawaii. The two pilots flipped a coin to see who got the job and Auggy Pedlar won. He had less than the 200 hours required by the Dole Derby organizers—his function in the Lincoln Oil troupe had been more as wing-walker than pilot—while Sloniger, the putative loser, would go on to become chief pilot of American Airlines and get immortalized in Ernest K. Gann’s memoir Fate Is the Hunter.
Pedlar took off confidently to start his and Mildred’s race, but Miss Doran ’s engine started misfiring badly, so he returned to Oakland within minutes. Apparently even young Mildred realized this was the result of more than just an oiled sparkplug. Her fun flight to Hawaii had suddenly turned deadly serious. It took hours of work to fix the Whirlwind’s problems. By this time, Mildred Doran was an unhappy camper, and she re-embarked “looking ashen and in tears,” according to newspaper
The Buhl CA-5 Airsedan Miss Doran got its name from passenger Mildred Doran. Below left: Doran (center) was flying with pilot John August Pedlar (right) and navigator Vilas Knope. Below right: When Miss Doran was reported missing, William “Lonestar Bill” Erwin (pictured with wife Constance) and Alvin Eichwaldt flew off to search in Dallas Spirit, only to go missing themselves.
reporters. Even navigator Vilas Knope urged her to stay behind. But she was back aboard the Buhl when it took off again, the last of the Derby contestants, far behind everybody else. Doran, Pedlar and Knope were never seen again.
Once word arrived that neither the Golden Eagle nor Miss Doran had arrived in Hawaii, Erwin and Eichwaldt , though out of the race , managed to get the Dallas Spirit’s engine running smoothly and took off west to search for the two airplanes. The last thing heard from the Dallas Spirit was a truncated radio call that said the airplane was in a spin about 650 miles west of Oakland.
The only Dole Derby entrant still in existence is Woolaroc, on display at the Woolaroc Museum & Wildlife Preserve in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. After the Dole Derby, Frank Phillips of Phillips Petroleum, who had provided financing for the airplane, asked pilot Art Goebel to fly Woolaroc around the country to publicize the company’s aviation fuel. Goebel later had the airplane altered for an attempt to set a new coast-to-coast speed record, but decided the new modifications made Woolaroc too dangerous to fly. Restored to its Dole Derby appearance, the airplane retired to a special hangar that Phillips had built on his ranch. In 1985 the airplane moved to a newly built museum building, where it resides today.
The race winner was a Travel Air 5000 named Woolaroc flown by Hollywood movie pilot Art Goebel. His navigator was William V. Davis Jr., a pilot himself who was skilled enough to become a member of the Navy’s first official flight demonstration team, the Three Seahawks. Davis went on to become the second Navy pilot to fly faster than sound, in the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket.
Woolaroc was sponsored by Phillips Petroleum, a company that to this day is known for branding its gasoline, and its gas stations, as “Phillips 66.” Though the Phillips airplane’s name hints of aboriginal Australia, it was actually a construct that stood for woods, lakes and rocks, which company founder Frank Phillips felt characterized his ranch outside Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Woolaroc won the race by finishing three hours ahead of Aloha , the only other entrant to finish.
Aloha , another Breese-Wilde, was the sole Hawaiian entrant. The airplane had three 50-gallon wing and fuselage tanks and carried another 250 gallons loose in the cabin, in 50 five-gallon cans. Navigator Paul Schluter, a merchant marine captain, not only needed to navigate but also had to decant five gallons at a time into the fuselage tank. The airplane started the race thanks to the efforts of pilot Martin Jensen’s wife, who at the last minute had raised $15,000 to pay for the airplane. “God bless that
darling wife of mine,” Jensen said. “I’ll make it or die in the attempt.” He and Schluter did make it—but they reached Honolulu with only four gallons of fuel remaining, after a variety of navigation problems en route.
One of Dole’s hopes had been that his Derby would engender air travel to Hawaii, and in 1935, Pan American Airways cautiously started service between San Francisco and Hawaii and onward to Manila, operating big four-engine Sikorsky and Martin flying boats. One of the young airline’s major concerns was whether memories of the Dole race would discourage potential passengers. In fact, two PAA directors
quit the board rather than be associated with what they feared would become a debacle, since they felt the Dole affair had thoroughly poisoned the Pacific waters.
Though it never did slow airline traffic, the Dole Derby was one of the last major aviation stunts, flown before the pilot community realized that careful preparation, proven equipment and solid skills are more productive than greed, luck and brass balls.
Stephan Wilkinson is Aviation History ’s contributing editor. For further reading he recommends Race to Hawaii by Jason Ryan.
AN AMERICAN GOT THE CHANCE TO SEE GERMANY’S “FLYING MAN” AT WORK ONLY A WEEK BEFORE TRAGEDY STRUCK
BY STEVE WARTENBERGRobert W. Wood, an American studying chemistry and physics at the University of Berlin, received a letter from Otto Lilienthal on August 8, 1896. Lilienthal was the German experimenter who had become known as the “Flying Man” after gaining international attention with his glider flights over the previous five years. His letter was an invitation for Wood to join him the following day in the hills north of Berlin, where Wood said the engineer “was in the habit of exercising every Sunday with his flying machine.”
Wood, 28, had watched Lilienthal make several successful flights with his glider the previous Sunday. He had even attempted two glider flights himself, with mixed results. Lilienthal’s glider exercise “produces an impression that can never be forgotten,” Wood wrote. But the American was busy preparing for a trip to Siberia, so he was unable to join his friend this time. As a result, he was “spared the ordeal of witnessing the dreadful accident which caused his death, the news of which reached Berlin the following evening.”
Wood wrote those words from London on October 16, 1896, part of a
lengthy description of the flights Lilienthal had made the week before his fatal crash. The story, published later that month in the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper, provides one of the most detailed accounts of Lilienthal and his glider flights, and is a reminder of how the German’s work and the hundreds of test flights he made helped advance the science of aeronautics.
Lilienthal’s life and his death inspired Wilbur and Orville Wright to make history a few years later. “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896,” Wilbur Wright said, adding Lilienthal had “accomplished so much.”
Otto Lilienthal was born in 1848 in Anklam, a town in what was then Prussia. As a child he became transfixed by the flight of birds, mesmerized by and jealous of their ability to glide effortlessly across the sky. His fascination with the shape of different birds’ wings would later help him design the wings of his gliders.
After graduating from Berlin’s Royal Technical Academy in 1870 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Lilienthal volunteered for military service and fought in the FrancoPrussian War. Even before that he had started working with his brother, Gustav (born in 1849), to study and build gliders. These early studies dated as far back as 1867.
Lilienthal made his living as a mechanical and construction engineer but remained committed to the study of aeronautics. “My brother and I, who were then young and wholly without means, used to spare from our breakfast, penny by penny, the money to prosecute our investigations; and often the struggle for life compelled us to interrupt them indefinitely,” he said. The brothers became members of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1873 and Otto gave his first public lecture that same year on bird flight.
In 1883 the elder Lilienthal founded a successful company in Berlin that manufactured boilers and steam engines. He later used the factory to build his gliders. In 1889 he published Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, one of the first scientific studies of aeronautics. The Wright brothers would later use calculations from the book as a guide for their early glider designs.
By
rage, with inventors working on bigger, better airships that could fly faster and farther. Lilienthal was not one of them. “I have always regarded the balloon, and the exclusive attention which it so attracted, as a hinderance rather than a help to the development of the art of flight,” he said in an 1894 story in the New York Herald. “If it had never been invented, it is probable that more serious investigations would have been prosecuted toward other solutions of the problem.”
Unlike Lilienthal, many leading scientists of the day remained skeptical about the art of flight. “While we were devoting every moment of our spare time to the solution of the problem, almost everyone in Germany regarded the man who would waste his energies in such unproductive labor as a fool,” Lilienthal told the Herald. Years earlier, a distinguished professor of mathematics at the Berlin Industrial Academy told Lilienthal it would “do no harm” to amuse himself with his glider experiments, “but warned me earnestly against putting any money into them.”
Lilienthal continued to believe that understanding the curved, tapered shape of the wings of flying birds would provide the key to success for manned flight. In Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, Lilienthal wrote that it is “unmistakable that the wide portion of the wing close to the body, which does little work and has little movement, is intended for sustaining, whilst the narrower tips, with their much greater amplitude of movement, have to furnish the tractive power necessary to compensate for the resistance of the bird’s body and for any possible restraining component.”
Never satisfied with theory alone, Lilienthal constructed his first piloted glider in 1891. He called it the Derwitzer Glider. It had curved wings with a span of 23 feet and weighed about 40 pounds. The design was similar to modern hang gliders.
Lilienthal was able to glide about 80 feet in the Derwitzer. Encouraged by this early success, Otto and Gustav built a succession of gliders over the next few years, tinkering with the shape and length of the wings and the materials they used in the quest to make them lighter. They designed nine different models, including a biplane glider and even a version with flapping wings. Early in their experiments, Lilienthal said, he “gave up all efforts toward propulsion, and applied myself to the discovery of the simplest form of wing that would enable me to sail steadily through the air on a gentle incline, and by practice to master the wind, that hereditary
Top: A Lilienthal patent for one of his flying machines, issued in 1895, reveals a depth of detail. He was a painstaking experimenter whose work with gliders had considerable impact on those who followed him. Above: Lilienthal’s brother Gustav (center) helped with the work. After his brother’s death, Gustav turned his attention from gliders to prefabricated housing; he died in 1933.
Wood didn’t have time to get a photograph of the first flight he witnessed, but he captured these images of Lilienthal and his glider on later attempts. He described the flights as “the wild fearless rush of Lilienthal through the air.”
foe of all aeronauts.” He later tinkered with a powered glider, hoping to mimic the flapping of the wings of a bird. From 1893 to 1896 he experimented with a small engine powered by carbonic acid. According to a newspaper story from 1894, the motor “acted with such unexpected vigor that the wings were broken, and the modifications thus shown to be necessary will require some time for their completion.”
Lilienthal made more than 2,000 glider test flights and eventually was flying up to 300 yards
on a regular basis. Newspaper accounts from around the world described his experiments. “He flies stretches of several hundred yards, and feels as much at home sixty feet above ground as he does six feet,” wrote Britain’s Guardian on December 30, 1893. “He can also guide the machine.” An 1894 headline in the Chicago Tribune declared, “He Flies as a Bird.”
The Flying Man described his latest glider model and the art of flying in a newspaper story published in several American newspapers in 1894. By this point his glider was composed primarily of woven muslin stretched over ribs of willow. In addition to the two muslin-covered wings, this glider had rudders for additional stability; a vertical rudder in the back shaped like a palm leaf and a flat, horizontal rudder in front of the wings. Lilienthal sat on a narrow support seat suspended beneath the apparatus, with his head sticking up above the wings. On some gliders Lilienthal could swing each wing forward as he took to the air to maximize lift. He began a flight at the top of a hill, running against the wind. At the edge of the hill he would leap into the air, spreading his wings as wide as possible, and sail majestically across the sky.
Mastering wind currents was a delicate balancing act. “The operator must be able in a moment to transfer the center of gravity so far to the rear as to overcome the action of the air, which might otherwise tend to throw him forward and precipitate him to the earth,” Lilienthal said. “It is not easy to realize in practice at first, but after a short experience the movement becomes almost involuntary.”
Lilienthal sold at least two of his gliders in 1896. One was to the New York Journal, owned by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who never turned down an opportunity for publicity. The newspaper recruited a local athlete, Harry Bodine, who attempted to fly the glider on April 24, 1896, “a date which will hereafter occupy a permanent place in the history of aeronautics,” the Journal proclaimed.
Bodine made several attempts to run, jump and glide, but “the wind struck the wings with such force as to almost throw machine and operator over backward.” Someone then suggested flying the glider as a manned kite. Local illustrator Frank Ver Beck was on hand and he volunteered to pilot the machine. Three strong men were recruited to pull the 50-foot rope attached to the glider. When they started running, “man and machine shot twenty feet into the air. The rope was torn from the hands of the men with lightning velocity, taking particles of flesh from one hand as it went.” Ver Beck remained aloft for a few seconds before returning to earth, “not very slowly or yet very gracefully.” The right wing hit the ground first, breaking a few of the wooden ribs. Had Ver Beck known how to pilot the glider, the Journal story surmised, he could have flown at least 300 yards.
The glider was repaired the next day and the wind was a bit calmer. Bodine made several untethered test flights, gliding only 10 to 15 feet at a time. A day later he soared 75 yards. The new pilot was smitten. “There is an overwhelming ambition to reach the clouds,” Bodine said. “Strangely enough, too, after you leave the earth there is not the least bit of fear.”
Octave Chanute, a French American engineer and aviation pioneer, also purchased a Lilienthal glider. Chanute and three others—one of them an early researcher into manned flight named Augustus M. Herring—assembled the glider on the banks of a lake about 30 miles south of Chicago in June 1896, drawing a crowd as they worked. “The natives waited patiently for the boat to be brought out, thinking a sail on the lake was in prospect,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “A panic struck them when they saw Mr. Herring mount the odd-shaped affair and sail through the air.” Herring made several flights, once gliding as far as 80 feet. According to the
Tribune, Lilienthal’s machines “have found their way to almost every country in Europe and to the United States, but few except the inventor have been able to master the problems of their manipulation.”
Wood visited Lilienthal’s factory in Berlin later that summer and “it was here that I first became really acquainted with him,” he wrote. In a small corner of the boiler and engine factory he saw the Flug Apparat, or flight apparatus department, where several men were assembling a new glider with enormous wings. Lilienthal “explained every detail of its construction, little realizing that he was destined never to put it to actual test.” A week later Wood accompanied Lilienthal, his 14-year-old son and a “manservant” on an expedition to the hills north of Berlin. First they took a train to Neustadt and from there a horsedrawn cart carried the party the 20 miles to Rhinow. Storks flew above and Lilienthal told Wood they were “his teachers.” The party had lunch at an inn in Rhinow where, Wood wrote, Lilienthal’s “arrival always causes a hum of excitement among the peasants.” They loaded a glider, which Lilienthal kept in a local barn, onto the wagon, and drove to the base of the hills. “A more ideal spot for flying could hardly be conceived,” Wood wrote.
There they assembled the glider, and “so perfectly was the machine fitted together that it was impossible to find a loose cord or brace, and the cloth everywhere under such tension that the whole machine rang like a drum when rapped with the knuckles.” They carried the glider up a hill, and then to the top of a 30-foot tower Lilienthal had built. The pilot wore a flannel shirt and knee-length breeches with thickly padded knees. The padding was in case of a hard landing “for in such an emergency he had learned to drop instantly to his knees after striking with his feet….” Over hundreds of flights he had made over the past few years Lilienthal had survived several emergency landings with only minor injuries.
Wood watched from below, camera ready, as
Lilienthal experimented with both single-wing and biplane configurations with his gliders. Almost as impressive was the artificial hill he built for his experiments. Today the hill is the centerpiece of a Berlin park named in his honor.
Lilienthal was flying this glider when his luck ran out on August 9, 1896, one week after Wood’s visit. A gust of wind hit the craft and the aviator lost control, falling 50 feet to the ground. His spine was broken in the crash and Lilienthal died the next day at the age of 48.
Lilienthal took three quick steps forward and was immediately airborne. “He went over my head at a terrific pace, at an elevation of about fifty feet, the wind playing wild tunes on the tense cordage of the machine….” It happened so fast that Wood didn’t have time to take a photograph. And then, in what Wood called a forerunner of the disaster to come, the glider tipped sideways. Lilienthal twisted his body violently in the opposite direction and “brought the machine once more on even keel, and sailed away below me across the fields at the bottom, kicking at the tops of the haycocks as he passed over them.” Wood ran over to Lilienthal, who was out of breath. “Did you see that?” Lilienthal said. “I thought for a moment it was all up with me. I tipped so, then so, and I threw out my legs thus and righted it.”
Wood was very impressed by what he had witnessed. “I have seen high dives and parachute jumps from balloons, and many other feats of skill and daring, but I have never witnessed anything that strung the nerves to such a pitch of excitement or awakened such a feeling of enthusiasm and admiration as the wild fearless rush of Otto Lilienthal through the air,” he wrote.
Undaunted by his near accident, Lilienthal climbed back up the hill again and again to take off and glide down to the grassy pastures below while Wood took photographs. Late in the afternoon, Wood “managed to screw up enough courage to try the machine.” He found it difficult even to hold the 40-pound machine steady as the wind battered the wings. “The first feeling is one of utter helplessness,” Wood wrote.
He stood on the side of the hill far below where Lilienthal had started his flights, trying
to get a feel for the glider. “I ran slowly against the wind, the weight of the machine lightening with each step, and presently felt the lifting force. The next instant my feet were off the ground…the apparatus tipped from side to side a good deal, but I managed to land safely, much to my satisfaction, and immediately determined to order a machine for myself and learn to fly.” Wood’s second attempt was less successful, as one of the wings dragged across the ground and he could not get airborne.
On the trip back to Berlin, Lilienthal discussed his plans with Wood. He hoped someday to construct a flying rink in Berlin “with an artificial slope which could be turned so as to always face the wind. Here people could come and hire machines and learn to use them, commencing with small elevations and gradually going higher up the slope, as practice gave them skill.” The proposed flying rink would serve as a laboratory of sorts, as Lilienthal would learn from the visitors and improve his gliders. He compared the development of the glider to that of the bicycle, saying that since no single person was responsible for the design of the bicycle, it “must be the same with the flying machine.”
A week later, Lilienthal made the trek to Rhinow to continue his weekly test flights. According to newspaper reports, he was about 50 feet in the air on one flight when disaster struck. “Suddenly his machine stopped and Lilienthal threw himself toward the rear,” newspapers reported. “The apparatus turned several somersaults and finally shot down like a rocket, Lilienthal striking the ground head first.” He died a day later, leaving behind a wife and four children. According to legend, his final words were: “Mine is the true inventor’s death; I am satisfied to die in the interest of science.” Another version is: “Sacrifices must be made.” It’s doubtful he said either.
Wood believed his friend had begun work that would ultimately lead to powered flight. He wrote, “If the unfortunate death of the pioneer does not deter others from experimenting along these lines, and it does not seem to me that it should, the results accumulated by him will not be lost and he will not have given up his life in a vain cause.”
Chanute remained as the thread that would connect Lilienthal to the Wright brothers. After his experiments with Lilienthal’s glider, Chanute went on to build gliders of his own design, and eventually met and advised the
WOOD BELIEVED HIS FRIEND HAD BEGUN WORK THAT WOULD LEAD TO POWERED FLIGHT.
Wrights in the years leading up to their first successful flights. “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important,” wrote Wilbur Wright in a posthumous article that appeared in the September 1912 issue of the Aero Club of America Bulletin a few months after his death. “His greatness appeared in every phase of the problem.”
Augustus Herring continued his own research in aviation and on October 22, 1898, supposedly flew a powered glider he had designed. Later he partnered with aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss to form the Herring-Curtiss Company.
Gustav Lilienthal continued to work on their concept for a wing-flapping aircraft. It was
Lilienthal’s work served as an inspiration for others, including Octave Chanute (above). He and Augustus Herring (top) once purchased a Lilienthal glider for their work and Chanute later advised the Wrights. Left: One of only six Lilienthal gliders remaining, this one is at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
never successful. The “other Lilienthal” did find success in the housing industry as one of the pioneers of prefabricated housing. He died in 1933. Wood had a long and successful career as a physics professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. He was one of the inventors of tear gas, became a pioneer in the field of ultraviolet and infrared rays and served as a consultant on the Manhattan Project. Wood never forgot his time with Lilienthal and gave lectures over the years on the man and his machines. In 1907, perhaps inspired by Lilienthal, he tried, unsuccessfully, to build a steam-powered helicopter. Wood died in 1955 after living long enough to see the airplane advance far beyond anything Otto Lilienthal could have imagined.
Steve Wartenberg is a freelance writer based in Columbus, Ohio. A former newspaper reporter, he has written several books. For further reading he recommends Lilienthal’s own Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation: A Contribution Towards a System of Aviation.
INSPIRED BY A SEED, AN AUSTRIAN DESIGNER DEVELOPED A FAMILY OF AIRPLANES— AND THE FIRST WARPLANES
In “Etrich Taube,” artist Russell Smith portrays an Austrian version of the once-ubiquitous monoplane. The word “taube” means “dove” or “pigeon,” but designer Ignaz “Igo” Etrich derived his inspiration from the seed of the Zanonia plant.
Between 1910 and 1915, the aviation scene in Central Europe was dominated by a series of graceful, birdlike airplanes collectively referred to as Tauben (literally, “pigeons,” though English-speakers preferred to call them “doves”).
Most were monoplanes with wings braced by a combination of wires and a girder-like structure underneath the wings called a Brücke (“bridge”). Their most characteristic feature was reflexed or washed-out wingtips that curved upward at the trailing edge, endowing them with inherent stability. In a time when aircraft were usually difficult and often dangerous to control, that alone made the Taube both popular and famous.
Germany built and flew the most Tauben before and during the first year of World War I. Indeed, by the end of 1914, Allied troops tended to use the term “Taube” for every German airplane they saw. Despite its Teutonic association, however, the Taube design originated in AustriaHungary. And in spite of its avian shape, the Taube’s evolutionary process literally grew from a seed.
The Etrich behind the Taube was born in Trutnov, Bohemia—then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—on December 25, 1879. He received his father’s name, Ignaz Etrich, but came to be called Igo. In 1895 the Etrichs, who owned linen mills in two Bohemian towns, became interested in the glider experiments of German aviator Otto Lilienthal (see the feature starting on page 44). Ignaz sent his son to school that year to learn the
fundamentals of aviation, and then sent him to the Technical College in Leipzig.
In August 1896, Lilienthal was fatally injured in a glider accident. Determined to continue his experiments, the Etrichs purchased two gliders in Berlin, but in 1898 they began work on their own design. It featured a welded steel-tube frame, a tall three-wheeled undercarriage and a pilot’s seat, but the glider proved heavy and unstable. During a test flight in 1901, it crashed on the runway, injuring Igo. Disappointed, Ignaz Etrich returned to managing his linen factory, but in 1903 he hired Franz Xaver Wels, a fencing teacher who built box kites and monoplane flying models, to assist his son with the gliders.
The most influential aeronautical literature Etrich and Wels found was a small 50-page book published in March 1897 by a professor from Hamburg, Friedrich Ahlborn. Entitled Über die Stabilität der Flugapparate (On the Stability of Flying Machines), it criticized Lilienthal’s gliders, which depended on the pilot’s skill to stay in the air. Ahlborn concluded that practical flight required a self-stabilizing aircraft. He also claimed that the shape necessary to achieve auto-stability already existed, in the form of the seed of a Javanese vine, Zanonia macrocarpa (later reclassified as Alsomitra macrocarpa).
In January 1904, Wels and the Etrichs contacted Ahlborn, who sent them a Zanonia seed. The seed itself lay in the axis of two winglike appendages, very near their leading edges. The trailing edges of the “wings” were reflexed, or curved upward. The seed’s natural design allowed it to glide clear of its parent plant before taking root, and it inspired Etrich to develop the concept for a man-carrying flying machine based on the same shape.
Using paper and glue, the Etrichs and Wels began to construct larger and larger models, then began work on a tailless glider with bamboo wings, covered with cellulose-doped fabric. Sometime in mid-1904 the glider astonished spectators—and its constructors, for that matter—when it sailed along for 1,640 feet before gently touching down for a perfect landing. Etrich’s glider went on to make hundreds of unmanned flights, proving Ahlborn’s auto-stability theory.
On March 3, 1905, Etrich applied for an Austrian patent on his “Zanonia wing.” Patent No.23465, granted on October 1, covered the
wing’s geometry as well as other details, such as the ratio between two wing-mounted contrarotating pusher propellers and the engine that was to power them—even though none of this had been installed. The patent also included a crude means of varying the pitch of Etrich’s differential-thrust propellers. Igo Etrich now installed a 3½-hp Laurin und Klement motorcycle engine on the glider to power two propellers. When he tested the Motor-Gleiter (motor-glider), however, he found it too unstable to fly.
Etrich and Wels continued work on a man-carrying aircraft. With the addition of two vertical pylons and buttressing cables to stiffen the wings, the glider flew on October 2, 1906, with a 154-pound sandbag in place of a pilot. Following three flawless unmanned flights, Wels got into the cockpit. He hoped to control the flying machine by leaning, but that proved neither possible nor, in this case, necessary. The tailless wing skidded to a perfect landing after a flight of 492 feet. A second flight increased the distance to 590 feet, and a third reached 850.
Etrich built a second Motor-Gleiter in the winter of 1906-1907. He originally intended to use a 50-hp Antoinette engine to power a single chain-driven pusher propeller, but Wels claimed that would be “too much power” and recommended a 24-hp Antoinette instead. Not entirely satisfied with the design, Etrich mounted a rectangular elevator in front of the wing, operated by a pair of foot pedals. One hand wheel warped the wingtips for lateral control, while another adjusted the propeller’s pitch. For all that work, however, the Motor-Gleiter never flew. The 24-hp engine on which Wels had insisted proved insufficient to get it off the ground, causing a growing friction between him and Etrich.
At Wels’ suggestion, early in 1908 Ignaz Etrich bought his son a workshop in Vienna. At about that same time the Etrich Textile Company got a substantial contract from Russia and Igo spent the next six months establishing a mill there. Upon returning to Vienna, he discovered that Wels had modified the Motor-Gleiter into a tailless wing again, with the front stabilizer removed and the engine driving a tractor propeller by means of an extension shaft. Two pylons anchored the supporting guy wires, and the pilot was moved aft, between two large wheels. In this form, the plane was given several designations, such as Etrich I, Sperling (sparrow) and Praterspatz (references to the sparrows that inhabited Vienna’s Prater Park, where
flight testing was conducted). The engine was still too weak, and Etrich reported that “flights were without results because the apparatus was directionally unstable…and ran into trees!” As one consequence of the failures, Etrich moved his experiments outside Vienna, to an airfield at Wiener Neustadt.
In the fall of 1908 Etrich sent Wels to France to obtain a “stronger” engine and also to appraise Orville and Wilbur Wright’s Flyer, which Wilbur had been demonstrating in Paris. Wels was so impressed that after returning to Vienna he began work on a similar biplane using
Top: In 1908 Etrich and his partner Franz Xaver Wels were still working with gliders as they sought an engine that would power their designs. Center: Etrich and Wels learned about the aerodynamic properties of the Zanonia seed from a small book by German professor Friedrich Ahlborn. Bottom: Etrich
Motor-Gleiter
While Etrich was in Moscow on family business in 1908, Wels worked on a monoplane that was variously called the Wels-Etrich, the Etrich I and the “Praterspatz” (a reference to the sparrows in Prater Park, Vienna, where it was test-flown). It flew poorly—and was a factor leading to the dissolution of Etrich’s and Wels’ partnership.
ailerons instead of the Wrights’ wing-warping system. When Etrich returned from Russia, he was incensed to learn that Wels had abandoned the Zanonia-seed concept against his wishes. He stopped work on the biplane, dismissed Wels on July 20, 1909, and replaced him with a fellow Bohemian, Karl Illner.
By this time, Etrich had concluded that his flying wings could not maintain their stability with engines installed. Therefore, in 1907 he gave his Etrich I a fuselage with triangular vertical stabilizers above and below a larger horizontal stabilizer. The airplane remained underpowered, so in October 1909 Etrich bought a 40-hp Clerget inline water-cooled engine that proved sufficient.
Somehow, amid all his aviation activity, Etrich found time for other pursuits—on November 23, 1909, he married Miss Louise Fink-Bartholomei.
The honeymoon was brief, however, for six days later, with the Clerget installed in his revised aircraft, Etrich achieved his first real flight in it, traveling 2¾ miles at 43.5 mph at an altitude of 82 feet. In so doing, he was credited with designing and piloting the first Austrian airplane capable of sustained flight.
Toward the end of 1909, Etrich began construction of a completely new airplane. Dubbed Etrich II but also called the Taube—the first airplane to bear the name—it had a wingspan of 45 feet and was 34 feet long. The Clerget provided the power. This time, Etrich mounted the modified Zanonia wing on a slender fuselage with two tandem cockpits and a fan-shaped horizontal stabilizing surface, the end of which could be warped to serve as an elevator. A triangular vertical stabilizer and rudder sat above the horizontal stabilizer; in most later Taubes, a second such arrangement was installed beneath the stabilizer as well.
Testing began on April 10, 1910. The first take-
off happened so quickly that it startled Etrich, who consequently made a rough landing that damaged the landing gear and injured his back. Realizing that his clumsy reaction was largely due to the strain of designing and flying aircraft over the past several years, Etrich later remarked, “I now left all of the work to Illner.” Illner took the repaired Taube up for a short flight on April 20. The next day, he flew it for eight minutes, including “curves and eights.” Four days later, Illner made an official flight in the plane that earned him his pilot’s certificate—Austrian license No.3.
Almost immediately the Taube began setting records, starting with an endurance flight of 25 minutes on April 30. On May 15 the Taube broke all Austrian records by staying up at an altitude of 300 meters (984 feet) for one hour, eight minutes. Two days later Illner flew the 28 miles from Wiener Neustadt to Vienna in 32 minutes at altitudes ranging from 984 to 1,312 feet, then returned in 30 minutes. On the next day Etrich’s wife, Louise, went up as a passenger.
Igo Etrich followed his creation with a succession of refinements. Etrich III was also called the Möwe (seagull). Etrich IV was called a Taube and a license for its manufacture was sold to Viennese-born Edmund E. Rumpler in Germany. On July 7, 1910, Etrich licensed Camillo Castiglioni’s Motor-Luftfahrzeug Gesellschaft to build the engines and instruments for five Etrich IV Taubes, while Jacob Lohner & Co. in Vienna built the airframes. He subsequently sold licenses to various manufacturers in Russia, France, Britain and the United States, but of those countries, only France produced a single Taube. Italy bought two examples of Etrich X.
According to Etrich, his agreement with Rumpler stipulated that its aircraft were to be called Etrich-Rumpler Taubes, but Rumpler violated the deal, claiming that “although Etrich
THE FIRST TAKEOFF HAPPENED SO QUICKLY THAT IT STARTLED ETRICH, WHO MADE A ROUGH LANDING.
employed the right principles, Rumpler had to do a lot to make the Taube a practical aircraft.” Rumpler built his versions in Germany—where Etrich held no patents—and became the most prolific single manufacturer of Taubes. Other German companies, such as Gotha, Jatho, Jeannin, Harlan and Albatros, built Taubes of their own. Variations of the Taube were being built and exported to Italy, Russia, Spain, Britain and China.
Etrich touted the unique Etrich VII Limousin, built in Trutnov, as the world’s first airliner. The pilot and three passengers sat in tandem within a streamlined aluminum-braced fuselage, with Cellon windows providing a beautiful view for all. Drippings and noise from the engine probably made the interior less than pleasant, however, and in the interest of allowing the pilot to concentrate on his flying, his seat was later
Above: A Rumpler-Taube takes off in Germany sometime in 1913 or 1914. Edmund Rumpler violated his business agreement with Etrich when he started putting his name first when naming his airplanes. Center: Etrich promoted his bird-like Limousin as the world’s first airliner. Bottom: In September 1913 Alfred Friedrich flew his Taube on a “pleasure trip” from Berlin to London. Igo Etrich flew the final leg of the flight as a passenger.
repositioned in an open cockpit behind the wing. On August 16, 1912, the Limousin set two world records when Austrian 2nd Lt. Heinrich Bier flew it with three passengers at a speed of 65.74 mph and, in a second flight that day, reached 69.44 mph with two passengers.
Edmund Rumpler built an enclosed Limousin of his own, which he exhibited at the Berlin Aero Show between April 3 and 14, 1912. Not quite as streamlined as Etrich’s creation, the Rumpler Limousin enclosed its pilot and passenger inside an aluminum-and-plywood cabin with four mica windows and a door for entry. Another difference between the two Limousins was that the pilot of Rumpler’s version had practically no forward visibility.
In 1912, Etrich set up factories in Germany but was disappointed by his failure to interest the Germans in his Limousin, or in an unusual three-seat design that he called the Schwalbe. The latter, powered by a 60-hp Austro-Daimler engine, had a scimitar-shaped wing and spars made of steel tube, but it had neither ailerons nor wing-warping. The Taubes’ stability notwithstanding, it is easy to guess why an airplane whose controls were limited to rudder and elevators would not appeal to pilots. Moreover, by that time the whole Taube concept, with the inherent drag-producing weaknesses of its design, was becoming obsolete.
Etrich built several more Taubes for his flying school in Johannisthal, Germany, in 1913. The first of them, bearing the German registration
Top: A German Etrich Taube appears amazingly birdlike when viewed from below. Graceful as it appeared, by the time this photo was taken in 1918 the airplane was obsolete. Center: A display at the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre in New Zealand captures the sense of a Taube in combat. Bottom: Austrians prepare to take their RumplerEindecker aloft in 1912.
number D.2 and its builder’s name prominently displayed under the wing, made a publicity flight from Berlin to London, with interim stops in Paris and Brussels. Alfred Friedrich was the pilot and Etrich flew as a passenger for part of the journey, including its final landing at Hendon on September 12, 1913. During Friedrich’s aerial linking of capitals, the British government issued its first diplomatic air clearance to him, under the provisions of the Aerial Navigation Acts of 1911 and 1913. Replying to the question, “Object of Voyage,” Friedrich wrote: “Pleasure Trip!”
D uring 1913, Lohner and other Taube manufacturers tried to increase the speed of their aircraft by means of streamlining and more powerful engines, but such efforts only underscored the drawbacks in Etrich’s concept. By the end of 1912, the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Air Service realized that the Taube had reached the limits of its potential.
Given the records set by the stable, reliable Taube , it is small wonder, albeit ironic, that an airplane named after a dove would also establish several “firsts” in aerial warfare. When Italian forces invaded the Turkish-held North African provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica on October 5, 1911, they brought with them a small collection of aircraft, including two Lohner-built Etrich Taubes (called Colomba, or doves, by the Italians). On October 23, Captain Carlo Piazza flew a Blériot XI on the first wartime reconnaissance mission in a heavier-than-air craft. Then, on November 1, Sub-Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti flew one of the Colomba over the Turkish camp at Ain Zara and dropped 17 pounds of Cipelli grenades on the enemy—the first bombing attack ever made by an airplane.
When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, half the aircraft in the German air service were of Taube design. Taubes played a vital, if overrated, role in the German victory at Tannenberg in August 1914 (biplanes were also involved), while Gunther Plüschow and his Rumpler Taube gained fame by being the entire German air service during the Japanese siege of
Tsingtao from August to November 1914. On August 30, 2nd Lt. Ferdinand von Hiddesen, piloting a Rumpler Taube, carried out the first bombing attack on an enemy capital when he threw two bombs over the Quai de Valmy in Paris, killing two people. On October 25, 1914, 2nd Lt. Karl Caspar and 1st Lt. Werner Roos flew a Gotha Taube across the English Channel to drop the first bomb on English soil—which exploded harmlessly in a garden in Dover.
A more dubious distinction was held by another German Taube on August 25, 1914, when it was attacked by a B.E.2a flown by Lieutenant Hubert D. Harvey-Kelly of No. 2 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps. After an exchange of small-arms fire, the Taube crew landed and ran into the woods. Harvey-Kelly also landed and burned the Taube before taking off, having scored the first air-to-air victory (of sorts) by a British airman.
The beginnings of aerial combat sounded the death-knell of the military Taube, as speed and maneuverability began to assert their importance over stability. A few Lohner-built Etrich Taubes saw limited Austro-Hungarian service in the war’s first months, but by December 1914, when the Germans declared their Taubes “not usable for Front service,” the Austro-Hungarians had already relegated them to the training role, where their forgiving flight characteristics were still a valuable asset. The Taube’s military career had been brief—but long enough for it to make its mark on aerial warfare.
After the war Igo Etrich lived in the Czechoslovak Republic, which included his native Bohemia. At an exhibition in Prague in
1926, he unveiled the Etrich VIII, also called the Sport-Taube , a high-wing, enclosed-cockpit monoplane whose only real connection to the old Taube lay in the flared tips of its cantilever-structure wings. During a flight in 1929, it managed a top speed of 93 mph with only a 45-hp Salmson radial engine. Nevertheless, it never went into production and Etrich abandoned development in 1931. (A flyable reconstruction of the Sport-Taube was completed in 1979 and can now be seen at the National Technical Museum in Prague-Kbely.) A final attempt by Etrich to use his Zanonia-seed wing resulted in a fanciful-looking, giant flying boat with three such wings in a tandem arrangement that he conceived in 1930, but it appeared in model form only.
World War II and its aftermath brought traumatic changes to Europe, including Czechoslovakia. In 1946, Etrich left the country to live in Bavaria. He moved to Freilassing near Salzburg, Austria, in 1950, and was made honorary president of the Austrian Aero-Club in 1954. In 1955, he became a naturalized West German citizen. Even at age 85, Igo Etrich often indulged his love of flying by going up in sailplanes, albeit as a passenger. He died in Salzburg on February 4, 1967, and was buried there. Appropriately, the tombstone was carved in the shape of his Taube.
Jon Guttman is the senior editor for Military History and Wild West magazines. For further reading he recommends Taube, Dove of War, by Col. John A. de Vries and The Taube at War, by Peter Grosz.
Mike Fithian’s reproduction of a 1912 Etrich Taube now thrills airshow audiences at New York’s Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Fithian based his airplane on one flown by his grandfather in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Air Service before the start of World War I.
A TAUBE DROPPED THE FIRST BOMB ON ENGLISH SOIL, WHICH EXPLODED IN A GARDEN IN DOVER.
The Tupolev airliner rolled to a stop in Moscow on August 19, 1955. Aboard was KGB agent Evgeny Brik, back home for a vacation from his assignment in Canada. Glancing out a window, Brik saw a black limousine with curtained windows pull up and stop next t o the airplane. “As he descended the steps leading from the aircraft he was astonished to see Nikolai Alekseyevich Korznikov step from the car,” wrote Donald G. Mahar in Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada. Korznikov was a senior KGB officer who was responsible for the operations of KGB illegals all over the world. “Korznikov greeted him politely and motioned for him to enter the vehicle.”
Brik fought to remain calm. He knew that the most likely fate for a spy who provided information to a western intelligence service was likely a brutal interrogation followed by a bullet to the back of the head. He had reasons for concern. While living in Canada under the alias of David Soboloff, Brik had confessed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Security Service that he had been running a Soviet spy ring inside the top-secret Avro Arrow CF-105 interceptor program. He had requested asylum in Canada.
The KGB knew all this, because RCMP officer James Douglas Morrison had tipped them off in exchange for money to pay his gambling debts.
A.V. Roe Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of the British Hawker-Siddeley Group, was created in 1945 from a merger of Victory Aircraft and several other aircraft companies that had been established during World War II to produce warplanes for the conflict in Europe. A consortium of government and businesspeople set up a subsidiary company, Avro Canada, to design and build civilian jet transports and a jet interceptor. Avro Canada’s twin-jet CF-100 Canuck—Canada’s first homegrown combat aircraft—made its debut flight in January 1950, but the country’s military realized it needed a better interceptor than the subsonic Canuck to counter the growing Soviet threat in the wake of the USSR’s introduction of the long-range Tupolev TU-4 heavy bomber and the explosion of its own atomic bomb in 1949. Design work began i n 1953 on the airplane that would become the Avro Arrow and the Orenda PS.13 Iroquois engines that would power it, based on specifications
Left: Evgeny Brik called himself David Soboloff when he spied on Canada for the Soviets. Right: One of his targets was the Avro Arrow interceptor. Here the Canadian Snowbirds overfly a full-scale reproduction.
Canada received a warning about Soviet intentions in 1945 when cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected and revealed the extent of the USSR’s espionage activities in Canada. Gouzenko spoke to the press with his identify concealed by a hood (top) but a resourceful photographer caught him hoodless on the street in 1975.
provided by the government. “What the airstaff were asking for was the moon,” chief engineer Jim Floyd told author Greig Stewart in 1988. “In short, they required a two-place, twin-engined aircraft with all-weather reliability, long range, short take-off and landing, an internal weapons compartment as large as the bomb bay of a B-29, and a supersonic maneuverability of 2G at Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet, without any loss of speed or altitude—a requirement which has been met by few, if any, service aircraft even to this day. In addition, it was to be guided by the most sophisticated automatic flight and fire control system ever envisaged.” When the Canadian government issued its operational requirements in 1953, a Royal Canadian Air Force evaluation team concluded that no aircraft then on the drawing boards could meet the required specifications. Avro Canada rose to the challenge with the Arrow, a d elta wing, M ach 2-capable interceptor with what was then an advanced flyby-wire system. The Arrow was envisioned to counter the threat of Soviet bombers armed with nuclear bombs flying over the North Pole to attack North America.
As America would be the Soviets’ main target for a nuclear attack, the United States supported Avro Canada throughout the Arrow’s design, testing and manufacturing s tages. The assistance including providing 19 Pratt & Whitney J-75 jet engines, giving Avro Canada access to supersonic wind tunnels, lending it a Boeing B-47 Stratojet for flight testing the Iroquois as well as providing a research facility in Tennessee to test the engines. The U.S. also let Avro Canada use the missile launch facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, to test large free flight models of the airplane.
Avro rolled out the first CF-105 on October 4, 1957. As though to underscore the Cold War tensions behind the airplane, that was also the day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. The Arrow, powered by the American Pratt & Whitneys, made its first flight on March 25, 1958, with the program’s chief test pilot, Janusz Żurakowski, at the controls. The first CF-105 was followed by four more, all fitted with the American engines. With test pilot Spud
Potocki flying, Arrow 25204 reached a speed of Mach 1.98 (1,320 mph) while in a 60-degree climb on November 11, 1958. Potocki pronounced himself impressed, telling the authors of the 1980 book Avro Arrow, “I’m not sure that the average person would realize just how really advanced the Arrow was…. The Arrow ‘fly by wire’ control system was easily the most advanced in the world in 1958.”
Avro expected the airplane’s performance would only improve once equipped with the homegrown engines. The Iroquois was intended to be in the 30,000-lb. thrust range (compared to the 26,500 lbs. delivered by the Pratt & Whitneys on afterburners) and was being designed by Orenda, the gas turbine division of Avro Canada. The first example of the MK 2 Arrows, RL-206, was intended to receive the Iroquois engines and was nearly complete on the day the program was canceled in 1959.
But by then, it appears the Arrow had already been hopelessly compromised by Soviet spies.
In 1945 Canadian intelligence had received a wake-up call about the dangers of Soviet espionage. That September, Igor Gouzenko, a 26-year-old cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected and turned over files that laid bare evidence of massive Soviet infiltration of western intelligence services, as well as secrets from industrial, political and research circles. As individuals identified in Gouzenko’s documents were arrested and cross-examined, their testimony revealed links to other Soviet spies, who were then picked up secretly to avoid tipping off the embassy.
Gouzenko’s information revealed the extent of the Soviet desire to unlock secrets of U.S. and Canadian defenses. One spy exposed by Gouzenko’s information had given the Soviets samples of U-235 bomb grade fissionable material as well as many nuclear secrets. Another man the security services arrested was a member of the Canadian parliament.
The Soviets added one more spy to their Canadian roster in 1951, when Evgeny Brik arrived. He had lived in New York City as a child, but returned to the USSR during World War II with his father, a former official with the Soviet trade mission. Trained by the KGB as a deep cover agent and given the identity of David Soboloff, Brik had instructions to establish an identity in Canada in preparation for an intended move to New York City to serve as the radio and signals communication operator for established KGB illegal Rudolf Abel.
Instead, Brik fell in love with the wife of a Canadian soldier and persuaded his superiors that it would be best for him to stay in Canada. In 1953 he went to the RCMP, revealed himself as a Russian spy and requested asylum in Canada. He agreed to serve as a double agent. His handler would be Terry Guernsey, the RCMP officer in charge of counterintelligence operations.
One of the Soviet spies Brik handled had the code name “Lind”—his true identity remains unknown—who was running spy rings in Avro Canada and at the Orenda engine plant. In 1955, with Guernsey’s knowledge, Brik handed his KGB handler more than five pounds of top-secret documents from Avro that he had obtained from the mysterious Lind. The haul included airframe and engine drawings for the Arrow as well as photographs and test data. Guernsey allowed the document transfer to take place because the RCMP wanted to observe the spy cell in operation before they shut it down, even if it meant compromising the Arrow. According to
Guernsey, that wouldn’t matter. Someone in government had told him that the Arrow “would be obsolete in few years anyway.”
If there’s any doubt that the Arrow was hopelessly compromised, in October 1958, only seven months after the Arrow’s first flight, Avro Canada’s Jim Floyd was asked by his boss, Fred Smye, to arrange a tour for a group of Soviet aircraft engineers. Smye told Floyd to show the Soviets Avro’s design and manufacturing facilities and “answer any questions they may have.”
At first, F loyd said, he refused, but Smye told him he would find someone else to give the briefing. Floyd asked if he should withhold performance specifications. “They already know,” responded Smye. In the end, Floyd gave the tour of the Arrow facilities, keeping his information as vague as possible, and Orenda Engines’ chief engineer, Charles Grinyer, gave a tour of the engine plant. It is almost certain that the order came down from Canada’s Department of Defence Production. Why this was allowed to happen remains a mystery.
The announcement came only a few months later, at 11:00 a.m. on February 2 0, 1959, in the massive Avro Canada Plant beside what i s now Toronto Pearson International Airport, and in the Orenda Engine plant across t he road. All work on the A rrow and Iroquois engines was to stop. The government had canceled the program.
Two months later the five complete and flying Arrows and the 37 aircraft in various stages of assembly were ordered destroyed, along with all test data, engineering drawings and all Orenda Iroquois engines and parts. Avro couldn’t survive the cancellation, which threw thousands out of work and forced a substantial talent drain to the United States and other countries. A.V. Roe Canada was out of business by 1962.
The cancellation of the Arrow remains a controversial subject in Canada. It appears that some members of the government felt the program was taking too big a bite out of the defense budget at the expense of the army and navy. Some have speculated that the United States, preferring that Canada purchase American aircraft, was behind the cancellation, but that seems unlikely based on the amount of support it had already provided. It’s also possible the Soviets had other people inside the government who were working to influence the program’s cancellation.
Hoping to keep his team intact, in the summer of 1959 Floyd arranged to have around 30 of his best engineers go to the United States to work on the space program. Floyd himself left Avro to work on the British-French Concorde project. Without the Arrow to replace it, the CF-100 remains to this day Canada’s only mass-produced, homegrown interceptor.
After he returned to Moscow, Evgeny “David Soboloff” Brik endured 15 years in a Soviet prison, some of that time in solitary confinement, followed by several more years in a work camp. Brik did not know why he escaped execution but felt that it may have been due to the turmoil created by the death of Stalin two years before his trial. Perhaps high-ranking KGB officers did not wish to be associated with an exposed operation or felt that an execution may have focused too much attention on them. In 1991 Brik showed up at the British Embassy in Lithuania and asked if he could return to Canada. He lived in Ottawa until his death at the age of 89 in 2011.
Did the Soviets incorporate any of the knowledge they gained from the Arrow into their own designs? It’s possible. For instance, they may have pirated some of the Arrow’s boundary layer
In the spring of 1996, an article in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported that Evgeny Brik, a.k.a. David Soboloff, had returned to Canada a few years earlier and was living a quiet life in Canada’s capital. As nothing had been heard of Brik since he had returned to Moscow some 40 years earlier, the RCMP Security & Intelligence service (S&I) and Britain’s MI-5, which was also aware of the case, assumed that the KGB had ordered him killed.
I had first read about Brik/Soboloff in John Sawatsky’s 1982 book, For Services Rendered. The book had caused quite a stir in Ottawa by revealing the RCMP’s cover-up of the treason committed by one of their officers, Corporal James Morrison, who had betrayed Brik to the KGB. In the summer of 1996 I was researching the Avro Arrow project and I stopped at the Ottawa Citizen to question publisher Russell Mills, who had been helping Soboloff. Mills offered to pass on my questions but warned me that a reply was doubtful, as the former spy didn’t speak to many people.
I heard nothing for months. Then one afternoon in the fall of 1996 my phone rang. When I answered, a voice I didn’t recognize asked for me by name. “You may know me as David Soboloff,” he said. I took the receiver away from my ear and stared at it in disbelief.
I asked my caller why he didn’t have a Russian accent and he replied that he had spent many years in New York while growing up. He wanted to know why I wanted to speak to him, and I told him I was interested in Soviet spy operations inside the Avro Arrow project. He confirmed that he had smuggled out five pounds of airframe and engine drawings, test data, photographs and other documents before he was betrayed, and that soon after, he had heard that 11 engineers who were working on the project had left Canada.
Trying to confirm my caller’s identify, I asked him about his Canadian handler, Corporal Charlie Sweeny. He told me that Sweeny had once brought a gun to his basement apartment to give him. Soboloff had told him he didn’t need a gun and Sweeny responded by firing the weapon into a phone book, perhaps as some kind of demonstration. He also told me that Sweeny liked his whiskey, specifically Grand Macnish.
Soboloff then asked me why I was interested in events that had happened so long ago. “Why am I interested?” I replied. “You were a Russian spy in a top secret defense project in the middle of the Cold War.” He said it was not a big deal and that his phone card was about to run out. “Please call me collect anytime, I’ll pay for it,” I said, and then the line went dead.
As soon as I got off the phone, I called my father, who had worked in the same branch of counterintelligence as Sweeny. “Dad, you knew Charlie Sweeny, right?” I asked.
“Yes, I did,” he replied.
“Did he like whiskey?”
“Yeah, why?”
“What kind?”
“Grand Macnish.”
“In that case, “I said, “I think I’ve just spoken to David Soboloff.” I never heard from Soboloff again. —M.M.
and the Arrow’s cancellation remains a bone of contention to this day.
research and used it to design air intakes for their own aircraft, but the answer to that question—like the identity of the mysterious Lind— remains undetermined.
Little remains of the Avro Arrow today. Much that escaped destruction survived because Avro Canada employees removed parts from the company without authorization. Today, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa has an Arrow nose section, along with other bits and pieces and an Iroquois engine (see “Artifact,” page 9). Those artifacts, along with a Pratt & Whitney J-75 and a damaged Iroquois engine at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, are almost all that remains of an aircraft that by many accounts would have put Canada in the forefront of military aviation—and as a result became the target of Soviet
Mike McAllister is a retired millwright and a certified rescue diver with an interest in history. He has written for the Discovery Channel, Eye Spy, Diver magazine and other publications. He was a member of the Toronto Aerospace Museum for 10 years and belongs to the Canadian Harvard Aircraft Association Dive Recovery Team. For further reading he recommends Shutting Down the National Dream: A.V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow by Greig Stewart.
The Great Air Race, a chronicle of a gutsy 1919 American aerial competition, is a labor of love for its author, but what truly makes it engrossing and thought-provoking is that John Lancaster doesn’t soft-peddle the race’s problematic aspects.
The transcontinental competition was largely the creation of Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell. Resourceful in deploying air power during World War I, he remained passionately committed to the belief that the United States’ “long-term security was at risk,” and that only an autonomous air force— separate from the army—could allay that risk. Mitchell felt that a race pitting the best military pilots in a coast-to-coast contest would dazzle Americans and their political leaders and further his plans for aviation’s future.
The participants included sixty-three aircraft and sixty-three-plus participants (the “plus” were passengers on the planes, mostly mechanics and navigators—and one dog). The (all-male, except for the dog) entrants were divided into two teams, one starting on Long
Island and the other in San Francisco. The goal of the race was to fly cross-country—roughly, 2,700 miles—and then back to the pilots’ original takeoff site. As swiftly as possible, naturally. (The winner’s time: around three days.) The aircraft—biplanes—were dangerous. Constructed of wood and fabric, their instrument panels “usually included a compass [frequently unreliable], an altimeter, an airspeed indicator and sometimes a turn indicator….” This was primitive technology—but it was early in aviation history. Also, airfields were rudimentary at best, aviation maps didn’t cover most of the routes and weather forecasts were frequently wrong. And the airplanes didn’t carry parachutes.
Did Mitchell’s airborne extravaganza help achieve his dream of an independent air force? Not really. The Air Force didn’t become a discrete service until 1947, 11 years after Mitchell’s death. Moreover, the race had tragic results: nine participants died; fifty-four planes crashed, several more than once. My conclusion: One of the few good things to come out of the great air race is Lancaster’s The Great Air Race. —Howard Schneider
The author of The Great Air Race talked to Aviation History about his book. Here’s an excerpt:
The race was really a story worth telling because it illuminated so much about aviation in the period between World War I and Lindbergh. I think that’s kind of a murky area of aviation history for a lot of people.
There were all kinds of mishaps. I think my favorite example was a guy named Brailey Gish, who was a World War I pilot, although he never flew in combat. He was a former track star at the University of Washington, and he shattered his legs on his first night training flight in France right after he got over there. And he spent a year at Walter Reed army hospital in D.C., and he checked himself out of the hospital so he could fly the race. This guy crashed at least three times, maybe four. I’ve lost count, but he had everything go wrong. I mean, just a few hours out of Long Island his engine erupted in flames. And his helmet caught on fire. It was insane, but he was a great pilot. He puts the thing into a dive, blows out the flames, pancakes to a landing in a ravine, overturns, and makes his way— along with this passenger, who happened to be the French defense attaché—to Rochester, New York, catches a train back to Long Island and restarts the race, and crashes several more times after that.
Trixie [a participant in the race who flew as a passenger with pilot Belvin Maynard] was a seven-month-old German police dog that had been brought back from the battlefield in Europe. And yes, she did in fact fly the whole race and was, I would say, for the several weeks of the ride, the most famous dog in America. The press just loved her.
This transcript has been edited for publication. To see the entire interview online, go to historynet.com/John-Lancaster-interview
Valérie André was a Strasbourg-born neurosurgeon, helicopter pilot, parachutist and French general, and if there were one word to describe her, it might be “resourceful.” What word better fits the person Charles Morgan Evans details in his biography? Through an event-filled life, André dodged Nazi efforts to ship her to a concentration camp as she pursued her medical education; faced sexism and other obstacles to train as a neurosurgeon and the pilot of sometimes balky Hiller helicopters in Indochina for the French military’s Service de Santé des Armées (health service); flew 129 combat missions and retrieved 168 casualties—many so badly wounded they had to be stabilized before evacuation—amid enemy fire, difficult terrain and logistical problems; and somehow found time to qualify as a parachutist.
Even when challenged by amoebic dysentery, lack of respect for her officer’s rank and accomplishments, and barriers created to prevent her from returning to combat flying, André bypassed official channels to join a medical rescue team in Algeria and eventually flew the Sud Alouette II, Sikorsky H-19 and Sikorsky H-34. After serving in the Women’s Military Medical Corps of France and as chief medical officer at Villacoublay air base outside of Paris, as well as racking up decorations such as the Croix de Guerre, André became France’s first female general in 1976. Although the book’s narrative style can be a little bumpy at times, readers are likely to come away with a deep admiration for a physician, pilot and officer (now aged 101) with an unswerving devotion to humanitarian service and to the full participation of women in France’s armed forces. —Elizabeth
FoxwellJohn Andreas Olsen is a colonel in the Norwegian Air Force who previously assembled two highly regarded air power anthologies: Airpower Reborn: The Strategic Concepts of John Warden and John Boyd (2015) and Airpower Applied: U.S., NATO, and Israeli Combat Experience (2017). These books focused on theory and history, respectively, while the new compilation offers essays on personalities. The subjects are “twelve especially influential airmen” who served in the U.S. Air Force or its precursors.
Starting with Billy Mitchell and progressing chronologically to include such prominent figures as Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay, the book also covers lesser-known leaders like Air Force Lt. Gen. Glenn Kent, a nonflying staff officer and
Valérie André— Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire
By Charles Morgan Evans, Stackpole Books, 2023, $34.95From Billy Mitchell to Dave Deptula
later a RAND research fellow who made major contributions to Cold War strategy. In about 30 pages, each profile examines how the individual’s ideas developed and then impacted the application of air power. These accounts are engagingly written by accomplished historians and think-tank analysts like Richard Hallion, Phillip Meilinger, Dik Daso and Benjamin Lambeth.
Taken collectively, the mini-biographies convey much of the history of the air power story. World War II and Operation Desert Storm loom large through many of the chapters as examples of Western air power’s success against conventional forces, a contrast to the frustrations of modern limited war, where air power’s role is still being debated. As with the prior books in the trilogy, these latest essays contain lessons about air power’s past that should help military and civilian officials shape its future. This book is a great addition to the genre and should be required reading for air commanders and policymakers. —Philip Handleman
hicles, Zaloga knows better than most that even the best tank is nothing more than an inert heap of metal without fuel. The effectiveness of the oil campaign was clearly demonstrated in Germany’s December 1944 offensive in the Ardennes, popularly known as the “Battle of the Bulge,” which ran out of steam largely because the Wehrmacht ran out of gas. —Robert
GuttmanToday people have become accustomed to traveling anywhere in the world rapidly and inexpensively. It is frequently forgotten that such freedom of movement is a relatively recent phenomenon. Only a few decades ago the expression “jet set” was widely used to describe the wealthy and privileged because only they could afford to fly wherever they wanted on jet airliners. Perhaps more than any other invention, the advent of the jet engine and the resulting revolution in travel has made the world smaller and more accessible.
byEven the best-trained and best-equipped army cannot function without fuel. During World War II that fact was clearly recognized by Allied war planners, particularly General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ strategic bombing elements in Europe. Commencing in the spring of 1944, both Royal Air Force and USAAF bombers initiated a campaign specifically aimed at destroying the Third Reich’s sources of oil. That it succeeded is reflected by the fact that, between 1943 and the beginning of 1945, German oil production was reduced by more than 70 percent.
Following the Wehrmacht’s failure to capture the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus, Germany had two main sources of oil, the petroleum resources at Ploesti, Romania, and its own facilities for producing synthetic oil out of coal. In The Oil Campaign 1944-45, Steven Zaloga recounts the dedicated air campaign to eliminate Germany’s home fuel stocks, an effort that contributed immeasurably toward winning the war.
The Birth of Modern Air Power
by James S. Corum,Germany also recognized the importance of the Allied attacks against its oil production and increased the numbers of fighters and anti-aircraft batteries deployed specifically to defend those facilities. What came of that confrontation may have been the most important aerial battle of attrition since the 1940 Battle of Britain.
The strategic importance of the oil campaign was clearly not lost on the book’s author. One of the world’s foremost authorities on armored ve-
British writer H.G. Wells characterized mankind as “the tool-using, fire-making animal.” Perhaps no individual suited that description better than fellow Englishman Frank Whittle, who received his patent for the turbojet in 1930. His revolutionary new powerplant not only offered the potential of producing many times the power of conventional engines, but it did so with far fewer moving parts. However, as Graham Hoyland’s book reveals, Whittle had to overcome more than his share of obstacles to get his invention off the ground, working almost completely on his own and without official or financial support. His German rival, Hans von Ohain, stated that had Whittle received the support that he deserved, British jet engine technology would have been six years ahead of Germany’s and World War II might never even have happened.
Jet recounts the fascinating story of the engine’s development. Beyond that, however, the author explains the extent to which it has affected the nature of the world we live in today. Indeed, the jet engine deserves a place alongside nuclear energy and computer technology as one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century.
The Battle of Verdun is usually considered history’s first air campaign, its purpose summed up by General Henri Philippe Pétain’s brief, succinct order to Commandant Jean-Baptiste Marie Charles Tricornot de Rose on February 28, 1916: “Rose, I am blind! Sweep the skies for me!” What followed were months of struggle between the
Most airplanes are useless without an airport, and SimAirport (SA) gives us a glimpse into the world of airport design (requires Windows 7, 4GB RAM, GeForce 550 or Radeon 5000 class video card, simairport.com).
This is a deep simulation, like the popular SimCity game that models city creation and management. SimAirport lets players start with a completely clean slate and a budget. Players do it all: setting down foundations for buildings, designing runway positions and placement, constructing terminals, hiring staff, and purchasing airline contracts and organizing
AIRWARE ground level and higher. The underground layers support such things as fuel pipelines and luggage transport and luggage carousels. Above ground, players can build multistory terminals with restaurants and recreational areas. The airport also needs numerous restrooms, organized queues at gates, information systems like flight schedule displays and public address systems, and of course the now ubiquitous security checkpoints. Runways must be large enough to support different kinds of aircraft and players need to juggle the number of runways and number of flights while staggering the schedule to balance the demands on airport resources.
Aside from the need to plan the physical airport, the game also adds several strategic elements. There’s a financial model for fuel purchases and sales and a research and development tree for unlocking various technologies to support ongoing airport upgrades such as improved computer or communications systems.
flight schedules. It’s an impressive level of detail that could easily drown players. It’s fortunate SA includes several highly recommended tutorials to introduce players to various concepts and operations in the sim.
The ultimate goal is to build a profitable airport, and the key to doing this is balancing efficiency and customer satisfaction as the airport grows and supports more activity. This is easier said than done. A busy airport is not always efficient or customer-centric, as real-world travelers that have ever suffered delays at Newark have learned.
Sometimes, it feels like the game throws too much at the player. Details include multiple levels of elevation so players can build underground, at
earliest French and German fighters to eliminate the other side’s reconnaissance aircraft while allowing their own to gather intelligence unmolested. As necessity bred a newer generation of warplanes, armies began taking them more seriously and evolved a wider range of tasks for them to perform in direct support of the ground forces. Military aviation historian James S. Corum maintains that the first culmination of these technical advances in which reconnaissance, fighter and bomber aircraft became an integrated, coordinated component in operations was the Allied offensive he analyzes in Bloody April 1917.
Conceived by General Robert Nivelle, the French Grand Offensive involved a concurrent
It’s sometimes frustrating to assemble things like luggage systems and get everything working correctly, but also quite rewarding to put an airport into action and see how the simulation models the passengers flowing into the reception area, moving through ticketing and security, stopping at a newsstand or restaurant and finally waiting at a departure gate for a flight. Airport ratings and public opinion are modeled too, and unhappy customers and dissatisfied airlines forced to endure delays will make success difficult.
SA can be overwhelming, but despite not explicitly telegraphing any historical connections, it does a good job being thought provoking. It makes players sympathetic to inconveniences at an airport that’s under construction to add a terminal for more flights or changing layouts to improve foot traffic efficiency. Good simulations educate, and this one does. —Bernard Dy
British thrust to distract the Germans, after which the French artillery— the only factor over which Nivelle had any expertise when he was elevated into a high command—would break the German defenses in two days. The disastrous attack that followed only showed what a poor strategist Nivelle was, creating a crisis of mass mutinies throughout the French army. The air war was orchestrated with unprecedented air-ground cooperation on both sides, but in spite of the introduction of such outstanding aircraft as the Bristol F.2 Fighter and the S.E.5a, it was the Germans who prevailed. Nevertheless, the campaign yielded many lessons that guided further developments in military aviation over the next year. The author covers many of them, but strangely overlooks the United States’ declaration of war in April 1917 and the German air service’s anticipatory response with the stepped-up fighter building effort called the “Amerika Programme.” The trove of illustrations is marred by a few misidentifications, but in spite of those errors, Bloody April 1917 provides an interesting alternate perspective on the development of aerial warcraft. —Jon
GuttmanCan you identify this eccentric-looking civil aircraft?
Who designed the Antoinette?
Can you match the pre-1914 airplane with its designer?
1. America 2.
1. Which aircraft was interned by the Swiss in June 1918 and is still on display?
A. Breguet 14B2
C. Nieuport 28
B. DFW C.V
D. De Havilland DH-4
2. What airplane landed in Portugal on November 9, 1943— and then escaped internment?
A. Boeing B-17F
C. Consolidated B-24D
B. Lockheed P-38F
D. Douglas C-47
3. Georgia Rebel, the first American warplane to force land in Sweden on July 24, 1943, was what type of aircraft?
A. Boeing B-17F
C. Consolidated B-24H
A. Alberto Santos-Dumont
B. Léon Levavasseur
C. Aerial Experiment Association
D. British and Colonial Aeroplane Company
E. Thomas Scott Baldwin
F. T.O.M. Sopwith
G. Glenn Curtiss
H. Kiyotake Shigeno
I. Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke
J. Igor Sikorsky
B. Lockheed P-38F
D. Republic P-47D
4. What German aircraft’s internment in April 1944 became the target of every spy in Switzerland?
A. Heinkel He-111H
C. Messerschmitt Me-110G
B. Junkers Ju-88G
D. Dornier Do-217N
5. Which U.S. aircraft, interned at Vladivostok, was reverse engineered into a series of Soviet bombers?
A. North American B-25
C. Martin B-26
B. Consolidated B-24
D. Boeing B-29
For more about this issue’s MYSTERY SHIP, visit historynet.com/mystery-ship-Summer2023
In August 1943, a highly classified US Army Air Force unit, code-named the “Wright Project,” departed Langley Field for Guadalcanal in the South Pacific to join the fight against the Empire of Japan. Operating independently, under sealed orders drafted at the highest levels of Army Air Force, the Wright Project was unique, both in terms of the war-fighting capabilities provided by classified systems the ten B-24 Liberators of this small group of airmen brought to the war, and in the success these “crash-built” technologies allowed. The Wright airmen would fly only at night, usually as lone hunters of enemy ships. In so doing they would pave the way for the United States to enter and dominate the United a new dimension of war in the air for generations to come.
North American BT-14 Yale trainers of the U.S. Army Air Forces line up in formation at Randolph Field in Texas. It appears the photograph was taken before the United States entered World War II. The BT-14 was an upgrade of the BT-9, with a more powerful 450-hp Pratt & Whitney engine and an all-metal fuselage. Cadets would advance to the BT-14 after learning the fundamentals of flying in the Stearman PT-13 Kaydet. Future fighter pilots could move on to the AT-6 Texan, while those destined for bombers might transition to the Curtiss-Wright AT-9 or the Beechcraft AT-10 to develop the skills necessary for multi-engine craft.
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