Wings (37 page)

At 11.01 on the morning of 9 August 1945 Leonard Cheshire was in the nose of an American B-29 bomber, heading for the Japanese city of Nagasaki. ‘Suddenly,’ he
wrote later, ‘it was there.’ In the distance, a diamond shard of intense light expanded into a sheet of brilliance. Cheshire was flying as an official British observer, but due to the
pilot’s reluctance to endanger his passenger, he did not get as close to the seat of the explosion as he would have liked. What he did see was a vast cloud of smoke, ash and dust rising out
of a boiling sea of fire. It had an ‘evil kind of luminous quality . . . the colour of sulphur’.
¹

‘Fat Man’, the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki, killed about 35,000 people outright. ‘Little Boy’, dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima, killed
70,000–80,000 people. Neither wreaked as much destruction as the conventional bombs dropped on Tokyo five months earlier, which started a firestorm that took about 100,000 lives. It was the
nature of the new weapon and its obvious potential that was significant. The world had entered the nuclear age and the shape of military aviation would also change to
accommodate this new and awesome fact.

A second, more benign development would also affect profoundly the nature of flying, both military and civil. Before the Second World War had reached its end it was clear that the future
belonged to jets. Britain had been at the forefront of this development, thanks largely to the efforts of one man. Frank Whittle was born in 1907 in Earlsdon, a suburb of Coventry, a city with a
long tradition of engineering. His father, Moses, was a foreman in a machine-tool factory, who left to start his own business. When it failed, young Frank was forced to leave school. He spent much
of his time learning about gas and steam engines in the local library. He applied to join the RAF as an apprentice, but, at a shade over five feet tall, did not meet the regulation height. He
persisted, and was let in on his third attempt. It was a tribute to the Trenchard system that his talents were recognized and in 1928 Frank Whittle was sent off to Cranwell as an officer cadet.

He won a reputation as a stunt pilot. It was his intellectual qualities, though, that attracted most attention. In his graduation thesis he came up with the ideas that would make his name and
ultimately transform flight. He asserted that for aeroplanes to reach speeds of 500 mph or faster they would have to fly at much greater heights than they did at present, to take advantage of the
reduced drag resulting from lower air
density. Neither propellers nor piston engines functioned well in thin air. A new kind of engine was needed.

The notion of a jet engine had been around for some years. The principle was relatively simple. Air was compressed, fuel was fed into it and ignited. The resulting explosion produces gases,
which, if directed backwards, generate thrust. The great problem was how to compress the air in the first place.

Eighteen months after writing his thesis Whittle came up with a solution. He calculated that there could be enough energy produced at the explosive stage to not only provide thrust but to also
to turn a turbine which would drive an air compressor. Thus was born the ‘turbojet’ and Whittle took out a patent in 1930. He passed the idea on to the Air Ministry, which showed little
interest. The patent lapsed.

Four years later Whittle was at Cambridge, sponsored by the RAF, and resumed work on his ideas. He re-filed the patents, and since the university had no aeronautical laboratory facilities he
sought outside backers to take his research forward. He joined forces with two retired RAF officers and, with assistance from investment bankers, in March 1936 he formed British Power Jets. After
pausing to take a first-class honours degree, Whittle got to work designing a prototype. In April 1937 the first turbojet was ready for testing, and by the following year its fan, which controlled
the thrust, was measured revolving at speeds of up to 12,000 revolutions per minute.

At a University Air Squadron dinner Whittle met Henry Tizard, the chairman of the Government’s Aeronautical Research Committee. Tizard quickly grasped the importance
of the invention and pressed it on the Air Ministry. With tragicomic predictability the bureaucrats reacted with suspicion rather than gratitude, invoking the Official Secrets Act and
the fact that Whittle was a serving officer to bilk him of a fair price for his invention. By the time work started on an airframe, manufactured by the Gloster Aircraft Company (chosen on the basis
that they did not have many orders on their books at the time) and with an engine made by Rover, the Second World War had started and the project did not get the energy and resources it required.
An experimental Gloster fighter flew in May 1941, attracting Winston Churchill’s enthusiasm and demands for development to be speeded up. Other priorities intervened, however, and the war was
almost over by the time the first Gloster Meteors took to the skies.

The Germans had already developed their own jet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe (Swallow). It had a beautiful, streamlined design and its two underslung engines could speed it through
the air at about 560 mph – too fast, initially, for its guns to be brought to bear effectively. It went into service in July 1944 and by the end of the war was reckoned to have shot down
about 540 Allied aircraft.

The first Meteors arrived at Fighter Command’s 616 Squadron at the same time and went into action the following month against V-1s, shooting down fourteen by the time the flying bomb
threat was over. The earliest version suffered from several design defects and it was not until the end of January 1945 that it was fit for service in Europe. The Meteor and Schwalbe never met in
aerial combat and the forty-six
German aircraft claimed on behalf of the British jet were all destroyed in ground attacks.

Refinements and improvements ironed out the initial problems. By 1946 sixteen squadrons were equipped with Meteors. The Government had handed over the Whittle jet to the Americans during the
war, but they had been slow to develop it. In 1946 Britain found itself at the leading edge of a transforming technology and it was anxious to advertise its dominance and to reap the commercial
benefits.

Jets were all about speed. In late 1945 Group Captain H. J. ‘Willie’ Wilson roared over Herne Bay in Kent at 606 mph to establish a new world air speed record. The Americans set
about mounting a challenge with the Lockheed Shooting Star. To push the prize beyond their reach, the RAF’s High Speed Flight, founded in June 1946 to explore the boundaries of jet power,
made another attempt to ratchet up the record.

Jet test pilots found themselves in a similar situation to that of the first aviation pioneers. The aircraft were immeasurably more sophisticated and powerful. The element of risk, however
– of not knowing what your aircraft might or might not do – was just as acute. The consequences if things went wrong were even more drastic. In the case of engine failure, the canvas,
wood and wire contraptions of forty years before might well flutter to earth without mishap. Jets plummeted, and ejector seats were not fitted in the early models.

The uncertainties were related by Squadron Leader Bill Waterton, a handlebar-mustachioed, pre-war RAF professional and wartime fighter pilot, who, together with the HSF
commander Group Captain Teddy Donaldson, flew Meteors on the next attempt on the speed record in the summer of 1946. Huge publicity surrounded the event, fanned by the Air Ministry,
which was anxious to raise a glow of national pride from the ashes of post-war ennui. Success depended on optimum weather conditions – the warmer the better. August was cool and drizzly and
there were endless postponements. Eventually, on the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1946, conditions brightened enough for the pair to have a go. Donaldson took off first, at 5.45 p.m., and
landed fourteen minutes later. Waterton followed at eleven minutes past six. The international regulations proscribed that the test course was short and the altitude was minimal, less than 1,100
feet. Waterton’s Meteor Mark 4 was ‘a lovely craft, easy to fly, docile, and as smooth as silk’. That was at relatively low speeds. As it approached 600 miles an hour the port
wing tended to dip and no amount of trimming seemed able to cure the fault.

At first things went well. ‘I opened the throttles fully to 15,200 revolutions per minute,’ he wrote later. ‘The engines bit into the densely packed air, chewed and swallowed
it, then spat it out at supersonic speed through the red-hot tails of the jet pipe nozzles. I felt tensely confident.’ Then, as ‘the air speed indicator crawled up to 580.
The
cow’s putting port wing down as usual . . . Behave yourself you slut!
’
²

As he broke through the 600 mph mark the wing dug in deeper. It took all the strength in his arms to keep the stick straight and all the weight of his fourteen stones to jam on the rudder and
counteract the leftward drift. After a sweaty few
seconds he roared inland at Brighton and touched down, content to have survived. Later he learned that Donaldson had raised
the bar to 616 mph. Waterton had managed to record a speed only two miles an hour behind him. Success did not mollify his indignation at the pressure he felt had been heaped on him to take
unnecessary risks. The attempt, he judged, might easily have ended in ‘prestige-shattering, disastrous failure’. The Meteor went on to be a staple of the post-war RAF, but safety was
never one of its virtues. Nearly 900 were lost and 450 pilots killed in its years of service.

Jets claimed a fair number of lives on the ground. There were no whirring propellers to advertise danger, which sometimes had fatal consequences for the unwary. Colin Walker Downes, who we last
heard of watching the dogfights over London in 1940, recalled how ‘one day, while standing outside the squadron dispersal during a Meteor ground run, I saw an airman walk across the front of
the aircraft and in an instant disappear, as if in a magic show, followed by a loud bang as the impeller turbine disintegrated. Running over to the aircraft as the fitter shut down the engines, we
found no protective grills over the engine intakes and no sign of the airman, apart from one black shoe lying on the ground.’
³

Flying jets and flying propeller-driven fighters were different experiences. Walker Downes had done both and knew which he preferred. ‘Gone was the rasping, clattering noise of the twelve
cylinders combined with the propeller noise as the propeller heaved the aircraft into the air with the blade tips approaching the speed of sound, before the aircraft settled
down to a lengthy climb to altitude. Instead the surge of the jet thrust projected the aircraft rapidly into the air and the rate of climb to altitude was initially quite
breathtaking. With the pilot insulated within the pressurized cockpit, the whine of the jet engine penetrating the flying helmet was muted and soon ignored, and the flight was smooth and seemingly
effortless.’

It seemed to Downes that this was the closest that man had got to experiencing the true sensation of flight. Flying through the tropopause, the atmospheric threshold to the stratosphere, the
effects of weather ceased and ‘one could view one’s progress through space, marked by the condensation trails of the jet engine as it traced a broad white chalk line across the sky
against a deep azure board. At such times, if flying alone with the radio silent, there was an incredible feeling of not being part of this world, especially if above cloud, and regardless of
one’s religious beliefs, the effect was one of wonder.’
⁴

In America the end of the war came as a relief rather than a cause for celebration. The country retreated into one of its intermittent bouts of isolationism, from which it was only reluctantly
aroused when the extent of Soviet hostility towards the West was recognized. Even so, Washington was reluctant to share nuclear technology with its old ally, and Britain was forced to make its own
way into the atomic age. By the end of 1947 a nuclear arms programme was under way to develop an independent bomb. The RAF would have the job of delivering it. It was now all too clear which enemy
the bombs would be aimed at. The partnership between the free and
communist worlds had started to fall apart even before victory was declared. Stalin had made it clear that
the Soviet Union would be expanding eastwards. A dark red shadow fell across Eastern Europe. West Berlin alone stood out. In 1948 Moscow began to choke off the road and rail routes into the city,
leaving its 2 million inhabitants in the free area the choice of starvation or amalgamation with their communist neighbours.

It was the occasion for the West’s first major stand in what by now had become known as the Cold War. From June onwards, American, British and French aircraft established a
Luftbrücke
(air bridge) to relieve the besieged inhabitants. The RAF flew into Gatow in the British sector of West Berlin with Coastal Command Sunderlands, putting down on the
Havelsee lake nearby. The USAAF used Templehof in the centre. They established an astonishingly efficient delivery system that was a triumph of air traffic control. At Gatow, four-engined Yorks
(the replacement for the Lancasters) and Dakotas landed every three minutes, stayed on the ground for a maximum of less than an hour and then returned to one of the supply axes to reload. The
landing schedule was so tight that any aircraft unable to touch down on its first attempt had to return to its base to maintain the smooth rhythm of deliveries. In the ten months it took the West
to persuade the Soviets to call off the siege, aircraft flew 27,000 flights and delivered 235,000 tons of freight. Thanks to Allied air power, a great battle of wills had been won. It was only the
first of a continuous and titanic contest of resources, technology, skill and nerve that would last for forty more years, with on one side the forces of the North
Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949, and on the other the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.