The airplane that did the most to turn the tide of the war.

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More than 55000 Packard Merlins were built. To get the factory switched to the production of the engine, RR had to come up with more than $130million (US) at the time.

The engine was used to power the P-51 and at at least two marks of the P-40.

That is an example of Allied co-operation, not british dependence as such
 
I am not sure the factory was "switched" so much as a new factory was equipped to build Merlins managed/run by Packard.
It may need more research. Packard was still building cars into 1942 and was also expanding production of their V-2500 engine used in motor torpedo boats.
 
I agree about the Allied co-op. However, the second order for Allison engine Mustangs, the MkIA was ordered/paid for by the US Govt, not the British. This is why the US Govt held back the last 55(?) Mustangs after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Just FYI.
 

Packard built around 55,000 cars in 1942 (hadn't converted to full war production yet) and also built around 14,000 of the marine engines during the war, the Marine engine was a derivative of their old Aircraft engine. Packard was not one of the volume car makers but rather one of (if not the) luxury US carmaker of time.

120 million sounds a little strange.
Ford only got 14.3 million to build a factory to make R-2800s, that did cover the new building on a bare plot of ground and the factory was sized to make 800 engines a month.
The Initial Packard contract for Merlins was 9000 engines at 800 per month.
Allison got about 15,000,000 for under 1000 engines in 1939.
120 million for 6000 Merlins?

I would note that for Ford I have no idea if the 14.3 million covered the machinery in the factory or if that was a separate contract (or series of contracts). I do know that in many factories built/expanded during WW II the US gov (army or navy) owned the machinery and leased it (dollar a year?) to the company building the parts/engines. I worked at a P & W plant for a few years and lots of machinery still had brass tags stating it was property of the US gov and a serial number.

A lot of times writers get a little sloppy quoting contract prices without giving any details as to what the contract covered.

120 million just to change a factory over sounds a bit out of line. 120 million to set up a factory and pay for 6000 engines is still expensive but a lot more reasonable.
 
Horsepucky!! You sound like a "theoretical" aviator. It requires the APTITUDE AND MOTIVATION TO LEARN! I've been there and seen it. The armed forces have some of the best school systems in the country, and an incredible ability to detect the presence of aptitude in the absence of knowledge. I spent my entire hitch in the Navy involved one way or another in training, and have seen educational accomplishments the academic world would be hard put to match. Try turning immature, uncertain high school dropouts into competent, confident, responsible aviation electronics tecnicians in 40 weeks. And helping most of them get their GED in the process. I "fast tracked" that course in 32 weeks and got tapped to help out at night school where the less educated guys got help with their classwork and their GEDs. People who came in somewhat shaky at grade school arithmetic went out able to calculate inductive and capacitive reactance, resonant frequencies, and standing wave ratios. (This last was a great hit, since our class wasn't coed, and the WAVEs classroom was in a separate building.)
In time of war (Vietnam in my case) the service can't be as picky about qualifications, and high school dropouts were welcome in the enlisted ranks, as well as Cadets with some college, but not a Bachelor's degree trickling into flight training and the NFO program.
In my years of flight instructing after the Navy, I helped many an undereducated pilot wannabe teach themselves what they needed to know to be a professional aviator. All it takes is motivation and effort.
You didn't have to bring an education, you could get it along the way. The Navy dental surgeon that extracted my impacted wisdom teeth (a Navy Captain, BTW) enlisted in 1936 as a high school dropout, became an Aviation Ordnanceman, then a tail gunner on the old biplane Helldiver, then to flight school as an AVCAD, then Wildcats on Enterprise and Henderson Field. After the war he took an LOA and went to dental school (on Uncle's dime), and when he did my mouth, he was the most senior Captain in the Dental Corps, and held a PHD in some unrelated field he'd acquired along the way. In 1973, I met one of the last active enlisted pilots in the Navy, another high school dropout, who was flying as captain on a McD C-9 with his commanding officer, a newly frocked Rear Admiral (his son-in-law) in the FO seat. He was trained in WWII, still on active duty, and almost didn't have enough room on the sleeve of his MCPO jacket for all his hashmarks. He had more "fruit salad" on his jacket than the Admiral.
I worked in the world of fighter crew training, and we we had more liberal arts majors come through than math and science. Those techy types tended to get sucked into the nuclear power program. All that college degree does is tell Uncle that MAYBE you have the perseverance to stick with the program all the way, and MAYBE you might develop the couthness to be an officer and a genteman.
Cheers,
Wes
 
What was the main competitor to the C-47? If there was a series of misfortunes and the DC-3 was off the table - which aircraft would have stepped up?
 
I think the answer is how much effort it takes. The RAF were desperate for pilots, so of course people who already were pilots were given priority but not every holder of a private pilots license is a natural fighter pilot or even can be trained to be one. Many of the Polish pilots would not pass any entrance exam to the RAF simply because they couldn't read write or speak English, a problem in a force controlled by radios but ways were found to work around it.
 
Greyman said:
What was the main competitor to the C-47? If there was a series of misfortunes and the DC-3 was off the table - which aircraft would have stepped up?
Click to expand...
parsifal said:
probably not the answer you want, but IMO it would be the DC-2
Click to expand...

Interesting question. The DC-3 was pretty much a wide body DC-2 with a bit longer wings. SO if the DC-3 is off the table is the DC-2 still on it?

There was no direct competitor to the DC-3 in US (and as seen by the number of licence agreements for the DC-2 and DC-3 there wasn't much else in the rest of the world either).
The closest was the Lockheed 14/18 series and Lockheed, rather than go head to head with Douglas chose to emphasis speed over payload. It did lead to the Hudson and Ventura bombers so it was a pretty good airplane but you sure weren't going to stuff a jeep in it no matter how big a door you put in the side.
It took Curtiss several years to decide to get back in the airliner game and when they did they tried to go bigger than the DC-3

Design work started in 1937 and it was intended for the larger airplane with pressure cabin market like the original DC-4 (no relation to the common DC-4/C-54 and it over reached the market, too big and expensive for the airlines to gamble on) and Boeing Stratoliner (Fat body B-17). With no DC-3 on the table I am not sure if these would be either as the DC-3 was first airliner that could make money hauling passengers without a government subsidy or mail contract (sort of the same thing). The DC-2 may have been a good airplane but with only one seat on each side of the aisle it could NOT make enough money to pay for the fuel. oil, crew wages (both air and ground), pay back the bank for the purchase loan and pay any stockholders/investors. Would the larger airplanes been built without some good indication that you could make money with them?

Lockheed may have been trying to sell the faster planes on the idea of more flights per day or week? or the faster plane got the mail contracts?

DC-2/3 hit a sweet spot with the available engines and the performance, Faster than nearly everything else (transports anyway) with good payload using a pair of 730 hp engines (to start with) and was quite amenable to more powerful engines (of the same general size/weight). The DC-3 used about 900hp engines to start.
 
Greyman said:
What was the main competitor to the C-47? If there was a series of misfortunes and the DC-3 was off the table - which aircraft would have stepped up?
Click to expand...

In terms of design class, IMO it would have been the C-46. IIRC the C-46 actually carried more and was a little more robust but was tougher to maintain, a little harder to fly and cost more to operate, a reason why it did not do well in the post-war years..
 
As a cargo plane it did pretty good. As a passenger plane???
The R-2800s were pretty thirsty and if you couldn't fill the extra seats?

The US also dumped about 500 4 engine C-54/DC-4s on the market which took over the upper end of the airline market for a while.
 
Getting back to the original discussion - which aircraft did the most to win the war, I had a few thoughts.

First, I think we should again at least acknowledge that we have to consider the merits and significance of the Theaters and time periods which were or weren't significant.

  1. Early war in Europe (German blitz on Poland and the low Countries, Battle of France, Greece and Yugoslavia etc.*)
  2. The BoB (as distinct from the above, because it was on such a large scale and so important)
  3. Mediterranean Theater and Italy
  4. The Pacific (mainly early to mid-war is significant for this discussion, as after 1943 it's a done deal)
  5. The CBI
  6. The Russian Front (early Barbarossa etc.)
  7. The Russian Front (middle - Stalingrad, Moscow)
  8. The Russian Front (late - post Kursk)
  9. The battle of the Atlantic (early, middle and late)
  10. Northwest Europe and the bombing campaign (late)
So this is a separate debate - before we can determine a 'most important' plane we'd have to agree on a Theater and a timeframe, and I don't think we have that agreement. That's why I would say you'd have to have several, SBD for example is only relevant to the Pacific Theater. I suspect we here as (mostly) Anglophones are tending to downplay the importance of the Russian Front way too much. But it is also true that most of us here just don't know enough about the Russian Front to have nearly as detailed and nuanced a discussion as we can about WW2 in Western Europe, the Pacific and the Med. So I'm not sure where that leaves us.

But I thought we should at least recognize that this is the higher level part of the debate, so that we don't confuse it with the technical and etc. discussions about specific Theaters. We need to separate the two arguments to make any sense of it all.

Personally I couldn't pick one Theater and say it mattered the most but I would prioritize them as 1,2,6,4,7,3,9,10,5,8, and I think 7,2,4,3 and maybe 8 were really potential candidates for tipping points in the war, in that order.

* I know BoB happens in the middle of all this so to speak but I see it as distinct
 
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Ok second, I'd like to drill down a bit more into the Pacific War and play with it a bit on the meta-level.

With regard to the Japanese, you'll notice a distinct contrast between their early, middle and late war

Early war Japanese conquests in the Pacific were characterized by highly effective use of overwhelming force and surprise. The catastrophes at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia showed their ability to dominate by leveraging their assets and advantages, planning well, achieving surprise, achieving and sustaining early momentum, and essentially fighting a type of 'Blitzkrieg*.

In other words not attrition warfare. If the Japanese were able to get enough of their better quality warships and flying machines in action, and had time to plan, they were able to dominate Allied forces. There was a certain degree of panic among Allied forces and legends of Japanese invincibility - such as tales about the Zero climbing at 5,000 ft per minute and so forth. Japanese bombers and torpedo planes seemed to sink ships right and left, and their destroyers were dominating night surface combat.

This started to peter out after they were met with both more comparable equipment and numbers, and far better planning and preparation. I.e. if they had lined up planes on Henderson Field the way they had at Clark Field Guadalcanal would have been quickly lost. That is why Coral Sea and Milne Bay were so important, and even the tiny battle at Wake Island - they were not really major victories, more like draws, but they represented a faltering of the Japanese juggernaught and punctured the veil of their invincibility. It represented a stabilization of the slide into catastrophe for the Allies and a shift of the war from Blitzkrieg* where the Japanese had some hope of victory, toward attrition warfare where the US in particular would ultimately and inevitably have a decisive advantage.

But of course it wasn't settled overnight. Even long after Midway the Japanese were still dealing brutal knockout blows to the Allies such as we saw in surface actions like Savo Island etc.

This is why I think Midway was indeed important however because if the Japanese had fought the campaign in the Solomons with 6 aircraft carriers and an extra 50 or 100 aircrews, they may have been close to that Blitzkrieg level again. It was not enough to have fighters and pilots that could take on their Japanese equivalents with some possibility of success, but they had to be managed well and you needed close enough to parity in numbers - quantity as well as quality - to fight in a more attrition like manner, i.e. not getting bodyslammed by a Japanese Blitzkrieg.

If the Japanese had won Midway they would have still had the Strategic initiative and the ability to concentrate their forces in a decisive manner and probably win some more stunning victories ala the Philippines. That is why I would not rule out Hawaii falling if Midway had been taken.


* I am using this term as shorthand, in the broad or popular sense of the word.
 
So the Third question is then, the big what - if.

I know this gets us in trouble sometimes because some folks get too literal minded about it. We know the Japanese lost Midway and lost the war in 1945 etc. But this is just some speculation. What is the Japanese had won Midway and maybe one or two other battles after that, and the Americans had been forced to recoil into a defensive posture.

Well that means the Japanese would have been able to consolidate some of their gains closer to home, places with some Strategic resources and geographical value like Formosa, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It would have given them some time to build up their forces, maybe even improve training (the feasibility of this is an open question for me maybe someone else knows in detail) But what else could they have done?

One thing that seems likely to me is that they could have gone back into the Indian Ocean and done some real damage.

Reading about their short spring 1942 Indian Ocean / Ceylon raid, it looks like in a very short time they did some very serious 'Blitzkrieg' damage to the (mostly) British forces there, and if they hadn't had their hands so full dealing with the Yanks in the Pacific, I wonder how much Strategic damage they could have done in the Indian Ocean to British supply lines ?

From the way that raid went down, it looks like at that time in 1942 the Royal Navy was not ready to handle the IJN. The surface fleets were about equal, with a slight advantage for the British (5 battleships, 7 cruisers and 15 destroyers for the Royal Navy, plus about 30 frigates, armed merchantmen etc., with 4 battleships, 7 cruisers, and 19 destroyers for the IJN). But the Japanese had enough of an advantage in aircraft (both qualitatively and numerically at about 3-1 in planes) with 5 aircraft carriers vs. 3 for the British.

The results were very lopsided, and reminiscent of the opening Blitzkrieg assault of the IJN - the Royal Navy lost 1 carrier sunk, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 'armed merchant cruiser', 1 corvette, 1 sloop, 23 merchant ships and 40 aircraft. The Japanese lost ~20 aircraft. Certainly no devastating attrition of aircrew.

In the air, the Royal Navy's compliment of Fairey Fulmars, Swordfish, and Albacores, supported by land based Blenheim's and Hurricanes, proved incapable of withstanding the onslaught of Japanese air raids and unable to sink Japanese ships. Some examples -

A flight of Blenheim's makes a strike on the IJN fleet, they lose 5 planes and score zero hits. Would SBD's have been more useful there? I think so. For that matter A-20's might have gotten a couple of hits.

During the infamous Easter Sunday raid, according to the Wiki the RAF and FAA lost 27 aircraft, mostly Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost five. The wiki claims that 90% of the Japanese dive bombers hit their targets. That means they were relatively free of danger because they did not by comparison do quite that well at Midway or in the Solomons.

If the Japanese had been able to continue this kind of action a bit more, and if the Germans had won El Alamein which he have also been discussing, it might have gotten ... dicey for the Allies. Certainly Winston Churchill thought so:

"The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black. "



So IMO, the TL : DR is - if the Japanese had decisively won at Midway, they may very well have won in the Solomons, and bought themselves some time to do real damage to British forces in the Indian Ocean, perhaps capturing Ceylon, thereby causing serious Strategic Injury to the British War Effort. And perhaps affecting the outcome of the War.

A lot of big ifs there of course, and we know this did not actually happen. Just some food for thought.
 
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If the IJN had managed a crushing defeat of the USN at Midway, and had gone on to invade Midway, and had IJN landings had succeeded, I think it would have delayed the outcome but not changed it.

See the carrier production data here: Grim Economic Realities

In a year the USN would have had parity with the IJN, the economics simply did not favor the IJN. As long as Lend Lease kept moving to Russia, and Russia stayed in the war, the outcome was envitable when the US entered.
 
Passenger but eventually both. For the extra it could carry it still wasn't as cost effective as the C-47/DC-3. I've also read somewhere that Douglas had better product support and a better supply chain.
 
Perhaps, but it would have cost some time. If the US had lost, it's probably not until late 43 that they can challenge Japan again. By then, some better Japanese hardware might be available t contend with new US ships and planes.

I think the biggest error the Japanese made was not giving a clear warning before Pearl Harbor. If they had done that, say declared war one day beforehand, they might have lost a few more planes but I suspect they would have still pulled off the victory. And the US might not have been so determined to crush them and might have made some kind of settlement if they had lost Midway which easily could have happened if fickle luck had gone the other way. Because of the surprise attack nature of Pearl Harbor though due to the effect on US public opinion (magnified by US government propaganda of course) there was no way the US were going to settle anything less than total victory and occupation of Japan so yes I do think the outcome of the war was inevitable. But it may not have ended in 1945. And the US may have taken far heavier casualties.

Big what if, but IF the US had been knocked back to a defensive posture for say 6 months or a year starting in mid 1942, Strategic bombing of Japan would have been delayed. Pressure on Japanese merchant fleets would have eased substantially. Perhaps the Japanese could have got some of their much newer and better kit into action a bit sooner, including new carrier designs like the Taihō class Carrier which could accommodate the impressive 350 mile per hour, 20mm cannon armed, 1800 mile range Aichi B7A. The Akagi probably could have carried them too if it hadn't been sunk at Midway, it's elevators were big enough. And perhaps, who knows, with bigger carriers they might have been able to get N1K1 fighters carrier adapted to help protect them.

I know that is a lot of 'what-ifs' of course. But certainly they could have gotten more of their second generation land based fighters deployed at least.

The big question I guess is, how much of the slow down in Japanese war production (quality and quantity) was due to American military pressure such as Strategic bombing, submarine and commerce raiding and so on.
 

What is it with you? Think I was born yesterday?..
What the Hell is a THEORETICAL AVIATOR? …. Require Aptitude and Motivation to learn.
To advance in any thing requires Aptitude and Motivation.... No S(four letter word).
I have 45 years of Martial Arts and Soccer Referee Reffing advanced youth leagues.
At 68 can still chase down a Tournament level U19 team. I train everyday!
Coached and owned Soccer Teams and a League at one time.
Coached Kindergarten to High School and know about teaching and how to break bad habits.

In any military if you do not know how to write, figure out equation, and able to communicate you were not getting a skilled position. Public Education systems provide the foundation or you are not going to get to the next step...period !!
Just like learning a second, third or fourth Language you need education and Science has its own language. That is modern society.

My draft number in 1968 was 352 and did not have to join. Yet harassed by US Army and Navy to join because of my Engineering background and a few other attributes. Told I was not going to have to bear a weapon to fight.! HA HA !! I know more than you think and have friends absconded by the police in the south and were forced into the Army..!! Just about anyone with a good Skill or Technical Education was given a non Combat positions. Unless they chose to take field position. I documented about a dozen soldiers after Vietnam including my friends experience. WW2 and Korean War Veteran would not let them enter the front door of a VFW. I know because we were shown the door when we tried entering.

For the last 25 years own a Defense Contracting company, before that worked on Weapon Defense Systems as a Designer and Engineer. I know human resources and training programs. How applicants are evaluated. One of the tests administered for agile thinking was the Wolf Test.. Look it up!! There were a dozen other personality, visual, physical, mental acuity and other tests that improved likelihood of minimal fall out. Training the wrong person for a highly technical skill like flying Fighter plane ends in tragedy or a lot of "just" wrecked equipment. WW2 all the combatants lost about half of their planes to non combat issues. Vast majority to training. One not well documented story was the Germans placed a lot of their damaged planes on fields that would never fly. A whole bunch were Me 109's. The Allies racked up a lot of ground kills further wrecking the wrecks yet caught in AA traps. Which the Vietnamese improved on in Vietnam.

You need an education to operate equipment...you need a Body to wield a sword !!
 



To answer that based on some of your moronic rants - YES! You're talking to some folks who have more time flying actual aircraft than you have sleeping.

Furthermore your rants don't match your resume.

I suggest you tread lightly.
 
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