Routinely exceeding limitations is not a good business practice with planes. It will bite you in the arse eventually, or worse the guy who flies it last. Your attitude towards what you think the limits of the aircraft should be based on what one guy did with a brand new airplane would not for a long combat career make.
Again, I don't think they would do that in a checkout flight if it was really risky to the airplane. His actual quote was something like "there is no way to damage a P-40 by stressing the airframe" which I'm sure is an exaggeration but the real threat there for a newer pilot would be to get into a bad spin I think (or black out and auger in)
Airspeed installation error, out diving the enemy (Zeros in your one example - does not mean they dove to their max speed every time) is not as convincing to me as it is to you. From knowing what I do about Zeros I would not be anxious to get one fast in a shooting match as I would feel like I was running around with my skirt up asking to get spanked. Terrible roll rate and very stiff stick is not it's forte, so when a P40 rolled over and took the elevator down I would let it go (which would further reinforce the speed in dive advantage) but doesn't mean the Allied pilot was doing 500+.
Cheers,
Biff
No it doesn't, certainly not every time, but they weren't taking chances and from reading their accounts, I suspect many of them dove absolutely as fast as they could - it sounds like you had to get to very high speed to get away especially from the Ki-43s by the way (and they couldn't always tell the difference). Keep in mind that hundreds of Allied aircrew were dying right and left in fights with Japanese aircraft, in the Philippines, Java, it was a "bloody shambles" to use Christopher Shores apt title, and the stiffening of the resistance at Milne Bay and New Guinea and Darwin was a very close run thing with extremely high casualties (upwards of 70% for some Australian Squadrons).
From the
wiki for 75th FS RAAF:
"No. 75 Squadron's casualties quickly mounted and were exacerbated by high rates of disease.[4] Squadron Leader Jackson was shot down and killed on 28 April, shortly after he had destroyed a Japanese fighter.[6] His younger brother Squadron Leader Les Jackson assumed command the next day. By the time two USAAF squadrons arrived to reinforce it on 30 April, No. 75 Squadron had been reduced to just three serviceable aircraft and a further seven Kittyhawks in need of repair. The squadron was withdrawn from operations on 3 May after losing two aircraft the day before. During its period at Port Moresby No. 75 Squadron was confirmed to have destroyed 35 Japanese aircraft, probably destroyed another four and damaged 44. The squadron suffered twelve fatalities and lost 22 Kittyhawks, including six in accidents "
I have also read interviews how almost all of them had dysentary so bad they had to tape their pants shut over their boots so sh*t didn't get all over the cockpit. They also mentioned diving from 25,000 ft down to near sea level and then climbing back up again wasn't fun when you had dysentary gas bubbles in your guts. In short conditions were horrible, life was cheap, essentially, and these guys were fighting to their utmost limits and well beyond. It wasn't much better in the Middle East.
The thing about all these dichotomies between performance in the manual guidelines vs. pilot accounts - is that the aircraft lets remember, was
not sufficient to survive in against a Zero, a Ki-43 or a Bf 109 or an MC 202 - all excellent aircraft, if flown according to the limits that the manufacturer and the Army thought were reasonable and wise. And the pilots generally were not as well trained either in the first year or two of the war. Even if they were basically equivalent - you had to push the limits to get an edge otherwise you are going to be facing 50/50 odds. The only way they survived was by routinely
exceeding those limits. That is the historical fact. That is what was complained about in the Allison overboosting memo and it's what was described by so many of the pilots. They had to figure out how to push the envelope to be competitive. And this in fact was one of the strengths or merits of the P-40: that they were able to do so and survive. This is one of the main traits it was praised for by pilots "it would get you home". I believe that is what they meant.
Luckily for Anglo-American (Aussie, Canadian, NZ, South African etc.) pilots, they had this remarkable Company test pilot Herbert Fisher who knew the exact limits of the aircraft very well and spent a year going around to "
every airbase in the CBI, Africa and the Middle East" to paraphrase what I already quoted upthread, and even flew combat missions, to show them how to get away with pushing the aircraft to the edges of it's envelope. Not for his health I'm sure and I hope he didn't get Marlaria in the process. But because knowing exactly how far you could push the limits was very important for success and success meant survival in the sense of not being torn apart by cannon shells for those 22 year old combat pilots. They also had the good fortune to have fellow pilots like Nicky Barr among them who figured out how to pull G without blacking out and learned by experimentation (under the very imminent threat of death by heavy caliber bullets and cannon shells) that he could pull 6 or 7 G's in a P-40, and showed others how to do it.
War is extremely demanding and stressful, on men and machines. Almost all WW2 fighters, certainly Allied fighters in the early War, routinely had to be pushed to their limits and beyond in order for the pilot to survive. If you have an enemy aircraft right on your tail shooting 20mm cannon shells at you, and your choice is to dive faster and maybe extend away or stick to the manual limits and pull away gradually while hoping he doesn't hit you, in many cases the pilots clearly chose the former option. Obviously they had to walk a fine line because you most certainly still could destroy the plane or go into an uncontrollable spin you can't get out of, and die just the same.
S