THE BEST ENEMY MONEY CAN BUY
By Antony C. Sutton
MIG Fighters with Rolls-Royce Turbojets
"...In 1946 the Soviets bought fifty-five Rolls-Royce centrifugal compressor type turbojets — twenty-five Nenes and thirty Derwents. These Rolls-Royce engines, the most advanced in the world for the time, were well suited to Soviet production methods and introduced the Soviets to the use of a centrifugal turbojet. Up to 1947 Russian jets were all of the axial-flow type based on German designs. These Rolls-Royce turbines proved to be the best possible equipment for the MiG-15, which was designed by Siegfried Gunther and put into serial production under the name of the Soviet designers Mikoyan and Gurevich. Gunther was brought to Moscow and appointed chief designer in the construction office in Podberezhye.
Two versions of the Rolls-Royce engines were produced at Engine Plant No. 45 near Moscow from 1948 to the late 1950s. The plant was toured in 1956 by U.S. Air Force General Nathan Twining, who noted that it contained machine tools from the United States and Germany, and had 3,000 workers engaged in producing the Rolls-Royce Nene."
"In 1951 the American counterpart to this Rolls-Royce engine was the Pratt & Whitney J-42 Turbo-Wasp, based on the Nene, but not then in quantity production. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, therefore, the Russians had thousands of improved Rolls-Royce Nene engines in service powering MiG-15s, whereas the U.S. Air Force had only a few hundred F-86A Sabres with comparable engines. Several engines from MiG-15s captured in Korea were evaluated by the United States Air Force. Reports were prepared by engineers of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division of United Aircraft Corporation, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. We know from these analyses that by 1951 the Soviets had two versions of the original Rolls-Royce Nene in production quantities. The first version, the RD-45 that powered an early MiG-15, was a direct copy of the original Rolls-Royce Nene and delivered 5,000 pounds of thrust. The second version of the RD-45 delivered 6,000 pounds of static thrust at sea level and 6,750 pounds of thrust with water injection. The turbine blades in the Soviet RD-45 engines were made of a stainless steel alloy of the Nimonic-80 type, while the burner liner and swirl vanes were made of Nimonic-75. Parts of the Nene sold to
Russia in 1948 were fabricated from Nimonic alloys — "Nimonic" being the registered trademark of Henry Wiggin and Company of Birmingham, England. Both Nimonic-75 and Nimonic-80 were developed by Mond Nickel about 1940, and the specifications had previously been published by the Ministry of Supply in the United Kingdom on the grounds that it was nonstrategic information."
"The RD-45 (Nene) was produced in Moscow and also at Magadan from 1951 onwards, at Khabarovsk, at Ufa Plant No. 21, and at the Kiev Plant No. 43 from 1951 until sometime after 1958..."
In the Museum: The Mystery of the MiG | History | Air & Space Magazine
Siegfried Günther and the MiG 15:
"...And though the MiG was ... manufactured in Russia, it has German roots. After World War II, German engineers who had been working on a jet fighter for their own government found themselves suddenly without an employer. So the Soviet Union offered several thousand engineers and technicians security and employment in exchange for their expertise. Among the German aeronautical designers exported to Russia were many who had worked for the Luftwaffe on airplanes, including noted German designer Siegfried Günther, who is thought to have worked on the MiG-15."
"Whatever its origins, the MiG-15 was a superb airplane, able to outperform any of the American-made piston-engine and first-generation jet aircraft (such as the F-80) that challenged it during the Korean War. It wasn't until early 1953, after F-86 Sabres had been on the scene, that the United States achieved complete air superiority. The two fighters were fairly evenly matched, though the MiG had a faster climb rate, higher operating ceiling, and tighter turning rate at altitude. But the Korean and Chinese pilots who flew MiG-15s were no match for the far more experienced and better trained Sabre pilots, who started downing MiGs at a prodigious rate..."