P-51 Mustang: the bomber crews' savior that almost wasn't

 The US had a number of great fighter planes in WWII, but the North American P-51 Mustang was by far the most important.

 

The P-38 Lightning, P-39 Airacobra, P-40 Kitty Hawk, P-47 Thunderbolt, F6F Hellcat, obliterated thousands of enemy planes. But the P-51 Mustang was the only one that saved thousands of lives; the crews of the B-17’s making near suicidal missions deep into Germany.

 

General Hap Arnold was given command of the newly formed 8^th Air Force; charged with destroying Germany’s industrial base, paving the way to the D Day invasion. Arnold believed he could accomplish this with high altitude bomb runs using the precision Nordin bombsight, even tho no US fighter escorts could stay with the B-17’s thruout their missions. He tested his theory with war games over the Arizona desert with outstanding results.

 

But his real world missions were a monumental disaster as B-17’s fell from the skies over Germany like snowflakes in a blizzard. There were no German fighters and treacherous weather over Arizona to match the horrific conditions over the Reich. German fighter pilots simply waited for the P-38’s and P-47’s to turn back short on fuel prior to bomb runs; then pounced, picking off the slow ‘4 motors’ as the Germans called them. 

The 8^th had the highest casualty rate of the entire military. Crew morale sunk with many cracking up mentally before they cracked up from Messerschmitts and Focke Wulf fighters’ canon shells.

 

Then one of the all-time US WWII heroes appeared with a solution to stop the bomber carnage. Tommy Hitchcock, WWI fighter pilot, investment banker, world’s No. 1 polo player, arrived in London as an air force staff officer. 

Horrified by the  8^th’s  casualty rate, he noticed a new plane being developed by North American Aviation for the Brits: the P-51. Tho designed and built in America, it was strictly to be a multi purpose fighter-bomber for England. US Air Force brass wanted nothing to do with a British plane, especially since its US engine was swapped out by the Brits for their more powerful Rolls Royce Merlin.

 

Hitchcock recognized its wide performance edge over every US fighter. When he determined the P-51 could be fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks that could take it to Berlin and back, he knew the bomber bleeding rate could be sutured. 

But Arnold and the other US Air Force brass flying desks resisted strenuously. Hitchcock got help from revered US Ambassador to England, John Winant. Tho delayed for months, the duo finally convinced the military to adopt the Mustang as its own.

 

Voila, the bomber casualty rate plummeted as fast as the Mustang’s took to skies over Germany, shooting down German interceptors like ducks on the pond. One squadron downed 160 German fighters in their first month, compared to 120 in the previous 6 months.

 

Between January, 1944, till D Day, the Mustang kill rate and now effective B-17 bombing missions paved the way for the Normandy landing relatively free from German air power. Some military experts attributed D Day success to Tommy Hitchcock and his obsession with the P-51.

 

We’ll never know how many of the 4,754 B-17’s destroyed, resulting in over 26,000 dead airmen might have been prevented by earlier adoption of P-51. But without the P-51, the casualty rate would have kept skyrocketing.

 

There is a sad coda to the Tommy Hitchcock P-51 saga. In April 44, he was investigating a high accident rate for the Mustang when fitted with the auxiliary fuel tanks. Some would simply nose over and crash. Famed pilot warrior Hitchcock decided to investigate himself. Taking off on a test run with the extra fuel, he nosed over and crashed, ending his heroic and glorious work on behalf of the Greatest Generation.