Essential and Dispensible WW2 aircraft.

On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:10:50 -0700, "Scott M. Kozel"
wrote:

You miss the fact that the British were instrumental in keeping
Mustang production going and were instrumental in pushing continued
production alongside the introduction of the Merlin engine. Neither
of these initiatives came from the USAAF.

The USAAF examined the alternatives, and decided to build the P-51.

The USAAF examined the alternatives, were presented with a
British-sponsored alternative pushed by senior British officers,
Winston Churchill to Harry Hopkins and FDR, and at the May-June
discussions over the second Arnold-Towers-Portal agreement over
aircraft allocations. The USAAF alternatives available at this point
(mid-'42) were the P-38 which was only just entering substantive
production after critical aerodynamic problems and with engine output
limitations, the P-39 which was being discredited by combat reports
from the south-west Pacific, and the P-40 which was suffering from the
same altitude performance limitations as the P-39 was currently being
produced with a Packard Merlin 20 series engine to address that
shortcoming, while the P-47 remained the great white hope of USAAF
fighter procurement.

The decision to continue Mustang production with a Merlin-engined
variant originated with the British.

They wern't "pushed" to do anything that they didn't intentionally
decide to do.

They were; the Merlin-engined P-51 would not have existed if it had
not been for the British initiative of April-June 1942. The test
reports Arnold used in his memoirs to defend his fighter procurement
policy against media critics were British ones submitted to him by the
Slessor mission of early June 1942 which convinced him to continue
Mustang production at British behest.

I'm not sure what is your point. It wouldn't have existed, without
the U.S., either, at least not in quantities that would have had any
measurable impact on the war.

The Merlin-engined Mustang only became a part of USAAF procurement
policy by means of British agency, and the Mustang also only existed
to start with as a result of British agency.

As I said, the British efforts were in the preliminary design.

And as I've pointed out, the USAAF had no interest in the Mustang, nor
had any idea about a Merlin-engined Mustang until the British
presented them with it, and in addition swapped Spitfires for an
undertaking to produce them with an allocation of 200 to the RAF.

It was
NAA and Packard that built over 15,000 of the main models of the P-51,
in the U.S.; the British did not do that.

Who said they did?

Look, I'm not trying to make this a competetion of U.S. and British

Neither am I. I am pointing out the historical facts involved in
Merlin-Mustang procurement.

I merely stepped into this thread when someone questioned why the P-51
was listed under USA aircraft.

It was an American aircraft; nevertheless it would not have existed
without British agency in terms of sponsoring the initial design
(although the technological and development work was almost entirely
done by North American) and furthermore it wouldn't have existed in a
Merlin-engined variant without the British pushing it upon the USAAF
at a time in mid-1942 when Arnold's fighter procurement policy was
subject to significant public misgivings.

Gavin Bailey

--
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