Victor Davis Hanson (40:04)
Well, you know, I had we finished our history of warfare. It took us about five months from we did an earlier one from all of antiquity to the present. Then we did the 20th century great battle starting with the Russo Japanese War. But I had a lot of people write and said, you know, I'm more interested in World War II than anything. So I thought I'd have one or two episodes on. And a lot of people asked me questions about the technology, the ships. What's the difference between a battle cruiser and a battleship? Was a Sherman tank that good or was it unduly condemned? So I thought we would look at air power and as a general rule, the Allies, and I'm talking specifically about the British and the Americans, were ahead of the Axis. Not when the war started necessarily, but almost equal when the war started. The Japanese had had a very light flighter Called the Mitsubishi Zero. And it had two 20 millimeter cannon. It had no self sealing tanks. It was very light. It had a pretty powerful, I think it was 1300 horsepower. It had a long, long range and it could turn better, climb faster, dive better than existing American aircraft. And they were the F4 Wildcat and the P39 Airacobra and the P40, you know, they call it Warhawk except you know, the one with the alligator mouth or dragon mouth. P40. They all had a kind of an American trademark and that is they were heavily built and they could take a lot of punishment. But they weren't as fast and they didn't do well against the Zero. For about a year, From December of 41 all the way to early 43, Britain had the Supermarine Spitfire, had a Rolls Royce Merlin engine and it was comparable to the top flight German fighter of the war, the B.F. 109. And they were about the same speed. They could go over 300 miles an hour. They had about the same range. The Spitfire could turn faster and it could maneuver better. People argued that the 109 had a better dive or climbing anyway, they were about comparable. When the Germans started to bomb Britain, however, the British had a brilliant strategy. They had something called a Hawker Hurricane which was made of laminate wood and it had an engine. It wasn't as good a plane as a Supermarine Spitfire. It could not engage with the 109 fighter. So when the German bombers came over Britain during the blitz, they put the Hawker Hurricanes high up and the Supermarine Spitfires then engaged the 109s and tied them down. And as they were tying them down and dog fighting, the Hurricanes came down and increased speed. They had a good dive rate and they had a 20 millimeter cannon. And they went right through the bombers and then out again and took off so that nobody they had at a speed that was comparable or as good as the 109s. And so for the first part of the war it was more or less equal. And then technology and production caught up. The Americans then had things on the drawing boards as far as fighters that were way ahead of anything. And one of them was the P38 double engine fighter, the Lockheed Lightning and the F6 Wildcat and the F4 Corsair and Vought Corsair. And all of these could reach speeds of 400 to 450 miles an hour. They were typically American, they were very heavy. They had an armor plate that would protect the pilot from and one on the bottom of the floor. And some Models that would stop machine guns coming up, they had a rubber interior of the gas tank, so when you shot them, the rubber would close on the hole and stop a fire. The Japanese never had that. Germans even came late and they were superior at that point to every model of Japanese fighter. And by 1943 they had achieved not just air superiority, but air supremacy. That is, Hellcats on carriers were better than any Japanese. Zero and Raiden or Oscar or any of the other planes that followed them. And it got worse for the Japanese because the Hellcat then achieved amazing speeds. And so did the Corsair. And then in late 43 in Europe especially, but there were some in the Pacific, they created something called the P47 Thunderbolt. And it was a very strange plane. The Americans put this huge air cooled engine, those are the round ones, not the pointed ones. And they didn't have a radiator. And if you could get up high and you had a turbocharger, A turbocharger. All it did, it took the exhaust gas that goes out when you combust in the cylinders. And it uses that forced air to create horsepower to give you a boost. It's not quite like a supercharger that uses that to spin the crankshaft. But in any case, they came out with this Thunderbolt and it was armored, it had self seal and had this huge Allison Double WASP engine, about 2,000 plus horsepower, and it could go about 450 miles an hour and it could climb up to 40,000ft. It didn't have a long range, but it started to change the war because it could escort bombers from England all the way to the German border, so that the Luftwaffe could not take their 109s and shoot them down. The Germans, in response then came out with their own air cooled engine, The Focke Wulf 190. A superb plane. And in almost every category it was equal to the P47. So then the Americans said, well, we need a plane that's even faster, at least at high altitudes, than the P47, or at least comparable. But it has to have a range to go with the bombers all the way into Germany. And they had this brilliant P51 airframe. It had a certain type of new type of wing, it had a lift capacity, it had a big turbocharger. At least they added it later and they had the Allison engine, but it wasn't conducive to the type of turbocharger. So when they got up in thin air, it started to not be comparable with the Focke Wulf one. Hundred ninety. So they went to the British and the British said, we have the Merlin engine. The Spitfire is a wonderful plane. And we're Putting this latest 2000 horsepower Merlin engine in them. But your airframe is even more sophisticated. So we'll tell you, you can make these Merlins in the United States under Packard. So they did. And all of a sudden they created this P51 Mustang that could go 460 miles, 70 miles an hour, but it could go all the way with a drop tank. In other words, they fill a gasoline tank and over friendly territory they'd fly, then drop it, and then they would have the regular gas to go into Germany and back. And it had six.50 caliber machine gun, the P47 had eight and I think 3,500 rounds. But anyway, the point I'm getting is it was as good or better than the F W 190 latest German airplane. And they had a brilliant guy named Jimmy Doolittle. And he said instead of just sticking next to the B17s, once these Focke Wulf 190s come out of the clouds and they hit 450 miles, you can't stop them with a machine gun on a plane like, you know, a static 180, 200 mile B17. But you can destroy them when they take off and you can destroy them when they land and you can destroy them on their way to the bombers. So what he did was he told all these 18, 20 year old kids in these beautiful planes. And they had each 3, 400 hours of training, whereas the Luftwaffe was short of fuel, short of pilots, and they were sending young German 18 year old kids with 40, 50 hours and these sophisticated Focke Wulf 190s, when they turned like a hornet's nest of these P51s loose, they would just circle the airfields of Germany and wait for these planes to take off. They attack them when they were gaining speed, they would come back when they were landing and they would attack them high up at 40, 35,000ft. And all of a sudden the loss rate for B17s and B24s descended. Anyway. The point of all this is that when you look at the United States coming into the war on December of 19 with substandard aircraft like the Wildcat, it was not a bad plane, but it was substandard compared to the 109 in Europe or the 0. And then you look at some, even P40, P39, P36, all of these planes. And then suddenly in the space of 18 months. They're producing the P38 Lockheed Lightning double engine. They're producing the P47 Thunderbolt, they're producing the P51 Mustang, they're producing the F6 Hellcat, they're producing the Vought Corsair. And all of them are capable of getting almost except for the Lightning. Maybe it's earlier, up to 450 miles an hour. And they're all heavily armed and they're better than their Axis. And that was going to be true until the last six months of the war when you started to see misherschmitt jets come in from Germany. But they had very limited range and they were very vulnerable when they took off and landed. So the result of all this was I was asking my father once, so I said, you took off from Tenian and you had to fly 1600 miles from the Marianas over Tokyo. And did anything change? And he said, yeah, everything changed. I said, well, what changed? He said, well, we started flying February, March and we went all the way without any fighter escort. So when we got over Japan, there were the Raidens and the Henrys and the Oscars waiting for us even though we were way high before the March fire rage. But he said after February March we took Iwo Jima and Iwo Jima was two thirds about the way. So he said once we got near iwo Jima, these P51s started taking off and they started flying the rest of the way with us below, even though we were way high in the original raids. When you look at the loss rate, they lost almost 500, 450 or something B29s. But the loss rate radically changed from planes lost to enemy aircraft versus crashes. In other words, most B29s after March, April 1945, when they lost a plane that was overloaded or crashed or there was mechanical problems on the 3200 mile trip because they had fighter escort. And then just to finish. Japan never made a successful bomber for a variety of reasons. And Germany had a very different idea. They had crazy people. Goering wasn't even the worst of them in the Luftwaffe, but they believed that you could not hit anything with a bomber. We said the Norden bomb site could, but it wasn't very good in actuality. But they said you'd have to dive bomb. So they created two engine bombers or like the Stukas or the Junkers 88 and they would just dive bomb, but they couldn't carry very much 2000. And then they went to two engine bombers and they thought the answer Kind of like a modern jet is to increase the horsepower of the two engines because of the Dragon, what they call the nacelle, the big housing of the engine. Every engine slowed down a plane because it was kind of a obstruction in the air current. But they never figured out how to make two engines more powerful than four engines, even though four engines had a greater drag on them. So then they came up with the worst plane of the war, the Heinkel, I think it was 177. And they said, we solved the problem. Problem. We're going to put two massive 1800 horsepower engines back to back, not side by side. And we're going to have a crankshaft. So one engine is going to turn it and then the one right behind it will turn it even faster. And we're going to get a huge propeller. So two propellers will be turning twice as fast as four propellers. And then they could never synchronize them. So in other words, each engine has peculiarities. So they would never get exactly the same rpm. So you'd get the crankshaft turning and then the other one would be connected, but it would kind of go slow and retard it. And then they would break crankshafts or they wouldn't synchronize. And it was a disaster. But it was very funny because during the 30s they had the Condors and they were very sophisticated transport planes with four engines, but they never, they never caught on. And so in Britain they had the Sterling short, the Hanley Page. And then the best, maybe the best bomber of the war, the Lancaster Bomber could carry 15, 16,000 pounds of bombs. It had four Rolls Royce engines. And it was a rivalry with the two Americans that we thought the B17 was the best bomber of the war. Up until the B29. It had been there from 1936. We called it the Fort. It had 1150 caliber machine guns. It was built like a truck. It was very hard to shoot down. It was very kind of slow, 180 mile cruising speed. It only carried about £8,000. And we thought, we're going to put them all in daylight and you can't attack all these machine guns in collective use. And it didn't work. Didn't work, didn't work. And then we said, well, we're going to make a faster plane with more bomb load. The B24 will make more of them or as much. Didn't quite work like that. And the bombing was not working. 43, 44. And then they said, you know what? The British were kind of right. You get A smaller crew. You go at night and you don't have any moral scruples. You just firebomb and you try. If you go during the day at 25,000ft and you drop precision bombs, it never hits the target. And you got to climb all that way up and they know you're coming in daylight. And so they were about ready to give up. And then they came up with this idea that, well, what if we got these fighters and got extra fuel tanks? And they even told the British, why don't you get the Spitfire and put drop tanks on it? And the British never really wanted to do it. They thought they were needed for other missions. But the Americans finally, as I said, With P38s, P47s and P51s, they could escort these bombers all the way. And then they came up with the idea that, well, what if Boeing made a four engine bomber and they put the new double Watts Allison engine in it with 2000 horsepower, 2200. And you had four of them, like 9000 or 8500 horsepower, then you could carry 20,000 pounds of bombs. You could go up to 30,000ft and you could put 11 men in them and you could have all these turrets and they'd be indestructible. You'd have a pressurized cabin so that you put a range of 3,200 miles, not 2,000. And that was all designed for Germany because they didn't think D Day would work necessarily. They were going to base them in England. They could go all the way to Dresden and back. But they never used them because when the time they were very dangerous, they used magnesium in part of the engine apparatus that would catch fire. So the engines would catch fire and blow up in midair. And the original B29, I remember my father told me they were on their way to Kobe, and all of a sudden he looked around and he was in the central fire control where you could look down at the engines. And he said, wow, one of them just blew up. It melted. And this was right before they got to Tokyo at night. And you could see this flaming. So they cut it. And he said, well, good thing about the B29, it can fly on three engines. We'll drop the load and then the light load will be £20,000. We'll get back. So they dropped the load. And he's sitting there and he was relaxing and he saw the other one blow up. And he said, now we only have two engines. They got hot and then they were going out and this was in I think he said it was June or something. And then the third one started to blow up and was firing. So they were 200 miles from Iwo Jima and they landed where the fourth one blew up. And they had to change the engines, whole new engines, I think it was every hundred hours and it didn't work. And finally at the end of the war, they solved that problem with the alloy. It was a great engine, wonderful engine, but they didn't use magnesium to the same degree. And they were wonderful in the Korean War. But the point I'm making is the British and the Americans knew very early that the only way to carry a lot of bombs, so you didn't take too many planes was to get four engines and you had to have a turbocharger to go up at high altitudes. And they were way ahead of the Japanese, they were ahead of the Germans. Hitler was responsible for a lot of problems with the. If he had approved earlier design. They had two engine wonderful night fighters. They were working on a four engine bomber with four separate engines. And if they, they had have used the jets just for attacking bomber squads rather than trying to bomb, he tried to make them into a bomber. It was crazy. So he was responsible. Goering was a buffoon. And if you're interested you can read about Albert Galland, the first and the last. He was the head of the, a lot of very high commander of the Luftwaffe. And he talks about going into Poland and France with the BF 109 and how it was superior to everything. And they were just shooting down everything and then going into Britain and coming up against the Spitfires and these wonderful British pilots. And then it was even. And then all of a sudden the Americans come over and they're shooting down these unescorted B17s and killing all these Americans and they're winning the war. And then all of a sudden this big clunky thing called a P47 shows up and you shoot it and shoot it and shoot it and shoot it. You knock off a propeller on one of the propellers and it still flies. And you take out four cylinders of the cool engine, it still flies. And they shoot off the tail. There's even a couple of things where they shoot off a whole half of the wing and it still flies. Same thing with a P38. And then he says we're doomed because they're sending more fighters than we have. So really, World War II in some ways was won by the brilliance of American and British aerial engineers in so many insidious ways. Because once fighter escorts started to accompany the B17s, to a lesser extent the B24s. They needed planes to protect the German homeland. So what did they do? They took all These Focke Wulf 190s and Bf109s from the Russian front to use them to stop the bombers. 10,000. And they took all the wonderful 88 millimeter anti tank guns and they used them to shoot straight up as flak. And so as soon as they started to do that, then the Red army found out that the Germans had no air support and they lacked a lot of their tank killing capacity with 88 millimeter horizontal guns. It's very important because when they talked to Stalin, he kept threatening him, you're not opening a second front. And Churchill and Roosevelt kept saying, we're doing strategic bombing and we're losing. They lost almost 100,000 airmen, British and American, 80,000 something. And with wounded, probably more. But the point I'm making was the bombing not only disrupted, it didn't do much. In 42 and 43, they did burn down Hamburg and a lot of cologne. But by 44, mid 44 and late, they were doing enormous damage to the infrastructure of Germany. And most of that stuff was going to the eastern front. But more importantly, they were bringing back all of the Luftwaffe squadrons and all of the 88 millimeter teams and they were using them for air defense of Germany. And the Red army suddenly just took off.
