“It’s faster than the Mark V,” said Harker.
“Yes, well now we’ve got the Mark IX to go after the German FW-190s.”
“Throw in a Merlin-61 and it will be faster than the Mark IX, and probably perform like a dance queen at high altitude.”
Perhaps Harker was simply selling, like any good company man might, but his prediction would turn out to be very true. In October of 42, they did put a Merlin engine in the plane and it was everything Harker said it would be, and more. One other feature of the plane was its built-in reserve fuel tanks which gave it very long range. It could fly 1650 miles, a thousand miles farther than the plane it had been designed to replace, the Curtiss P-40. That got the light winking in the eyes of the American bomber advocates, and was largely responsible for getting the US interested in this new design.
Before the war, US theory on strategic bombing was built on the assumption that heavily armed planes like the B-17 “Flying Fortress” would be able to easily defend themselves and always get through to their targets. Even as the war came, the Army Air Force thought of the B-17 as its premier offensive weapon, and the US urged round the clock bombing against Germany, with the US flying the day operations. With most of the Luftwaffe in Russia, that worked for a time, until Germany answered the treat my simply transferring more of their excellent Bf-109 squadrons to the west, and then introduced the fearsome Focke Wulf 190. It was soon found that the B-17 was vulnerable against these excellent fighters and the pilots that flew them, so much so that daylight bombing had to be cancelled.
The US 8thAir force took the buzz about the new P-51 to heart, particularly when they heard about that tremendous range. No fighter had the range to accompany the bombers effectively before the P-51, and with that new engine making the plane more than a match for anything it would face, a legend was born. It could outfight the German 109s, and match the 190s as well. The British Spitfire IX could make 368 MPH at high altitude, but with that new Merlin engine, the Mustang could go over 430 MPH. Yet for the 8th Airforce, it had the only real quality that mattered—range.
Unbeknownst to Ronnie Harker, there were other contenders to the throne in the realm of fighter performance. The American designers wanting to protect those bombers had first thought to go with a twin-engine plane like the P-38, which was almost as fast as the Mustang at 414 MPH, and had a range of 1300 miles. It could do everything, flying as an interceptor, light bomber for ground attack, and it was also a good night fighter and recon plane. Over 10,000 would be built, but there was another plane that was much better that was overlooked…. In Fedorov’s history.
That plane was the Grumman F7F Tigercat, another sleek twin engine design that was so fast that it could simply run away from the Navy’s hot new single engine fighter, the F6F Hellcat. With four 20mm cannons and four more .50 caliber MGs, it could outpunch any fighter it encountered, and had hard points that could carry both bombs and torpedoes. The Navy took a pass on the plane when it failed carrier qualifications, being too fast on landing, and too heavy. But the Marines eyed the plane with a good deal of interest. Only 12 were ever built during the war in the old history, but in these events, another man like Ronnie Harker was out to change history.
His name was Captain Fred Trapnell, a hot shot test pilot for the Navy who thought he was sitting in the best fighter he had ever flown when he took the prototype up. He had been flying a captured Zero to see just what the magic was in that plane. The Navy wanted to beat it, and they were hoping the F6F would do the job. It would, and Trapnell’s recommendation on the F7F would not supplant the Hellcats on the decks of US carriers—but it would convince the Marines to push hard for the plane. It could achieve altitudes of 40,000 feet, hit hard, serve in any role like the P-38, and the Marines wanted it. They would see that production moved from 12 to over 250, and a good deal earlier than the Tigercats ever saw the skies over the Pacific in the old history.
So it was that the ships that never were would also be joined by planes that never got their chance in the war. The F7F Tigercat would be a notable performer for the Marines in good time. Another newcomer would be the Boeing F8F “Bearcat.” It was a single seater, yet the biggest and heaviest ever built by the US. A “Five fingered plane” it was designed to perform five crucial roles, as a fighter, interceptor, dive bomber, torpedo bomber, or level bomber. To do that job, it had even more punch than the Tigercat, with six 20mm cannons and six MGs. It was yet another nightmare on the drafting tables that the Japanese would have to face before this was over—a plane that could fly off the decks of US carriers that were cruising outside the range of the best Japanese land based fighters. Again, that range was a critical factor in the Pacific, and the Bearcats could fly an astonishing 2800 miles, twice that of the fabled Mustang.
All of this would pose a real challenge for Japan, but there was one more man fiddling with the history, and his name was Ivan Volkov. He had quietly told the Japanese about things on the US Drawing boards, and urged them to respond. When Karpov opened the northern front by taking Kamchatka and invading Sakhalin Island, Volkov approached the Japanese again with dire warnings. America was building a new bomber, he told them, with very long range and the hitting power to lay waste to Japanese cities if it was not stopped. The “bomber threat” would lead Japan to design a number of excellent interceptors, and this threat, combined with the defeat of her carriers, channeled production away from better carrier capable planes.
The Army was already working on a promising interceptor designed by Nakajima, the Ki-84 Hayate, or “Gale.” This plane, called Frank by the Allies, began to appear in Mid-1943 in the real history, and Volkov was attempting to move that development along faster. He would also offer technical support for designs like the Nakajima Ki-87, a radial engine fighter with an exhaust driven turbo-supercharger that could take two 30mm cannon and two more 20mm guns to 42,000 feet, and at 433MPH. There was a bomber interceptor that might have a dramatic impact on the war, and Volkov was doing everything possible to see that it was developed early.
Another challenger was the Mitsubishi Ki-83, a long range twin engine fighter that was first inspired by the appearance of the American P-38. The Mitsubishi version had the same hitting power of the Ki-87, but a range of just over 1200 miles. The Japanese had not called for such designs until 1943, when it was already too late to see them produced. Volkov had called for them in 1941, and delivered secret documents to designers like Tomio Kubo working for Mitsubishi. He made sure the Takajiwa company was also in the race with their Ki-94, a sweet high altitude interceptor that incorporated many features being built into the American Mustangs. Tatsuo Hasegawa was the man behind the plane, and Volkov also passed him documents to smooth the way toward his vision.
A third designer, Miki Tadano, had dreams of speed from an early age and would one day design Japan’s first “Bullet Train.” In WWII, he put his imagination and skills to work on the design of a bomber that would be as fast as a Zero, but have the range of a G3M, the plane the Allies called “Betty.” They would call his new brainchild “Francis,” the P1Y Medium Bomber, and it would come to production a full six months early. That was the plane the Navy would choose to carry its Okha Cherry Blossom man-guided missile bombs, though no one knew that just yet.
When Yamamoto learned how the war once ended, he was also deeply disturbed. Dazzled by the performance of Naval rockets as both a strike and defensive weapon, he initially hoped Japan would be able to produce them. When he learned of the Okha Cherry Blossom project, and the entire notion of the Kamikaze behind it, he shrugged, wanting something more than such desperate measures.