engineers, diplomacy and flying tailplanes

[Stephanie]

Among the revisiting of formerly classified material from the twentieth century is the repeated, and perhaps refueled controversy surrounding the flying tailplane design on supersonic aircraft.

There is no question that in recent years anything American, including, and especially, involvement in WWI and WWII, is unpopular in the extreme in the international community. In fact, I recently spoke briefly to a Coastal patrolman here in Sydney Harbour (about the boat licence I was obtaining) and, being an Englishman himself, made quick note of my American accent and did not miss the opportunity to tell me about how, having served in the British Army in the 70's, he believed Britain to have been on the wrong side in the Second World War; they should have been fighting against the Americans. I said nothing, of course, but looked into his eyes to see if there was some sign he was joking. Further comment proved that he was not.

To anyone who knows anything about history, it would have been hilariously funny, and to anyone who is abreast of the current cultural, political and economic environment, it is a comment that can easily be dismissed as a run-of-the-mill whinge. Similarly, another Englishman living in Australia these 50 years past told me that "he had a friend who had a friend" who was at Kokoda who saw Americans running when Australians stood and fought. Indeed most of the Australian general populace believe now that the Coral Sea was a sideshow and that it was Kokoda that halted the Japanese advance in the Pacific. Americans have never had a great reputation abroad, many times understandably so, unfortunately, but the attitude has never quite gone so far as to take such pleasure in the derision of any accomplishment, large or small, accredited to men who worked and fought during wartime.

Perpetuating, and also perpetuated by this new trend, is the renewed debate about who was first in supersonic flight, and who invented that infernal flying tailplane. There have been two recent British documentaries whose purpose was to prove that the American engineers could never have accomplished these things without British designs. Perhaps so, perhaps not, but isn't this just part of the story?

It has been my understanding that there was a war on at the time, a big one. The threat in Europe was the immense military force of the Third Reich, that, in the end, rejected diplomacy and was working on devastating weapons at an alarming rate. By the time the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the American military force numbered less than that of a small Eastern European country with a small and somewhat outdated navy, while Britain's military forces were stretched to their limit to protect and hold, where possible, her colonies. During those harrowing years of 1942 and 1943 there was a certain solidarity, and that there was collaboration in the design of many things, aircraft included, comes as no surprise. Therefore it can hardly be unexpected that the designs for the British flying tailplane were shared after their M project was discontinued (an event purported in one documentary to have been a conspiracy by American diplomats) and is consistent with the events at the time: by late 1943 America had more resources to devote to this kind of research, while on the war front the allies had to make plans to recapture their own and key areas, a task in which a supersonic fighter would not have been effective enough to have justified the time and money spent on it. These countries collaborated on many things during the war (and even during the cold war), even if people, i.e. engineers and the public, are loathe to see it that way in retrospect.

Some American engineers interviewed said that they had not seen the British plans for the tailplane that would reduce turbulence in the compressed air approaching supersonic speed, and others said that they were aware of them, but had their own designs that they had been working on. Chuck Yeager describes the implementation as coming from his conversations with his mechanic. Why, then, all of this recently renewed animosity from engineers, and the production of these documentaries, with no new information being brought to light other than the disgruntled engineers' interviews? (We all know that most documentaries are more a form of influencing public opinion rather than presenting historical facts meticulously.)

It is not because the tailplane design and supersonic flight is a newly-discovered dispute that these documentaries are presenting the story again. It is not for the benefit of current engineering, for that, as we all know, has moved on. Is it an attempt at historical revision via popular opinion and anti-American sentiments that such events are again brought up and rehashed before a fresh young and uninformed audience? I think that that might be the case. After all, no one mentions that intrepid young German pilot who flew his rocket-powered ME into the world's first supersonic flight - he was not on the winning side, alas!

I would be interested in any comments, opinion, corrections to information and rants, as the case may be! Have at it, gentlemen.