THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM

During World War II, Germany developed the Messerschmitt Me-262 twin jet fighter. In terms of its speed and climbing ability, it was unrivaled by any Allied aircraft. Only its late entry into the conflict kept it from changing the tide of the war.

It's tempting to credit, or blame, the meteoric rise of aviation progress in the '30s and '40s to World War II, but the truth is that even before the war began in earnest, world powers were already upping their game in advance of their moves to either attack or protect territory that might soon be in dispute. The major players were, in approximate order of appearance (approximate because it's complicated): Japan, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States (with Italy and others acting as wild cards along the way).

Based on lessons learned from World War I, the architects of power in each of those nations knew that in order to win in future wars, air power was a necessary ingredient. To achieve that, they correctly surmised that they'd have to produce huge numbers of pilots to fly huge numbers of aircraft that would be orders of magnitude more capable than their predecessors from the last war. They'd also need to better define and delineate between aircraft types, i.e., fighters, bombers, attack planes, liaisons, dive bombers and more, taking into account the special needs of each type. Their missions, in many cases, drove design approaches that were incompatible with other missions. Bombers couldn't have massive payloads and also be nimble, as fighters had to be.

Training strategies and equipment were also more specialized and effective. Germany was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I from assembling a new air force. So, it trained thousands of pilots in sailplanes, which were not banned because, after all, what was the harm? But by 1933, Germany had secretly created the Luftwaffe, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and by the time Germany launched its Blitzkrieg attack in Poland and France just over six years later, it had the largest and most capable air force in the world.

Japan, too, had been amassing its air forces as part of its imperialist move against China, so by the time the island nation launched its attack against the United States, it had the best aircraft carriers in the world, a development that allowed it to take the battle far and wide.

The United States, for its part, was building its air force and other military powers years before it entered World War II officially.

The subject of how the lead-up to World War II and the eventual war itself drove aviation innovation could be the subject of volumes. But in brief, the conflict drove the development of powerplant technology---by the end of the war, the jet engine was widely understood to be the future of propulsion---and airframe development, with far larger, faster and more maneuverable aircraft, and flying tactics and training. The years between 1930 and 1945 changed the world of aviation forever for all of us.

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J BeckettWriter