How does the P47 shape up?

8th Air Force pilots now know what P47s can do

By Andrew A. Rooney, Stars and Stripes staff writer

The P47 was a blueprint when they began to argue about whether or not it would fly circles around the Spitfire and outfight the best the Germans could put into the air.

Today there are a few hundred U.S. fighter pilots in England who don't give a damn about the blueprints or what the statistics and comparative tables say. They know they've got an airplane. Within the last month they have met FW190s and Me190Gs over France and Belgium, and they know how the 2,000 h.p. hope of the USAAF stacks up with the high altitude Luftwaffe machines.

In 12 or 15 operations from England over German-defended territory the U.S. fighter pilots have learned three things.

1 — The P47 is a good plane — not a super plane. Position, tactics, and experience will be the deciding factors in combat between the P47 and the FW 190.

2 — Until the USAAF has bases in France their gas-to-get-back weight and the fatigue of added flying hours puts them at a disadvantage in combat.

3 — Their sweeps are stretching Luftwaffe fighter strength thin over the Western Front, pulling German fighters from other fronts, and their support cuts down USAAF heavy bomber losses.

First Real Opportunity

The new fighters met their first real opposition when they supported the B17s over Antwerp May 14. The reactions of the men in the group commanded by Col. Arman Peterson, of Flagstaff, Oriz., were typical of other U.S. fighter pilots flying P47s. .

They lost one of their best men. Capt. Robert E. Adamina, of Oakland, Cal., but they learned more in the half-hour of action than they have since the first day they soloed. Maj. James Stone, of Plainfield, N.J., shot down the one FW definitely destroyed over Belgium.

Col. Peterson, flying on his second raid as a full colonel and his 13th in a P47, almost got one, but couldn't get a clean shot to bring the German plane down. Fighter pilots are the happy-go-lucky boys with the split-second timing, and they like action. They had been over the Channel several times before the Antwerp raid without running into much action. The previous day the P47s went with the Forts on the diversionary raid on the St. Omer airfield, while the main force of bombers hit the fuselage and bomber repair shops at Meaulte. They couldn't find a German plane in the sky.

"We did everything but land and invite them up," said 2/Lt. William P. Chattoway, of Monongahela, Pa.

The fighter unit under Col. Chesley G. Petersen, of Salt Lake City, DFC, DSC, DSO, has fought before. It is the old RAF Eagle outfit, and Fighter Command knows it is lucky to have at least a handful of experienced fighter pilots as a nucleus for the P47 force.

Most of them fought in the Battle of Britain and have taken part in offensive sweeps in Spits with the RAF. They are loyal to the Spitfire, but any of them will tell you that the P47 is a real airplane. The thing they found hardest to get used to was the size of the cockpit.

"It was tough to get out of those Spits," says 2/Lt. Doug Munson, of Plattsburgh, N.Y. "I could feel the pressure on each shoulder when I squeezed down into the Spit. You felt you were part of that plane when you flew it. You can't beat this P47 though. It's a different kind of a plane."

400 MPH Plus

The Thunderbolt is listed as an over-400-mph plane. Stories from Washington have given credit to two pilots who dived the plane at an announced speed of 735 mph. No one tosses that off lightly, but there is a story at one of the operational fighter groups in England of a Capt. Herbert E. Ross, of Stockton, Cal., now in Africa, who dived a P47 at much higher speed over an English field. The dive was at such speed that patches of paint the size of a man's hand came off the plane, and Capt. Ross reported that the wings riffled when he pulled out of the dive, looking like a corrugated roof.

Another group of fighter pilots getting their first taste of combat is commanded by Col. Hubert Zemke, 28-year-old flier who spent several months in Russia before the U.S. entered the war explaining the fine points of American planes to the Russians. He liked Russia and the Russians so much he has named his plane "Tovarich," Russian for "comrade."

Col. Zemke was a boxer in college in Montana, and once held the Golden Gloves title for five western states. Men at the colonel's field passed the word on that the colonel could be expected to show up on the card at the Rainbow Corner as Pfc Joe Somebody. The colonel heard that somebody was wise, and because it is not standard procedure for colonels, Pfc Joe Somebody never showed at the fights. But he's that kind of a guy.

All fighter pilots are very special types of guys. At the field they are apt to wear the knot of their tie down around where ARs say the end goes in, and when they go to town they are apt to look just a little better dressed than anyone else going to town.

The bomber crews have something to say about the P47s now that they have been with them on a few operations. Too often bomber crews are briefed for fighter support, and for reasons that only an army headquarters can understand the plans are changed, and the crews never hear of it. Bomber crews often have come back a little bit annoyed that the fighters they thought were to be there couldn't be found. Lately they have found them, and a very honest admiration has sprung up between the combat men at the bomber bases which have had P47 support and the fighter pilots.

After the Antwerp raid May 14, with P47 support, on which all bombers returned home from the operations for the first time since the Amiens raid March 13, several gunners at the station commanded by Col. Stanley Wray good-naturedly complained that "we'll lose our shootin' eye if they go with us often."

For the first time the fighter pilots saw what the Fortresses and Liberators were doing. On the Antwerp raid the fighter pilots were not briefed for the bomber target and 2/Lt. Nash M. Gilchrist, of New York, summed it tip with "I don't know what they blew the hell out of, but they sure blew the hell out of it."

It is ticklish business for P47s to escort the Forts and Libs. The P47 with its inline, radial engine, and stocky fuselage looks like an FW. The U.S. ships have distinctive white markings, and most of the German squadrons have their own markings. (The outfit the P47s ran into over Antwerp was made up mostly of red-nosed FWs.)

Despite the similarity there haven't been any reports yet of a Fortress damaging a P47. Gunners have been thoroughly schooled in identification and the tactics used by friendly fighters are designed to make it obvious to bomber gunners that they are supporting aircraft.

After the Antwerp raid one P47 pilot reported that an FW flew beneath him for what he later guessed must have been several minutes before he realized, too late, what it was. The German pilot apparently thought that the U.S. plane was just another Fritz in a Focke Wulf.

Confused With FW190

Problems of identification, fortunately, are as great for the Luftwaffe as they are for the USAAF, and in the long run mistakes on both sides cancel out.

Pilots have found their heavy plane will dive faster than the FW190, which gained its reputation on the speed of its gliding dive in which it showed little more than a streak of silver wing-tip to gunners. U.S. pilots here have found the P47 will fly faster than an FW above 25,000 feet. (The FW reputedly hits its operational peak at 27,000.) The fire-power on the P47 is the joy of every U.S. pilot. No German plane can match it.

They have to look realistically at the plane with which they trust their lives. It dives fast — it dives so fast that they soon find themselves down around 10,000 feet, off their own race track. It climbs slowly, and when they dive they have to know what is going to happen after they get down there.

They also have to keep in mind that they are carrying extra weight in gasoline that the Germans, just off the ground, don't have to carry. Every ten minutes they fly to get to German territory adds fatigue and nervous strain to give the German pilots an advantage.

With all things equal — or even without all of them being equal — U.S. fighter pilots who know arc confident their plane has a better than 50-50 chance with any plane the Germans can put into the air. It is good news for those who have worried about the "bugs" in the P47, and it means that at last the USAAF has a plane of its own that can compete with the Luftwaffe above 20,000 feet.