With all due apologies to director John Huston and story author Rudyard Kipling for the 1975 film "The Man Who Would Be King," we’re going to take a closer look at one of the greatest “What ifs/If onlys” of World War II aviation, the Curtiss P-60 fighter plane.
At the outbreak of World War II, the top single-engine fighter plane in the U. S. Army Air Force was the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. Powered by a 12-cylinder Allison liquid-cooled engine, the P-40 was a rugged, well-armed fighter with good performance at low to medium altitudes. Although it lacked the 2-stage supercharger that was needed for high-altitude combat in Western Europe, the P-40 fared well in the Pacific, Mediterranean and North African theaters where most air combat took place below 20,000 feet.
Although during wartime most people’s thoughts aren’t about business matters like sales and profit/loss, these considerations continue to be important to the companies supplying the weapons. After all, the government of the warring nation is buying the weapons from the various manufacturers, and it’s a very competitive “marketplace” for this equipment.
Driven by German and Japanese expansionist aggression, hostilities raged in both Europe and the Pacific from 1939-41. America’s eventual entry into the war was a forgone conclusion. (That entry became a reality after the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.) Seeing that the demand for fighter aircraft of even higher performance would soon skyrocket, the Curtiss company was eager to maintain its position as a primary supplier to the U.S. government and so it began development of a successor to the P-40 in hopes of pre-emptively securing its standing as a top aircraft vendor.
First prototype disappointing
That aircraft was called the P-60. Two competing single-engine fighters were on the scene at the same time, under development: The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the North American P-51 Mustang. Actually, the Mustang was originally intended to be supplied to the British for their use, but its advanced design and tremendous potential attracted the attention of the U.S. government as well.
The first P-60 test prototype flew in September of 1941, three months before America’s formal entrance into the war. Its performance was disappointing and it failed to meet its projected goals for maximum level speed and climb rate. The new engine did not deliver the expected horsepower, and its new wing design (called “laminar flow”) hadn’t been perfected. In fact, the P-60’s performance was only marginally better than the P-40 it was supposed to replace!
In the meantime, the rival P-47 and P-51 were each showing great promise with higher speeds, superior climb and better handling characteristics. The window of opportunity for Curtiss was closing rapidly.
Thus began a series of frenzied modifications, redesigns and desperate gyrations on Curtiss’ part to somehow keep the P-60 program alive. It would be utterly confusing and bewildering to attempt to list out in detail in the short space we have here all the different models and directions that the P-60 program took. Aircraft of wildly different design and make-up were all called “P-60” as Curtiss tried everything it could think of to keep the project active and the Government interested.
Too little too late
By the time the last variant of the P-60 was tested in July 1944—a version called the YP-60E, with an 18-cylinder air-cooled engine, totally different from the initial XP-60A prototype with its 12-clyinder liquid-cooled engine—both the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and North American P-51 Mustang were well-established fighter aircraft with tremendously successful combat records. Together, the P-47 and P-51 had wrested control of the skies above Europe away from Germany and broken the back of the Luftwaffe’s (German air force) fighter plane ranks. This total allied air superiority made the June 1944 D-Day landings at Normandy a complete success, free from German aerial opposition. Even if the YP-60E had proven to be a world-beater, it wouldn’t have mattered. The “heavy lifting” was already done. P-47’s (from 1943 onward) and P-51’s (from February 1944 onwards) had rendered the P-60 irrelevant. Just for the record, the YP-60E was no world-beater. It proved to be no better, and in some performance categories, not even as good, as the Thunderbolt and Mustang.
The American aircraft industry in World War II was truly astounding. It produced nearly 200,000 aircraft, of which almost 100,000 were fighters. Whereas Britain had perhaps three or four main single-seat fighter aircraft (the Hurricane, Spitfire and Typhoon/Tempest) and Germany relied primarily on two main types throughout the war (the Me-109 and Fw-190), the U.S deployed no less than eight distinct major models (P-38, -39, -40, -47, -51, F4F, F6F, F4U) and produced more of them in total than any other country. It’s noteworthy, however, that of these eight major U.S. fighter aircraft types, only two of them (the F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat) were produced by the same company (Grumman). The other six were all done by different companies, with no company other than Grumman enjoying a fighter plane “double hitter.” With such a well-developed industrial base populated by so many excellent, innovative companies, the competitive landscape faced by Curtiss in 1940 was quite difficult indeed.
In retrospect, with American World War II fighter plane production being spread among seven different companies, the odds against the P-60 being a success were very long. But the P-60 holds a special place in American aviation history. No single aircraft ever went through as many design changes, modifications and re-thinks as did the P-60. In the end, it was all for naught, but the P-60 was unquestionably the champion of the “What if/If only” title among World War II American warplanes. It truly was “The Plane That Would Be King.”
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