Few aircraft from the annals of World War II have captured the imagination as has the North American P-51 Mustang with much credit to the visionary efforts of Lt. Col. Thomas J. Hitchcock Jr. His influence on the Mustang’s development and adaptation was second to no one. His military career began when he was 17 and, during World War I, he joined the French Lafayette Flying Corps because the US Army was turning him away as too young. Captured by the Germans, and kept for six months, Hitchcock bided his time and pulled off a daring escape to Switzerland by walking over 100 miles.
Following the war, Hitchcock became a celebrated polo player, investment banker, and socialite-even serving as inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.” By the time America joined World War II, Hitchcock-then 42 was eager to take command of a fighter squadron but was too old to fly combat. Appointed Assistant Military Air Attaché in London, he played an essential behind-the-scenes role in the development of the Mustang.
Later, in April 1942, the Rolls-Royce test pilot Ronald Hawker flew the Mustang, which was then powered by the Allison, and recorded an exceptional performance for a low and medium-altitude airplane. However, he felt it had the potential to do much better at high altitudes with the Merlin 61 attached to it. The British tested this hypothesis and fitted five Mustangs with the Merlin engine. And behold, this served like a magic elixir. The Merlin-powered Mustangs reached speeds of better than 430 miles per hour at 30,000 feet – almost 100 miles per hour faster than their Allison-powered brethren.
Hitchcock’s report to Washington that fall recommended the immediate development of the P-51A into a high-altitude fighter by fitting the airplane with the Merlin engine in place of the Allison. He felt that the Merlin-powered Mustang would indeed be the better fighter of 1943. In quick succession, the US Army Air Forces ordered 2,200 of the new P-51Bs, and by the next year, the 354th Fighter Group became the first operational unit in the European Theater of Operations to be so equipped with these engines. The arrival of the Mustang was timely, providing desperately needed long-range fighter escorts for bomber formations deep into Germany.
By early 1944, the Mustang, combined with new aggressive tactics, started turning the tide of the air war against the Axis. During “Big Week” in February 1944, Mustang pilots destroyed 17 percent of the Luftwaffe’s experienced fighter pilots in air-to-air combat. The otherwise very successful Mustang did experience some issues with its external wing tanks, which caused the aircraft to become unstable in dives. It was left to Hitchcock, then Deputy Chief of Staff of the 9th Air Support Command, to attend to this problem. He unfortunately died in a crash during a test flight on April 18th, 1944.
Hitchcock did not survive to see the full fruits of what the P-51 Mustang was to do for Allied air supremacy-the sine qua non for the invasion of Normandy just two months later. By March 1944, though, as the Mustangs were escorting the first US daylight bombing raids on Berlin, the fighter that Hitchcock had championed was realizing its full potential.
It was a sea change in strategic air combat at that time, which found its reverberation even in the language of the Bomber Command leadership. The Nazis, who had bombed cities such as Rotterdam, London, and Warsaw among others, were to face the full ferocity of the Allied bombing offensive. For their part, the Allies had moved, at least in principle, from a defensive policy to an actual offensive policy with a promise that the German heartland would face massive bombing raids backed by the full industrial might of the United States.
The P-51 Mustang played a significant role in this change of strategy performance and the long-range capability of the airplane enabled the Allies to ensure air superiority and protection for the bomber formations deep in enemy territory.