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    100 Hawks for China
    100 Hawks for China
    100 Hawks for China
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    100 Hawks for China

    By Daniel Ford, Erik Shilling and Tye Lett

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    About this ebook

    At the outbreak of war, the Curtiss P-40 was America's best fighter plane, though outclassed by the British Spitfire, the German Messerschmitt 109, and probably the Japanese Zero. But the United States could build them by the thousand. First France, then Britain, and finally China tried desperately to buy the shark-faced Curtiss fighter--a story that historian Daniel Ford tells here with grace and humor. In the end, China was loaned the money to buy 100 planes from a Curtiss production run of "Tomahawks," as the P-40 was known to the Royal Air Force. China also hired 100 pilots to fly them. The result was the American Volunteer Group--the "Flying Tigers" who won immortality over the rice fields of Burma and the mountains of southwestern China from December 1941 to July 1942. This fascinating tribute to the P-40 also contains a facsimile of the RAF Pilot's Manual for the Tomahawk, annotated by AVG veteran Erik Shilling, along with a list of the 100 Hawks and what is known about each of them. Good reading for Flying Tiger buffs, and an essential resource for flight simmers. Revised and updated 2022.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWarbird Books
    Release dateDec 3, 2021
    ISBN9781502294685
    100 Hawks for China
    Author

    Daniel Ford

    Daniel Ford has spent a lifetime reading and writing about the wars of the past hundred years, from the Irish rebellion of 1916 to the counter-guerrilla operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is best known for his history of the American Volunteer Group--the 'Flying Tigers' of the Second World War--and his Vietnam novel that was filmed as Go Tell the Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster. Most recently, he has turned to the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and Soviet Russia. Most of his books and many shorter pieces are available in digital editions He lives and works in New Hampshire.

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      Book preview

      100 Hawks for China - Daniel Ford

      100 Hawks for China

      The Story of the Shark-Nosed P-40 That Shocked the Japanese in the Opening Months of the Pacific War

      (Book 2 of ‘Tales of the Flying Tigers’)

      Daniel Ford

      Warbird Books

      Revised and Updated 2022

      Contents

      How the Hawks Reached China

      P-40B Three-View Drawing

      RAF Pilot’s Manual for the Tomahawk

      A Tomahawk IIA in Full Warpaint

      Tye Lett’s Notes on the Allison Engine

      The Last Tomahawk Assembled at Rangoon

      What We Know About the AVG Hawks

      Copyright - Author - Books

      How the Hawks Reached China

      PARTIALLY DEAF, suffering from chronic bronchitis, and ostracized professionally for his belief that bombers were vulnerable to intercepting fighters, Captain Claire Lee Chennault retired from the U.S. Army Air Corps on April 30, 1937. Eight days later he embarked for China, where the Nationalist government had invited him to serve as a flight instructor.

      With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937, Chennault became aviation advisor to the Nationalist Chinese Air Force under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He followed the Nationalist government as it retreated inland, from Nanjing to Hankow to Chungking. Safe from invasion but not from aerial attack, Chungking became the ghastly exemplar of the results of strategic bombing as it would be practiced in World War II.

      His own fighter force destroyed by nimble Japanese fighters, Chiang played a wild card. In November 1940 he sent Chennault to Washington, D.C., to buy U.S. fighters for the defense of Chungking. Chennault had convinced the Generalissimo that a small force of highly trained men, flying aggressively, could take the offensive against the Japanese.

      The Airplane

      Given his choice, Chennault would not have picked the Curtiss P-40—or any other airplane with a liquid-cooled engine—to equip his American Volunteer Group in China. Yet in a way he had been present at its creation. As a captain in the Army Air Corps in 1934, he had helped draw up the specifications for the United States’ first modem fighter, or pursuit, as the airplane was called at the time: a low-wing, all-metal aircraft that could fly level at a then-impressive 300 mph. To compete for the resulting business, Curtiss-Wright developed the Hawk 75, which the Army Air Corps would later adopt under the designation P-36. But the airplane was slow and underarmed compared with the warplanes being produced in Europe.

      Because its Pratt & Whitney engine was air-cooled, the Hawk 75 had a large frontal surface area, which gave the fighter a stubby, no-nonsense look but did nothing for its aerodynamic efficiency. So Curtiss began to experiment with a liquid-cooled Allison engine manufactured by General Motors. The marriage of Hawk 75 airframe and Allison engine produced the Hawk 81.

      In spite of the components it shared with its predecessor—virtually everything except the snout, which was elongated to house the new, narrower engine—the Hawk 81 had a radically different appearance. Like the British Spitfire and the German Messerschmitt 109, it had a sinister look. Unlike them, however, it also seemed to have a face, the result of moving the radiator air scoop to the front of the aircraft, just below the propeller. If the Hawk 81’s conical spinner suggested a nose, the air scoop suggested, irresistibly, a mouth. It was inevitable that combat pilots would decorate it with the teeth and staring eyes of a shark.

      Claire Chennault cared little for appearances, and even less for liquid-cooled engines. To him they were an abomination, the product of engineers who had never been forced to contend with combat. Under wartime conditions, he believed, radiators and coolant tanks would be vulnerable to bullets or shrapnel, and the complicated fuel system would be fouled with dust and grime. But Curtiss-Wright was convinced that the Allison engine was the only one available that would give its craft the speed to compete with European fighters. Despite its extra weight, the liquid-cooled engine could boost the streamlined Hawk 81 to a top speed of about 350 mph. The airplane won the Army Air Corps fighter competition in 1939 and was designated the P-40.

      The original P-40 had two .50-caliber machineguns that fired half-inch bullets at a rate synchronized to the turning of its constant-speed propeller; it also had a .30-caliber machinegun for each wing. Curtiss produced 342 of these airplanes in the summer and fall of 1940. Some were also ordered by France, which fell to the German army before the planes arrived. They were taken over by the British Royal Air Force, which put them into service with the designation of Tomahawk Mark I, in deference to its American origins. They were used as trainers by volunteer Americans assigned to the RAF Eagle squadrons.

      By October 1940, the lessons learned by British and French pilots in the opening months of the European war led to modifications. The P-40B was kitted out with pilot armor, a second pair of wing-mounted guns, and externally sealed fuel tanks. The RAF adopted it as the Tomahawk II and used it to equip British Commonwealth squadrons in

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