The P-51 Mustang and the man who won the World War II air war with it

For the Allied forces, the skies over Europe from 1942 to 1943 brought near ruinous casualty numbers. The odds of a B-17 crewman surviving the 25 missions required to complete a tour were only one in four. Casualties totaled among the tens of thousands.

Amid the carnage, one of America’s gilded elite stepped forward, and without his near fanatical guidance, America’s bombing campaign against Germany may well have failed — with the Allied plans for D-Day postponed or potentially scrubbed all together.

Tommy Hitchcock, one of America’s most renowned polo players and the youngest American to win a pilot’s commission during the First World War, has become the archetype of the potency of individual human achievement.

Born on Feb. 11, 1900, in Aiken, South Carolina, the soft-spoken Hitchcock rose to prominence for his aggressive, hard charging ways during polo matches. His marriage to a Mellon family heiress in 1928 only helped to cement his celebrity status.

Actor David Bruce called Hitchcock the “only perfect man he had ever met,” while F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled two characters after him — writing that the athlete-turned successful businessman was “high in my pantheon of heroes.”

During World War I, the teenaged Hitchcock downed two German planes — for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre — before being shot down inside German territory on March 6, 1918.

Badly wounded, Hitchcock spent several months recuperating inside a German POW camp before, according to author Lynn Olson’s account in “Citizens of London,” the 18-year-old pilot, who was in transit to another camp, “stole a map from a sleeping guard and leaped from the train. Escaping detection, he hiked nearly a hundred miles to neutral Switzerland.”

Upon America’s entry into the Second World War, the 41-year-old volunteered his services as a fighter pilot but was turned down personally by Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of staff of the U.S. Army Air Forces, for being above the flying age.

Frustrated, the well-connected Hitchcock turned to his old friend John Gilbert Winant, who was, at that time, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Winant, according to Olson, suggested that the polo player-turned-fighter pilot-turned investment banker come to London as assistant U.S. military attaché to act as a liaison between the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force’s Fighter command.

Hitchcock accepted the job on the spot.

The Allied Bombing Campaign Reaches New Lows

After the Great War, the phrase “total war” carried different connotations. The key idea was no longer national mobilization and its governmental structures, but the erosion of the principle of non-combatant immunity.

The new theory permeating the Allied command structures was that Germany was to be crushed via an aerial assault to its core physical and psychological strength. To achieve this, systematic bombing of densely populated industrial areas would be necessary.

“There is one thing that will bring [Hitler] down,” Winston Churchill declared, “and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

Despite these grandiose promises, the RAF’s daylight raids on Germany’s industrial heartland had done very little damage at the staggering cost to British crews and aircraft. The USAAF under Arnold fared little better.

Despite Arnold’s belief in America’s superlative technology and aircraft — thanks to the ultra-secret Norden bombsight that allowed bombardiers to hit industrial targets with surgical precision — the American bombing raids in 1942-43 mirrored the efforts of their British counterparts.

“We just closed our minds to [long-range escorts],” Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, a deputy under Arnold, said after the war. “We couldn’t be stopped. The bomber was invincible.”

Despite this theory espoused by USAAF brass, the unescorted B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers could not protect themselves against enemy fighters alone. But at the time, no American fighter had the range to accompany the bombers deep into enemy territory.

Tens of thousands of American crewman were killed as a result, with nearly 75 percent killed, severely wounded or captured in 1943 alone.

To the Air Force brass, “the important thing … was to establish a presence, to prove a doctrine, to state out a position in public consciousness. If this cost the lives of many fine young men and inflicted no really serious damage on Germany’s fighting capability, that was too bad,” American journalist Harrison Salisbury later wrote.

Hitchcock disagreed with such dogma.

“His modus operandi was vastly different from the Eighth’s leaders,” Olson wrote. “He thought it far more important to cooperate with — and perhaps learn from — the RAF than to compete with it.”

It was during this time that Hitchcock made a trip to Duxford, an RAF development facility, where he learned about a promising new American fighter produced solely for the British — the P-51 Mustang.

Conceived by a German émigré who had once designed Messerschmitt fighters before fleeing to America, the P-51 was built by California’s North American Aviation Co. with its initial use planned for the RAF as low-level tactical fighter-bomber.

Hitchcock was stunned. The performance of the P-51, when fitted with a British Merlin engine, could “go as fast and as far as the bombers without losing its fighting characteristics,” historian Donald Miller wrote. It was, he noted, “the plane the Bomber Mafia had claimed was impossible to build.”

Despite this, Hitchcock’s superiors remained unimpressed and rejected the introduction of the American-British hybrid fighter.

“Sired by the English out of an American mother, the Mustang had no parent in the [Air Force] … to appreciate and push its good points,” Hitchcock wrote in 1942.

The Mustang, however, would soon find an adopted parent in Hitchcock.

The former fighter pilot became relentless in his quest to adapt the aircraft into the best fighter on the Western Front.

From flooding Washington with the plane’s sterling test performance statistics to hosting lavish parties to drum up support for the Mustang among well-connected friends, Hitchcock did it all — including taking the new plane for a spin himself.

Yet despite his best efforts, Arnold roundly denied Hitchcock’s attempts to flood the USAAF with the newcomer.

“The word channels, like the word no, was an utterance he sometimes could not hear well,” Hitchcock’s biographer Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. observed. “He planned on going straight to the top.”

Flying into Washington in November 1942, Hitchcock called on an old friend from the Great War, undersecretary of war Robert Lovett. The latter happened to be one of Arnold’s civilian bosses.

Lovett, who had flown British planes during World War I, agreed with Hitchcock’s assessment of the plane and the necessity for long-distance escorts, and pressed hard for Arnold to adopt the Mustang.

Arnold reluctantly acquiesced, ordering some 2,200 P-51Bs in late 1942. Despite the order being of the highest priority, the production of the plane lagged, and Arnold with his hands “tied by his mouth” according to Lovett, did very little to press the matter.

An incensed Hitchcock roared into action, repeatedly making trips to the U.S. in 1943 to press for the swift production of the fighter escort.

Meanwhile, throughout the summer and fall of 1943, the U.S. Army Air Forces struggled to staunch its losses.

In the span of only a few days in October, the USAAF was forced to reconsider its entire strategic bombing endeavor in the European theater, according to the National World War II Museum.

Carnage on Oct. 8 over the German U-boat yards at Bremen and aircraft factories at Vegesack, as well as intense action on Oct. 9 near a Focke-Wulf aircraft plant at Marienburg, culminated in the devastating Oct. 10 raid on Munster.

Of the 275 planes that set out towards Munster, 30 did not return. Among the heavy losses were those of the 100th Bomb Group. Losing 12 out of 13 planes, the 100th earned its “Bloody” nickname at the cost of nearly the entire squadron in a single mission.

In the face of such heavy losses, Hitchcock’s doggedness was about to pay off.

On Jan. 11, 1944, three months after the slaughter over Munster, the tide of the air war was about to turn.

The P-51 would soon give a command performance. As a B-17 formation headed for a Focke-Wulf factory a few dozen miles from Berlin, they were greeted by the stomach sinking sound of enemy fighters. This time, however, the heavy bombers were not such easy prey. As Olson recounts:

“The Focke-Wulf pilots were dumbfounded: never before had an Allied fighter challenged the Luftwaffe so far inside Germany,” Olson recounted. “For more than half an hour, the single Mustang, piloted by Major James Howard, weaved and bobbed, dived and climbed, in its furious attack on the Focke-Wulfs… Sixty Allied bombers were lost on that January 11 mission, but not one plane went down from the group defended by Howard.”

Maj. Howard would later be presented the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary efforts during the fight.

While five months would elapse before the Mustang would arrive in large numbers over the skies of Europe, the tide would finally begin to turn in April and May of 1944 — mere months before the Allied assault in Normandy.

Hitchcock would never see the end of the war, nor his key contribution come to fruition. He was killed while piloting his beloved P-51 during a test run in 1944 in Wiltshire, England.

“The story of the P-51,″ the official wartime history of the USAAF declared, “came close to representing the costliest mistake made by the Army Air Forces in World War II.”

Yet, thanks in large part to Hitchcock, when soldiers and sailors looked to the skies over Normandy while storming the beaches at Utah and Omaha, any fighter aircraft they spotted was decidedly American.

In a 1945 post-war interrogation, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring recounted the moment he knew Germany had lost the war.

“The first time your bombers came over Hanover, escorted by fighters, I began to be worried,” he said. “When they came with fighter escorts over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.”