Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2
    P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2
    P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2
    Ebook209 pages2 hours

    P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2

    By Warren Thompson and Mark Styling

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The first aircraft to be purposely designed as a radar-equipped nightfighter, Northrop's P-61 Black Widow was heavily influenced by early RAF combat experience with radar-equipped aircraft in 1940/41.

    Built essentially around the bulky Radiation Laboratory SCR-720 radar, which was mounted in the aircraft's nose, the P-61 proved to be the largest fighter ever produced for frontline service by the USAAF. Twin-engined and twin-boomed, the Black Widow was armed with a dorsal barbette of four 0.50-in Browning machine guns and two ventrally-mounted 20 mm cannon.

    This volume features all the frontline users of the mighty P-61, and includes many first-hand accounts from pilots and gunners who saw action in the Pacific, Mediterranean and Western Europe.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateNov 20, 2012
    ISBN9781782006787
    P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2
    Author

    Warren Thompson

    Warren Thompson has been an avid military aviation historian and editor for over 40 years and his personal reference collection includes thousands of photos and detailed interviews with over 2,000 pilots and aircrew members. He has had over 25 books published including three books on the Korean War for Osprey. His book Korean War Aces in the Aircraft of the Aces series was a bestseller.

    Read more from Warren Thompson

    Related to P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2

    Titles in the series (78)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Wars & Military For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2 - Warren Thompson

      COMMENTARY

      PRELUDE TO COMBAT

      Wars have been fought for thousands of years, and in most, if not all of these conflicts, combat has taken place almost exclusively during daylight hours. Night has always seemed to provide a time to rest and regroup. However, with the invention of the aeroplane, new battle tactics began to evolve, although it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that the art of using aircraft to fight at night began to mature.

      The Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Luftwaffe would have to claim the lion’s share of the credit for perfecting this art during the final years of peace. As the advent of a second world war became more of a reality, the potential for delivering significant damage and destruction to an enemy at night increased greatly. This was a new facet to the art of waging war, and the United States was only an observer at the onset.

      As early as 1940, Northrop took the lead in coming up with a design for an aircraft that could fight in this new nocturnal arena. The finished product was not only one of the largest fighters built during World War 2, but it also proved to be the most devastating aircraft of its type to emerge from that era.

      A YP-61 is seen undergoing various sundry tests over the mountains of northern California. There were 13 pre-production ‘YPs’ built, and they provided most of the critical data that would be incorporated into the P-61A. The first YP-61 flew on 6 August 1943 (Nick Williams).

      A visual clue as to just how much firepower the Black Widow possessed. Machine gun and cannon fire was designed to converge several hundred feet in front of the fighter, resulting in the deadliest of barrages. This test was carried out at the Northrop factory (Roy Wolford)

      Northrop’s new entry into the nightfighter business was an all-metal, twin boom, twin tail, monoplane. In terms of its sheer size, the aircraft boasted dimensions more-suited to a medium bomber than a fighter – it was three times heavier than a P-51 and almost twice as heavy as the P-47. The P-61 was powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines that developed over 2000 horsepower each, and with a comfortable combat range of over 1000 miles, it could cover a wide area and be available for instant high speed intercepts. Thanks to its ‘long legs’, the P-61 always worked alone.

      During its initial production, the Black Widow was fitted with a top turret that housed four. 50 cal machine guns and a ventral fairing with four 20 mm cannon – the combination of this firepower and the aircraft’s new radar put any enemy aircraft flying at night in harm’s way!

      This volume is about the P-61, and what it accomplished in a hostile environment. We have all read ‘spell binding’ accounts of daylight dogfights, and we can easily visualise just what the pilots’ saw. It was always taken for granted that when you flew, the sky was bright and the visibility extended as far as one could see. Not so for the nightfighter.

      An impressive line up of brand new P-61A-10s outside the Northrop assembly plant in Hawthorne, California. Exactly 100 A-10s were produced, and most saw combat. Note the camouflage netting in the right background (Northrop)

      It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to lock onto a target at 2500 ft in inky blackness, then move in close to attempt visual identification, only to have the enemy pilot start taking violent evasive action which resulted in an aggressive dogfight at all altitudes. Throughout the engagement, the only contact the pilot would have with his quarry was through the eyes of his radar operator, who would be verbally translating to him what he saw on his small radar screen.

      A 20-minute pursuit may end up in a blinding fireball 800 ft in front of the pilot, leaving him with just three or four seconds to pull up to avoid being consumed by the resulting debris. Fighting within a black, invisible, void, the result of each intercept initially hinged on how good the ground control intercept (GCI) people were, and once the ‘bogey’ appeared on the P-61’s airborne intercept scope, how well the pilot and radar operator communicated.

      ‘The Maestro’. John W Myers was Northrop’s Chief Test Pilot for the P-61, and he took his knowledge and skills into the field to show young nightfighter pilots how to get the maximum performance out of the aircraft. His demonstrations are still vividly remembered to this day by those who experienced them (John W Myers)

      Each ‘kill’ was unique. The mission reports seemed repetitious and without excitement, but you can be assured that this image existed only on paper. They were all different, with the majority of them being a frustrating experience for the aircrews involved. If they had had the benefit of daylight, the end result would have been more impressive! According to records published in The Development and Production of Fighter Aircraft (TSEST-A7), the P-61 was determined to be highly manoeuvrable – more so than any other USAAF fighter. It could have been a major ‘player’ as a day fighter too, but that was not role for which this highly-specialised aircraft had been developed. As a result, there were very few encounters between enemy fighters and the Black Widow during daylight hours, and of the few that took place, some are covered in detail in this text.

      The four 20 mm cannon housed in the base of the crew nacelle are serviced prior to test firing. This photograph was taken at the Northrop factory in California soon after this particular P-61 had come off the final assembly line (Northrop)

      The resulting explosion of a ‘bogey’ at night is impressive, but the aircrews nevertheless still failed to see exactly what their 20 mm fire was doing to the target. Maj Carroll Smith (the USAAF’s top nightfighter ace with seven kills) was one of the few P-61 pilots to claim a kill during daylight, and he describes in chapter four how his target (a Japanese ‘Frank’) disintegrated in front of his eyes following a burst of 20 mm fire.

      Between December 1942 and August 1945, the United States Army Air Corps/Force trained a total of 35,000 day fighter pilots. By comparison, only 485 nightfighter crews were trained during the same period. With the former, most of the cycle was spent honing the pilot’s individual proficiency and his ability to work in a group. It was just the opposite with the nightfighters, for each was expected to be proficient within his speciality, but the success of these nocturnal warriors depended on how well they worked as a team – as did their very existence.

      Here, the turret dome has been removed in order to better show off the array of four .50 cal machine guns that have been installed in the XP-61. This view was taken during the early testing of the Black Widow (Gerald Balzer)

      When P-61 As started reaching the forward areas, there was one glaring problem that initially cropped up which could not have been anticipated beforehand. Young pilots were not sure of themselves in this new, heavy, fighter, and they expressed particular concern in respect to the P-61’s single engine performance at low altitude or on take-off. The problem got so bad that it was having a detrimental effect on the performance of the crews in combat. There was a simple solution to this problem, however, and it took the form of Northrop’s most experienced P-61 test pilot, John W Myers. A most gifted aviator, he could ‘wring out’ the Black Widow as if it were an agile ‘hot-rod’. Here, he relates the measures taken to reassure the pilots in forward area;.

      All instrumental in making the Black Widow the deadliest nightfighter of its generation, Northrop’s elite group of four test pilots pose in front of an idling P-61A. They are, from left to right, John W Myers, Max Stanley, Harry Crosby and Alex Papana. Crosby was later killed in the first flight of the XP-79. Note the face peering though the open side canopy hatch (Northrop)

      ‘We had to get out where the Black Widows were in a hostile environment. My own objective was to make this lethal weapon the easiest to fly and most forgiving aeroplane in history. It would prove to those kids who were going to fly it on a black night that they had every comfort and every aid we could give them. The programme dictated that I would get to an island base a few days after the two tech reps – Danny Collins and Scott Johnson – had supervised re-assembling the first aeroplane at that particular base. I would fly it, with a pilot sitting behind me in the gunner’s station. Then we would trade places and I would ride with him. I would do this a few times with three or four of the squadron’s pilots and then move on to another squadron.

      ‘It was natural that those kids would think that a 35,000-lb aeroplane (a monster in those days) was not manoeuvrable. Also, there was great concern about the loss of control in the event of an engine failure, so I had a little show-off flight that I had practiced. It took about three minutes. Very short take-off roll, back across the deck at red-line 420 mph, loop down to the deck again in an Immelmann. Coming out of this manoeuvre, feather one engine on the way down to the deck, two

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1