Focke-Wulf FW-190 vs P-51 Mustang: Which Was Better? One Wrong Turn Gave It Away

In the autumn of 1941, Royal Air Force pilots over the English Channel started filing reports that nobody at Fighter Command wanted to believe. There was a new German fighter. It had a blunt, round nose, nothing like the sleek killers they had learned to fear. It rolled faster than anything in the sky. They could not follow it.

They could not shake it. And when they dove away, the way they had always dove away, it came down after them and it was gaining. In a single season, the Spitfire, the aircraft that had saved Britain, had been made obsolete. Three years later, a German squadron commander climbed to 30,000 ft over Berlin and saw something that made no sense at all.

Single-engine American fighters, hundreds of them, more than 500 mi from England, in a place where no fighter on Earth had the fuel to be. Two machines, two men who drew them. One was built to be a racehorse. The other was deliberately built to be a cavalry horse, ugly, stubborn, and almost impossible to kill. For 4 years, they traded the sky back and forth.

And every time the advantage changed hands, young men paid for it with their lives. So, which one was better? The honest answer is not the one you expect. Before we dive in, get comfortable and grab your favorite warm drink. Now, check the time. What does your clock say right now? Leave it in the comments and let’s step back into World War II together.

The story does not begin in the sky. It begins in a room full of men in suits in Berlin in 1936. The German Air Ministry had called a competition. They wanted a modern fighter, a single-seat monoplane with a retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit. And they wanted it to be the aircraft that would rearm a country that had been forbidden an air force at all. Four companies came.

Arado brought the Ar 80. Heinkel brought the 112. Messerschmitt brought a small, brutal, minimal thing called the Bf 109. And Focke-Wulf brought the Fw 159. The man who had designed it was 38 years old. His name was Kurt Tank, and he was not a typical engineer. He had gone through the first war as a young soldier, in the mud, in a world still built around horses, and he had come out of it with a conviction that never left him.

He also flew, not as a hobby and not for show. He test flew his own prototypes personally, which meant that every mistake he made on paper he eventually had to sit inside of. The Fw 159 was a high-wing design. The wing perched above the fuselage like a parasol. It looked like the past. Its undercarriage failed repeatedly during trials, folding under the aircraft on the grass. It was knocked out early.

The Bf 109 won. For Kurt Tank, this was not a setback. It was the largest contract of his professional life gone, handed to a rival, and there was no second competition coming. Except that the men in suits were nervous. They had watched the British and the Americans, and they understood something uncomfortable about what they had just chosen.

The Bf 109 was brilliant, and brilliance ages fast. If a foreign design leapfrogged it, Germany would have exactly one fighter and no alternative. So quietly, without fanfare, the air ministry went looking for a backup. Tank came back with two proposals. One of them was conventional, a narrow fuselage wrapped around a liquid-cooled V12, the same philosophy as the Bf 109, the same philosophy as the Spitfire.

Put the largest possible engine inside the smallest possible airframe and chase speed until there is nothing left to shave off. The other proposal was the one everyone laughed at. It had a radial engine, a fat air-cooled cylinder of iron with its pistons arranged in a circle presenting a frontal area like the end of a barrel.

Every serious fighter designer in Europe agreed on this point. Radials belonged on transports, on trainers, on carrier aircraft that had to be tough and did not have to be fast. Bolting one onto a front-line fighter was the aerodynamic equivalent of racing with a wall strapped to your nose. Tank did not argue about drag.

He argued about horses. The Spitfire and the Bf 109, he said, were racehorses. On a smooth track, groomed, warmed up, in the hands of a professional, nothing on Earth would catch them. But take away the track, put them on a churned field in the rain, in the cold with a tired boy in the saddle, and a mechanic who had learned his trade in 6 weeks, the racehorse stumbles, the racehorse breaks a leg.

What the coming war needed, he said, was not a racehorse, it was a cavalry horse, something that would carry a heavy load, take a wound, and keep moving, start in the mud, and forgive the rider his mistakes. It was a beautiful argument. It was also not the reason he got the contract. The real reason was far less romantic.

Every serious German fighter and heavy fighter in development was queuing for the same engine, the Daimler-Benz V12, and there were not enough of them. Demand had outrun production before the war had even started. Tank’s radial design used an engine that nobody else was fighting over. That is the first uncomfortable truth of this story.

The Focke-Wulf 190, an aircraft that would go on to be built more than 20,000 times, was not approved because someone in that ministry recognized its genius. It was approved because it ran on the engine nobody wanted. On the 1st of June, 1939, a test pilot named Hans Sander climbed into the first prototype at Bremen. He was 31 years old.

He opened the throttle, and the aircraft did something that made the engineers standing on the grass lean forward. It went. It was fast. It was light on the controls in a way that no fighter that heavy had any right to be. Sander could roll it with two fingers, the horizon spinning past the canopy rail faster than he could count, and it stopped exactly where he asked it to stop.

And then the temperature started to climb. The secret to making a radial engine cut through the air was a tight cowling, a smooth metal shroud wrapped around all that iron, closing the gap, turning the barrel into a bullet. Tank’s team had wrapped it beautifully. They had also strangled it. The cooling air could not get through fast enough, and the heat had nowhere to go but backwards, into the firewall, into the floor, into the cockpit.

Sander sat in a metal box that was heating like a stove. The air temperature around him climbed past 50°. Exhaust gas found its way past the seals and into the air he was breathing, and the smell of it filled a space he could not leave. He brought it home. The men who helped him out of the cockpit were looking at a pilot who had just flown one of the fastest aircraft in the world while being slowly cooked inside it.

It took months to fix. Cooling fans, redesigned exhaust routing, a switch to a bigger and more promising engine, the 14-cylinder 41.8 L BMW 801. There were stretches of that year when the entire program sat one bad report away from cancellation. The thing that made the 190 fast is the same thing that almost killed it in the cradle.

4,000 mi away, across an ocean that had not yet become a battlefield, the second half of this story was about to begin in a hurry. In 1940, Britain was not losing the air war, but it was losing the arithmetic. Spitfires and Hurricanes were coming off the lines, and they were not coming off fast enough.

And every factory that built them sat within reach of German bombers. So, the British Purchasing Commission went to America with a simple proposition. They approached North American Aviation in Inglewood, California, and asked them to build the Curtiss P-40 under license. Somebody else’s design, built in volume, in a country nobody was bombing.

North American said no. What they said instead was, “Give us the same amount of time, and we will build you something better.” It was an extraordinary piece of nerve from a company that had never built a fighter in its life. And the terms were brutal. The airframe had to exist, standing on its own wheels, in a little over 4 months.

The engineer who led that project was a quiet, meticulous man of 40 named Edgar Schmued. He had been born in Hornbach, in Germany. He had no American engineering degree. He had come up through workshops and drawing boards in Germany, then Brazil, then finally California, and he had built his entire standing out of what he could produce on paper.

The man whose team would draw the aircraft that broke the back of the German fighter force had been born a few hundred miles from Kurt Tank’s factory. He did not do it alone, and it is worth saying that plainly because the legend usually forgets it. Raymond Rice was the chief engineer above him.

Edward Horkey handled the aerodynamics. And before a single line was drawn, North American paid Curtis for their wind tunnel data on the P-40 so that the aircraft they were selling as a fresh start would at least begin from somebody’s hard-won numbers instead of from nothing at all. What came out of that room was not a miracle of new physics.

It was a machine in which every single decision had been made in favor of efficiency. A new wing shape drawn so the air would cling to it smoothly and give up less of itself to drag. A radiator pulled out of the nose and buried in a duct under the belly shaped so carefully that the hot air leaving the back of it actually pushed the aircraft forward a little instead of merely holding it back.

And fuel, close to twice the internal fuel of a Spitfire. Nobody had asked for that. Nobody in 1940 believed a fighter would ever need to fly that far. The airframe rolled out of the shop in under 4 months, exactly as promised. And then it stood there in the California sun, finished and useless because the engine had not arrived.

On the 26th of October 1940, a freelance test pilot named Vance Breese finally took it into the air. It was fast. Down low, it could stay with a Spitfire, and it could do it while carrying enough fuel to fly twice as far. The British accepted it, gave it a name, the Mustang, and sent it to squadrons. And then they demoted it because above about 20,000 ft, the American V12 in its nose ran out of breath.

The supercharger simply could not feed it enough air, and the higher the aircraft climbed, the more ordinary it became. Up where the fighting was going to happen, up where the bombers would one day fly, it was not a contender at all. So, the Royal Air Force made a sensible, professional, entirely logical decision. They took the finest low-level fighter they had ever received from America, and they handed it a second-class job, tactical reconnaissance, photographing roads and marshalling yards at treetop height, shooting up trains.

The aircraft that would one day escort heavy bombers to Berlin and bring them home again spent its first 2 years of service flying underneath the war, looking up at it. And while it did, on the other side of the channel, in September of 1941, young men in Spitfires began meeting something with a blunt round nose.

And they began not coming home. The Royal Air Force had spent the previous summer learning to beat the Messerschmitt. They knew it the way a boxer knows an old opponent. They knew it dove better, and they knew it climbed better, and they knew that if you could drag it into a tight turn and hold it there, the Spitfire would come around inside it, and the fight was yours.

That knowledge was worth a great deal. In September of 1941, over the French coast, it became worthless in about 4 weeks. The reports that came back were almost identical, squadron after squadron. A radial-engined fighter, blunt-nosed. They assumed at first it was a captured French aircraft because nothing in German service looked like that.

Then the assumption stopped mattering because the thing was killing them. It was faster in level flight. It climbed better. It dove away and kept accelerating when a Spitfire would have started to shake. And the rolling. God, the rolling. A Spitfire pilot rolling hard had to haul the stick across the cockpit against a wall of air pressure, fighting the controls with both arms and one knee. The German fighter flicked.

One moment it was in front of you, and the next it had snapped 90° and dropped out of your gunsight, and there was nothing you could do about it because the physical effort required to follow was more than a man could produce. Only one thing saved them. In a slow, tight, grinding turn, the Spitfire would still come around inside.

So, that became the doctrine. Turn. Keep turning. Never dive, never run, never try to climb away. Just circle and pray, and wait for him to get bored. That is not a fighting tactic. That is a survival tactic, and every pilot flying it knew the difference. Fighter Command had lost air superiority over the Channel for the first time since the summer of 1940, and the worst part was that they did not know why. They had guesses.

They had gun camera film. They had wreckage pulled out of the sea in pieces so small they explained nothing. What they did not have was the aircraft. So, somebody in London proposed stealing one. The plan was serious enough to be given resources and a name. Send men across the Channel by sea at night.

Get them onto a German airfield in occupied France. Get a pilot into a cockpit he had never seen in the dark with instruments labeled in a language he could not read. Start an engine he had never started, and fly at home through an air defense system that would assume he was the enemy, which, from every possible direction, he would be.

The pilot they had in mind for it was one of the best test pilots in Britain. The planners looked at the casualty estimates and kept working anyway, because the alternative was to keep sending young men out to fight something they did not understand. They were still working on it on the 23rd of June, 1942. That morning, a formation of German fighters from a unit based in occupied France went up to intercept Allied aircraft over the channel.

Among them was a young officer, a lieutenant, serving as an adjutant in his group. His name was Armin Faber. The fight that followed was the kind that has no shape to anyone inside it. Aircraft crossing, closing, gone. Faber got onto a Spitfire and shot it down. The Czech pilot flying it got out, badly hurt, and came down by parachute over English soil.

And then Faber found himself alone. This is the part that pilots understand instantly, and everyone else has to be told. In a hard, turning, diving fight over water, with no coastline in view, with the sun somewhere above a haze layer, and the sea below you the same color as the sky, a man can lose north completely.

Not lose confidence in north, lose north and replace it with a false one, and then fly that false one with total conviction. Faber turned for home. He believed he was flying south. He was flying north. He crossed a coastline. He saw an airfield in green country in summer, with hangars and a runway and aircraft parked on the grass, and everything about it said he had made it.

He came over the field, and because he was young, and because he had just shot down a Spitfire, he rolled the aircraft over the airfield in celebration. Then he put the wheels down and landed. The airfield was Pembrey in South Wales. He had flown the length of the Bristol Channel over a country at war with his own, and he had landed at a Royal Air Force station in an aircraft that Britain had been preparing to sacrifice men to obtain.

The story that has been told ever since is that an unarmed British officer on the ground worked out what had just taxied in, grabbed the only thing within reach, a flare pistol, and pointed it at the cockpit until Faber climbed out with his hands up. Whether the details were exactly that neat, nobody can now prove.

What is documented is that he was captured uninjured and that the aircraft was undamaged. Every rivet of it. It was the first intact Focke-Wulf 190 the Allies ever got their hands on, and it arrived at the precise moment they needed it most. They took it apart, then they put it back together, painted it in British markings, and flew it.

For dozens of hours across weeks, they’d put it up against the best they had, including the new Spitfire Mark IX, and they wrote down everything. And what they found was not that it was invincible. What they found was that it had a shape. It was better at almost everything, but almost everything was not everything.

The turn was the weakness they already knew about, and there was a second weakness, one they could not have guessed from a gun camera, and it would matter far more than the first. Above about 20,000 ft, the Focke-Wulf began to fade. The supercharger on that big radial was doing all it could, and it was not enough.

And the higher it went, the more of its advantage bled away. The German Air Force knew this, too. It is why the Messerschmitt never went away, why both aircraft flew side by side for the rest of the war. The 190 owned the lower and middle air. The BF 109 went high, which was fine. It was a perfectly sound arrangement.

It only became a catastrophe when somebody started sending bombers across Germany at 25,000 ft in daylight. By 1943, the Americans had committed to something the British had already tried and abandoned, daylight precision bombing. Go in during the day, see the target, hit the target, accept the cost. The theory was that the bombers did not need escorts.

A B-17 carried as many as 13 heavy machine guns. Put a formation of them together, box after box, and the overlapping fire was supposed to make the whole thing untouchable. It was a good theory. It was tested by German fighter pilots in the air at the cost of American lives, and it failed. The escorts could not solve it, either, because the escorts could not get there.

The P-47 Thunderbolt was a superb aircraft, big, tough, brutal above 20,000 ft, and it drank fuel like it was being paid to. Escorting from England, it would reach the German frontier, and then the fighter leader would come on the radio and say he was turning back, and hundreds of men in the bombers would watch the little shapes bank away west and shrink and disappear.

The German controllers on the ground watched it, too. They had radar. They could see the escorts leave. They waited. Then the fighters came. The Messerschmitts would usually go for whatever escort remained, and the Focke Wulfs, with their heavier cannon and their rockets slung under the wings, would go for the bombers.

They would hit them on the way in. They would land, refuel, rearm, and hit the same formation on the way back out. On the 17th of August, 1943, the Eighth Air Force went to Regensburg and Schweinfurt. 60 B-17s did not come back. 60 aircraft. 10 men in each. They went back to Schweinfurt on the 14th of October. Of 291 bombers sent, 60 were lost, and dozens more came home carrying dead men and holes you could put a fist through.

Two raids, 1,200 empty bunks. If you have never seen an airfield after a mission like that, it is hard to describe what it does to the men on the ground. The formations come back thin. The ground crews stand at the hard stands where their own aircraft should be parking, and they keep standing there long after the last engine has been shut down, listening to a sky that has gone quiet.

Somebody starts folding the blankets on the cots that will not be needed. In the mess that evening, there is too much room at the tables, and the men who did come back sit in it and say very little. And in the morning, they are told where they are going next. The deep penetration raids stopped. Let that stand for a moment, because it gets skipped in almost every telling of this war.

In the autumn of 1943, the German fighter force beat the American daylight bombing campaign. Not slowed it, beat it. The Americans had to stop going, and they had to stop going because the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt had made the cost unpayable. If the story had ended there, there would be no argument about which fighter was better.

But 18 months earlier, in a quiet corner of England, something had already happened that would take all of it away. On the 30th of April, 1942, at an airfield at Duxford, a man named Ronald Harker was handed the keys to an aircraft he had not asked to fly. Harker was 33. He was not a squadron commander and not a designer.

He worked for Rolls-Royce as a liaison test pilot, which meant that his job was to fly other people’s airplanes and report back on the engines inside them. He was, in the most literal sense, a middleman. He took the Mustang up. He flew it for about half an hour. He came down knowing something. The airframe was extraordinary. It was clean in a way that Rolls-Royce test pilots, who spent their working lives measuring exactly how much power it took to push a given shape through the air, could feel in their hands.

The aircraft was giving away almost nothing to drag. It was simply being held back by the engine bolted to the front of it. And Rolls-Royce had, sitting on a bench in Derby, the answer. The Merlin 61 with a two-stage supercharger, an engine that compressed the thin air at altitude twice before feeding it to the cylinders.

It was already going into the Spitfire Mark IX, and it had already restored the balance against the Focke-Wulf. Harker went back and wrote a memo. That is all it was, a short document from a man with no authority suggesting that a British engine be put into an American airframe that the Royal Air Force had already classified as a low-altitude reconnaissance machine.

Nobody was obliged to read it. Several people who did read it disagreed. It had to climb through two separate national bureaucracies, two air forces, two governments, and two aircraft industries that each had their own programs to protect and their own reasons to say no. There were engineers who thought the conversion was not worth the airframes it would consume.

There were officials on both sides of the Atlantic who saw an American company being handed a British engine or a British idea being handed to an American company and found reasons to slow it down. The conversions flew in the autumn of 1942 and they were a revelation immediately. The Merlin powered Mustang did not reach front-line American squadrons in numbers until the very end of 1943.

Count the months. Then count Schweinfurt. The aircraft that could have flown all the way to those targets and back, the one machine in the world with both the range and now the high altitude power to do it, existed as a proven design while American crews were being shot out of the sky over Germany because nothing could escort them. It was not malice.

It was not stupidity exactly. It was the ordinary grinding slowness of large organizations and it is one of the most expensive delays in the history of air warfare. When it finally came though, it came completely. The transformation was not incremental. With the two-stage Merlin built under license in America by Packard, the Mustang gained about 50 miles an hour at the top end, far more than that in the thin air where it had previously been useless and a ceiling that put it above anything the German day fighter force could reliably reach.

Its top speed went past 430 miles an hour and it kept the fuel. It kept all of it. With drop tanks under the wings, it could leave England, fly to Berlin, fight and come home. On the 4th of March, 1944, American fighters appeared over Berlin. Two days later they came back in force and the German fighter pilots who climbed to meet them had to absorb in the space of a single interception the fact that there was now no distance at which their bombers were safe and no distance at which they themselves were safe either.

Here is the part of this comparison that almost nobody expects, and it is the part that decided it. The Mustang was not faster than the Focke-Wulf because it had a bigger engine. It had a considerably smaller one. The Merlin displaced about 27 L. The BMW in the nose of the 190 displaced nearly 42. The Daimler-Benz in the Messerschmitt was in between.

The American fighter was pulling more power out of less engine at greater height, and part of the reason was not in the engine at all. It was in the fuel. American and British aviation fuel was, by 1944, of a quality the Germans could no longer match. The standard Allied grade allowed the supercharger to be pushed to boost pressures that would have destroyed a lesser fuel, and from the middle of that year some units received better still.

The fuel simply did not detonate under pressure. The engine could be leaned on hard, and it would take it. German fuel could not do that. Their best high-grade aviation spirit sat several points lower, and much of the force was running on something lower still. Every extra pound of boost a German engine designer wanted to use, he had to buy some other way.

So, they bought it with chemistry. Water and methanol injected into the intake to cool the charge and stop it detonating. Nitrous oxide carried in bottles for a few minutes of extra power at high altitude. These were brilliant, resourceful engineering solutions, and every one of them was a work-around for a problem that had been created somewhere else entirely.

Because the reason German fuel was getting worse was that Allied bombers were burning down the plants that made it. Think about what that means for this comparison. The contest between these two fighters was not settled in the air. It was settled in synthetic oil refineries at ground level, hundreds of miles below the fight, and the bombers doing that burning were being escorted by Mustangs.

The Mustang was, in the most direct way possible, helping to strangle the engine of its own opponent. And then, in January of 1944, a 47-year-old American general took command of the Eighth Air Force and changed the rules. James Doolittle was already famous. He was also, by temperament, a man who looked at an inherited assumption and asked what it was actually costing.

What he found when he arrived was a fighter force tied to the bombers. The standing instruction was that the escorts’ first duty was to bring the bombers home, which in practice meant that fighter pilots sat above the formations and were not permitted to leave them. German fighters would form up in plain sight, out of range, assembling into attack formations, and the Americans had to watch them do it.

Doolittle cut the rope. By his own account, he had the sign in the Fighter Command headquarters taken down and replaced, so that the first duty of the Eighth Air Force fighters was no longer to protect the bombers, but to destroy the German fighter force. Go out ahead of the formations, hunt them while they are climbing, follow them down, and when they land, go down to the deck and shoot them on the ground, in the circuit, on the taxiway, wherever you find them.

The bomber crews hated it. That has to be said honestly, because it is the human cost of the decision. For a man sitting in a Plexiglas nose at 25,000 ft over Germany, the sight of his own fighters overhead was the only comfort available. Doolittle took it away. Crews looked up into an empty sky and felt abandoned, and some of them went down in the weeks that followed while their escorts were 40 miles ahead killing the aircraft that would otherwise have been waiting.

It was a cold piece of arithmetic and it was completely correct. The way to protect bombers was not to guard them. It was to destroy the force that attacked them and to keep destroying it. And above all to kill the men who flew it. In late February of 1944, the Americans deliberately sent their bombers out as bait day after day to force the German fighters into the air where the Mustangs could reach them.

The German fighter force went up because they had to. And they were met at their own altitude by an aircraft that was faster than they were with pilots who were no longer required to stay home. The hunters had become the hunted and the change happened over the course of a single spring. The German response was to build something terrifying.

If the bomber boxes could not be broken by ordinary fighters, then the fighters would be armored until they could fly straight into the mass defensive fire and survive it. The Focke-Wulf was the natural choice because the Focke-Wulf could carry the weight. They bolted steel plate to the cockpit sides.

They fitted thick armored glass panels beside the pilot’s head. They hung heavy 30 mm cannon in the wings, weapons that fired shells so destructive that three or four hits would take the wing off a four-engined bomber. They called them Sturmbock, assault rams, and the men who flew them in the assault units were trained to do something that violated every instinct a fighter pilot has.

Do not fire from distance. Close from behind in tight formation into the concentrated fire of an entire bomber group and keep closing until the bomber fills the windscreen and you can see the tail gunner’s face and then fire. On the 7th of July, 1944, an assault group led by a Focke-Wulf major came in behind an American bomber wing near Oschersleben.

The bombers were B-24s, and one group in that wing had drifted out of position. There is no comfortable way to picture what that looks like from inside a bomber. The assault fighters come in low and level from dead astern, so close together that their wingtips are almost overlapping, and they do not break away at the range every other German fighter has broken away at for 2 years.

They keep coming. The waist gunners are firing into them and seeing the tracers strike and bounce. The tail gunner, a boy of 20 in a Plexiglas bubble at the very back, watches a wall of engines fill his field of view and understands, in the last seconds available to him, that his guns are not going to be enough. In a few minutes, close to 30 bombers came down.

It worked. It worked exactly as designed, and it remains one of the most shocking single interceptions of the war. And it could not be repeated because of what came next. An armored airplane is a heavy airplane. All that steel and glass and cannon had turned a fast, beautifully rolling fighter into something that wallowed.

It could survive a bomber’s guns. It could not survive the escorts. The Mustangs came down out of the sun onto assault formations that could no longer roll, could no longer climb, could no longer run. The German pilots had to sit there in their armor, committed, watching the bombers grow in the windscreen while something faster came down behind them, and they had a choice between breaking off and failing the mission, or holding formation and dying in it.

The armor that kept them alive for 5 minutes was the same armor that killed them in the sixth. Kurt Tank was 46 years old in 1944, and he did the one thing he had spent eight years arguing against. He put a V12 in the nose of his fighter. There was no shame in it, and he did not pretend otherwise.

The radio had given him everything it had. What he needed now was altitude, and to get altitude, he needed an engine that could breathe thin air. And the one he could actually obtain was an inverted V12 called the Jumo 213, an engine originally built for bombers, which meant it was not being fought over by anyone else. The same logic that had given him the radio in 1938 now gave him its replacement.

The nose went long and slender. The fuselage had to be stretched behind the cockpit to keep the balance. What came out of it was the Focke-Wulf 190D, and the men who flew it called it the Dora. It was by almost every account from the pilots who took it into combat, the finest piston engine fighter Germany ever put into service in numbers.

But it is worth being precise about what it actually was, because the legend has grown past the facts. The Dora did not suddenly own the top of the sky. Its supercharger was a single-stage unit, and its cockpit was not pressurized. Where it was superb was in the lower and middle air, below about 20,000 ft, where it accelerated hard, climbed hard, and with water-methanol injection running, could go after a Mustang and catch it.

The aircraft that finally reached into the Mustang’s own thin air was different again. It was called the Ta 152, and it carried Tank’s own name in the designation. The high-altitude version had a long, graceful, glider-like wing and a sealed, pressurized cockpit, and it was built to hunt at heights where a man without pressurization simply cannot function.

It was designed to meet a threat that never arrived. The German requirement for extreme altitude fighters had been driven by the fear of a coming generation of high-flying heavy bombers, and the aircraft that loomed largest in that fear was the American B-29. It never came. Not one B-29 flew a combat mission over Europe. Germany spent some of the last engineering capacity it had left building a beautiful answer to a question nobody ended up asking.

And even where the answers were right, they arrived in numbers that could not matter. Something like 700 Doras reached combat units, and historians still argue about the exact figure, depending on which subvariants you count. The Ta-152 was built in the low dozens. Set that against the totals for the whole war. More than 20,000 Focke-Wulf 190s of all types. More than 15,000 Mustangs.

But the production numbers hide the thing that actually killed the German fighter force, and it was not a shortage of aircraft. In the last full year of the war, German factories built more fighters than they ever had. Dispersed into forests and caves and small workshops, exactly as Tank had designed them to be, they kept coming off the lines while the cities around them burned.

What Germany could not manufacture was flying hours. By late 1944, a German fighter pilot was arriving at a front-line squadron with something around a hundred hours in his logbook, and often considerably less. Fuel was too scarce to train with. The instructors who should have been teaching him had been pulled into combat units and killed.

The American boy climbing into a Mustang to meet him had 300 hours, sometimes more, and had done his learning over Texas and Arizona, where nobody was shooting at him. Put those two young men in identical aircraft, and the outcome is not in doubt. Now, give the better trained one the faster aircraft, as well. That is the answer to the question, and it has almost nothing to do with engineering.

On Christmas Day, 1944, over Belgium, a 25-year-old from North Carolina, named George Preddy, was flying low near Liège. He had more aerial victories than any other Mustang pilot in the war, and he was chasing a Focke-Wulf 190 down at treetop height with everything he had. American anti-aircraft gunners on the ground saw fighters coming in fast and low, and opened fire. They shot him down.

He was killed by his own side in the best fighter the Allies had, at the peak of his ability, at the age of 25, and he had survived everything the German Air Force had been able to throw at him for 2 years. The finest aircraft in the world does not save the finest pilot. It never has. That is the whole argument about which machine was better reduced to one man and  one Christmas morning.

A week later, the German fighter force made its last great effort. On the 1st of January, 1945, in the gray light before dawn, hundreds of German fighters took off across the Western Front, more than had flown together in years. The plan was to come in below radar and hit Allied airfields in Belgium, Holland, and France, and to destroy on the ground the air force they could no longer beat in the air.

In some places, it worked. Allied aircraft burned in rows on the grass. And then, the arithmetic arrived. The Allies replaced every aircraft lost that morning within weeks. The factories were in Michigan and California and in an England that was no longer being bombed and the losses barely registered. Germany lost something it could not replace.

Somewhere over 200 pilots were killed, missing, or taken prisoner in a single morning. And among them were squadron commanders and group commanders and the last of the men who still knew how to lead a formation into a fight and bring most of it home. Many of them were not shot down by Allied fighters at all. They were shot down by their own anti-aircraft batteries who had not been told the operation was happening because secrecy had been taken so far that the guns along the route were never warned.

They flew out through their own guns to attack an enemy who could absorb the damage and they came back without the men who had been holding the whole force together. That was the morning the German fighter arm finished itself. So, which was better? It deserves a straight answer, not a shrug, so here it is, honestly, with the parts that each side will not want to hear.

Below 20,000 ft before 1943, the Focke-Wulf was the better fighter and it is not close. It rolled faster than anything. It was tougher. Its air-cooled engine could take rifle caliber hits that would have killed a liquid-cooled engine in seconds. And its wide undercarriage forgave the kind of landing that broke Messerschmitts and killed the boys flying them.

Above 20,000 ft after the Merlin went in, the Mustang was the better fighter and that is not close, either. On range, there is no comparison at all and range is the thing that actually decided the campaign. A fighter that cannot reach the fight is a fighter that does not exist. The Mustang could escort a bomber across the whole of Germany and still have enough left to chase somebody home.

That single quality, which nobody had specified and nobody in 1940 had thought to want, is why the strategic bombing campaign could continue at all. On ruggedness, on the ability to be flown by an average pilot, on the ability to carry bombs and rockets and go back down to the ground war and be useful there, the Focke-Wulf was better and remained better until the last week of the war.

And in their final forms, the Dora against the Mustang D, flown by two equally good pilots at a sensible height, the honest answer is that it would come down to who saw whom first, which is what it always came down to. But the comparison itself contains a lie and it is worth naming. The Mustang was built in factories nobody was bombing, out of alloys nobody was rationing, by workers who went home at night to houses that were still there.

And it was fed fuel of a quality that let its engine give up power the Germans could only reach through chemistry and ingenuity. The Focke-Wulf was built in pieces in workshops scattered through the woods, by forced labor and exhausted men, out of whatever material could be found, and it was flown by teenagers on watered-down fuel, by pilots who had never been taught to use it properly.

Judged as pieces of engineering, they were two of the finest fighters anyone produced in that war. They were never judged as pieces of engineering. They were judged by the countries behind them. Which brings us back to a room in Berlin in 1936 and a man of 38 who had just lost a competition arguing that the coming war would not be won by the perfect machine, but by the machine that still worked when everything around it had fallen apart.

Kurt Tank was right. He was completely right and he built exactly the aircraft he said he would build, rugged and forgiving and almost impossible to kill. An airplane that could take off from a muddy field with a novice at the controls and come home with holes in it. He simply did not understand what was going to fall apart.

It was not the runways, it was the refineries that made the fuel and the flying schools that made the pilots. And in the end it was the supply of young men themselves used up faster than a country can produce them. You can design an aircraft to survive a broken airfield. Nobody has ever designed one that can survive a broken nation.

That is the answer. The question of which fighter was better assumes that airplanes fight each other. They never do. They only ever carry the men who do and the countries that sent them.