P-51 Mustang vs. Fw 190 D-9: Faster, Harder, and Still Not Enough to Survive

Autumn 1944. A field of wet grass outside Oldenberg in northern Germany. A row of new fighters stands with cold engines and open canopies. The men who are supposed to fly them are standing 30 paces away and nobody is walking toward them. They have flown faky wolves for 3 years. They trust the fat radial engine because it is cooled by air and air cannot leak.

A bullet through an air cooled engine cost you a cylinder. A bullet through a radiator cost you your life slowly while you watch a needle climb and count how far it is home. These new machines have long noses. A long nose means liquid. Liquid means dying by arithmetic. One of them says it out loud.

He does not want it. 300 miles west on a wet field in England, another young man is walking out to the aircraft that will be waiting for them. Six machine guns, a Merlin built in Detroit, fuel enough to fight over Berlin and come home for dinner. 90 days from this morning, the machine these men are refusing to touch will be faster than that Mustang through the middle of the sky. It will climb harder.

It will accelerate harder. Every one of them will come to believe it is the finest thing Germany ever built with a propeller on the front. Almost all of them will still be dead by spring. Make yourself comfortable with your favorite drink. Then check the time and tell us exactly what your clock says right now.

We’d love to know what time people around the world are joining us. The crates came by rail in the last week of September 1944. The ground crews of the third group of fighter wing 54 worked through the night to uncrate them, and by the time the light came up over the flat lower Saxon fields, the new fighters were standing in a line on the grass with the dew already gray on their wings.

The pilots came out after breakfast to look at them and stopped. The Fwolf 190 they knew was a squad animal, wide, blunt. The nose ended almost immediately in a steel ring of cylinders, and behind that ring sat a man who felt correctly that he had an engine block between himself and whatever was coming at him from the front.

You could put a cannon shell into a BMW radial, lose a cylinder, and still fly home on the rest of them. Men had done it. Everyone in that group knew someone who had done it. What was standing on the grass in front of them now was longer. The nose ran out ahead of the windscreen like a pointing finger. To keep the whole thing in balance, they had cut the fuselage open behind the cockpit and let a section into it.

And the result was an aircraft that looked stretched, awkward, slightly wrong, like a photograph of a familiar face taken with the wrong lens. Somebody called it the long nose. The name stuck. Long-nosed Dora. They knew what the long-nose meant. It meant an inline engine. It meant water and glycol and a radiator and pipes running the length of the airframe carrying fluid that had to stay inside those pipes or the engine would seize in about 90 seconds.

90 seconds. That was the number they had all been told. Lose your coolant and you have about 90 seconds of engine left. And there is nothing in the cockpit you can do with that time except choose where you are going to hit the ground. Their commander was a 24y old named Robert Weiss. He had been at this since he was a boy.

Most of his victories had been scored in the east in weather that turned the oil in the sump to grease in a war that killed his friends faster than the wing could replace them. He was very good. He was very tired. The photographs of him from that period are not photographs of a young man. Weiss listened to his pilots complain about the long nose.

Then he told them to get into it. 50 kilometers to the east in the drawing offices at Bremen, the man who had given them the thing did not particularly want them to have it either. Kurt Tank was 46 years old that autumn. He ran the design work at Faulk Wolf, and unlike most men who sign off on aircraft drawings, he flew the results himself.

He had taken the first 190 up personally. He knew what his own airplanes felt like at the top of a climb, which is a rarer qualification among aircraft designers than most people assume. The 190 had been a shock to the Royal Air Force when it appeared over the channel in 1941. It rolled faster than anything the British had.

It was brutal and simple, and it outflew the Spitfire Mark 5 so completely that the British had to build a new Spitfire to answer it. But the war had moved upward. By 1943, the fight was no longer over the channel at 10,000 ft. It was over Germany at 25,000 ft, where the American heavy bombers came in boxes, and where the air is thin enough that everything an engine does depends entirely on how much of that thin air it can squeeze into itself.

The BMW radial in the nose of the 190 could not squeeze enough. above roughly 20,000 ft. It ran out of breath. Faulkwolf tried to fix it. There were turbo installations and larger blowers and a great deal of engineering effort, and none of it produced an aircraft that could be built in the numbers Germany needed at the altitudes Germany needed.

So Tank did the obvious thing, which is also the thing engineers hate most. He took an airframe that worked and he put a completely different kind of engine into the front of it. He was not proud of it. In the paperwork and the conversations of that year, the long nose is treated as an interim measure, something to fill a hole until the aircraft tank actually wanted was ready.

That aircraft was the TA 152, a high alitude machine with long wings and a pressurized cockpit, and Tank believed it would be the fighter that mattered. He was wrong about that. The TA 152 arrived in numbers too small to count. The stop gap became the last faka wolf that fought. 9,000 kilometers away in Englewood, California, another German was drawing a fighter.

Edgar Schmood was 44 years old. He had been born in a small town in the Palatinate at the very end of the previous century. He had learned his engineering in Germany. He had left in 1930 when he was 30 years old, going first to Brazil and then to the United States. He led the design team at North American Aviation and he was the man most responsible for the shape of the P-51 Mustang.

Two men trained in the same country drawing the two aircraft that would meet each other in the sky above it. The Mustang almost did not happen, and once it had happened, it very nearly failed. The British ordered it in 1940 in a hurry because they needed fighters and American factories had capacity. North American built the airframe fast and built it beautifully.

The wing used a new laminer flow section. The radiator duct underneath was shaped so carefully that at speed it gave back a part of its own drag as thrust and into the front of this superb airframe they bolted an Allison engine with a single stage supercharger. Down low it was magnificent. Near the ground it was faster than a Spitfire Mark 5.

Up high it was nothing at all. Above about 15,000 feet, the power fell away, and the aeroplane went with it. And the Royal Air Force, which needed a high altitude fighter more badly than it needed anything else in the world, quietly assigned its new American Mustangs to low-level reconnaissance and army cooperation work.

That should have been the end of the story. A very fast machine wasted. On the 30th of April 1942 at Duxford, a Rolls-Royce test pilot named Ronald Harker was invited to fly one. Harker was 33. He was not a famous man, and he never became one. He flew the Mustang for about half an hour, landed, and wrote a short report which said in effect that this was the finest airframe he had ever handled, and that somebody ought to put a proper engine into it.

The proper engine he had in mind was the two-stage Merlin. At Rolls-Royce, there was a performance engineer named Whittleled Chalier, a pole, and he sat down to work out what would actually happen if you did that. He had no aircraft to measure. He had drag figures, weight figures, power curves, and a pencil. His answer was 432 m an hour at a little under 26,000 ft.

That number was so far beyond anything. then flying that it should have been treated as an arithmetic error. It was not an error. When the real aircraft finally flew, it did very nearly exactly what Chalier had said it would do on paper, which is one of the cleanest pieces of engineering prophecy in the entire war.

Rolls-Royce converted five Mustang airframes by hand to prove the point. The installations were ugly. They worked. North American watching this happen built its own version properly and the first factory Merlin Mustang flew on the 30th of November 1942. Now look at what was actually sitting in the nose of that aircraft because this is where the whole story lives.

The Merlin in the Mustang displaced about 27 L and turned 3,000 revolutions a minute. Its supercharger had two stages, one impeller feeding the next and two drive speeds. Between the stages, there was a cooler. After the second stage, there was a much larger one. Both of them existed to solve a single problem, which is that compressing air makes it hot, and hot air is thin air, and hot air also wants to detonate.

It was fed by a Bendix Stromberg pressure carburetor, which metered fuel with a precision an ordinary float carburetor could not approach, and which did not starve when the pilot shoved the nose down, and it drank American fuel. First 130 grade, later 150 grade. Packard in Detroit built these engines under license, something close to a third of all the Merlin made anywhere in the world.

They came out of a plant nobody was bombing on a continent nobody was invading. Fed by suppliers nobody was interrupting and shipped down a supply line nobody was cutting. Now look at the other nose. The Junker’s Jumo 213A was an inverted V12 of 35 L. 8 L larger than the Merlin. It turned 3,250 revolutions a minute which was high for its day.

It had direct fuel injection, so it would not falter under negative load. It had a swirl throttle that cut pumping losses below full altitude, an idea the Germans had studied carefully after seeing it on Soviet engines. In several genuine respects, it was the more advanced piece of machinery. It had one supercharger stage, two speeds, but one stage.

It had no charge cooler at all. Nothing at all between the blower and the cylinders except pipe. And it burned German B4 fuel rated at 87 octane by the Germans who made it. And when the Americans tested captured samples by their own method at about 89, call it 89. It is still not 150. Weiss put his pilots into the long nose in the first days of October. They flew it.

They came back. For a while, nobody said very much. The thing they had refused to walk toward climbed better than the aircraft they loved. It accelerated better down low and through the middle altitudes. It was simply a harder, faster, meaner machine than any fuckwolf any of them had ever strapped on. They had been handed the best fighter of their lives.

They had been handed it in October 1944. The first job they were given with it was to fly in circles. In October 1944, the third group of fighter wing 54 was ordered to fly airfield protection over the jet fields at Akmer and Hepe. Not interception, not bomber attack, airfield protection. Germany had jets now.

The Messormidt 262 was the fastest combat aircraft in the world and there was nothing in the Allied inventory that could catch it in level flight. It was also for about 4 minutes of every sort the most helpless aeroplane in the sky. A jet in 1944 did not have throttle response. You pushed the lever and the engines thought about it.

On takeoff, the 262 needed a long run and a long, flat, patient acceleration before it had the speed to defend itself. On landing, it came down the approach slow, heavy, committed, with its gear hanging out, and its engines nearly idle, and it could not go around in a hurry because the engines would not spool up in a hurry.

The Americans worked this out very quickly. So they came and sat over the jetfields, Mustangs and thunderbolts orbiting at height above Akmer, waiting for the moment when a 262 lowered its wheels and then falling on it. Which is how the best propeller fighter Germany ever built came to spend the autumn flying racetrack patterns over a patch of lower Saxony at 4,000 ft so that somebody else’s aircraft could take off.

The pilots hated it. It was not what the airplane was for. They had a machine that could outclimb and out accelerate anything they had ever flown. And they were using it as a fence. There is a particular tiredness that comes from flying a racetrack. You are at low power, at low altitude, going nowhere. The engine note never changes.

The same church spire comes around under your left wing every 3 minutes. Then the same flooded field, then the same road with the same card on it. And you are turning your head until your neck aches. Because the only thing that is going to happen today will come out of the sun and it will happen once.

And then the jet would start to roll. You could hear it through the airframe before you saw it. That flat tearing noise, nothing like an engine, more like canvas being ripped very slowly. The 262 would run and run and run down the strip with its nose high and its wheels still down and its wings doing almost nothing yet, and every man orbiting above it would be counting, and every man knew that this was the Minet.

They watched the hedros at the far end. They watched the gap between the cloud layers. They watched the smear of the horizon where the low sun made everything the same color. Sometimes nothing came. Sometimes the jet cleaned up and accelerated away and became untouchable and everyone went home. And sometimes there were four dots up there that had been sitting in the glare for 20 minutes waiting for exactly this. But it worked. It was necessary.

And the men who were doing it understood in a way that they did not discuss over dinner exactly what it meant about the state of the war that the fastest fighter in Germany now needed a bodyguard. At the same hour from a wet field in East Anglia, another young man was climbing into a cockpit for a very different kind of day.

The American escort mission was not a dog fight. It was mostly an endurance event with a few minutes of murder in the middle of it. He took off with two drop tanks slung under the wings and the aircraft was heavy and unhappy and reluctant and he climbed for the better part of an hour to find the bombers and then he throttled back and he sat there.

That is the part nobody films the sitting 26,000 ft and outside the canopy it is 50° below zero. The oxygen mask is wet inside from his own breath and the wet freezes and by the second hour there is ice on the rubber against his face. His feet stopped being warm somewhere over the Dutch coast.

There is a relief tube between his legs and using it at that temperature in that harness in that flying suit is a piece of engineering in itself. He has a map on his knee and a compass and a watch. He is flying a straight line over a continent that is entirely hostile on the assumption that his own arithmetic will bring him back to a small island in a large ocean.

4 hours, five, sometimes seven. And then somewhere out on the flank, a smear of dots appears against the cloud and everything he has been sitting on for 5 hours is spent in 90 seconds. That was the job. The men doing it on both sides of that sky were mostly in their early 20s. Neither of them would have recognized anything glamorous in what he was doing.

The difference between them was not courage and it was not skill. The difference was that when the American landed, there was a fresh aircraft, a fresh set of spark plugs, an unlimited hose of high-grade fuel, and a replacement pilot with 300 hours in his log book standing behind him. That fuel deserves a moment of its own because it is the single least glamorous war-winning weapon of the entire conflict.

From the summer of 1944, the American fighter groups in England began running 150 grade fuel. What that number buys you is permission. Permission to shove more air into the engine before the mixture blows itself up. on the Merlin in the Mustang. It meant the pilot could pull 75 inches of mercury on the manifold pressure gauge. On that setting, at sea level, the engine gave something close to 1,788 horsepower.

The same engine on the older fuel at 67 in gave about 1,580. 200 horsepower out of nothing but a change in what came out of the hose. It was not free. The lead content that made the fuel work also fouled spark plugs and the ground crews paid for every mile an hour of it. Engines ran rough. Plugs came out black. Maintenance hours went up across the whole command and there were arguments about whether the trade was worth it.

That is the honest version. The Americans had trouble with the very fuel that was saving them. The difference was that they had enough spark plugs to lose the argument and win anyway. Now put the two aircraft in the same piece of sky because this is where the comparison stops being a table of numbers and becomes something a man has to survive.

Down low near the ground they are almost exactly matched. Below about 2,000 m, call it 6,000 ft. The Mustang has an edge of a few kilometers an hour. It is a real edge and it is small enough that it means nothing. In practice, at that height, whoever saw the other man first is going to win. Climb higher, and something changes. Between about 3,000 and 6,000 m, roughly 10 to 20,000 ft, the long-nosed Dora is the faster aeroplane.

Not by a little, by as much as 20 km an hour, which is around 12 m an hour. And in a fight where a man is trying to close a gap or open one, 12 m an hour is the difference between a firing solution and a wasted afternoon. There is a specific engineering reason for it and it belongs to the Merlin, not to the Jumo. The Mustang supercharger had two drive speeds.

Low blower for the bottom of the sky, high blower for the top. Between them there is a band of altitude where the low gear has run out and the high gear has not yet earned its keep. And in that band the engine is working harder for less. Every pilot who flew a Merlin knew the feeling of the automatic gear change and the sag that came before it.

The Germans had this problem too. The Jumo 213 also had two speeds, but its ratios were set closer together, and its swirl throttle cut the losses when the throttle was not wide open. And the result was that the Dora’s gap was narrow and shallow, while the Mustangs was wide and deep. Right there in that band of the sky, the German aeroplane was simply better. Keep climbing.

Above 6,000 m, about 20,000 ft, the second stage of the Merlin comes fully alive. And the Mustang takes the lead back and never gives it up again. 10 km an hour at first, more as you go higher. And the higher you go, the wider the gap gets because the Jumo has one blower and one blower only.

and above its critical altitude, the manifold pressure falls away and there is nothing left in the design to arrest it, which is a problem because 25,000 ft is precisely where the bombers were. The Germans had built a fighter that was superior to the Mustang in a band of altitude the Americans had no reason to fly in.

Understand what that meant on an ordinary morning. The bombers are up at 25,000 ft and the escort is above them, higher still because height is money and you never spend it until you have to. The Germans come up from below through cloud through the band where they own the numbers. And for those few minutes, the German pilot has an aeroplane that will do things the man above him cannot match.

But he does not fight there. He cannot. The thing he has been sent to kill is four miles up. So he climbs out of the only piece of sky where he is the faster man. And he keeps climbing and with every thousand feet the needle on his manifold pressure gauge slides a little further back and the thin air takes a little more from the one blower he has.

And somewhere on the way up the advantage crosses over and now it belongs to the man he is climbing toward. He arrives at the bombers with less than he started with. The American arrives with more. That is the whole thing. Not skill, not courage, not tactics, gearing. One aeroplane was designed by people who assumed the fight would happen at the top of the sky.

And the other was adapted in a hurry by people who no longer had the luxury of choosing where anything happened. And when the fight went down instead of up, when Adora caught something low over the fields and both of them ended up at 2,000 ft with the trees going past, the German had a real chance. He had the power. He had the acceleration.

Down there, the numbers came back to him. The trouble was that by 1944, almost nothing important happened at 2,000 ft. There was one more card in the German hand, and it was a good one. Behind the cockpit of the Dora, where a fuel tank might have been, there was a tank of something else.

Roughly half methanol, a little under half plain water, and about 1% of a corrosion inhibitor, so the whole mixture did not eat the engine from the inside. The Germans called it MW50. Spray that into the intake and two things happen. The water evaporates and cools the charge, which makes it denser, which is worth a little power on its own.

And more importantly, the mixture becomes far harder to detonate. The engine can be squeezed harder before it destroys itself, which is exactly what high octane fuel does, except that methanol and water were things Germany could still make in 1944, and high octane aviation gasoline increasingly was not. With that tank open, running 1.

8 atmospheres of boost, the Jumo 213 produced somewhere around 2,100 metric horsepower. 2,100 against the Merlin’s 1,788. On paper, the German engine wins the power contest outright, and that is not a trick of the numbers. 35 lers turning 3,250 revolutions with fuel injection is a serious piece of machinery. And the Dora on the deck would do 606 km an hour, which is 377 m an hour, right down where the ground is going past fast enough to hurt.

But look at where that power came from. The tank held about 10 minutes. 10 minutes. That was the whole allowance. Not 10 minutes per hour. Not 10 minutes per fight, 10 minutes before the tank was dry. And the engine went back to being a good engine on bad fuel. And once it was dry, there was exactly one place in the world to fill it up again.

And that place was the ground. The Mustang’s power was not on loan. It was not on a timer. It was not rationed by a corporal with a jug. It was simply what came out of the fuel tanks the aircraft had taken off with. for as long as there was fuel in them, 7 hours from home if necessary.

That is the whole war in one comparison. The German aeroplane could borrow strength. The American aeroplane owned it. There is one more honest thing to say before we go on, and it is about drag. Modern aerodynamic analysis of these airframes puts the Mustang cleanest of the three great fighters of that winter. The Dora is second.

And the Dora, for all its blunt shoulders and its huge annular radiator, is cleaner than a Spitfire Mark 9, which tells you that Kurt Tank’s stop gap was not a crude machine. It was a very good aeroplane built by very good engineers in a country that was running out of everything. And now the part that decides it. None of this mattered.

Not the 20 kilometers an hour, not the 2,100 horsepower, not the fuel injection or the swirl throttle or the 10-minute tank. Because by the winter of 1944, a German replacement pilot was arriving at a frontline fighter unit with somewhere around 100 hours of flying in his log book, and often considerably less.

Some of those hours were on trainers. Very few of them were on the type he was about to be killed in. The American arriving at an English airfield in the same month had over 300. Think about what that actually means in a cockpit. 300 hours means your hands do the flying while your eyes do something else. It means you can hold formation, watch your leader, work the fuel selector, keep the mixture right, and still spend most of your attention on the two square meters of sky behind your own tail, which is the only piece of sky that will ever

kill you. 100 hours means you are still flying the aeroplane. All of you, all the time, you are working the throttle and the propeller and the trim and the gun site and the radio. And every one of those things is taking a piece of the only thing you have that matters, which is the ability to notice.

The men in the third group knew this. They watched it happen. A new man would join. He would be 19 and polite and he would fly the longnose reasonably well in a straight line and on his third or fourth mission he would be gone and nobody would have seen it happen and there would be no story to tell his family because there was nothing to tell.

Hans Dortonman was 23 that winter and he was one of the first men to score with the Dora. He was very good in it. He would fly fa wolves until the last week of the war and survive. He would also watch most of the men he flew with disappear. Say this plainly because it is the thing that gets left out of every comparison ever written about these two aircraft.

A large proportion of the Doras that were shot down that winter were not shot down because the Mustang was a better fighter. They were shot down because the young man sitting in them had never been taught properly and with enough hours to make it instinct how to look behind himself. The aeroplane was not the problem.

The airplane was almost never the problem. There is a thing experienced pilots describe and inexperienced pilots cannot, which is that after enough hours, the machine stops being separate from you. You do not think about the rudder. You do not think about the trim. Your right hand knows where the throttle quadrant is. The way your hand knows where your own pocket is.

All of that becomes automatic. And what it buys you is not comfort. What it buys you is attention. Attention is the currency. It is the only currency. The boy with 100 hours spends all of his on the aeroplane. He is holding formation and it is costing him everything he has. He is fighting the trim. He is checking the gauges because he has not yet learned which ones lie.

He is listening to the engine because he has not yet learned what it sounds like when it is fine. He never once looks properly behind himself because there is nothing left to look with. And somewhere above and behind him there is a young American with 300 hours in his log book who has been watching him for 90 seconds.

The Germans in the third group could see it coming. They flew wide. They weaved. They put the new men in the middle of the formation where there was the most protection and the least required of them. It bought a few of them a few more weeks. The arithmetic did not change. Germany was feeding boys into a machine that could only be survived by men who had already survived it.

On the 29th of December 1944, Robert Weiss did not come back from a mission over the country around the river Aller. He was 24 years old. He had well over 100 victories. He had spent most of his adult life in a cockpit and he had almost none of his adult life outside one. The records do not agree about what happened to him. They do not agree about who was involved or how it ended.

There are several accounts and they contradict each other which is a thing that happens far more often in this war than the neat books admit. And the honest answer is that the group lost its commander over the aller on a December afternoon and the details went with him. His pilots were told at the field there was no version of that winter in which an airworthy fighter was allowed to sit idle out of respect and everyone standing on that grass understood it.

3 days later came the worst morning of all. On the 1st of January 1945, the German fighter force did the thing it had been holding back for months. Nearly every serviceable single engine fighter in the west took off at first light in radio silence at treetop height to attack Allied airfields across Belgium, Holland and northern France.

It was called Bowden Plata. The idea was not stupid. If you cannot beat the enemy air force in the air, you destroy it on the ground while it is parked. It had worked for the Germans in 1941 in Russia on a scale that had nearly ended a war, but that had been a different Luftwafa flown by different men.

For this operation, the third group of Fighter Wing 54 was attached to Fighter Wing 26 and it went to Belgium to an airfield called Grimbergen north of Brussels. They flew the whole way at rooftop height under the radar, navigating off-roads and canals and church towers with the frost still on the fields underneath them. Many of the young pilots had never flown a low-level navigation route in their lives, and some of them were following the man in front simply because it was the only thing they knew how to do.

It was cold and it was barely light. The cockpits had been freezing all night, and the heaters took 20 minutes to make any difference, so most of them flew the first half of the mission with their hands going numb inside their gloves. At that height, you do not look at instruments. You cannot. The ground is close enough that a moment of inattention is a hedge through the windscreen.

So they flew with their eyes outside, watching the frost patterns on the fields go by, watching the shadow of their own aircraft running along beside them across the canals, and behind them, spread across the whole of the western sky, was every fighter Germany had left. Some of them had never seen so many German aircraft in the air at once.

Some of the youngest had never seen more than a dozen. For 20 minutes that morning, if you did not think about it too hard, it looked like the Luftvafa of 1940. They arrived at Grimburgen and they found almost nothing there. The airfield was very nearly empty. There were a handful of machines to shoot at.

The Great Blow, the one they had saved their last aircraft and their last trained men for, landed on bare concrete. and then they had to fly home. That was the part nobody had planned for properly. To keep the operation secret, the German anti-aircraft batteries along the coast and the river lines had not been told what was coming.

So, several hundred low-flying single engine aircraft came back across their own defenses at rooftop height from the direction of the enemy without warning. Their own gunners did what gunners do. A significant share of the German aircraft lost that morning were shot down by German guns. By nightfall on the 1st of January, the Luftwaffa still had aeroplanes.

Factories in the woods and the tunnels were still turning them out in numbers that would astonish anyone who looks at the production figures. What it did not have anymore, in any quantity that mattered, was men who knew how to fly them. The machines kept coming. The pilots did not. Here is the crulest part of the whole story. They fixed it.

Early in 1945, Faul Wolf finished the aircraft that answered every complaint a Dora pilot could have made about high altitude. It was called the D13, and in the nose of it was the Jumo 213F. The F had two supercharger stages, two stages, and three drive speeds, which is to say the exact thing the Merlin had been carrying around since 1942, plus one better.

The band where the old Dora ran out of breath, simply stopped existing. Above 20,000 ft, where the 213A had been sliding backward, the F kept pulling. The power stayed up through 23,000 25,000 higher. They cleaned up the airframe too. The machine guns over the engine came out which tidied the cowling. In their place, the aircraft carried three cannon of 20 mm, two in the wing roots and one firing through the hollow propeller shaft, which is a beautiful arrangement because a gun on the center line does not care about convergence range. Whatever the nose is

pointing at, the shells go there. It was by any reasonable measure a match for anything the Allies had flying with a propeller in the spring of 1945. Large orders were placed. 17 were built. 17, not 1700, not 17 a week. 17 aircraft total of the fighter that would have made the argument even. In the same season, the plant in Detroit was still running Merlin out of the door by the thousand on schedule with every screw and every bearing arriving when it was supposed to arrive.

The Germans had solved the engineering problem. They no longer had a country left to print the solution in. Sit with that number for a moment because it is worth more than any performance chart in this story. 17 aircraft is not a production run. 17 aircraft is a handful of men in a handful of cockpits on a handful of mornings.

If you had put every D13 ever built into the air at the same time over the same field, they would have made one formation and a single squadron of Mustangs would have outnumbered them. Somewhere in the files, there were orders for hundreds. There were tooling plans and delivery schedules and factory allocations. All of it drawn up by serious men doing serious work.

And all of it describing a Germany that had stopped existing while they were writing it down. The drawings were right, the engine was right, the arithmetic was right. There was simply nobody left to make the thing. Which brings us to a field outside Munich in April 1945 and to the strangest unit of the entire war. At Munich Ream, there was a jet squadron made up of some of the most decorated pilots left alive in Germany, flying Messers 262s.

Everybody knew the 262 could not be caught in level flight. Everybody also knew by now that it could be caught with its wheels down. So a small flight of fwolf Doris was attached to guard them. It was put under a 22-year-old named Hines Saxenberg and its entire purpose was to be over that airfield during the four minutes a jet was vulnerable.

Take off after the jets orbit, wait and be there when they came back with their gear hanging and their engines at idle. The Doras had their unders sides painted in broad red and white stripes, not for glory, not for recognition in combat. The stripes were there so that German anti-aircraft gunners, who by that stage of the war were exhausted, poorly trained, and firing at almost anything with wings, would hesitate for the half second it took to realize these ones were their own. That is where it ended.

The best piston fighter Germany ever built, painted like a fairground ride so its own side would not shoot it down. flying circles over one airfield in Bavaria while American fighters roamed the whole of Germany at will and picked their targets. Picture the morning routine of that flight because it is one of the quietest and saddest images of the war.

They started their engines after the jets started theirs because fuel was too precious to burn on the ground. They took off into a spring sky over Bavaria that was by April of 1945 almost always full of somebody else’s aeroplanes. They climbed to a few thousand ft and they stayed there and they did not go anywhere. The countryside underneath them was beautiful and it was finished.

Roads full of people walking the other way. Railards that were no longer railards. Columns of smoke on three horizons and none of them military. and all of them somebody’s town. And these young men in their striped aircraft went round and round over one strip of concrete, guarding four minutes at each end of somebody else’s mission in a fighter that could have gone anywhere and had nowhere left to go.

They were not defending Germany anymore. Germany was gone. They were defending a runway. Hans Dortman was still flying Adora in the last week of the war, and he had not yet turned 24. He had joined a fighter arm that ruled the sky over Europe, and he was ending his war as one of a handful of survivors in an air force that could no longer protect a single airfield.

When the surrender came, according to the accounts written afterward, he did not hand his aircraft over intact. You can decide for yourself what that was. Pride or grief, or simply a man refusing to let strangers have the last thing he had left that worked. So the comparison, let us do it honestly the way these two aircraft deserve.

The Dora 9 was faster than the Mustang between roughly 10 and 20,000 ft by as much as 12 m an hour. It climbed harder. It accelerated harder. Its engine was bigger, turned faster, had fuel injection that would not cut out. And with the water methanol tank open, it made more horsepower than the Merlin did.

Near the ground, it would do 377 m an hour. The Mustang was faster below 6 1/2,000 ft, faster above 20,000 ft, and increasingly faster the higher it went. It was the cleaner airframe. It carried its power without a timer on it. And it could do all of this over Berlin, the better part of 600 m from its own runway, and then fly home.

That last one is not a footnote. It is the entire war. The Dora had roughly an hour in the air. It was an interceptor defending the ground it stood on. The Mustang was designed to leave England, cross the North Sea, cross Holland, cross Germany, fight over the capital, and come back. And it did that all winter.

An aircraft that can only defend cannot win. It can only lose more slowly. Add up the fighting qualities and it is close. Genuinely close. Most of the speed differences between these two machines are 6 to 12 miles an hour, which is inside the margin of a rough engine, a dirty airframe, a patched wing, or a tired man.

On paper, this is very nearly a draw. But it was never a duel. The Mustang was assembled in a lit factory by people who went home at night to a country nobody had bombed. Its parts arrived on time. Its fuel was 150 grade and there was as much of it as anyone wanted. Its pilot had 300 hours before he ever saw an enemy. And when his aircraft was damaged, he was given another one.

The Dora was assembled in dispersed workshops, in sheds under trees, in tunnels, by people who were hungry, and in many cases were not there by choice. Its parts arrived when the rail line had not been cut. Its fuel was 89 octane and there was less of it every month. Its pilot was 20, had a 100 hours, and when his aircraft was damaged, there was frequently no fuel to fly the replacement.

If you want the fairest single sentence anyone can write about these two aircraft, it is this. Put a good pilot in either one at the altitude that suits it with a full tank of what it likes to drink, and the fight will be decided by which of the two men saw the other one first. That was true in 1944, and it is true in every honest account written since.

But nobody got to fight that fight. Not once, not on a single day of that winter. Every encounter between a Mustang and a long-nosed Dora happened inside a war that had already tilted so far that the aircraft were almost incidental to it. Ask which fighter was better and you are asking a question that has an answer. Ask which one was going to win and you are asking a question that stopped being about aeroplanes sometime in 1943.

Kurt Tank lived until 1983. After the war, he took his drawings and his engineers to Argentina and designed jet fighters there. And later he did the same thing in India. He spent his old age doing what he had always done, which was building aircraft for countries that could not build their own.

Edgar Schmood stayed in California. Within three years of the end of the war, he was part of the team behind the F86 Saber, the aeroplane that would go and fight over Korea. And the story of iconic matchups would start over again with different men in different cockpits. Two engineers from the same country.

One of them ended the war with a fighter that could not be built. The other ended it with a fighter that could not be stopped. The men who flew them mostly did not get to be part of any of that. Robert Weiss is still somewhere near the aller. Most of the pilots who stood on the wet grass at Oldenberg that September morning, refusing to walk toward the long-nosed airplane they did not want, did not see the end of the following spring.

They were right about one thing in the end. It was a beautiful machine. It just arrived too late, in too small a number, in the hands of boys who had not been given enough hours to use it. And that not speed, not horsepower, not 150 octane is why the better airplane lost.