★★★☆☆ Not quite what I expected

Wings of War: The World War II Fighter Plane That Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly

David Fairbank White, Margaret Stanback White

Wings of War was not quite what I expected. Based on the publisher's blurb, I thought it would be a chronicle of the science and engineering behind a crucial war-winning weapon, the P-51 Mustang fighter. Thus, I was expecting something like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, or Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma, which tells the story of how England secretly broke Nazi codes, or Chance and Design by Alan Hodgkin, which in part describes his work developing radar targeting devices for use in aircraft.

Authors David Fairbank White and Margaret Stanback White (whom I will henceforth refer to as "the Whites") completely succeeded in convincing me that the P-51 Mustang (why was an airplane named after a feral horse? -- OK, not important...) is on a par with Bletchley Park and radar as an innovation crucial to the winning of World War II and more important than the atomic bomb, which arrived too late in WWII to do more than put a period to already inevitable Allied victory. They also write well of air combat -- the combat sections of Wings of War are the most exciting parts.

Where the Whites fall short of the standard set by Rhodes, Hodges, and Hodgkin, however, is in explaining the science and engineering behind the P-51. They tell the story through the eyes of three main protagonists: Edgar Schmued, the designer who first imagined and built the P-51, Tommy Hitchcock, the man who fought for its adoption, and Don Blakeslee, an ace who fought in the P-51.

PART ONE of Wings of War thus tells about how Schmued designed the P-51. The Whites mostly fail to explain the science and technology behind Schmued's design. Indeed, they give the impression that the design of the P-51 sprang full-grown into Schmued's brain, with no antecedents or ideas behind it, and that over the course of the crucial 102 days he and his team just wrote it down and built it. (I will confess I'm being somewhat unfair here, but this was certainly the way it felt to me as I read.) Here are some questions I wanted to see answered: What makes an airplane a good fighter? How does a designer engineer these characteristics into his design? What were Schmued's key innovations, and how did they contribute to making the P-51 an outstanding fighter plane? Why had no one done these things before? What enabled Schmued to adopt his innovations?

Astonishingly, the first question, "What makes an airplane a good fighter?", is not even broached in PART ONE, where Schmued's design of the P-51 is described. From the later combat sections it appears that the answers are range, speed, and maneuverability. The Whites do have a little to say about Schmued's innovations. For instance, Schmued used second-degree curves (conic sections) in the shape of the P-51. He said, "I laid out the lines myself, and it was a first." Why? Why had no previous designer thought to use conics (an obvious idea to any mathematician)? Why did Schmued think this was important? Aside from some vague incantations of the phrase "Lift and Drag", you will search Wings of War in vain for an explanation of how second-degree curves make it a better fighter.

What makes PART ONE puzzling is that the Whites DO know how to present a compelling technical rationale for an innovation. They show this in their discussion of the Royce Merlin engine. It turns out that Schmued made an important mistake in his initial design of the P-51. He designed it with an American Allison engine that could not perform at the altitudes needed for the P-51 to effectively protect bombers. Rolls-Royce designed an aircraft engine, the Merlin (now THERE's a name that makes sense!) that worked effectively at high altitude. The Whites do an excellent job of explaining what it takes to make an engine work at high altitude (it's all about air pressure) and how Royce designed the Merlin to do that (superchargers!). The English and also Schmued modified the design of the P-51 to carry Merlins. The result was the P-51B that became the war-winning weapon.

There is a second defect in Wings of War. The Whites have an annoying tendency to talk to themselves. Their writing frequently makes the assumption that the reader already knows everything the Whites know and has the same interests they do. A particularly egregious (albeit unimportant) example of this occurs in the discussion of the Merlin engine. They write

The Merlin 61 delivered 1,490 horsepower. It ran like Craig Breedlove setting the land speed record.

My immediate reaction on reading this was, "Who the Heck is Craig Breedlove?" (except I didn't use the word "Heck"). I did a text search in case he had been mentioned earlier and I had forgotten about him -- nope. This is the sole mention in the entire book of Breedlove. So I googled him -- he's a race car driver. The Craig Breedlove remark is no more than a colorful but uninformative way to say that the Merlin was fast. The Whites don't appear to have conceived of the possibility of a reader who hadn't heard of Craig Breedlove. This kind of thing happens throughout the book. The Whites often substitute name-dropping for exposition. They will list a bunch of names of people or aircraft to illustrate a point, without apparently considering the possibility of readers who don't recognize these names. Although there are endnotes, they are not linked in the text (or at least were not in my ePUB ARC), and thus are of little use to a reader.

Wings of War definitely picks up once the P-51B has been built and put into combat. The Whites' passion for flying and air combat comes through loud and clear. (In fact, it points out rather too clearly how pale and wan by contrast their passion for science and engineering is.) I quite enjoyed the explanation of how the P-51 was used and up-engineered to win the air war in Europe, even defeating experimental jet fighters that the Nazis put into battle toward the end of the war.

I thank NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for an advance reader copy of Wings of War. This review contains my honest opinions.

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