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'Gentlemen, I give you the Whittle engine' (part 2)

In one of the most boneheaded decisions of World War II, the Air Ministry passed over Power Jets and instead picked the Rover company to build the W-2 turbojet that would power a follow-on twin-jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. An automobile manufacturer, Rover's only experience in aircraft engines came from operating a "shadow factory," a surrogate that would take over if another manufacturer were bombed out.

"I can't remember whose idea it was," Kings Norton told me, "but Rover's did come in and were presented with the Whittle engine... In their wisdom, and very much against Whittle's own ideas, they wanted to make changes in the design. They may conceivably have been improvements, but they had to be tested, and Whittle saw this as more and more delay."

In the end, an airworthy W-1 was not ready in time for Gloster to run taxiing tests on its Pioneer airframe. So Whittle assembled a "lashup," as he called it, from a spare rotor, some rejected parts, and bits from his prototype Whittle Unit. The resulting W-1X--the final letter indicating that it wasn't safe to fly--was trucked to western England so Gloster could proceed with its tests. On April 7, 1941, Flight Lieutenant Gerry Sayer taxied onto the Hucclecote airstrip and ran the W-1X up to 13,000 rpm, at which point the Pioneer rolled across the grass strip at 20 mph. Next morning, Whittle himself took the controls for a run-up to 15,000 rpm and 60 mph. After lunch he agreed that Sayer could push the engine briefly to 16,000 rpm.

Sayer did so, and the fat little Pioneer lifted off the grass and flew 200 yards before touching down again.

When Britain declared war, Henry Tizard realized that his country did not have the industrial strength to hold off Germany, and he was one of the first to propose sharing technical information with the United States. His was a lonely voice in 1939, but by the summer of 1940 Britain had exhausted its gold reserves, buying American airplanes and engines to supplement its own production, leaving it with no other currency than its great lead in military technology.

The idea of swapping British knowledge for American material outraged Lord Beaverbrook, who was a Canadian by birth and congenitally wary of Yankee traders. When his scientific advisor was put in charge of a technology exchange mission to Washington, Beaverbrook lectured Churchill before Tizard left: "My view is: give no secrets to Americans, except for money value received." When Tizard returned, Beaverbrook grumbled, "The American government ... is asking for the moon and appears unwilling to pay sixpence" for it.

Tizard's mission did indeed give the Americans more than it got, including Britain's pioneering work in radar technology, but apparently it held back on the subject of jet propulsion. "The interesting parts of the [turbojet] subject were apparently not known to Tizard," complained Vannevar Bush of the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Evidently Tizard was heeding Lord Beaverbrook's warnings. In fact, he knew a great deal about the Whittle engine--certainly enough to have steered NACA engineers away from their pursuit of a piston-jet hybrid like the one Whittle had considered and rejected in 1929.

U.S. military intelligence had been filing reports about jet propulsion projects in Britain, Germany, and Italy. When these reached Major General Harold (Hap) Arnold early in 1941, the Air Force chief thought they referred to rockets or takeoff boosters like those under development in the United States. When he realized that the Europeans were onto something much more radical, Arnold decided to visit Britain and have a look at this and other advances in military technology.

Happily for him, the Minister of Aircraft Production had by this time become a convert to Tizard's philosophy of technology exchange. "We would even allow him to see the Whittle engine, which has just made its first jumps," Beaverbrook wrote in a memorandum on April 11, 1941--the same day Arnold reached Europe. (The memo, which like other documents quoted here I found at the Public Records Office outside London, was probably written for Winston Churchill.) "We have not shown it to a soul yet. Indeed we have even flown it on a cloudy day so that the angels could not see it. But what is forbidden to the angels shall be permitted to the [American] General."

Beaverbrook's new-found amiability was prompted by the Lend-Lease Act just passed by the U.S. Congress, giving Britain a $4.7 billion draft on American industry, on the genial fiction that the "loaned" materiel would all be returned when the war was over. This astonishing bit of generosity also ensured that Hap Arnold would be welcomed to country-house evenings with Beaverbrook and Churchill, given an audience with King George VI, and briefed by Henry Tizard--who alerted him to the likelihood that an entire generation of airplanes and engines "might be thrown on the scrap pile," as Arnold wrote in his diary, as a result of British progress in jet propulsion.

Hap Arnold had never flown a combat mission, was not a natural pilot, and was too short-tempered to be a good executive. But he had three great assets: a West Point ring, a knack for impressing his superiors, and a genius for logistics, which he now put to work on behalf of the turbojet.

Back in Washington on May 1, he told Vannevar Bush of NACA to have somebody evaluate the Whittle engine. The job fell to Roy Shoults, a General Electric engineer already in Britain, where he was helping to modify GE's turbo-superchargers on the B-17 Flying Fortress. As it happened, the GE refit was done at the BTH factory, which was building parts for the W-1 and developing its own version of the W-2.

"As I went about my turbo-supercharger work," recalled Shoults, a bald, beefy man with a head resembling a .45-caliber bullet, "I was gradually made aware of the details of the Whittle engine." Among other things, he must have heard that the Gloster Pioneer had made its first aerial flight on May 15 at Cranwell.

In its blithe neglect of innovation, the RAF didn't even send a camera crew to Cranwell. However, an amateur cameraman did succeed in capturing the event on film, which I was able to view at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. On its tricycle landing gear, the Pioneer had the stubby, plump-breasted look of a game bird, running along the ground, trying to gain enough speed to take off.

We also have the memorable description by a laborer who happened to be "concreting the runways" that morning. "I see an aeroplane come out the hangar without a propeller," he recalled. "It came right closer to us and turned into the wind and run down the ground like a partridge and took off into the air and circled around, whistling around, all around, and disappeared into the clouds."

Before the Cranwell trails were concluded, the Pioneer managed to reach a speed of 370 mph--faster than the Merlin-equipped Spitfire that was its chase plane. At this point, the W-1 was delivering a thrust of 850 pounds. (At such speeds, one pound of thrust is roughly equal to one horsepower.)

At the end of May, Hap Arnold put in a formal request for the turbojet technology. By this time, Lord Beaverbrook had been replaced by Colonel John Moore-Brabazon, who responded to Arnold's request with a grudging, nine-paragraph memo, typed on blue note paper with Secret scrawled across the top in red pencil. "The Whittle jet propulsion engine," the new minister wrote, "consists of ten combustion chambers (equivalent to the cylinders of a normal engine), an exhaust gas turbine, a supercharger, and an exhaust jet or nozzle." Arnold forwarded this rather unhelpful description to Vannevar Bush at NACA.

Then the Curtiss-Wright company blundered into the negotiations, asking for a license to build the Whittle engine in the United States. Like Roy Shoults, the company had heard about the turbojet through routine gossip, but the British concluded that giving secrets to the Americans was like publishing them in the Times. For his part, Arnold believed that the British were responsible for the leak. Weeks passed while the damaged was assessed, blamed passed around, and feathers smoothed.

Finally, on July 15, Moore-Brabazon cabled the British Air Ministry in Washington that "we agree to the release of information on the Whittle [engine] to U.S. government, subject to special care being taken to safeguard its secrecy." As to who should build it, Moore-Brabazon suggested General Electric, whose turbo-superchargers he greatly admired.

And so the decision to give America the turbojet was made, apparently without any apprehension about sharing the future of aviation with the awakening giant across the sea. Lord Kings Norton thought that the ministers made the decision gladly: "We really asked your country to come into it," he told me, "because we wanted that vast production capacity behind the manufacture" of the turbojet.

Frank Whittle agreed. When I visited him, he lived in a condominium apartment in Maryland, with the happy address of Windstream Drive. I found a stocky, rosy-cheeked man in a polo shirt, surrounded by mementos of the turbojet. I asked him if anyone in Britain was worried about handing off his turbojet to General Electric. "Oh, I don't think so," he said. "As I understand it, the U.S. government gave an undertaking that the information gained would be used only for war purposes." Indeed, Sir Frank recalled, he wanted a shadow factory to build the turbojet in North America. He expected, however, that the work would be done in Canada, which at the time was one of those washes of Empire pink on the globe.

Nor do the British archives contain any hint of a debate on the gift of the turbojet. And after all, why should there have been? Quite apart from the fact that it was engaged in a war it could not win without American participation, Britain had dominated world trade for centuries, and great powers generally have the most to gain from the free flow of goods and information. In the summer of 1941, not even Winston Churchill really understood that the world's center of gravity had shifted 3,000 miles to the westward.

At 10:30 a.m. on July 21, Harold Roxbee Cox briefed Roy Shoults of GE and Colonel Alfred Lyons of the American Embassy staff. He then took the two Americans to the Ladywood Works and the Gloster factory, to show them the engine and the airframe. Though they weren't entirely sure what they had heard and seen, they recommended on August 16 that a crash program be undertaken to mass-produce the Whittle engine in the United States. Shoults flew home to brief Hap Arnold in person.

Arnold agreed with the British that GE was "a most suitable firm" to build an American turbojet, and he sent Shoults home to Boston to brief his superiors at the River Works plant in nearby Lynn. At the same time, Arnold sent an Army Air Forces officer to London for an expert evaluation of the turbojet. This was Donald Keirn, a lanky, jug-eared major with a fighter pilot mustache and a background in engine research. He took the train to Rugby on August 28, inspected the Ladywood Works, and spent four days picking Whittle's brain.

A GE delegation went to Washington on September 4. As the story is told, Hap Arnold turned to a small safe in his office, twirled the combination lock, took out a sheaf of drawings, and handed them over. "Gentlemen," he is supposed to have said, "I give you the Whittle engine." Talk about the strangeness of war! Here was a two-star general, on nobody's authority but his own, dispensing what was arguably the most important commercial advantage of the 20th century.

But what exactly did Arnold hand over? Moore-Brabazon's grudging memo, no doubt, and probably notes and sketches from Don Keirn, Al Lyon, and Roy Shoults--but not the production drawings that would have enabled GE to set to work, for no such drawings had reached the U.S. No matter: the GE executives promised that they would build a working turbojet in six months, and that fifteen production engines would follow soon after.

Next day, a delegation from Bell Aircraft appeared in Arnold's office. With the same brash confidence as the GE executives, they promised to supply three prototype jet fighters. Arnold proposed to skip the testing of the engine in an experiment airframe, as the British had done with the Gloster Pioneer. (Winston Churchill was under the impression that the Pioneer was a warplane, and wanted to rush it into production, but it was no more than a testbed.)