| |
If the middle word of life is
"If", "What if" is an endlessly
fascinating game of history.
In the Second World War for instance, "what if"
Admiral Karl Doenitz's U-Boat fleet had been defeated at
sea by 1942 through the Allied use of superior maritime
patrol aircraft? Field Marshall Rommel's Afrika Korps
would similarly have surrendered much earlier, perhaps
taking Mussolini's defence of Italy with it. A Second
Front could have begun with an invasion of France in 1943
rather than 1944, the Americans, British and French could
have taken Berlin whole and the post-war "Iron
Curtain" would have been drawn much further east -
perhaps with both sides not perfecting atomic weapons
until the 1950s.
A crazy idea? Perhaps not according to an article in The
Times of 14 March 2002 - and not least because those
superior maritime patrol aircraft could have been built
in Gloucester!
The story begins with a man named John Millar, whose 99th
birthday the article was celebrating. Already a qualified
pilot, he travelled to the United States in 1934 and was
amazed at the advances that the Americans were making in
all-metal construction, at a time when many British
military aircraft were still built of wood and canvas. In
1936 he became the European Agent for both Lockheed and
Consolidated and approached the RAF with an offer they
should have found hard to refuse.
Lockheed already made a proven twin-engined airliner
known as the Electra 10 - in fact the same airliner type
that was to carry Neville Chamberlain to see Adolf Hitler
at Munich in 1938. But far from sharing the British Prime
Minister's hopes of "Peace in Our Time",
Lockheed were already working on a maritime patrol
variant - the Model 14 - which Millar hoped to pitch to
Air Marshall Cyril Newall - Member of the Air Council for
Supply and Organisation - when they met in London. Newall
later became Chief of the Air Staff and reversed much of
the damage done to the RAF in the
"locust years" of 1931-5 but he simply could not believe that the
Model 14 would perform as claimed.
"Don't waste your time on this aircraft" he
told the sales rep. "it's just so much American hot
air"
Millar had also submitted the technical data of the Model
14 to Gloster Aircraft, who were keen to take up
Lockheed's licence for manufacture it in England. The Air
Ministry forbade them to do so, but such was the growing
threat from Nazi Germany that a British Purchasing
Committee was talking to Lockheed directly about their
Model 14 as early as 1938.
As a result, the can-do Americans finalised design work
on a 2000 mile range patrol bomber in five days and
nights. Later known as the Hudson, it
featured an automatic pilot, five gun defensive armament
and a 1500 lb bomb load and crew comfort way in excess of
anything that the RAF's first retractable-undercarriage
monoplane - the Avro Anson - could
offer.
|
|
| |
The first RAF Hudson squadrons
were formed in 1939 and the type later evolved into the
even more capable Ventura bomber - although every one of
the hundreds of individual machines pitted against the
Kriegsmarine had to be shipped to Britain all the way
from California.
Had they been built by Glosters at Hucclecote, RAF
Hudsons could have been operational by 1937. As it is,
Lockheed do not even rate a mention in the index of Derek
James seminal work "Gloster Aircraft since
1917." However, on the flipside of probably winning
the Battle of the Atlantic years earlier than was the
actual case, would Glosters not have been totally
stretched by the demands of making the necessary Hudsons
at the same time as producing enough Hawker Hurricanes to
win the Battle of Britain? (There again, with sufficient
Hudsons bolstering the Royal Navy, would Hitler have even
threatened Britain after the fall of France?) |
|
