Fiat G.55 Centauro

By 1941 the Regia Aeronautica had learned a hard lesson: its nimble but lightly armed and underpowered fighters could not match the latest Allied types. The answer was the 'Serie 5' — a generation of fighters built around the powerful German Daimler-Benz DB 605 inverted-V12, built under licence by Fiat as the RA.1050 Tifone.

Fiat's chief designer Giuseppe Gabrielli drew the G.55 Centauro around this engine. First flown in April 1942, it joined the Macchi C.205 Veltro and Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario as the three 'Serie 5' fighters — and of the three the G.55 was the largest, the most heavily armed, and arguably the best all-rounder.

The DB 605A delivered around 1,475 hp, pushing the Centauro to roughly 620 km/h at altitude with a service ceiling near 12,700 m — figures that finally let an Italian fighter meet Spitfires, Mustangs and heavy bombers on equal terms, especially at the high altitudes where earlier Italian types had struggled.

Armament was heavy and well-arranged. The definitive G.55/I carried three 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon — one firing through the propeller hub, one in each wing — plus two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the cowling. This concentrated, hard-hitting battery made it far deadlier against bombers than the two-gun fighters that had preceded it.

The Germans were impressed enough to test the G.55 against their own Bf 109G and Fw 190A at Guidonia in early 1943, and Kurt Tank and others rated it highly — Reichsmarschall Göring reportedly called it 'the best Axis fighter' of its day. Its one drawback was industrial: the airframe was complex and slow to build, and Italy never produced it in the numbers the situation demanded.

The initial G.55/0 pre-series gave way to the standard G.55/I with the three-cannon armament. A planned G.55/II would have carried five 20 mm cannon. Fiat also developed the G.55S, a torpedo-carrying version, and the lightened, refined G.56 with the more powerful DB 603 — the fastest of all the Serie 5 designs, though it never entered production.

Total wartime output was only around 300 aircraft, split between machines built before and after the September 1943 armistice. After the war Fiat revived the design: the G.55A single-seater and G.55B two-seat trainer kept the DB 605, and the line was then re-engined with the Rolls-Royce Merlin as the G.59, a few serving into the 1950s and some exported to Argentina, Egypt and Syria.

The Centauro entered service in the summer of 1943, first flying in the defence of Rome and southern Italy against USAAF heavy-bomber raids. In these high-altitude interceptions its DB 605 engine and three-cannon battery made it the most effective Italian fighter available, credited with a number of B-17 and B-24 kills.

The armistice of 8 September 1943 split the surviving aircraft. In the south a few flew on with the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force alongside the Allies; in the German-occupied north the larger share equipped the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana (ANR), which fought on beside the Luftwaffe against the Allied air forces over Italy until 1945.

In both services the G.55 acquitted itself well, but it was always too few. With only about 300 built against thousands of Allied aircraft, the Centauro could win individual fights but never alter the strategic balance in the skies over Italy.

The Centauro’s fate was sealed on the factory floor. Fiat’s Turin plants lay under the bombs of the Allied strategic offensive, and the G.55 was an expensive aircraft to make — requiring roughly three times the man-hours of a Bf 109G. A German plan to adopt the design for the Luftwaffe was studied seriously in 1943 and dropped for exactly that reason.

Under the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana the type equipped units such as the Squadriglia “Montefusco” and the 2° Gruppo Caccia in the defence of northern Italy, but bombing, sabotage and the German preference for standardising on the Bf 109 strangled output. When production ended in the autumn of 1944, the best Italian fighter of the war had been built in fewer numbers than a single week of American Mustang production.

The Fiat G.55 Centauro is widely judged the finest fighter Italy fielded in the Second World War — fast, strong, heavily armed and effective at the high altitudes where the war in the air was increasingly decided. It married Italian aerodynamic refinement to a proven German engine and a genuinely modern armament.

Its problem was timing and quantity. Arriving in mid-1943 as Italy's war collapsed, and built by an industry under siege, the Centauro never had the chance its quality deserved. Roughly 300 were completed; the Bf 109 and Fw 190 it matched on performance were built in tens of thousands. Design quality was never the constraint on the Regia Aeronautica — production was.

• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• Nino Arena, L’Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana 1943–1945 (STEM Mucchi).