Macchi C.200 Saetta

The 1936 Regia Aeronautica requirement was for an all-metal monoplane fighter to replace the fabric-and-wire biplanes still equipping Italy’s squadrons, and it went to Mario Castoldi — the designer of the M.C.72 racing seaplane, which in 1934 set a world speed record for piston-engined floatplanes of over 709 km/h that has never been beaten.

Castoldi was working under a constraint no amount of aerodynamic skill could remove: Italy had no reliable high-output inline engine in production. He designed the Saetta around the air-cooled Fiat A.74 RC.38 radial of 870 hp, accepting the drag of its broad frontal area in exchange for an engine that existed and worked. The prototype flew on 24 December 1937, and the type won the Caccia I competition of 1938 against Fiat, Reggiane and the rest.

The warning came early and from a competent source. After trials at Guidonia on 11 June 1938, Maggiore Ugo Borgogno reported that in a hard turn the Saetta became extremely difficult to hold: it would try to roll inverted and fall into a violent flat spin. The aircraft was ordered into production anyway.

At the beginning of 1940 two pilots were killed by exactly that behaviour. Deliveries and production were stopped, and the Regia Aeronautica considered abandoning the type outright — a remarkable position for a fighter that had won its competition and was already in squadron service. The fix did not come from Macchi. Sergio Stefanutti, chief designer of SAI Ambrosini at Passignano sul Trasimeno, working from Messerschmitt’s and NACA studies, rebuilt the outer wing to a variable rather than constant profile, achieved in production by covering parts of the wing in plywood. The revised wing entered production in 1939–40 and became standard on the aircraft built by Macchi and Breda as well.

The Saetta entered service with a fully enclosed canopy and ended up with an open cockpit, and the reversal is usually explained by Italian temperament — pilots raised on aerobatic biplanes who wanted the wind on their faces. Preference did play a part, but treating it as the whole explanation misrepresents what the pilots actually reported. The complaints were specific and technical: the glazing clouded with age, degrading the visibility it was supposed to improve; the hood could not be opened above a certain airspeed; and it was dangerous to a man trying to bail out.

The change came after roughly 240 aircraft had been built. A semi-enclosed canopy with a solid rear fairing followed — which cost rearward vision — and the semi-enclosed standard was introduced in August 1941, from the twelfth aircraft of Macchi’s fifth production series. The humped fairing behind the pilot gave the type its service nickname, Gobbo, the hunchback.

The armament was the Italian standard and the Italian weakness: two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the cowling, synchronised through the propeller, with about 370 rounds each. Synchronisation is the part that matters and it is rarely quoted. The Breda fired at 700 rpm free; through the propeller that fell to 575, and it could drop to about 380 depending on engine revolutions. Against a fighter, at close range, two of them were lethal enough. Against a bomber they required long, exposed firing passes.

This is the same limitation that would afflict the C.202 Folgore, which inherited both the airframe philosophy and the pair of cowling guns. What the Saetta had instead was structural strength: the airframe was stressed for dives that would have broken lighter fighters, and its pilots learned to fight it in the vertical, where the sturdy radial and the strong wing worked in their favour.

Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 with about 150 Saettas in service, and the type went on to fight over the Mediterranean and Malta, across North Africa, over Greece and the Balkans, and in Russia. The C.200 is usually filed as the transitional type that mattered mainly for what came after it. The service record does not support the filing: between 10 June 1940 and the armistice of 8 September 1943, the Saetta flew more operational sorties than any other Italian aircraft.

Production totals are given as 1,151 plus two prototypes, as 1,153, and as about 1,200; the differences come from whether the prototypes are counted and from rounding, so the archive gives the range rather than a false precision. Built by Macchi, Breda and SAI-Ambrosini, it was among the most numerous Italian fighters of the war, and it held the front line until the DB 601-engined C.202 began to displace it from late 1941.

The best-documented chapter of the type’s combat career was flown a long way from Italy. The 22° Gruppo Autonomo — four squadriglie, the 359ª, 362ª, 369ª and 371ª — went east in the summer of 1941 with 51 Saettas as the fighter element of the Italian expeditionary corps in Russia. Operations began from Krivoi Rog on 27 August 1941, and the unit worked forward through Zaporozhye, Stalino, Voroshilovgrad, Millerovo and Kantemirovka.

In the low-altitude fighting of the southern steppe, where agility and a rugged air-cooled engine counted for more than top speed, the group compiled the best record of any Italian fighter unit of the war: 47 Soviet aircraft destroyed in the air and on the ground against 10 Macchi lost. Those are claims rather than confirmed kills, and wartime claims by every air force ran ahead of the enemy’s admitted losses — but the ratio is striking enough that the direction of it is not in doubt. The 22° Gruppo was relieved by the 21° Gruppo, flying the C.202, in May 1942.

Two development lines ran off the Saetta. The C.200 CB (Caccia Bombardiere) carried light bombs or drop tanks for ground attack, and the tropicalised C.200 AS took sand filters to North Africa. The more important line was the one that changed the engine: Castoldi mated the same clean structure to a licence-built Daimler-Benz DB 601 and produced the C.202 Folgore, and from there the DB 605-engined C.205 Veltro.

The Saetta is therefore two things at once, and the second is usually allowed to swallow the first. It was the ancestor of Italy’s best fighters, and it was also the aeroplane that flew more operational sorties than any other Italian type between June 1940 and September 1943 — under-gunned, out-paced in level flight, and in the front line from the first day of Italy’s war to the last day before the armistice.

• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• Håkan Gustavsson & Ludovico Slongo, Desert Prelude 1940–41 (MMP/Stratus).
• Giovanni Massimello & Giorgio Apostolo, Italian Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).