Macchi C.205 Veltro

The Macchi C.202 Folgore had given Italy a world-class airframe, but it was held back by two stubborn faults: it was under-gunned, and its Alfa Romeo-built engine was already being eclipsed by newer German designs. The cure was obvious the moment it became available. In 1942 the more powerful Daimler-Benz DB 605 entered licence production in Italy, and Mario Castoldi moved at once to fit it to the Folgore's structure.

The result, first flown on 19 April 1942, was the C.205 Veltro — the Greyhound. Outwardly almost identical to the Folgore, it was a far more potent machine: faster, harder-hitting and able to fight at the high altitudes where the American bomber streams now operated. Many in the Regia Aeronautica regarded it, with the rival Reggiane Re.2005 and Fiat G.55, as one of the three superb Serie 5 fighters that finally gave Italy aircraft the equal of anything in the sky.

At the Veltro's heart was the Fiat R.A.1050 RC.58 Tifone, the Italian licence version of the DB 605A, delivering some 1,475 hp — a decisive 300-horsepower advance over the Folgore. The extra power lifted top speed to 642 km/h and transformed the climb, while Castoldi's clean, well-balanced airframe carried the new weight without losing the sweet handling for which the line was famous.

Just as important was the armament. The early C.205V Serie I retained the Folgore's gun fit, but the definitive Serie III added two 20mm MG 151/20 cannon in the wings alongside the two 12.7mm Breda-SAFAT guns in the nose — at last giving an Italian fighter the firepower to destroy, not merely damage, a four-engined bomber. In trials at Guidonia the Veltro outperformed a captured Spitfire Mk.V at every altitude above 3,000 m, and later comparison against a P-51 showed it at least an equal at medium height.

Two principal sub-types reached service. The C.205V Serie I was essentially a re-engined Folgore and was rushed into action in mid-1943; the cannon-armed Serie III was the true production Veltro and the version on which the type's reputation rests. A further refined development, the C.205N Orione, with a lengthened fuselage, greater span and still heavier armament, was flown as a prototype but never entered production before events overtook it.

The Veltro's tragedy was numbers. Just as it was hitting its stride, Allied bombing of the northern factories, chronic engine shortages and then the armistice of 8 September 1943 tore Italian industry apart. Only about 262 aircraft were ever completed — a tiny output for so fine a design, and the reason the Veltro is remembered more for its quality than for any decisive effect on the war.

The Veltro first saw combat in the summer of 1943 in the defence of Sicily and southern Italy, where its handful of pilots threw themselves against the USAAF’s heavy-bomber formations and their swarming escorts. In those battles the type proved everything its trials had promised — fast, tough and, with its 20 mm cannon, genuinely deadly to a bomber — the equal of the Spitfire IX and the Bf 109G it flew alongside.

But performance was never the problem. There were simply never remotely enough of them: barely more than a couple of hundred were built before the armistice, a rounding error against the thousands of Allied aircraft over Italy. Of the three Serie 5 fighters the Veltro was the one that did most of the fighting, and it arrived just as Italy ran out of time to build it.

The Veltro’s short career is best measured through two pilots. Luigi Gorrini was the highest-scoring man on the type: flying in the Difesa di Roma through July and August 1943, he finished the pre-armistice period with 14 confirmed victories and six damaged, among them three B-24 Liberators, three P-38s, two B-17s and two Spitfires. Those were the targets the 20 mm cannon had been fitted for, and against a four-engined bomber the difference between the Folgore’s machine guns and the Veltro’s cannon was the difference between damaging and destroying.

The other was Adriano Visconti, Italy’s highest-scoring ace with 26 credited victories — eleven of them scored in the few weeks he had the Veltro. Flying for the ANR, which received some 29 of the type on its northern airfields, he claimed a P-38 south of Cuneo on 3 January 1944 and led interceptions of the B-17 formations bombing the factories of the Po valley. Both men were flying the most combat-proven fighter Italy produced, in numbers that made no difference to anything.

The armistice split the survivors. In the south a few flew with the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force alongside the Allies; in the north the larger share equipped the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana, which fought on against American raids over the Po valley until 1945, often in bitter combat against overwhelming numbers.

The design outlived the war. A small batch went to Germany for evaluation and captured examples were tested by the USAAF, and afterwards refurbished Veltros were exported to Egypt — proof of a fighter still viable years after its debut, and of how sound the Serie 5 airframe had always been.

The last chapter was fought under another flag. Egypt ordered 62 Veltros after the war and had about fifteen delivered before the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, flying them on ground-attack sorties with underwing bomb racks. On 7 January 1949 a C.205 claimed an Israeli P-51D Mustang; two or three Veltros were claimed by Israeli fighters in return. An Italian design of 1942 was still being shot at, and shooting back, seven years later.

Allied and Axis pilots who flew the Veltro rated it among the finest single-engine fighters of the war: it kept the Folgore’s handling and added the power and the 20 mm armament the earlier aircraft had always lacked. Where a Veltro met the enemy on anything like equal numbers, it could hold its own against what the Allies were fielding in 1943.

Equal numbers were what it never got. About 262 were completed, against the ~1,150 Folgores that had carried the Regia Aeronautica through the previous two years, and against Allied production counted in tens of thousands. The G.55 came out ahead of it in the German comparative trials at Guidonia; the Veltro was the Serie 5 fighter that actually did the fighting, in Sicily, over Italy and with the ANR to the end.

• Håkan Gustavsson & Ludovico Slongo, Macchi C.202/C.205V Aces 1941–45 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces 106).
• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).