Curtiss P-40 Warhawk

The Curtiss P-40 was never meant to be great — only to be ready. When war loomed in the late 1930s the US Army needed a modern fighter quickly, and Curtiss provided one by the simplest possible means: taking its radial-engined P-36 Hawk and fitting it with the new liquid-cooled Allison V-1710. The prototype XP-40 first flew on 14 October 1938, a clean, sleek fighter with a long, pointed nose.

Designed by Donovan Berlin, it was rugged, simple and — above all — available, and availability counted for everything. When the fighting began, the P-40 was the best fighter America could build in quantity, so it went to war on every front while better aircraft were still on the drawing board. It would spend its whole career as the fighter that was there when it was needed, rather than the one everyone wanted.

The P-40’s great weakness was written into its engine. The Allison V-1710 was reliable and gave about 1,150 hp low down, but it lacked a two-stage supercharger, so its power fell away sharply above about 4,500 m. Higher than that the Warhawk was sluggish and easily out-climbed, and it could never fight the Bf 109 or the Zero on equal terms in the thin air where those duels were so often decided.

Down low it was another aircraft entirely: fast, immensely strong, and superb in a dive, where its weight let it outrun almost anything. It was heavily armed — the definitive P-40E carried six .50-calibre machine guns — and could soak up battle damage that would have felled a lighter fighter. Some later models, the P-40F and L, swapped the Allison for a Packard-built Merlin to claw back altitude performance, but the type never fully escaped its reputation as a low-level machine.

The P-40 became a legend in the hands of the American Volunteer Group — the “Flying Tigers” — the American pilots who fought for China against Japan in 1941–42. Their commander, Claire Chennault, understood the Warhawk’s strengths and weaknesses exactly, and drilled his pilots never to dogfight the nimble Japanese Ki-43 and Zero but to dive, fire and escape, using height and speed rather than agility.

The tactics worked spectacularly. Flying a handful of worn Tomahawks against overwhelming odds over Burma and China, the Tigers claimed a lopsided kill ratio and gave a battered Allied cause one of its first heroes. And they gave the P-40 its enduring image: the fierce shark’s mouth painted across the nose, one of the most famous pieces of nose art in the history of war.

In truth the shark’s mouth had come first to North Africa. It was No. 112 Squadron RAF, flying Tomahawks over the Western Desert, that originated the marking the Flying Tigers made famous — and it was in the desert that the P-40 did some of its most important work. As the Tomahawk and then the Kittyhawk, it became a mainstay of the Desert Air Force from 1941 to 1943.

The low-altitude air war over the desert suited it far better than the high skies of Europe. British, Australian, South African and other Commonwealth squadrons flew it as a fighter and, increasingly, as a fighter-bomber — the “Kittybomber” — hammering Rommel’s columns and airfields. It was over the desert, too, that the German ace Hans-Joachim Marseille ran up much of his enormous score against P-40 units — a reminder that in the wrong tactical circumstances the Warhawk remained vulnerable.

The P-40 was the US Army’s frontline fighter when the war reached America. On 7 December 1941 most of the Warhawks at Pearl Harbor were destroyed on the ground, but two young pilots — Lieutenants George Welch and Kenneth Taylor — reached their aircraft, got airborne into the middle of the raid and shot down several Japanese aircraft between them, among the only American fighter successes of that catastrophic morning.

Through the desperate first year of the Pacific war the P-40 carried much of the burden of the fighting — over the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea and Darwin — holding the line against Japanese air power until better fighters arrived. It was rarely the equal of the Zero on paper, but flown with discipline it was a dangerous opponent, and it bought the Allies time they badly needed.

Few aircraft served so widely. Around 13,700 P-40s were built — the third most-produced American fighter of the war — and they flew under the flags of the United States, Britain and the Commonwealth, China, and the Soviet Union, which received some two thousand under Lend-Lease and used them hard on the Eastern Front.

By 1944 it was thoroughly outclassed as a pure fighter, and production wound down in favour of the Mustang and the Thunderbolt. But by then the P-40 had already done its most valuable work. It had been the Allied fighter of the difficult early years — the one that fought, and held, when there was little else to send.

The P-40 Warhawk is a study in how much a merely adequate design can achieve. It was not the fastest fighter, nor the best climber, nor a match for the Zero or the Messerschmitt at altitude — and its pilots knew it. Yet it was tough, well-armed, available in quantity, and deadly in the hands of men who fought it on its own terms.

No single decisive battle attaches to the P-40. Its significance is cumulative: it was the fighter available in quantity when the Allies had nothing better — with the AVG in China, with the Desert Air Force in North Africa, over Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and on the Eastern Front under Lend-Lease. Around 13,700 were built, and by 1944 it had been comprehensively superseded by the Mustang and the Thunderbolt.

• Carl Molesworth, P-40 Warhawk Aces (Osprey Aircraft of the Aces).
• Dan Ford, Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group (Smithsonian).
• Christopher Shores, Fighters over the Desert (Neville Spearman).
• William Green, Warplanes of the Second World War (Macdonald).