Meanwhile, in the effort to find a product for export sale and, possibly, break into an Army competition, we built a fighter under circumstances so fantastic as almost to belie the telling. Jack Northrup, who had built a sweet little single-seater for the Army, using the Wright 1510 two-row engine, had won high praise from the Army Engineering Division at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in competition with fighters by Curtiss and Seversky. But during an interlude in the contest, after the plane had gone back to California, it had sailed out over the broad Pacific and not returned. There had been gossip at the time that the Japs might have had something to do with it. At any rate, Jack Northrup had decided not to reenter the Army competition, but Jack Horner, sales manager of Pratt and Whitney, suggested that Vought take over the design from Northrup, reconstruct the model around the Pratt and Whitney 1535 engine, and create an export fighter model for United Aircraft.
I conducted the negotiations with Jack Northrup over the telephone and sent our men west by air. Starting with few drawings and no materials, we rushed the airplane to completion in something like forty-five days. During the work at East Hartford, the Connecticut River overflowed its banks and cut off the electric power, but our crews, working night and day, finished the little ship in the light of their automobile headlights.
In the competition at Wright Field, which was based not on the actual performance of the prototype but on what the contractor was willing to guarantee in production, we lost out to Alex Seversky. When we offered the airplane to the Navy, with arresting gear, we were unable to arouse interest. While this put us in the clear for an export permit, we failed to sell any of the craft, at least to countries with cash to buy them. One day our European export representative, Tom Hamilton, brought some Japanese officers to Hartford.
When the Jap pilot put the little fighter through its paces, we looked at one another in wonderment. We had long understood that these boys couldn’t learn to fly—they had myopic eyes. But whatever else the Japs had, this pilot had everything; he didn’t put on any dive-and-zoom noise show, but checked out the little airplane especially as to its maneuverability at altitude, the characteristic at which it excelled. And so with the full approval of Washington, the plane, which had been rejected by both Army and Navy, was sold to the Japanese.
Later on in the Pacific war, their fighter pilots proved quite proficient in the air. Furthermore, their fleet fighters, the Zeros, could give even our Grumman Wildcats plenty of trouble. Finally one of their Zeros was captured and brought to San Diego where, after passing severe tests by the guards, I was permitted to see it. It was bigger than our Northrup-Vought and powered with a Japanese two-row radial of about the size of our 1830. The engine was of Japanese design but incorporated what the Japs considered to be the best features of the French Gnome-Rhone radials, the British Bristol Jupiter, the Wright Cyclone, and the Pratt and Whitney Wasp. And it displayed beautiful workmanship throughout.
As for the airplane, it looked a good deal like the Northrup-Vought, though it was larger and incorporated some of the best features of other aircraft bought by the Japanese, as well as some neat wrinkles of their own. The power-plant installation was distinctly Chance Vought Aircraft, and the wheel stowage into the wing roots was definitely Northrup. The wing-tip folding was Japanese, and it looked like an idea we should have used. All in all, it was a masterful example of good imitation—they even copied the Navy inspection stamp from the Pratt and Whitney type parts—plus some good Jap innovation which combined to make the product of an “inferior race” all too devastating. As Admiral Reeves had been wont to remark, “One should never discount an enemy.”
But while the Japs had been busy with their Zeros, we had not been idle at Vought. I, for one, had not forgotten the lesson of Panama, even though our Navy now seemed to have turned its back on the fighter-bomber idea. Fighter pilots are inherently resentful of any suggestion that they should know how to dive bomb as well as dogfight. But the fact remains that, once they have driven an enemy from the skies, neither they nor their ships are useful unless they can turn a hand at attacking objectives on the ground. With this idea in mind, we set out at Vought to build a new Corsair. She must be able to out-perform enemy fighters and still be readily convertible to a dive bomber; she must have the structural ruggedness and strength to withstand the high stresses of this work. This meant, in turn, that she must be larger than the pure fighter and to this end she must have a more powerful engine. That is just another way of expressing Bruce Leighton’s ancient adage about the power plant being the heart of the airplane.
We had such an engine in the new Pratt and Whitney 2800. Originally intended to develop from 1,800 to 2,000 horsepower, this engine was later actually used at from 2,500 to 3,000 in World War II. Around the new power plant we designed a new fighter bomber, and offered it to BUAERO in anticipation of the war that seemed inevitable. But BUAERO was cool to our proposal. Large airplanes could not be carried on the flattops in the same numbers as could the smaller, more compact fighters; number was an important factor in the complement of a carrier. They were willing to let us go ahead on the project, but they could not hold out much hope for ultimate production.
Now I took a long breath and embarked on the gamble of a lifetime. We would commit Chance Vought to a new single-seat fighter, one with such blazing speed and such fire power and such maneuverability that it could blast any enemy from the skies, even though handicapped with all the rigging that goes on a carrier fighter. We would build into it such rugged strength that it could carry heavy bombs in a dive, and still withstand the clumsiness of any horny-handed pilot who might try to pull its tail off.
But in taking this kind of decision we were not alone. Out in Seattle, Boeing had staked its future on the conviction of the Young Turks of the Army that a long-range heavy bomber would one day become the backbone of air power, no matter who said it would not. Farther down the West Coast, Don Douglas risked everything on the future of a new four-engined transport to be called the “DC-4” at a time when the Army remained cold to all transport and the airlines were doing very well, thank you, with the DC-3. Across the city, Bob Gross, at Lockheed, took his chances with a new twin-engined liquid-cooled fighter to be called the “Lightning,” at a time when the predominance of opinion was against such craft. Nearby, Dutch Kindleberger of North American, always crazy like a fox, dreamed up a single-seat liquid-cooled fighter around the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, a fighter which was to be called the “Mustang,” that would one day become a long-range escort for bombers over Europe. Down at San Diego, Reuben Fleet plugged along with flying boats and amphibians, long after the smart money was all on carrier planes. His Consolidated’s Catalinas would one day fight the world over for all our allies. And down Baltimore way the Old Master, Glenn Martin, rode his own hobby of light, fast bombers for ground attack at the very moment when the “Young Turks” seemed about to prevail in their battle for heavy bombardment. Out at Farmingdale, Long Island, the brilliant engineer Kartveli was forging his Thunderbolts, intended as fighters but destined for use in the invasion of Europe as the long-range fighter bombers that broke Hermann Goering’s heart because he was sure we couldn’t build such planes.