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24. The Focke-Wulf 190 Tragedy
- University Press of Mississippi
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[ 328 ] THE FOCKE-WULF 190 TRAGEDY Wright Field had been testing captured German fighters and bombers since 1943 to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Whatever the Wright Field test pilots learned about those aircraft was passed on to the men fighting the Luftwaffe. One of many test pilots at Wright Field was Kenneth O. Chilstrom. Ken was assigned to the Fighter Section of the Flight Test Division of the Army Air Forces Technical Service Command. His assignment was a fighter pilot’s dream. Flight test was what every hotshot pilot aspired to, and Ken thought of himself as a hotshot pilot. Dick Johnson, a Wright Field test pilot, described this feeling of being the best of the best, of having arrived in fighter pilot heaven:“We all knew that, for an aviator, Wright Field was the greatest place on earth.. . .At Wright Field, one was privileged to fly seven days a week.. . . Aviator Heaven? It was indeed!”1 For young Chilstrom, flying was a dream that came true with the advent of World War II. Born in 1921 in Zumbrota, Minnesota, Ken started building model airplanes soon after entering grade school. One week out of high school, Ken and two friends went to the Army Air Corps recruiting office and enlisted. They wanted to become pilots, but they didn’t have the two years of college required to enter the 24 The Focke-Wulf 190 Tragedy [ 329 ] aviation cadet program. So he and his friends enlisted and were sent to Chanute Field, Illinois, where they became aircraft mechanics. Ken attended night school to gain the needed college credits for pilot training . By 1941 the world situation had changed dramatically, and he was allowed to enter the aviation cadet program without the previously required two years of college. He graduated in Class 42I at Lake Charles, Louisiana, and as a freshly minted second lieutenant pilot was assigned to the 58th Fighter Group at Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., on the banks of the Potomac River. The mission of the 58th was to guard the nation’s capital. In February 1943, Ken and his fellow 58th Group pilots took a train up to the Curtiss Airplane Factory in Buffalo, New York, and picked up brand-new P-40 Warhawks and flew them to Norfolk, Virginia, where they then embarked on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. About one hundred nautical miles off the North African coast, the 58th pilots were told to strap on their P-40s and get ready to launch for an airfield near Casablanca. “I was number thirty-five when we launched off the USS Ranger,”Ken recalled,“somewhere in the middle. They had turned the carrier into the wind and got her up to maximum speed to get as much wind across the deck as they possibly could.As I sat there with the prop turning I never saw anyone else fly off. Everyone went off to the left of the carrier and disappeared. I didn’t know if they made it or not. We didn’t lose anyone, I later learned, but I didn’t know that as I sat there sweating in my P-40 cockpit wondering what awaited me. After I launched and dropped off the side of the carrier, I quickly discovered that as I got near the water I picked up additional lift from the ground effect and I flew on just above the wave tops. “Something had happened to our airplanes at Norfolk which we pilots were not aware of until we launched off the Ranger toward Casablanca. When we landed in Norfolk, coming from the Curtiss factory in Buffalo, we had to taxi our new planes a couple of miles to get alongside the Ranger to be loaded. In the process we wore out our brakes. None of us realized that until we sat on the deck of the Ranger [54.196.105.235] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:39 GMT) The Focke-Wulf 190 Tragedy [ 330 ] getting ready to launch. The deck controller would give the wind-up signal with his hands. The pilot whose turn it was then applied power, the brakes wouldn’t hold and the plane began to eke forward.As soon as the controller saw him moving forward he gave the signal to launch. Like all the others before me, when my turn came, all I could do when my P-40 began to slide forward because of the bad brakes was to move...