SOUND BARRIER claims that British fliers broke the sound barrier, when in reality it was American pilot Chuck Yaeger in 1947. On the other hand, OBJECTIVE BURMA showed Errol Flynn and American soldiers winning the Burmese campaign, which was a British victory. So it all evened out in the end.
"I think it would be fun to run a newspaper"
Yeah, but then came the 2000 movie U-571, which depicts Americans seizing the U-Boat that contained an undamaged Enigma machine, thereby allowing the Allies to break the supposedly foolproof German code. Of course, in real life it was the Brits who scored that coup, so I'm now awaiting their next cinematic riposte. Maybe a Yorkshireman as first man on the moon?
By the way, Tom Wolf wrote in his book "The Right Stuff" that whenever Yeager was approached by some gushy nitwit telling him he/she had seen the movie about the Englishman who broke the sound barrier, he'd clench his jaw in anger and frustration, and who could blame him? But real pilots always get a kick out of the supposed "solution" to breaking the sound barrier in the film -- pushing the stick forward, against all common sense. As any pilot will tell you, that's a fast one-way ticket to the cemetary!
This is a great thread. I laughed out loud! :-D In defense of the filmmakers, though, they didn't find out that Chuck Yeager had already broken the sound barrier until they were already halfway through filming. That info had been kept classified. David Lean wanted to add in a line acknowledging it, but the British studios said, "Naaaaaah."
shareIn the book 'The Right Stuff' (either that or in a biography) apparently Chuck Yeager was asked if he had 'reversed the controls' in order to break the sound barrier.....
The plane that Yeager broke the sound barrier in was British designed and the plans were kind of stolen by the Americans!
shareThat is absolute nonsense. The Bell XS-1 was designed and built by Bell, an American company in America. Great Britain had nothing to do with it.
By the way, if you listen carefully to the dialogue they do explain in the film how they achieved supersonic flight. The issue was loss of pitch control as they approached sonic speed. This happens because a shock wave forms at the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer and then progresses over the surface of the stabilizer. It reaches a point where it "blanks out" the elevator. At that point the elevator no longer has any effect on the air stream and the pilot loses all pitch control.
To overcome this they made the horizontal stabilizer all in one piece, with no separate elevator. In order to allow pitch control, the stabilizer was moved up and down by the control yoke through a jack-screw. Jack Ridley explains this in the dialogue. Bell Aircraft had invented the first stabilator.
I think that we revealed that we broke the sound barrier within a few month's of General (then major) Yeager's flight. However, the "all flying tail" was kept classified for years and it was included on the F-86E model.
Check out the TIZARD MISSION. British scientist visited the US with the hope of the US developing UK tech. Obviously with Britain fighting a war and the US having vast resourses they thought it made sense.
The British show the US new technology on Atomic Power, Rocket Tech, Radar and Jet propolsion. Technology was developed some of it lead to the Atomoc Bomb.
One of the companies heavily involved with seeing this new tech was Bell Labs.
After the war the US refused to exchange any tech ideas with the UK especially the Atomic Bomb. The UK demanded their tech back and America rufused. The UK was in terrible financial trouble and the US loaned the UK money with the condition that it could keep all the tech including Jet technology and the designs for a Jet plane that could break the speed of sound. You have to remember the Uk was years ahead on Jet technology than the US.
Years later Nasa would have to go to Rolls Royce to ask them how to make a more reliable and efficient Rocket engine. Rolls re designed the US engine and gave it back to the US and this rocket became the back bone of the US space programme. Uk was never publically thanked.
wwestar;
You don't say in your reply whether "TIZARD MISSION" is a film (documentary or drama), magazine article, or a book. Regardless, you do reference some great points.
The United Stats and Great Britain worked very closely with each other during the war and since. I have had first hand experience working with RAF 101 Squadron and AWE Aldermaston. Great Britain is, if anything, more sensitive to discussing technology and certain aspects of military missions involving surveillance and reconnaissance, so I will say no more about that.
Bell Labs, by far the larger portion of which was involved in electronics probably worked closely with Motorola, Raytheon, and British scientists on various EM programs. It was a British scientist (whose name I forget) who first discovered RADAR. U. S. researchers improved greatly on the British system with the invention of the Klystron and the cavity magnetron. Both provided the means to produce radar signals of much shorter frequency which, therefor required much smaller receiver antennae. This allowed them to be fitted on ships and later even airplanes.
The Bell X-1 was a "brute force" design for breaking the sound barrier. The shape of the plane was based on the .50 BMG, the steel jacketed bullet for the .50 caliber Browning dual-purpose heavy machine gun. It has (it is still in use, having been in continuous use by the military since it's first production in 1919) a muzzle velocity of greater than 3,000 ft/sec and the bullet was, therefor, the fastest object known to travel through the atmosphere. The X-1 was powered by a liquid-fuel rocket motor developed and built by Reaction Motors Inc., and American company. The idea was to build a shape that would hold a man, the motor, and fuel, while being stable in supersonic flight. Then, force that shape through the sound barrier by putting enough force behind itand watch what happens. We succeeded.
After the war we discovered that the greatest security breach within the "Manhattan Engineering District" (the A-Bomb project) traced directly to Klaus Fuchs. Dr. Fuchs was a physicist of Jewish ethnicity and German nationality. He escaped from Nazi Germany about 1938 to England. Great Britain took him into their secret weapons development and then passed him onto the U.S., vouching for his trustworthiness without ever having properly vetted his background. He was certainly anti-Nazi, with good reason. Not only was he Jewish, he was also a committed communist. Either characteristic marked him for death by the Nazis. Unfortunately, the latter trait made him more loyal to the Soviet Union than to either Great Britain or the United States. He ended up becoming the primary source for detailed design of the U.S. Mk 2 nuclear bomb (Fat Man).
After discovering this the U.S. became more circumspect in sharing highly classified information with Great Britain.
Technology is one of the few things that one can share and yet still keep. General Electric did take enormous advantage of British knowledge (the Whittle engine) in developing the J35 engine, but North American - you must remember them. The Britis went to them for help in building British designed airplanes and they offered to make their own design. It would be faster for them to build and airplane from scratch than retool to build Spitfires. That led to the P-51 that had the range of a bomber and the speed of a fighter, using a Rolls-Royce designed engine) - designed their "jet powered Mustang" by themselves. When the straight wing version proved too slow, the took Willy Messerschmidt's (German)wing design and improved it.
The United States (Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American at the University of Chicago) built the first uranium pile that allowed controlled nuclear fission. The United States (Robert Oppenheimer, an American born with a large group of American, British, German, Hungarian, Italian, and other born scientists) designed and built the first several (at least five) nuclear weapons. The United States designed and built the first plane to break the sound barrier, the first operational production plane to break sound barrier in level flight (the North American F-100), the first jet bomber to break the sound barrier (the General Dynamics B-58), and so on.
In spite of all that we (the United States) owe to Great Britain, including our cultural heritage, the claims that you make on behalf of Great Britain for American technological development sound like the old Soviet Union with its claims of having invented everything. You need to show a lot more documentation to garner credibility.
The TIZARD mission is not a book or a film but an historical event. You can read about it in books. The Cavity Magnatron was the very thing that the British gave to the Americans.
The British supersonic jet was called the M.52 designed in 1943. Bell Engineers on a visit to the UK in 1944 were shown the plans.
Under the exchange of technical ideas policy Britain provides the US with considerable know how on how to build an Atomic Bomb and the US agrees on un limited resourses.
Britain hands over design of the M.52 to US authorities in Jan 1946 in exchange for the new info discovered in developing the Atomic Bomb.
US refuses to share Atomic secrets and retains the plans for the M.52
Bell flies X1 in Dec 1946. UK finds plans for the M.52 at the Ministry Of Defence when being refurbished 2006. Aviation experts get to see the 1943 designs for the first time which are 95% identical to X1.
Thank you for giving me the impetus to look up the Tizard Mission. It is quite interesting to read about. It sounds familiar and I think I have read references to it before. For instance, I was sure that I had read that British scientists had come up with the cavity magnetron, but could not remember where I had read or heard of that. Klystron tubes are large and heavy, so the cavity magnetron was essential to making airborne radar possible. Apparently, the primary purpose of the Tizard Mission was to obtain AMERICAN engineering expertise and capability to mass produce the cavity magnetron.
No other source that I found, not Wikipedia (including British contributors), not the online Cambridge Museum references to Sir Henry Tizard, not the American or BBC reviews of Steven Phelps book on the Tizard Mission, nor the BBC program notes on their special on the Tizard Mission in 2007, I repeat none of them make the broad sweeping claims for the British having invented everything in America that you make.
The Bell XS-1 was based on a large caliber, high velocity, machine gun bullet, the fastest and largest object that was known to be stable in supersonic flight. The Miles M.52 was also based on a high velocity bullet, though I don't know of what caliber. The Bell X-1 was designed from the beginning to be rocket powered as the United States did not have jet engine technology sufficient to provide sufficient thrust to push the plane to supersonic speed. Interestingly, the Miles M.52 was designed to use a turbojet with reheat. Reheat, what we call afterburning, was not incorporated in any American engines until after the sound barrier was broken. I did find one source that did give credit to the M.52 for the concept of the all-flying tail. It also credits Bell with developing the rest of he design on their own.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread69322/pg1
The British, Supermarine, Avro, Hawker-Siddley, and BAC, possible others whose names I've forgotten have produced many innovative, and superbly performing aircraft. They also have, and probably continue to build some American designs (Hercules, Orions, Wessex) under license. The "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain has resulted in many technological advances in both countries. We have helped each other with electronics including RADAR, computers, nuclear weapons, nuclear detection, tanks, artillery, machine guns, and individual weapons. Heck, we even help each other with things that don't have anything to do with death and destruction. But, on October 18, 1947 an American Air Force pilot flew and American designed and built airplane past the speed of sound for the first time (that we know of).
Whoa!!!! I didn't mention broad sweeping claims that the UK invented everything. My post was about supersonic flight and the claim that the X1 had nothing to do with the UK. The Tizard mission was merely the start of an anglo american exchange on scientific ideas that the US eventually screwed the British on. The sharing of ideas wouldn't start again until 1958.
This thread is about the film the Sound Barrier.
Just found a small part of a documentary on You Tube.
Miles M.52 Supersonic Aircraft.
You might find it interesting, there's a book about it as well.
Just found a small part of a documentary on You Tube.
Miles M.52 Supersonic Aircraft.
You might find it interesMiles M.52, Gateway to Supersonic Flight
(2012) Captain Eric Brown with Dennis Bancroft, Spellmount, The History Press, hrdbk, 222pp, £18.99, ISBN 978-0-752-47014-6
of the my joys of the 2000s has been attendance at the annual conference of the British Rocketry Oral History Programme (BROHP), at Charterhouse School each spring. I did not know about the first one, but I was invited to speak at the second one about the Waverider re-entry vehicle – an edited and updated version of that talk appeared earlier this year in “Rocket Science”, edited by Ian Sales.
BROHP's aim was to record the testimony of the people who took part in Britain's rocketry and space programme, back in the days when on tiny budgets they produced vehicles such as Black Knight, Blue Streak and the SR-53, whose capabilities rivalled the best in the world and in some areas remain unmatched today. The conferences bringing them together were fine events, despite the 'where did it all go wrong?' theme which ran through everything, sad tales of missed opportunities and government indifference.
The pattern was set still earlier with the Miles M.52 project, which could and should have given Britain the first penetration of the Sound Barrier – and with jet propulsion, in level flight, at a higher level of technology than Chuck Yeager's rocket-powered Bell X-1. The project was inspired by intelligence information on the German jet and rocket programme, indicating that they were working on an aircraft to reach 1000 mph, faster than sound. It was actually 1000 kilometres per hour, but the task of matching the supposed German capability was assigned in May 1943 to Miles Aircraft and Frank Whittle, and they rose splendidly to the challenge.
The test pilot was to be Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown, RN, one of the many extraordinary people I met through the Charterhouse conferences. A prewar protégé of Goering's, his technical education and command of German made him invaluable at Farnborough during the war and in interrogating German experts afterwards; he is the world's most experienced test pilot, with a tally of aircraft types in the Guinness Book of Records which is unlikely ever to be equalled. He was the only Allied pilot to fly the Me-163 under rocket power, the first to perform carrier landings with jets, and his autobiography Wings on My Sleeve doesn't cover the half of what I have heard from his own lips over the Charterhouse years.
Eric has now written the detailed history of the M.52 project – a fairly short text, heavily backed up with photographs and technical drawings, followed by his own assessment of what went wrong and what might have been. In March 1946, at an advanced stage of preparation for test flight, the Ministry of Supply summarily cancelled the project, ordering all prototypes, materials, drawings etc to be destroyed. Technical data passed to the USA, particularly on control surfaces, was incorporated into the Bell X-1 in which Yeager broke the Sound Barrier the following year, but Britain threw away a technical lead from which our aircraft industry never recovered. In February 1955 a Government White Paper bemoaned the decision, which 'seriously delayed the progress of aeronautical research in the UK'. Whittle's engine, which was capable of much higher speeds, was never built; if it had been, in Eric Brown's view, with continuing development and with the modular construction of the aircraft, both would still be at the forefront of research today.
Cost and concerns over pilot safety were the reasons given for the cancellation. Major personal factors were Whittle's departure from Power Jets, which then ceased production of jet engines, and the late influence of Barnes Wallis, who famously refused to risk more human life after the losses in the Dam Buster raids. On Wallis's advice the piloted flights of the M.52 were replaced by a series of piloted rocket tests, which achieved nothing but cost far more than the aircraft itself would have done. Eric Brown's comment on the issue is that as a professional test pilot, he was paid and was ready to take risks. I have mixed feelings on that: the capsule escape system for the M.52 was incorporated into the Bell X-2, but failed to save the life of Milburn Apt when it broke apart at Mach 3. Escape at Mach 1 might or might not have been a different proposition, but the world would be a duller place without Eric.
For years conspiracy theories have argued that the cancellations of the M.52, etc, were all due to American influence, not wishing the competition. The late Geoffrey Pardoe certainly believed that was the case with the Blue Streak's potential as a satellite launcher, had we gone our way instead of pursuing the failed Europa programme. Dennis Bancroft, Eric Brown's collaborator, does not share that view of the M.52 issue. But the book ends on a revelation. 'As if to underscore the possibility of a financial deal having been done over the M.52 between Britain and the USAF, there no longer exist any records attributable to John Wilmott, the Government Minister of Supply and Aircraft Production at the relevant time. How could there be absolutely no traceable evidence of Mr. Wilmot's term of office?' To which one can only add, 'How indeed?'
Duncan Lunan
Thank you for the reference. It does look interesting.
You, along with other posters that I've read since your challenge got me to "researching," seem to be strong on the conspiracy side. Although you do seem flexible and open minded. You did "hint" that the UK contributed more heavily to the nuclear weapons program than they get credit for, as well as other inventions. You also claim that the U.S. "quit sharing" in 1946. I don't think that this is accurate, though my own involvement stems only from 1987.
The general public may be unaware of UK contributions, but it is well documented within the weapons community. Admittedly, that material was all classified until 1992 and much of it remains classified.
Your posts have led me to find other sources which credibly assert that while Bell arrived at the basic design of the X-1 independently, they almost certainly obtained at least the concept of the all moving tail plane from the M.52.
As to the conspiracy ideas, there has been no evidence that any American company or the U.S. government ever pushed on the UK government to stop any research in order to benefit U.S. companies. However, there is circumstantial evidence and some conferences on record to indicate that U.S. DoD decisions did affect UK decisions regarding development of aircraft. The Avro Arrow was one casualty partly due to that cause and there may have been others.
With Chuck Yeager's flight and the Bell X-1 program as a whole, we learned a lot about supersonic flight and changed the books. I am not convinced that the U.S. froze out the British for ten years or more (1946 - 1958). In fact, future developments within the UK contradict such a claim. Also, while I must speak from memory about weapons development and intelligence collection that was classified when I studied it and that I have not seen in unclassified sources yet, I am pretty sure that there is documentation that details our cooperation during the Forties and Fifties.
In any case, I will thank you again for your interesting references and for goading me into reading more about that era. Also, I think that part of your claim is well founded. British scientists deserve credit for the cavity magnetron, the idea for the all moving tail plane, and for independently designing the M.52 which probably could have beat the X-1 to Mach 1 if the UK had not defunded the program.
But they did, so it didn't, and therefore "The Sound Barrier" is without support in the real rather than the real world.