Thus the stage was set for the engineers and designers of Rolls-Royce and Supermarine to create, five years later, the immortal Spitfire. Mitchell and built by the Supermarine Company. Significantly, the winning planes were designed by Reginald J. The R gave Britain victories in the Schneider Trophy seaplane races three years in succession, a world air speed record of 407.5 mph and possession of the trophy in perpetuity. Its enlargement to 37 liters resulted in the Buzzard, from which a 1929 racing version, called simply “R” by Rolls-Royce, eventually developed 2,500 hp. Strongly influenced by the Curtiss D-12, the Kestrel’s basic design was so sound that its derivatives, in various sizes and versions, were produced to the end of the company’s piston engine era. The Merlin’s origins date back to the 1920s, with the 21-liter V12 Kestrel, the first Rolls-Royce production engine to be supercharged.
Without the inspired genius of a gifted mathematician and the dedication of a small group of engineers who developed the Merlin, the world today might be a very different place. These three momentous events-Bohr’s rescue, Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Britain and America’s long-distance fighter escort missions-had one thing in common: They were all made possible by the same aero engine-the magnificent Rolls-Royce Merlin. The 980-mile round trip was the first fully escorted long-distance raid of the war, and the beginning of successful daylight precision bombing and the progressive destruction of the Luftwaffe. Army Air Forces bombers on a mission to Kiel, Germany. Two months after Bohr’s harrowing flight, on December 13, 1943, North American P-51B Mustang fighters accompanied 710 U.S. The effect of a possible British capitulation on subsequent events in Russia, North Africa, Normandy and the Far East can only be imagined. If the close-run Battle of Britain had gone the other way, Great Britain, with much of its armor, trucks and heavy weapons left behind in the evacuation of Dunkirk, would have been in a precarious position. Of course, he might never have been rescued if Britain had lost the ferocious aerial struggle for its existence in the summer of 1940. The Nazi atomic bomb project ultimately fizzled, but it might have ended differently if Bohr had been in charge, coerced by threats to his family. The Mosquito was the only aircraft fast enough to evade German fighters patrolling the North Sea to intercept the BOAC flights, which conveyed clandestine personnel and precision supplies such as ball bearings. On December 6 he flew from England to the United States to join the Manhattan Project. With the help of the British secret service, Bohr had been smuggled to neutral Sweden. Word leaked that he was about to be arrested and would face a stark choice: Join Adolf Hitler’s atomic weapon project or be sent with his wife and son to almost certain death in a concentration camp. By 1943 the Nazi roundup and deportation of Jews in Denmark put Bohr at great risk, as his mother was Jewish. And the passenger who emerged, stiff from being crammed into an improvised bunk in the bomb bay of the unpressurized aircraft, was physicist Niels Bohr, 1922 Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in nuclear fission research.īohr had determined that the uranium isotope U-235 could create a chain reaction, and therefore could be used to construct a powerful atomic bomb, findings he detailed at a January 1939 conference in Washington, D.C. The year was 1943, and although the plane carried civilian markings and the pilot and navigator were nominally civilian employees of BOAC, it was a de Havilland Mosquito bomber. The British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Stockholm, Sweden, landed at an airfield in Leuchars, northern Scotland, one of several hundred round trips the airline made between the two cities. The Engine That Won World War II | HistoryNet Close
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