Why the F4U Corsair Never Fought the Luftwaffe — The WWII Battle That Never Happened

Video from the channel Secretos de Reddit about Vought F4U Corsair, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 53:01. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary examining why the Vought F4U Corsair, one of the fastest American fighters in 1943, was never used as a bomber escort over Germany. It compares the Corsair and the Grumman F6F Hellcat with the German fighters of mid-1943, the Messerschmitt Bf 109G and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190A, and reviews US Navy tests against a captured Fw 190 and against a P-51B Mustang, as well as the only British Corsair mission over occupied Europe.

The starting point is "Black Thursday," 14 October 1943: of the 291 bombers sent against the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, 60 did not return, because the escort fighters lacked the range to accompany them to the target. The documentary recalls Rex Beisel's design at Chance Vought: the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine delivering 2,000 hp, a propeller a little over 13 feet across, and the inverted gull wing, which allowed a short, sturdy landing gear. The prototype made its maiden flight on 29 May 1940 with Lyman Bullard at the controls, and weeks later Boone Guyton had to make an emergency landing on a golf course near Norwich. Because of poor visibility on landing, asymmetric stalling and deck bouncing, in 1943 the Navy withdrew it from carriers and handed it to the Marine Corps.

With the 1943 versions, without water injection, the Corsair comes out faster than the Bf 109G at any altitude and about even with the Fw 190A. The Hellcat, the slowest of the four, dived the best (limiting Mach of 0.79) and had the lowest stall speed (87 mph, against the Corsair's 98). At Patuxent River, the captured Fw 190 climbed better, but both naval fighters beat it in turns. In early 1944, against the P-51B, the Corsair climbed between 750 and 1,000 feet per minute faster up to 20,000 feet, although the Mustang was faster above 25,000 feet, the bombers' cruising altitude. The documentary attributes the decision to that disadvantage, to the fact that all production was allocated to the Navy and the Marines, to logistics, and to drop tanks, which took Mustangs all the way to Berlin in March 1944. Royal Navy Corsairs, which adopted a curved approach and wingtips clipped by about 8 inches, covered from 7,000 feet the attack of Operation Tungsten against the battleship Tirpitz at Kåfjord, on 3 April 1944, without a single German fighter appearing.