Command Failure

Curtis The P-40 Warhawk/Tomahawk

The Curtis P-40 was first flown in 1938. It was a modification of the earlier P-36 Hawk and was designated as the Warhawk by the United States Army Air Corps and Tomahawk by the British Commonwealth and Soviet air forces.

The designation Kittyhawk was given to the P-40D and all later variants. The Kittyhawk was the main fighter used by the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II. When production ended in 1944, over 13,700 had been built.

The glorious advantage of the P-40 Tomahawk flown by the combined 57^th and 52^nd PGs during late 1941 was that, unlike technology in the 21^st century, rather than ditch a current popular design and declare it obsolescent... or worse, obsolete, the Curtis Aircraft Company took their popular and effective P-36 design and modified it to meet the then current Army requirements for a pursuit aircraft. Like today's A-10 Warthog, the US Army Air Corps wanted a pursuit aircraft that would serve mostly for ground support of infantry troops and that is what they got.

It wasn’t the fault of Curtis that what the Army and US government wanted was not combat competitive with what the Brits, Soviets, Germans, and Japanese were designing and building during the 1930s. Each country was preparing for a different kind of war. In fact, had been engaged in such a war in Spain and China.

The question of the age was the truism of war in that one opponent always fights the last, or previous, war while what becomes the winner does not. That is what the USA came to understand in spades as the world sank into war in the mid 1930s in Europe and Asia.

Exhibiting neotany, the war planners in the United States could not see, or chose to ignore, the "writing on the wall." Would war be waged on the ground or on the seas or in the skies or in that netherworld in between? It was a question that lead to the 193x court martial of America’s premier advocate for war in the air, Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell.

The US chose the netherworld of developing effective ground support aircraft versus high altitude pursuit fighter aircraft to combat the bomber threat. That is how the P-40 came into being. Though the coming war was to be dominated by battles in the air it was finally decided the old fashioned way. On the ground.