The SS Officer Demanded Release — Patton's Answer Left the Room Silent.

The ground crews had been laughing at it for days. A fat American machine with a barrel for a body, sitting at the end of a runway in occupied France in fresh German paint. One of them called it a flying milk bottle. The intelligence briefings agreed with the mechanics, which did not happen often. Hauptmann Hans-Werner Lerche was not the kind of officer who laughed before he had looked. He had flown more than a hundred different aircraft types — German, Soviet, British — and his reports had a reputation that made his superiors uneasy. When an enemy design was good, he wrote that it was good. He walked around the captured P-47 slowly, looking for the lie in it. He did not find one. What he found instead was an engine that made more power at altitude than anything in the world. An airframe built around a turbocharger spun by exhaust gas — waste energy — so it lost nothing climbing to thirty thousand feet while the DB 605 in every German fighter quietly bled away a third of its power just trying to keep up. Above twenty-five thousand feet the fat, mocked American machine was the faster aircraft by a comfortable margin. Above thirty thousand, it wasn't close. And it would not die. The R-2800 Double Wasp ran on after entire cylinders had been shot away. It carried men home through two hundred bullet holes. The liquid-cooled Daimler-Benz could be killed by a single round through its coolant lines. The American radial had no coolant lines to hit. Lerche's verdict, written in the flat prose of a test report, was not what his superiors wanted to read. The Thunderbolt was excellent at high altitude, in diving attacks, at maximum boost. The Luftwaffe had built its fighters for the middle of the sky. The Americans had taken the top of it. He told the truth, in writing, plainly, and left the people above him to do as little with it as they pleased. 🔔 Subscribe for more untold military history everyday.