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After A Year At War
by Jim "Twitch" Tittle
December 1942
In December 1942, a year into the war, you could get your dime's worth in the purchase of Mechanix Illustrated. Nearly 200 pages packed with interesting gadgets, stories, invention ideas and classified ads were printed on "war grade" paper. There existed magazines such as Life, Colliers and many more reflecting the war but nothing like today's vast number of periodicals.
Many of the aviation books I own were purchased in my youth at a used bookstore in my hometown of St. Louis. They had tons of old magazines too that could be purchased for 5-25 cents each. Unfortunately I have but a few from the WWII years but their contents allow us to peer back sixty-one years at the home-front reading material available.
Miracle Carburetor!
Decades later the same advertisements ran in similar pages—study at home and become an engineer, mechanic, electrician, or so on. Ads referring to government jobs which paid $1,260-$2,100 per year must have been attractive. Gilbert offered for sale electric trains, chemistry sets and the famous Erector Set for young inquiring minds. And as in later years in similar publications were a variety of ads for plans and blueprints so you could build your own model glider, tank, or submarine. The cover with the P-47 illustrated on it referred to the story inside on how to build-your-own flying scale model powered by a diminutive gas engine. I can smell the balsa wood and cement now!
Save On Smokes!
War Stories
It was the duty of the press of the time to keep the propaganda machine running by publishing upbeat, positive articles on how we were winning the war whether we were or not.
"We Kept the Tigers Flying" was the main article written by A.V.G. pilot James Cross. He wrote of his combat methods of the P-40 in Burma often describing 500 mph dives while quickly firing on Japanese bombers and fighters. The tactics used would later be normal energy fighter stuff used often but this is before Robert Scott's book God Is My Co-pilot. It may be the first pilot account written about A.V.G.
A side bar in the article, obvious written by the magazine, estimated the Zero's speed to be in excess of 400 mph but that the plane was constructed of wood and fabric and broke apart in a dive pull out. The 3-view silhouette make it look more like the P-43 Lancer than the Zero. But such was the information of the day, incomplete. Certainly folks reading must have felt comfortable to know that the P-40 was the big iron defending them with speed and firepower against those flimsy Japanese planes.
Unnamed A.V.G. Pilots
There is a photo article called "Pigboat Men," about the submarine fleet and the "many victories." Of course no mention was made of the dud torpedoes that the American Navy procured without proper testing.
Marine Lieutenant H. L. Merillat gave a first-hand account of the assault on Guadalcanal and surrounding islands. A superb taste of the infantry war is seen as he describes the mud, snipers, hand-to-hand combat, positions overrun and the well-entrenched enemy.
War Techo
Author, Willy Ley, described the German anti-tank guns with diagrams and photos describing the ingenious method of velocity enhancement. Seems the firing chamber was 28mm and the muzzle bore was 20mm. The AT round had copper skirts that accelerated the round as the gasses expanded to the muzzle. The 20mm projectile exited at much greater range and velocity than a standard weapon would have allowed. This translated into greater penetration of enemy armor. The concept came from an earlier rifle design by a German named Gerlich, which propelled a 7.9mm bullet to 5,800 fpm! He stated 7,000 fpm could be achieved. Carl Puff who experimented with the principle preceded Gerlich in 1903 but the Imperial German Army said there was no need for faster bullets. This concept is a direct forerunner of today's saboted artillery rounds.
New styles of ground camouflage were illustrated that showed factory complexes disappearing or looking like civilian targets.
A Kaiser-Hughes twin-hulled flying boat was depicted looking like a perverted P-38. It was to have seven 2,000 hp engines to transport 60 tons of cargo/troops 2,000 miles or 20 tons 6,000 miles. 5,000 were supposedly beginning construction. All that came of it was the lone Hughes HH-1 flown once in 1947. But that drawing must have frightened our enemies.
High-Performance Claims
Drawings of a coming "flying wing" spanning 192 feet that would fly at 320 mph carrying 35 tons of cargo or 300 passengers 3,500 miles was featured. Four 4,000 hp piston engines mounted on the leading edge would power the 87-ton mammoth. Northrup's B-49 with six jet pushers was built, but another serious flying wing wasn't seen until the B-2. The performance estimates of the 1942 ship were highly optimistic.
The best article was on the proposed seven-man torpedo boat being designed by F. M. Bellanca of Bell P-39 fame. It is unorthodox even by today's standards. A fuselage, reminiscent of a B-25, sat above two hugs pontoons and steam turbine drove two contra-rotating pusher props. The multi-compartmented pontoons housed the fuel, boiler's water condensers and two torpedoes each that were catapult-launched by a hydraulic arm. The pontoon design kept it afloat even if compartments took in water due to damage. In that case self-bailers went into operation. The size of them made it un-swamp-able in rough seas.
What A Great Concept!
Further armament included two-twin .50 caliber power turrets up top and side blisters each with a fifty. The nose gunner had a 37mm cannon.
Drawing only nineteen inches of water, enemy torpedoes would pass under the craft. The robust power plant was secretly developed by Woodruff Warren and was thirty percent more efficient than comparable designs. The boilers were a variation of naval inventor Walter LaMont that built up high power to weight ratios and ran on a non-volatile equivalent of home heating oil. The system was closed circuit and the craft's boiler water recycled to the condensers for infinite use. No steam escaped from the machinery and the engine ran silently, save for the whir of the props.
This baby could hit 100 mph with an 8,000-mile range meaning it could leave a Pacific coast port and be off Japan in forty-eight hours. It could hit European targets in even less time.
Pictured was an actual 65 mph landing boat of conventional hull design being tested so the potential was real. Superlatives such as innovative, lethal, or efficient just can't describe it. It was just too damned cool!
Post War
Popular Mechanix has always catered to do-it-yourselfers with how-to articles. The December 1942 is no exception with articles on building lamps, wooden Christmas decorations, camera gadgets, home aids, radio receivers, and wartime car tune up tips.
New products and coming inventions covered items from kitchen appliances to autos. A futurist, Dr. Charles Stine of the DuPont Company, envisioned how the war industry would be converted to a peacetime techno-industrial machine pumping out goodies for the world economy. He predicted much of which actually happened from war research: synthetic materials and fuels, plastics, uses of exotic metals, chemistry advances, more powerful and efficient autos, light, private plane ownership, trans-continental air service and more.
These predictions have much greater foresight than later ones in the 60's and 70's about how we'd all have flying cars and be whisked to work in vacuum tubes while colonies on Mars and other planets would all happen by 2000!
The periodicals of the time were part propaganda and always hopeful about the future unlike many of today. Maybe it really was a better time, maybe not.
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