Against this backdrop, the scene deserves setting properly: a secret German airfield in late August 1939, days before the Second World War begins, and a small aluminum airplane, the Heinkel He 178, climbing into the air under the power of a turbojet alone. At the controls is Erich Warsitz; behind the engine is a 27-year-old physicist, Hans von Ohain. No witness that morning grasped that the flight would reorder aviation, warfare and the world economy, and none knew that essentially the same machine had been growing, more slowly and more painfully, in England.
Frank Whittle’s path ran through the ranks. Born in Coventry in 1907 to a working-class family, he failed his first attempt to join the RAF’s apprentice scheme on fitness, dieted his way in, and reported for training in September 1923. At Cranwell he wrote a paper, “Future Developments in Aircraft Design.” It argued that speeds beyond 500 mph belonged to the stratosphere and would need rocket or gas-turbine propulsion. The Air Ministry, guided by Alan A. Griffith, thought the metals impossible and the fuel appetite ruinous, and its obstruction cost five years; a patent arrived in 1930 anyway. Not until 1936 did Whittle, with two former RAF pilots, found Power Jets. The Whittle Unit first fired on April 12, 1937, and nearly killed the program, running away to 8,000 revolutions per minute before shutdown. Sustained runs at 16,000 RPM only came in the summer of 1939; war, declared on September 3, finally concentrated official minds, and Gloster received a contract for two jet prototypes in February 1940.
Von Ohain’s route was softer and faster. Born in Dessau on December 14, 1911, raised in noble comfort, he took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1935, nine days before receiving a patent on his engine concept. A Ju-52 flight in 1931 had set the problem for him; the National Aviation Hall of Fame records that he “conceived the idea for jet propulsion in 1933 when he realized that the great noise and vibrations of the propeller piston engines seemed to destroy the smoothness and steadiness of flying”. One bureaucratic wrinkle is delicious: “When von Ohain applied for a patent on his invention in 1936, the patent office referenced Frank Whittle’s 1930 patent, which established Whittle as the forerunner in (turbo) jet propulsion technology and development. However, since important differences existed between the two ideas, he received his patent”. Whittle never knew.
What the German effort had was industrial shelter. Max Hahn, a mechanic with a gift for metal, built the first model; a letter of introduction brought von Ohain to Ernst Heinkel in March 1936, with workshop, money and engineers attached. His team dodged the combustion crisis that was tormenting Whittle by running its first bench engine on hydrogen in spring 1937, switching to gasoline that September. By March 1939 the HeS 3A delivered 992 pounds of static thrust, airborne under an He 118 that July; the refined HeS 3B then took the He 178 into history on August 27, 1939, marred only by a bird-strike delay and a landing gear that refused to retract. The German Air Ministry stayed cooler than the Royal Air Force had been, yet seeded jet programs at BMW and Junkers. Von Ohain’s next engine, the HeS 8, lost the war inside the war: paired with the Heinkel He 280 fighter, “its thrust was low and its diameter was too large.” The Messerschmitt Me 262, narrow axial engines and all, took the laurels, and “The war ended before another engine design became operational”.
The wider picture the two men shared, as Walter Boyne saw it, was bleak symmetry: governments slow to see it, rewards inadequate, others profiting. Beyond pay raises and one worthless check at war’s end, von Ohain was never truly compensated, and Whittle’s health and finances fared little better. Von Ohain went to the United States under Operation Paperclip in 1947, alongside Wernher von Braun, made the Air Force’s aeronautical research laboratory a directorship in 1956, became chief scientist of the aero propulsion laboratory by 1975, and died in 1998 at 86. Against expectation, the rivals became friends: “Whittle and von Ohain met many times in the United States, often when they were jointly receiving some prestigious honor, such as the 1991 Charles Stark Draper Prize. When they were together, von Ohain deferred graciously to Sir Frank.”
The European view of the story is not who won but how close it ran: a mechanic’s son in England and a doctor of physics in Germany, building the same heresy on opposite sides of a closing war, one stalled by ministry doubt, one accelerated by a manufacturer’s ambition. When the 262s and the Meteor’s descendants finally met in the air, the machines had already converged; only the paperwork, as ever, had kept them apart.
Sources
- The Converging Paths of Whittle and von Ohain | Air & Space Forces Magazine
- Hans Von Ohain: The Other Father Of The Jet Engine
