Operation Outback
The process of setting up Australia with Yararas and the imminent new fighter officially was dubbed Operation Outback in mid February of 1942.
The first two RAAF Yarara squadrons had already returned to Australia and DAP had begun rolling their first lisence built examples of the machine off their line in Melbourne by the end of January 1942.
Outback also included the refinement of defense strategies for Australia’s northern reaches. Beyond Darwin, which was established as the command centre for Yarara strike operations along the northern coastline, three other bases for the aircraft were established; Cape Talbot to the west of Darwin and Nhulunbuy and Weipa to the east.
Very quickly, concentrations of the aircraft built up on the northern coast. If the Japanese tried to attack, they would have a much larger number of Yararas to contend with than any carrier could launch.
Another aspect of Outback was the loan of the repaired Tierra del Fuego to the RAN to keep Australian pilots current on carrier procedures. This was seen as essential not only because the RAN had taken navalised Yararas, but also because priority was being put on the navalised version of the new fighter.
Progress on the Resistencia had been better than hoped and she was fully expected to be launched and operational before 1942 was out. The two Colosus class carriers under construction in Brasil were experiencing similar rapid progress. In light of such developments, the Tierra del Fuego was considered an open ended loan to Australia and was provisionally christened HMAS Carpenteria.
Additionally, Outback saw the equipping of New Zealand with Yararas and the new fighter. RNZAF pilots were already in Australia getting their Yarara training before the first examples of the type crossed the Tasman Sea to take up station in New Zealand.
The New Predator Arrives
The first week of March saw the first production variant of the swift and sleek new fighter that was the fruition of the Argentine and Australian joint efforts take to the air from La Pampa. The fighter was approximately the same size as the Supermarine Spitfire and considered roughly comparable in abilities and performance to the British fighter.
The Argentines named the new machine the Culpeo, after a type of fox native to the western part of the country. After a bit of debate, the Australian variants collectively became known as the Goshawk.
The aircraft featured a four blade propeller, two .303 machine guns in each wing and a pair of 20mm Hispano cannons mounted in the nose and excellent all round visibility via a bubble canopy.
Just as DAP had been chosen to build the Australian Yararas, Commonwealth Aircraft was selected to build the Goshawk. In so being selected, Commonwealth was told to discontinue work on their own fighter design that they’d been working on since late 1941, the Boomerang.
The “Hindenberg” Cruise
The Graf Zeppelin had left the shipyards and was at sea off the coast of France by early March waiting for its air wing to assemble. The full complement of He-130s and Bf-110s was aboard and the He-100 squadrons were beginning to arrive. By the middle of the month, the carrier along with its air wing and battle group were out in the open waters of the Atlantic.
The primary mission of the Graf Zeppelin’s first cruise was to hold station on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar and patrol the Morrocan coast. Large parts of Northern Africa were under Allied control at the time, but north western Africa still had large contingents of Vichy French activity within them and Germany hoped to blockade Allied approaches and retake a foothold in Africa.
En route to Africa, The Zeppelin battle group was engaged by the HMS Illustrious and her respective battle group. With the Zeppelin being the larger of the two carriers and with a technically better equipped air wing; the act of engaging it was taken with no small amount of trepidation.
The Illustrious air group consisted of Sea Wolf units with their aircraft in either heavy fighter or surface strike configurations and Grumman Martlets as the fighter force.
Based on the Carpenteria Incident, the Royal Navy was confident that the heavy fighter Sea Wolf could handle any incoming He-130 so long as the Martlets could keep He-100s busy. The He-100 was largely an unknown quantity, the Luftwaffe had never fielded the type so there was no frame of reference for what it was like to face them in combat. It was know to be faster than the Martlet but, like the Martlet, it was also known to be a pre war design.
As ships gunners manned their stations and air wings began launching, the events of this engagement would be a surprise for most involved.
Most of The He-130s that were lost in the battle were taken by ship based anti aircraft guns as the heavy fighter Sea Wolf units had their hands tied by their Bf-110 counterparts
He-130 losses were heavy largely because the Bf-110 and Sea Wolf turned out to be quite evenly matched and kept each other very busy. Typically, one to one combat between the two types ended in stalemate; most victories of one over the other required at least a two on one scenario.
The biggest surprise for both sides was in how the He-100 had fared in combat against the Martlet.
“We knew very little about the Heinkel fighter; had we been going up against a navalised Bf-109, we could at least have the RAF’s experience of fighting them to guide us. We knew our own aircraft’s limitations and presumed, quite rightly as it turned out, that we would have to employ tactics such as the Thatch Weave to get the better of it.
They were faster and more manouverable than we were, but if we could get one into our sights and get a shot in at just the right spot, they would go down quite easily. We were shocked and didn’t know what to make of it at the time.
We were simply happy that many more of us than expected made it back to the carrier that day.”
The recollections of a former He-100 pilot largely fill in the blanks of the situation the FAA Martlet pilots found themselves in:
“We were very sure of ourselves and our aircraft up till then. Before embarking on the cruise, we had some mock battles against Luftwaffe Bf-109 units and even one or two against captured Hurricanes and Spitfires and the He-100 proved itself more than a match for any of them.
The Heinkel fighter was quite complex in many respects, the cooling system was based on evaporative cooling. Such cooling systems were rather new and still being experimented with, but they did allow for a very clean aircraft design.
That cooling system almost proved our undoing as it turned out to be an area of great vulnerability to us. A hit almost anywhere in the nose of the aircraft or one of the wing coolant tanks was enough to take an He-100 out of battle.
The complexities of The He-100 also caused maintenance issues aboard ship that did not make themselves apparent when ground based. It was a very high maintenance machine; too high maintenance for the limited resources of carrier operations.
It was a fine aircraft, but only if you had the resources to keep it going.”
The outcome of the battle is often called the “Hindenberg Event” in German historical references; though many historians of the event consider that to be rather a case of overstatement that is focussed to much on the He-100’s own technologies working against it. In reality, the battle was largely a stalemate.
Changes Ahead
The Graf Zeppelin returned to port after the engagement against the Illustrious. The carrier itself had not been damaged in the conflict, but all of the combat aircraft types were put under close scrutiny by the Kriegsmarine top brass.
The He-100 simply had to go, as good as it was in performance, maintaining it on a carrier was clearly too risky and labour intensive.
The losses of the He-130 were not strictly the result of the Sea Wolves tying up the Bf-110s that could have protected them. The aircraft was a solid performer, and it was concluded that better tactics had to be developed for it.
The Bf-110 simply needed an edge over its Sea Wolf counterpart.
The replacement of the He-100 was dictated by the simple fact that the Bf-109 could not be reliably navalised and the only other fighter with potential to replace it was the now operational Focke-Wulf Fw-190.
Studies into an improved Bf-110 largely circled around weight savings and improved manouverability. The first step was to see if the aircraft could be reasonably handled by a pilot alone. As it turned out, it could be done and the large greenhouse canopy and second crew station were replaced with revised upper decking that incorporated a much smaller bubble canopy over a slightly raised cockpit with much improved pilot visibility.
Experiments with the BMW 801 radial engine and the additional power it provided over the inline engines standard on the Bf-110 did create a more agile machine when married to the revised single seat airframe. A futher modification of giving the aircraft a more conventional tail unit provided further weight savings at no cost of manouverability.
The Kriegsmarine test pilots very much liked the new prototype and its handling and were certain it could give the needed advantage over the Sea Wolf; however, there was the large issue of freeing up BMW 801 engines for a fleet of the type and the Luftwaffe had some say over that.
After testing the aircraft and being very impressed with the handling, Luftwaffe test pilots recommended a prototype optimised to their own requirements. The Kriegsmarine’s new Bf-110 variant’s life depended on the Luftwaffe being able to make some use of it as well.
The Luftwaffe prototype stripped out all naval gear for an even lighter machine that they nicknamed “Fliegenklatsche”, or “Flyswatter” in English. It was a particularly appropriate moniker as the Luftwaffe was looking for anything to counter the DeHavilland Mosquito which had entered service in late 1941.
The Kriegsmarine waited nervously for the results of Luftwaffe testing.
The FAA’s New Gear
The confrontation between the Illustrious and Zeppelin also led to the Royal Navy examining its flying resources.
Replacement of the Martlet was already being worked on before the battle. The Supermarine Seafire had flown for the first time in January of 1942; as such, the writing was largely on the wall for the Martlet before the incident.
The surface attack Sea Wolf did better than the He-130 in hitting targets and surviving the battle. This was partly due to tactical flexibility; while a portion of the Sea Wolf attack force was armed with torpedoes, another portion was armed with unguided rockets of armour piercing or incindiary varieties. The Sea Wolf also had something of a speed and manouverability advantage over its German counterpart.
Like the Yarara, the Sea Wolf was still very sound in the strike arena, the only change proposed for it was more engine power in the form of the Rolls Royce Griffon engine.
Like the fighter version of the Yarara, the Sea Wolf fighter was showing some limitations and Fairey had been working on addressing them since december of 1941. Ultimately, the final product was a quite different beast from the Sea Wolf; different enough to be designated its own name, the Firefy.
Like the German efforts on the Bf-110, Fairey centred their work on reducing the Sea Wolf’s weight and more powerful engine options. For commonality with the Sea Wolf, the Firefly was given the Griffon engine but most everything was different beyond that.
The Firefly kept large sections of the Sea Wolf fuselage but, like developments in the Bf-110, the cockpit went to a single seat and slightly elevated arrangement under a bubble canopy. With the exception of the four 20 mm Hispano cannons and radiators, the wing was entirely different to that of the Sea Wolf.
Fairey had designed a simplified and lighter unbent wing for the Firefly. As the primary purpose of the bent wing was for outsized weapon clearance and the Firefly was not going to be carrying any torpedoes so long as the Sea Wolf was around, there was really no need to maintain that feature.
Unlike the Kriegsmarine’s Bf-110 reworking, the Firefly’s acceptance into FAA service was not hindered by interservice politics.
Developments in the Sea Wolf did not go unseen by Argentina, who promptly set about pursuing a lisence for Griffon production. Australia pursued a production for the Griffon as well, though independantly of the Argentines.