And would it have been any good?

The writer Luke Turner shared a link with me via X leading to a sketched cutaway from 1945 of a formidably armed fighter-interceptor labelled as the ‘Westland Wildcat’. The twin-boom pusher design, reminiscent of the Saab 21, was plausible, but what was it?

The Westland aircraft company had created the revolutionary Whirlwind fighter design in 1938, was this sketch evidence of another innovative fighter that never made it into production? Sadly, this article is no exception to Betteridge’s law that the answer to a question in a headline is always ‘no’. The Wildcat, which is no relation to today’s helicopter of the same name, was an attempt at disinformation by an incarcerated Marine pilot.

According to the British National Archives “Guy ‘Griff’ Griffiths is a Royal Marine pilot and one of the first naval officers to be captured. He found distraction from captivity in dreaming up a scheme for feeding misleading intelligence to the German authorities whilst imprisoned in Dulag Luft – creating sketches of fake British aircraft which he leaves around the camp for guards to find.”

Guy Beresford Kerr “Griff” Griffiths (6 June 1915 – 12 July 1999) was a Skua pilot at the start of the war. Eleven days into the Second World War, three Skuas were dispatched from HMS Ark Royal to defend a merchant ship against a German submarine attack. This was the first British Naval bombing of the conflict, and one of the pilots was Griffith. Due to incorrect fuse arming, the Skuas bombs damaged the tails of two of the three aeroplanes, which crashed into the sea with the loss of both air observers. Griff, along with fellow pilot Thurstan, survived, becoming the first naval officers captured in the war. Griffiths’ spirit of defiance survived captivity and he used his artistic skills to create fake British warplane designs to confuse and waste the time of Nazi intelligence (he also forged documents to aid escape attempts). He was freed in 1945 and become the first Royal Marines officer to fly a helicopter. During the Korean War he visually identified the first downed MiG-15.

The Westland Wildcat

So would the Wildcat have worked in real-life? Jim Smith had significant technical roles in the development of the UK’s leading military aviation programmes from ASRAAM and Nimrod, to the JSF and Eurofighter Typhoon. He was also Britain’s technical liaison to the British Embassy in Washington, covering several projects including the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest. We asked him his opinion of this intriguing design:

“The Wildcat concept is a compact, single-engine, twin boom-design that shows its Westland
pedigree in the compact central fuselage nacelle, pusher engine and heavy armament, with nose-
mounted cannon supplemented by additional weapons in the front of the tail-booms. The nacelle-
form fuselage not only looks like the front end of the Whirlwind, it also resembles in layout the
fuselage of the 1931 Pterodactyl IV, and the projected Mk VI fighter. To me, it looks to be reflecting
an answer to the question “How can we deliver the punch of the Whirlwind in a design using a single
Merlin engine?”.

This would be desirable for two reasons. Firstly, the Peregrine engine powering the Whirlwind had
found itself at a development dead end, given the far greater urgency of continuously keeping the
Merlin competitive, because of its criticality to the performance of key fighter, strike, and bomber
aircraft. Secondly, moving to a single-engine design would have a greater chance of Air Ministry
approval than simply replacing the two Peregrines on the Whirlwind with two Merlin engines, given
the pressing demand for those engines.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed pod and boom layout offers both benefits and disadvantages – like any
other aircraft, there are trade-offs to be made between desirable characteristics like range,
manoeuvre performance, speed and handling. The most obvious attraction of the design is the
realisation of a small, yet heavily armed fighter, combining aerodynamic and structural efficiency
into what should be a fast, manoeuvrable and effective platform.

Where then, do the disadvantages or questionable aspect arise? Apart from the question mark
about whether Merlin engines would have been available, that is. Two aspects strike me as requiring
some thought – and possible revision.

The undercarriage arrangement is a particular problem as the ‘conventional’ tailwheel layout will
lead to low ground clearance for the propeller – or longer and heavier undercarriage legs will be
required to give adequate clearance. This problem is compounded by the positioning of the fin,
rudder and tailwheel in the centre of the tailplane. This results in fin, rudder and landing loads all
having to be sustained by the tailplane, inevitably adding weight to the structure.
A second related issue is the complexity of the control runs for the empennage. Positioning the fin
and rudder at mid-tailplane has the advantage of these surfaces being in the propeller slipstream,
but with the disadvantage of complexity of the control system, which has to pass from the cockpit
through the wing to the tail-booms, down the booms, and then across through the tailplane to the
fin.

I suggest that the use of a nosewheel undercarriage would result in better ground handling, and be a
lighter solution to providing adequate ground clearance. Similarly, moving to a fin and rudder carried
on each boom would not only simplify the control system, but also provide a more structurally
efficient transfer of fin loads into the structure. Of course, the resulting configuration would perhaps
then look like a piston-engined precursor to the Vampire, and, perhaps less like a quirky Westland
product.

Pilot escape might be another problem area, and the Wildcat might, perhaps, have been an early
ejection seat adopter should the design have gone into production. Another issue, often
encountered with pusher engine installations, is difficulty in cooling the engine. Arrangements for
engine cooling are not entirely clear, the drawing hinting at an under-fuselage radiator, rather like
that of the Hurricane. This is certainly an area which would need to be considered in development.

With a small design, as this appears to be, one does wonder what the combat range would be,
particularly as the available volume in the fuselage and wing appears limited. Timing is everything
here – as a shorter-range interceptor fighter the concept has some promise. But in the latter stages
of the war, larger, longer-range escort fighters were perhaps a greater priority.”

The National Archives bew exhibition, ‘Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives’ draws on The National Archives’ vast collections of wartime era documents and photographs – featuring not only the iconic stories that you may have heard of, but many stories of survival that have rarely been told.