The ‘Useless’ American Fighter That Hunted German Pilots More Than Any Soviet Plane

When Luftvafa ground stations broadcast akong akong Porrishkin is in the air, junior German pilots were ordered to return to their airfields immediately, not engage, not fight.

F.Lee.Alexander Pokskin was the most feared pilot on the Eastern Front.

A three-time hero of the Soviet Union who scored 48 of his 59 kills in the same airplane.

An airplane the United States military called inferior and tried to erase from history.

The Bell P39 era Cobra produced four of the top six Soviet aces and achieved kill ratios of 8:1 against the Luftwafa.

Stalin personally wrote to Roosevelt requesting more.

And yet America shipped half of total production overseas, excluded it from the Air Force Academy memorial, and never formed a single pilots association.

So what really happened to the P39? The answer involves a bankrupt company, a turbocharger removed while its only champion was conveniently sent to England, a fascist journalist who poisoned its reputation before Britain ever flew it, and a procurement chief who walked from controlling $43 billion in wartime contracts directly into the aircraft industry’s top lobbying job.

February 1937, rightfield, Ohio.

Lieutenant Benjamin S.

Kelsece and Captain Gordon P.

Savile issue circular proposal X609.

They want something revolutionary.

A highaltitude interceptor with a turbo supercharger, tricycle landing gear, and a cannon firing through the propeller hub.

Bell Aircraft wins the contract.

The company is tiny, founded in July 1935 with just 56 employees.

By the time war breaks out, they have roughly 1,000 workers, while Lockheed, Republic, and North American employ tens of thousands.

Bell has produced only 15 flyable aircraft in total.

They are functionally on the brink of bankruptcy, but their prototype is extraordinary.

The XP39 first flies on April 6th, 1939 from Wrightfield with a General Electric turbo supercharger bolted to its Allison engine.

The engine sits behind the pilot, connected to the propeller by a 10- ft drive shaft running between his legs.

This frees the nose for a 37 mm cannon, the most powerful armament of any American fighter.

Bel claims the prototype reaches 390 mph at 20,000 ft.

The real number, calculated later by NACA engineers, was closer to 340.

The prototype was unarmed, unarmored, and weighed 5,550 lb.

A combat loaded production aircraft would weigh 7,500.

Still, the design has potential.

Then, General Hap Arnold orders the XP39 sent to NACA’s Langley wind tunnel for evaluation.

Benjamin Kelsey, the man who wrote the specification requiring a turbocharger, is ordered to England.

He would later call this the biggest regret of his career.

But what happened while he was gone would change aviation history forever.

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Now, let me show you what happened while Kelsey was gone.

August 1939, a joint USAAC and NACA meeting at Wrightfield.

Benjamin Kelsey is 3,000 mi away in England.

The P39’s only advocate is absent.

Larry Bell himself, the CEO of Bell Aircraft, proposes removing the turbocharger from production aircraft.

NACA engineers concur.

They theorized that aerodynamic cleanup alone could push the P39 to 429 mph without the turbo installation that produced drag.

They promised Bell that stripping the turbocharger and cleaning up the airframe will make the plane faster.

That promise never materialized.

The production P39D achieved roughly 368 mph at 13,800 ft.

Above 12,000 ft, performance degraded rapidly.

Above 20,000 ft, the P39 was nearly useless.

Now, here is where the conspiracy gets interesting.

The NACA wind tunnel data told a complicated story.

The XP39’s turbo installation was genuinely terrible.

The intercooler removed only 25% of heat during high-speed flight and just 12% during climb.

The ducting had sharp corners creating severe pressure losses.

The whole assembly protruded into the slipstream like a tumor.

A modern computational fluid dynamics study confirmed that the original turbo installation was a drag nightmare.

But Lockheed solved the exact same engineering challenge with the P38 Lightning.

The technology existed.

The problem was solvable.

So why did Bell delete the turbocharger instead of redesigning the installation? The answer was money and desperation.

Bell Aircraft had secured a desperately needed $2 million French advance on an 11 million order.

The company could not afford delays for a turbo redesign.

One historian concluded that neither Bell nor Woods were willing to go to the mat for their beautiful fighter, and to preserve the company’s financial viability, they would have to take it on the chin.

Bell chose solvency over performance.

and the fighter paid the price for the next 80 years.

When Kelsey returned from England and learned what had happened, he expressed deep regret.

He was the P39’s technical champion.

He had written the specification requiring a turbocharger, and he was absent at the moment that mattered most.

Was this a coincidence? Perhaps.

But the men who benefited from Kelsey’s absence tell a different story.

Major General Oliver P.

Eckles sat in a corner office at Wrightfield, Ohio.

He was chief of the Material Division, the single most powerful figure in the US Army Air Force’s aircraft procurement.

Every major fighter acquisition flowed through his desk.

His pattern of behavior raises serious questions.

When North American aviation delivered P-51 Mustang test aircraft to Wrightfield, ELS refused to fly them.

A visiting test pilot asked why the P-51 had never been evaluated.

Ekolles replied, “Why would we waste effort flying it when there is no plan to purchase any?” Ekals championed the doomed Fisher P75, an aircraft that never entered service.

He tried to force North American to build P40s on license from Curtis rather than develop new fighters.

He held a personal grudge against Howard Hughes, blocking him from contracts for years after Hughes snubbed a demonstration.

And here is the revolving door.

After retiring in December 1946, Oliver Eckles became president of the Aircraft Industries Association, the main lobbying organization for every major aircraft manufacturer.

The man who controlled $43.5 billion in wartime procurement walked directly into the industry’s top lobbying position.

Now consider Hap Arnold, the US Army Air Force’s chief.

Arnold was personal friends with Dutch Kindleberger, president of North American Aviation, the company that built the P-51 Mustang.

They had served together in World War I.

Arnold’s only direct intervention in fighter procurement was to override Eckles and force purchase the P-51, directly benefiting his friend’s company.

No such intervention was ever made for the P39.

And what about Benjamin Kelsey, the P39’s nominal champion sitting at his desk in Washington? He had a deep personal relationship with the competing P38 Lightning.

He co-wrote the specification Lockheed 1.

He personally flew the XP38 prototype on its record-breaking cross-country flight.

He later flew P-38 combat missions over Nazi occupied Europe and nearly died testing P38 dive flaps.

His emotional investment in the P38 dwarfed any connection to the P39.

Bell Aircraft was a political outsider, a high school dropout running a tiny company from Buffalo, New York, competing against established manufacturers with deep Pentagon relationships based in politically connected Southern California, the P39 never had a chance.

March 1940, 8 months before any British pilot ever sat in a P39, Charles G.

Gray published a devastating anonymous article in the Aeroplane magazine.

He savaged the aircraft as all wrong and warned the British Purchasing Commission not to be hoodwinkedked.

Gray was one of the most influential aviation journalists in Britain.

He was a former editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.

The Air Ministry, as one historian noted, ran scared of him on many issues.

He was also a known fascist sympathizer with pro-German attitudes who had been fired from the airplane when war broke out.

He had previously led a campaign to close the Royal Aircraft Factory during World War I just as it was about to deliver some very advanced designs.

When production P400s arrived and performed below Bell’s inflated claims, 355 mph at 13,000 ft versus the advertised 400 from an unarmed prototype, Gray’s predictions appeared vindicated.

The Air Ministry panicked.

The political embarrassment of having bought an aircraft Gray publicly warned against was acute.

Only RAF number 6001 squadron ever operated the P400 in combat.

They flew exactly one mission, attacking barges near Dunkirk on October 9th, 1941.

By March 1942, they had re-equipped with Spitfires.

Was the rejection entirely unfair? No.

The performance shortfall was real.

The cockpit could not be jettisoned in emergency.

Rain obliterated forward visibility, but consider the context.

Britain ordered 675 aircraft before any British pilot ever flew one.

They tested the plane for barely 4 months.

They flew only eight combat sordies, and internal RAF assessments acknowledged the P400 was effective for low-level fighter and ground attack work, a role never seriously explored.

There was also a financial motive.

Britain had paid cash for P400s under pre-lend lease contracts.

Dumping them freed up money for superior aircraft available free under lend lease.

A fascist sympathizer poisoned the well.

The Air Ministry feared media attack.

Economic convenience sealed the deal and the P39 was branded a failure in Western aviation history forever.

Now we travel 6,000 mi east to the snow-covered airfields of the Soviet Union where the airplane America rejected was about to become a legend.

The numbers tell a story that Western historians tried to bury for decades.

Alexander Pushkin scored 48 of his 59 confirmed victories in P39s.

He was a three-time hero of the Soviet Union, the first person to receive that honor three times during the war.

His personal notebooks suggest his actual score exceeded 100, but many kills over enemy territory could not be confirmed.

He developed the legendary tactical formula.

Height, speed, maneuver, fire, specifically around the P39’s strengths.

He invented the bookshelf formation.

Pairs of fighters stacked at altitude tiers toward the sun.

He had his engineering crew wire the cannon and machine gun triggers together so all weapons fired simultaneously.

When Pukrishkin’s P39 call sign Sautka appeared over the battlefield, Luftwafa ground stations broadcast warnings.

Junior German pilots were ordered to return to their airfields immediately.

On April 29th, 1943, during the Kuban air battles, eight P39s led by Pocrishkin attacked three squadrons of Junker’s Ju87 Stookas escorted by Messersmidt BF-109s.

12 German aircraft were destroyed.

Pokin claimed five.

He considered it his greatest achievement that not a single supporting aircraft was lost.

Gregori Rkolof scored 50 to 56 victories in P39s, the highest individual P39 kill count by some measures.

He shot down the widest variety of enemy types of any Soviet ace, Hankle bombers, Yunker’s attack aircraft, Messer Schmidt and Wolf fighters, even an Italian Seavoya flying boat.

He had color blindness which he managed to hide from military doctors his entire career.

Nikolai Gulav destroyed 41 enemy aircraft in just 12 months of P39 combat.

The most efficient kill rate of any Aracobra pilot.

The 9inth Guard’s Fighter Aviation Division, Pocrishkin’s unit, was credited with 1,147 total victories and produced 31 heroes of the Soviet Union.

The 153rd Guards Fighter Regiment provides the starkkest statistical evidence.

In its first two months of P39 service, 20 Air Cobras shot down 18 bombers and 45 fighters while losing only eight aircraft, approximately an 8:1 kill ratio.

But here is where the story gets truly damning for the American military establishment.

Soviet pilot Nikolai Galadnikov offered this devastating assessment of American tactical doctrine.

If we had flown it the way the Americans outlined in the aircraft specifications, they would have shot us down immediately.

This fighter was a dud in its design regimes, but we conducted normal combat in our regimes.

The Soviets understood what the Americans and British refused to accept.

Below 15,000 ft, the P-39 was a superb fighter.

Its roll rate of 75 degrees per second at 235 mph exceeded the Zero, the F4F Wildcat, the F6F Hellcat, and the P38 Lightning.

The Royal Air Force itself confirmed it could easily outturn a Messor Schmidt BF109.

The 37 mm cannon was devastating.

Galadnikov said one hit and that was usually goodbye to the enemy.

Eastern front combat rarely occurred above 20,000 ft, exactly where the P39 thrived.

The reliable American radios transformed Soviet tactical coordination at a time when only 1 in 10 Soviet aircraft had functioning communications equipment.

The tricycle landing gear performed superbly on Russia’s soggy snow-covered airfields.

The Soviets removed wing-mounted machine guns to improve roll rate.

Bell eventually delivered aircraft without them at Soviet request.

And yet Pokushkin was briefly blacklisted after the war for preferring an American fighter over Soviet designs.

He was once denied a third hero of the Soviet Union award because it would have glorified foreign manufacturing.

His preference for the P39 stunted his career growth under Stalin.

Soviet testimony about the aircraft’s effectiveness was systematically discredited in Western historioggraphy.

One analyst noted it may be that because this testimony comes from the former Soviet Union, it is distrusted.

The Cold War erased the P39’s greatest achievements from history.

Approximately 4,773 went to the Soviet Union, roughly half of total production.

The P39 was the most numerous foreign fighter in the Soviet Air Force inventory.

More than onethird of all American and British supplied fighters.

Add the 2,397 P63 King Cobras and improved P39, also shipped to the Soviets.

Bell sent approximately 7,170 Cobra family aircraft to the Soviet Union.

the largest export of any American fighter family to any single nation in the war.

The delivery route was extraordinary.

P39 aircraft flew from Bell’s Buffalo factory to Great Falls, Montana, where Soviet red stars were painted on their fuselages.

American ferry pilots flew them through Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Soviet ferry regiments then flew them across the bearing straight just 55 mi of freezing ocean and through Siberian air strips spanning 12 time zones and 14,000 km to Kras no 133 aircraft crashed during North American ferry flights 38 women air force service pilots died delivering aircraft to Great Falls by 1944 a P39 cost $50,166.

Essentially identical to a P-51 Mustang at $51,572.

If the P39 were truly worthless, shipping 4,773 of them to an ally fighting for survival would have been an act of sabotage, not strategy.

Stalin personally wrote to Roosevelt requesting more P39s.

extraordinary given that the Soviets despised most lend lease equipment.

The M3 Grant tank was nicknamed coffin for seven brothers, but they loved the P39.

Soviet pilots discovered in combat that the P39 could enter a fatal flat spin when ammunition was expended.

The center of gravity shifted rearward as the ammunition bays emptied.

They demonstrated this to skeptical Bell representatives.

Belell denied the flaw existed.

They had been unable to reproduce the effect in testing.

The mystery went unexplained for decades.

In the 1970s, NASA’s Langley Research Center found the original World War II P39 spin tunnel model in storage.

Researchers first replicated wartime tests with a full ammunition load.

Results were consistent, no tumbling.

Then they rebalanced the model to simulate empty ammunition bays.

The model tumbled.

Every wartime test had assumed full ammunition loads.

The fatal characteristic only appeared with depleted ammunition, exactly the condition combat pilots experienced.

This was a genuine failure of testing methodology that cost pilots their lives.

It was discovered three decades too late.

Bell had not lied about their test results.

They had simply tested the wrong configuration and pilots died because of it.

The P39 Araco Cobra is the only one of the five principal USAF fighters.

The P38, P39, P40, P47, and P-51 that never had a pilots association.

It is excluded from the fighter memorial at the Air Force Academy.

the sole major American World War II fighter not represented.

Colonel Evans G.

Stevens, a P39 combat veteran, observed that they did not really know it was an unpopular airplane.

He said they did not have any chance to think about that.

Lieutenant Colonel William A.

Shomo, an American ace, said that nothing could touch a P39 used below 15,000 ft.

He added that he would have taken on the vaunted P38 at lower altitudes.

The last plane shot down by the Luftbuffa was a Soviet P39 on May 8, 1945.

The last Soviet air victory of World War II was also a P39.

On May 9, 1945, Captain Vasilei Shinichikov downed a Foco Wolf 189 over Prague.

The P39 fired the opening and closing shots of the air war on the Eastern Front and America pretended it never happened.

In 2015, underwater archaeologist Wayne Lousardi led a team to discover the P39Q of Second Lieutenant Frank Moody in Lake Hiron.

Moody was a Tuskegee airman.

His aircraft had crashed during a gunnery exercise in April 1944.

NOAA and the Tuskegee Airman National Museum excavated the site in 2023.

A marginalized pilot, a marginalized aircraft, both forgotten, both now remembered.

The P39 Araco Cobra was not a perfect fighter.

Its turbocharger was genuinely problematic.

Its high alitude performance was genuinely poor.

But the evidence strongly suggests its reputation was shaped less by honest assessment than by institutional bias, political convenience, financial desperation, propaganda from a fascist sympathizing journalist, cold war erasure of Soviet testimony, and an establishment that found it useful to call the plane inferior while shipping thousands of them to an ally that used them to devastating effect.

The P39’s real crime was not poor performance.

It was being built by the wrong company, championed by absent advocates, and judged by metrics designed for a war it was never meant to fight.

Alexander Pokskin became a marshal of aviation.

He lived until 1985.

He never stopped preferring the P39 to any Soviet fighter he flew.

When he died, his medals filled a case.

Three gold stars of the hero of the Soviet Union.

All earned in an American airplane his own country tried to forget.

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The P39 deserved better.

So did the men who flew it.

And now you know the truth.