Daniel D. Whitney

I have developed a love-hate relationship with this book over the past weeks. There is much to love in the obvious enthusiasm that Mr. Whitney brings to his subject, and there is much to hate about the way he chose to express his enthusiasm. So let us see how I acquired this dilemma.

"Vees for Victory" is a full account of the Allison V-1710 liquid-cooled 12-cylinder engine that powered the majority of U.S. Army Air Forces pursuit aircraft built during the Second World War, a claim that should come with some caveats. The author, Dan Whitney, is a nuclear and mechanical engineer whose background is clear in the manner in which the book is written. The organization of this 470-page work is complex, matching the author's approach to this subject. The book naturally begins with an introduction, which to my eye more resembles an executive summary as the author will return to the subjects mentioned at least once and perhaps even several times in the course of the book.

Whitney then presents his reader with a total of 17 numbered chapters, each broken up into smaller sections set off by headers. Chapter 1 describes the founding and origins of the Allison firm, while Chapter 2, a very brief chapter, speaks to the first flight of the V-1710 engine. Chapter 3 describes the new pursuit ships the U.S. Army Air Corps sought to develop in the 1930's, inspired by the development of engines such as the V-1710.

Chapters 4-6 cover the introduction of the V-1710 to military service, starting with its rather rough debut in the Curtiss P-40 series of fighters. Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the earliest models of the V-1710 built for both the Army and the Navy--the Navy's use intended for installations aboard the huge rigid airshis in vogue with the service in the early 1930's. Chapters 9 through 13 cover specific models of the engine that constituted the bulk of Allison's production, while Chapter 14 involves the more exotic V-3420 engine--essentially two V-1710 engines combined into a single powerplant.

Chapter 15 can be considered the whole point of the book--a comparison between Allison's engine and the Rolls-Royce V-1650 Merlin engine. Chapter 16 speaks to specific engineering challenges of the V-1710, while Chapter 17 is about how Allision went about making the engine during the war. Chapter 18 concerns the engine's post-World War II employment in various guises and platforms. Whiney also includes no fewer than 11 appendices covering a wide variety of V-1710 facts, statistics, and tables. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and an index.

While there is no doubt that the author has command of his subject, the question lies in how he uses that command. Whitney spends a great deal of effort to be an apologist for Allison (and by extension General Motors), but he never really gets into why such a defense should be necessary. The reader can infer this effort from reading Chapter 15 as Whitney compares the Allison product with Rolls-Royce's Merlin. The unspoken question in this Chapter is why should the British product (and by extension its American Packard relative) have such a sterling reputation while Allison's engine is dogged by history? What remains unspoken in the book is the V-1710's association with what aircraft enthusiasts would label substandard fighters. Both Allison-powered Bell P-39/63's and Curtiss P-40's were suitable for holding the line for the Allies in the early part of America's World War II, but they were not war winners in the fashion of Republic's big radial-powered P-47 and North American's elegant Merlin-powered P-51. The Allison-powered P-38 falls in between these two extremes, considered neither a dog nor a war-winner. So there is a perceived taint associated with the V-1710 regardless of facts. Was this book Whitney's attempt to defend Allison? If so, that defense left a lot to be desired.

A second problem with this book is the author's ability to impart knowledge to the reader. One need only look at the table of contents to observe that this book is an organizational Frankenstein with bits and pieces of information scattered across the length of the book. Evidence of this lack of organization appears in the needless repetition of events, facts, and people throughout. Coupled with the lack of organization is a poor writing style with numerous errors, chief of which is Whitney's apparent confusion between possessives and plurals. I place a lot of blame on Whitney's editors over at Schiffer, who did not perform their due diligence when preparing this book for publication.

A third problem with this book is scholarship. While Whitney did a lot of research to put this book together, once the author leaves the safe waters of the Allison plants he quickly runs into shoals. His discussion of German aircraft engine development, specifically on their "double vee" engines like the Daimler-Benz DB-606, is way off the mark in attributing the Daimler-Benz effort to Allison's V-3420 engine's public debut at the 1939 World's Fair, when in fact the German engine flew in 1936.

Overall, I was disappointed by "Vees for Victory" as it was such a slog. Granted, I learned a great deal in the course of reading this book, but it took considerable effort to do so. While I credit Whitney for the heroic research effort it took to gather this much information in one place, he (and his Schiffer editors) apparently did not spend much effort trying to communicate this information to the reader.… (plus d'informations)