WORLD WAR 2 IN REVIEW: Those Screaming Invaders: The North American A-36 Dive Bomber

by Arthur W. Everett Jr.

American A-36 Invader pilots, after five months of operation in the Mediterranean theater, are making the Germans wish they’d never heard of dive bombing. Their close support in pounding German positions has softened the task of advancing Allied ground forces from Sicily up the Italian boot.

At Troina in Sicily they blasted into submission a battery of Nazi 88 mm guns and enabled our ground forces to take that strategic town. It was one of the decisive battles of the Sicilian campaign.

Later when American ground troops were scheduled to move against two well-defended heights in the center of the enemy line in Italy, the Invaders sent waves of planes over the area every ten minutes until the hills were pockmarked with bomb craters. They dive-bombed only a few hundred feet ahead of American lines but not an Allied soldier was singed and the Germans were forced to draw back leaving the battered area to our troops.

These are only two of many examples of the split-second timing and dead-center accuracy that is the trademark of the A-36 groups operating under Major General Edwin J. House’s command.

It’s difficult to separate the Invader pilot from his plane. He’s inclined to give all the credit for his exploits to the aircraft itself. That’s not quite true. No plane is any greater than the pilot who flies it.

The A-36 fighter-bomber carries 500-pound bombs. It travels faster at medium altitude where it can weave and twist along through heavy flak. Near the target the pilot pulls the plane up several thousand feet, rolls it lazily over on its back, pulls back on the stick and sends the plane screaming down in a vertical dive on the target. He drops his bombs after a dive of several thousand feet. Like gray teardrops they drip off the nose of the A-36 and fall straight down ahead of the ship. The pilot begins to coax the ship out of its dive while it’s traveling at about 375 miles per hour straight down. As he eases back on the stick his eyes bug out, his cheeks feel like they’re being drawn down to his knees, and his stomach acts like it’s going right through the floor of the cockpit. But there’s seldom any blackout and, after about fifteen hundred feet of dive, the A-36 straightens out.

It is impossible to describe the terror this plane strikes in the hearts of enemy troops beneath it. Its shrill scream is louder and more eerie than the German Stuka’s. [Remember that next time someone speaks of the “terrible effect of the Stuka’s sound during a dive.”—Editor] It plunges down through three levels of flak straight at you and there’s no way in the world to dodge it on the ground. Italian troops captured in Sicily after being heavily bombed by A-36s were so shaken they were actually hysterical. They wept and moaned of the “screaming hell-divers,” their own nickname for the fighter-bomber.

Once the Invader drops its bombs it becomes a low-level strafing plane. Its six fifty-caliber machine guns are deadly when the plane skims along enemy roads at tree-top level. German trucks by the hundreds litter roads in Sicily and Italy, twisted monuments to the effectiveness of these strafers.

Because you never know what you’ll hit, this low-level work is the toughest of all. On one mission Lieutenant Colonel Dorr E. Newton, commander of one A-36 group, ran smack into a high tension wire that had escaped his notice as he winged along. But he lived to tell about it.

Not so fortunate was one youngster in Italy. His flight of four Invaders moved in to strafe an innocent-appearing string of forty enemy box cars on a rail siding. He turned his guns on them and the whole earth for thousands of feet around literally blew straight up in the air. The train was loaded with munitions. The pilot was blown up with his plane and his flight comrades, one of them over a mile away from the blast, narrowly missed a similar fate. Their planes were twisted and peppered with holes. The three of them managed to limp home.

Another pilot strafed a German dump in Italy early in the campaign. It, too, was chock full of munitions and they went off together. The pilot managed to crawl out of his burning plane and landed safely in the sea a few miles away. He was back in the air the next day.

The men who man the Invaders are not, strictly speaking, fighter pilots. Their job is to get in there and bomb or strafe and then get out and home again. But they can fight if they have to. During the desperate days on the Salerno beachheads they rushed the Invaders in from Sicily to fly patrol above our troops. They did such a good job on this unfamiliar task that they drew the unstinting admiration of American Spitfire pilots to whom combat is an old, familiar story. They shot down a dozen or more of the Luftwaffe’s best fighter planes in three days. And they didn’t lose a single A-36 to the enemy in the air.

Invader pilots age fast. They are young—all pilots are. The average age is about twenty-three. They haven’t the cockiness of a Spitfire pilot, the suave nonchalance of the P-40 fighter. But they have an esprit de corps that’s incomparable. They’re intensely proud of the ship they fly and the job they do. Many of them now have upwards of sixty missions to their credit. That’s a lot of combat and it can’t help but age a man. They’ve been pounding the Germans ever since they went into combat last June over Pantelleria.

One group, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Paul, has been plugging away at Germany’s Hermann Göring Division ever since the landings in Sicily. Members of this group know each other intimately by now. The Germans are constantly trying new ruses to conceal their heavy flak guns and bag the A-36s. The Invaders are just as intent on devising new ways of sneaking down on the enemy troops and blasting more of their men and equipment to bits.

The A-36 groups operate close to the front lines. In fact, they love to play host to visitors who don’t realize this fact. You can stand in front of the operations tent and watch a flight of the square-winged, square-tailed 36s take off. A few minutes later an officer will hold up a hand for silence. Sure enough, you can hear the thump of their exploding bombs on German territory only a few miles away. A few minutes later they’re back on the ground, piling into a jeep headed for interrogation at the intelligence tent.

The pilots named the A-36 themselves. Probably they’re the first flyers to do so. It happened this way:

Back in Africa when they first entered combat the news releases referred to the planes as Mustangs, or P-51 fighter-bombers. That irked the boys. True, their ship is a Mustang converted into a dive-bomber. But they felt their work was such that they were entitled to some distinction from the P-51 fighter pilot. Sitting around a tent on a dusty Cap Bon airfield one day they were trying to pick a name for their ship. After several failures, Lieutenant Robert Walsh spoke up: “What’s the matter with calling it the Invader? They’re using us right now to invade Sicily. Someday not so long from now we’ll be invading Europe.” The others agreed. Since then the name has caught on and has received official sanction. The plane has lived up to its name.

Addenda

The Invader was officially the A-36A-NA, a P-51A optimized for ground attack with the North American Aviation designation NA-97. The aircraft retained the six Browning MG 53-2 .50-caliber machine gun armament of the P-51A but had dive brakes mounted above and below the wing; these were later wired shut in combat operations. Powered by a 1,325-horsepower Allison V-1710-87 engine. The underwing racks could each carry a 500-pound bomb. Five were built, carrying serial numbers 42-83663 through 42-84162 (c/n 97-15881 through 97-16380), with aircraft 42-83685 being supplied to the RAF as EW998. Delivered in Olive Drab and Neutral Gray finish.

Deliveries started in September 1942 and were completed in March 1943. The type first saw action in Sicily and Italy in 1943, flying 23,373 missions, dropping 8,014 tons of bombs, destroying seventeen enemy aircraft on the ground and eighty-four in the air for a loss of 177 of its own number. Top speed was 356 miles per hour clean, and 310 miles per hour with two bombs at 5,000 feet. Ceiling was 25,100 feet. Range was 550 miles. Weight empty was 6,100 pounds, and loaded was 10,700 pounds. Wing span was 37 feet 0¼ inches. Length was 32 feet 2½ inches.