The U.S. Army Air Forces paid attention as Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers contributed to early German blitzkrieg victories in Europe.
Dabbling with the concept of steeply diving bombers, the Army Air Forces ordered some multi-place Curtiss Helldivers and Douglas Dauntlesses, both of which would serve the U.S. Navy and Marines well, but the Army Air Forces not so much.
Meanwhile, the nascent Mustang fighter held promise as a single-seat dive bomber for the Army. What steep-diving bombers gained in speed as they hurtled toward their intended target could be slowed by the extension of dive brakes into the slipstream.
Unthinkable for a pure fighter, the dive bomber versions of the Mustang incorporated a sturdy set of dive brakes that extended above and below the wings when rotated into the slipstream by stout hydraulic actuators.
In keeping with the AAF’s intended A-for-Attack mission, the dive-bombing Mustang was designated A-36. The name Apache was occasionally associated with the A-36.
North American Aviation historian Norm Avery used the name Invader for the A-36 in his book “North American Aircraft 1934-1998, Volume 1.” The Invader moniker later was applied to the twin-engine Douglas A-26 attack bomber, and A-36s either went unnamed or came under the P-51 Mustang umbrella.
The A-36 was the first member of the Mustang family ordered in quantity by the AAF. Although quantity production is a relative thing: 500 A-36s were built, a puny purchase compared with the overall P-51 Mustang run in excess of 15,000 aircraft.
A-36s were sent off to war around the same time as some P-51 and P-51A models in 1943.
The order for A-36s as bombers kept the North American Mustang production line active and gaining in experience in the hectic months of 1942 while the AAF awaited its next budget allocation for pure fighters, which would start funding the long and impressive P-51 fighter series.
First flight of an A-36 was in September 1942. The production of 500 of the dive bombers finished in March 1943.
As with other early Mustang variants, the A-36 flew behind an Allison V-1710 liquid-cooled engine. Though Allisons of the 1942-1943 era were known to have less high altitude performance than the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the Allison was suitable and surprisingly rugged for the lower altitudes inhabited by dive bombers like the A-36.
The A-36 was sent to war in North Africa, Italy, and India with a reinforced wing carrying a bomb shackle on each side, outboard of the main landing gear, in addition to the heavy-duty hydraulic dive brakes.
Armament was four wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns plus two more .50s in the lower contours of the streamlined nose of the A-36. The .50-caliber weapons could neutralize ground targets as well as aerial adversaries.
The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (NMUSAF) credits the A-36A with a top speed of 365 mph, sufficient in its altitude range to make it a plausible air-to-air fighter.
The late Frank Olynyk, whose passion for getting World War II fighter actions accurately chronicled, gives us a listing for aerial victories in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations that summed up 66.99 confirmed aerial victories made by A-36 pilots (with some finely shared fractional tallying), 11 probable downings, and 22 damaged enemy aircraft. Not bad for a dive bomber. In the Mediterranean, A-36As sometimes flew bomber escort missions, according to museum officials.
The Army Air Forces tracked all kinds of statistical data throughout the war, and from this information details about stateside aircraft accidents measured per 100,000 flying hours painted a grim picture of the A-36 dive bomber in the hands of new pilots. The wartime average rate for the A-36 in U.S. accidents was 274 per 100,000 flying hours. By comparison, the big four-engine B-24 Liberator posted a rate of 35 accidents per 100,000 flying hours. The bigger B-29 Superfortress was at 40 per 100,000.
To be fair, the heavy bombers with four times the range of an A-36 could be expected to log more simple flying hours at higher altitudes on long missions than the A-36s, born to bomb from lower altitudes in steep dives where pilot skill and quick reaction could mean the difference between life and death.
The accident rate for A-36s in the continental U.S. during the war claimed 69 of the dive bombers destroyed out of a total of 226 accidents tallied for A-36s. That represents 14% of A-36 production lost to stateside mishaps.
The A-36 was withdrawn from combat in 1944. Later versions of the P-51, along with P-47s, carried an ever-increasing share of the ground attack mission through the end of the war.
Only a smattering of A-36s entered the market after VJ-Day. From these few, one was donated to NMUSAF for display.
Two others remain in civilian hands, including A-36A serial number 42-83738, part of the Collings Foundation collection that won Grand Champion-World War II at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2012.
My interest in the scarce North American A-36 piqued when I saw an Army Air Corps data plate that was removed from A-36A number 42-84000. What became of this aircraft? What did it do in the war?
Records I have found on 42-84000 are sparse, only indicating it was condemned as excess inventory in July 1944, which coincides with the lapse of A-36As from combat in the Mediterranean. A-36s only a couple numbers on either side of this one were assigned to the 86th Fighter Bomber Group of the 12th Air Force, engaging in combat over Italy.
Until more information comes to light on the fate of A-36A number 42-84000, its data plate remains an enigmatic and evocative witness to a rare dive bomber design that boosted Mustang production early in World War II.
(The author acknowledges the research efforts of historians including Frank Olynyk, Barrett Tillman, Gerald Balzer, and Norm Avery, with a special tip of the hat to Denny Peltier.)
