April 9th, 1940. Nazi Germany invades Denmark and Norway. The next day, April 10th, a telephone rings in a modest office building in Englewood, California. On the line, a British liaison officer from the purchasing commission, his voice tight with urgency. Europe is bracing for worse. In one month, Hitler will turn west into France and the low countries.

 

 

 The Royal Air Force is already burning through aircraft faster than factories can replace them. The British need fighter planes. Not in 2 years. Not in one year. Now the call reaches James Dutch Kindleberger, president of North American Aviation. He listens to the requirements. Long range, high-speed, heavy armorament, combat ready.

 Then the British officer adds one more detail. We need the first prototype in 120 days. Kindleberger nearly drops the phone. 120 days to design a fighter aircraft from scratch. Most fighters take 2 to 3 years to develop. The P40 Warhawk took 30 months. The P38 Lightning took 4 years. 120 days is not just ambitious. It is impossible.

 Kindleberger calls an emergency meeting. His engineering team files into the conference room. He outlines the British request and then he asks the question that hangs in the air like smoke. Can we do this? The room erupts. Veteran engineers shake their heads. Impossible. Absurd. Wind tunnel testing alone takes 6 months. Stress analysis takes another four.

 You cannot just wish a fighter plane into existence. Physics does not work that way. But in the back of the room, a quiet man with a German accent raises his hand. His name is Edgar Schmood, and he says three words that will change the course of World War II. I can do it. This is the story of how one engineer accepted an impossible challenge.

 How he designed a fighter plane in 117 days and how that aircraft became the deadliest American fighter of World War II. The engineers who said it could not be done were right about one thing. It was impossible. But nobody told Ed Gashmood that. Before we dive in, had you heard of Edgishmood before today? If you value clear, wellsourced World War II stories, please subscribe and tap like.

 It really helps. To understand how Schmood accomplished the impossible, you need to know what he had been doing in the years before that phone call. Edgar Schmood was born in 1899 in Hornbach, Germany, a small town in the Palatinate. He grew up during the First World War, watching primitive biplanes duel over the Western Front.

 By age 16, he was sketching aircraft designs in school notebooks. By 21, he had become a skilled mechanical engineer, largely self-taught, having apprenticed in engine works and manufacturing plants across Germany. He worked for Daimler, then for Fauler in Holland, designing commercial aircraft. Then in 1925, he immigrated first to Brazil, then to the United States.

 By the mid 1930s, he had become an American citizen and joined North American Aviation in early 1936 as a preliminary design engineer. later serving as chief of preliminary design. But here is what made Schmood different from every other aircraft engineer in America. He believed war was coming and he believed the United States was unprepared.

 In 1936, while his colleagues designed basic trainers for the Army Airore, Schmood started a side project. In his spare time, evenings, weekends, lunch breaks, he began sketching fighter concepts. Not because anyone asked him to, not because the company needed one, but because he knew that when war came, America would need the best fighter plane in the world.

 For 4 years, he filled notebooks with calculations. He studied every fighter aircraft on Earth, the British Spitfire, the German Messid Burf 109, the Japanese Zero. He analyzed their strengths, dissected their weaknesses, and he designed something better. He sketched wing profiles that reduced drag, fuselage shapes that minimized weight, cooling systems that could offset their own drag.

 He calculated performance numbers that did not exist yet, range figures that seemed like science fiction. His colleagues thought he was wasting his time. America was not at war. Nobody was buying fighters. But Schmood kept drawing, kept calculating, kept refining. So when that phone call came from Britain in April 1940 and when Kindleberger asked if anyone could design a fighter in 120 days, Schmood did not hesitate.

 He had not been starting from zero. He had years of preliminary workwing profiles, structural concepts, performance calculations that gave him a head start the other engineers did not have. He just needed to turn those sketches into reality. The British requirements were brutal. The fighter needed to fly over 400 mph, faster than anything in the American arsenal.

 But it also needed to be light enough to maneuver, strong enough to survive combat, and simple enough to mass produce. Every engineer knows the iron law of aircraft design. Speed requires power. Power requires big engines. Big engines add weight. Weight kills speed. It is a vicious circle. And for decades, aircraft designers solved it the same way. Add more horsepower.

Build bigger engines. Accept the weight penalty. Schmood looked at the problem differently. What if you did not need more power? What if you just needed less drag? He pulled out his notebooks. Inside were sketches of a revolutionary wing designed something called a lamina flow air foil.

 Working with research from NARA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Schmood, adapted their new 6 series air foils for a fighter wing. In conventional wings, air flowing over the surface becomes turbulent, creating drag that slows the aircraft. But this new wing had a different shape, thinner, smoother, with the thickest point further back.

 The theory said air would flow over the wing in smooth laminina layers like stacked sheets of paper sliding past each other. Less turbulence meant dramatically less drag. There was just one problem. Nobody had ever built a lamina flow wing that actually worked in combat conditions. The theory was sound, but manufacturing tolerances had to be perfect.

 A single rivet out of place, a tiny surface imperfection, and the lamina flow would collapse into turbulence. You would end up with a wing that performed worse than conventional designs. It was risky, unproven. Some engineers called it impossible. Schmoo did not care. He had spent years perfecting the mathematics. He knew it would work, even if the real world results were only partially laminina.

 He handed the wing design to his team. They stared at the blueprints complex curves, precise dimensions, tolerances measured in thousandth of an inch. Can we manufacture this? One engineer asked. Schmood did not blink. We have to. Within two weeks, the first wing panels were being formed in the North American factory. Sheet metal workers bent aluminum to tolerances they had never attempted before.

 Inspectors measured every surface with micrometers. A single defect meant scrapping the entire panel and starting over. It was slow, expensive, maddening. But when they bolted the first complete wing to a test frame and ran airflow analysis, the numbers were undeniable. dramatic drag reduction enough to make a measurable difference in top speed and range.

 In combat, the wing would not maintain perfect lamina flow rivets, gunports, dirt, and battle damage would disrupt it. But even partial lamina flow gave the Mustang a crucial edge over every other fighter in the sky. Schmood had solved impossible problem number one. Speed was only half the battle. The British needed range.

 Their fighters, Spitfires, and Hurricanes could fly for 90 minutes before running out of fuel. That was enough to defend England, but it was not enough to escort bombers deep into occupied Europe. The Americans had the same problem. The P40 Warhawk had a range of about 700 m. The P47 Thunderbolt, still in development, would manage maybe 500.

 Neither could protect bombers on long range missions into Germany. An escort fighter is an aircraft designed to fly alongside bombers and protect them from enemy interceptors, staying with them all the way to the target and back. The solution seemed obvious. Add more fuel tanks. But fuel weighs 6 lb per gallon. More fuel meant more weight.

 More weight meant you needed a bigger engine. A bigger engine added more weight. And you were right back to the same problem. Schmood attacked it from every angle. first reduce weight everywhere else. He designed the fuselage using semi mononoke construction where the aluminum skin itself bears structural loads reinforced by a light internal frame.

Think of a soda can. The shell carries the strength. No heavy internal framework. No wasted material. Every panel, every rib, every former optimized for strength to weight ratio. Second, aerodynamic efficiency. That laminina flow wing did not just reduce drag, it reduced fuel consumption. Less drag meant the engine did not have to work as hard.

 Less work meant less fuel burned per mile. Third, ingenious cooling design. Schmood designed a vententral belly scoop for the radiator that used something called the Meredith effect. As air flowed through the radiator, it heated up and expanded. The duct was shaped so this hot air accelerated out the back like a tiny jet, offsetting most of the cooling drag and under some conditions, even giving a small net push. Fourth, smart fuel management.

Schmood designed internal tanks that fit into every available space behind the cockpit, in the wings, under the fuselage. He calculated weight distribution so the aircraft remained balanced as fuel burned off. and he added provisions for external drop tanks, disposable fuel containers that could be jettisoned when empty.

 His team worked through the mathematics. They calculated fuel consumption at different altitudes, different speeds, different engine settings. They ran the numbers again and again. The result, with internal fuel alone, the fighter could fly over 900 m. With drop tanks, maximum range exceeded 1,600 mi.

 1,600 mi meant a fighter could take off from England, escort bombers to Berlin, deep in the heart of Nazi Germany, and fly home. Something no other fighter in the world could do. Engineers from other companies heard the numbers and called them fantasy, impossible propaganda. But Schmood had the calculations. He knew he was right.

 Impossible problem number two solved. Solving technical problems was one thing. Building an actual aircraft in 120 days was another. Schmood assembled a team of 25 designers and draftsmen. He divided them into groups. One for the fuselage, one for the wings, one for the tail section, one for the engine installation, one for the landing gear.

 Each group worked in shifts, 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. No computers, no CAD software, just pencils, drafting tables, and slide rules. Every component had to be drawn by hand. Every measurement calculated manually. Every stress load verified with equations that filled entire pages. One mistake, a decimal point in the wrong place.

 A miscalculated load factor could kill a pilot. Schmood moved between the groups like a general commanding troops. He checked every drawing, questioned every decision, pushed for simpler solutions, lighter components, cleaner air flow. When engineers hit problems, Schmoo did not send them away to think about it. He stood at the drafting table and solved it on the spot, sketching solutions, running calculations in his head, making decisions in minutes that would normally take days of committee meetings.

 The factory worked in parallel. As soon as drawings were finished, they were rushed to the manufacturing floor. Machinists began cutting parts before the full aircraft was even designed. It was chaos. It was terrifying. One mistake in the design and thousands of parts would be useless scrap metal.

 But Schmood had spent years thinking through the fundamentals. He knew what would work. He knew what would not. And he trusted his mathematics. Each day that passed was one less day to complete the prototype. Engineers worked until they collapsed at their drafting tables. Some slept on CS in the office. Others went days without seeing their families.

Schmood was everywhere checking welds, examining parts, making lastminute modifications. He slept 4 hours a night on a cot in his office. His colleagues later said they never saw him eat a full meal during those four months. Just coffee and sandwiches at his desk while he reviewed drawings.

 May passed June, July, August, and slowly, impossibly, the aircraft took shape. Wings mated to the fuselage, landing gear attached, engine mounted, fuel tanks installed, control surfaces connected. On September 9th, 1940,117 days after the British phone call, 3 days ahead of schedule, the prototype rolled out of the factory.

 It sat on the Englewood tarmac under the California sun, unpainted aluminum, gleaming like polished silver. Test pilot Vance Bree walked around it slowly, running his hand along the fuselage. The lines were unlike anything he had ever seen. Sleek, predatory, beautiful. On October 26th, 1940, Breeze climbed into the cockpit for the first flight.

 Ground crew fired up the Allison Vone 710 engine. It roared to life, 1200 horsepower, shaking the airframe. Breeze taxied to the runway, pushed the throttle forward. The prototype accelerated smoothly. At 85 mph, it lifted into the air. Over the following weeks of flight testing, the numbers kept getting better. The Mustang reached 382 mph at 13,000 ft.

 Among the fastest American single engine fighters tested to that date, designed and constructed in less than 4 months. Edgar Schmood stood on the tarmac watching his creation carved through the sky. For years, it had existed only in his imagination and his notebooks. Now it was real. The British named it the Mustang, and the impossible had just become reality.

 The Mustang entered service with the Royal Air Force in early 1942. British pilots loved it. Below 15,000 ft, it was the best fighter in the sky, faster than Spitfires. More maneuverable than Hurricanes with twice the range of either. But there was a problem. A fatal flaw that threatened to make the Mustang irrelevant.

 The Allison engine, brilliant at low altitude, lost power above 15,000 ft. And the air war over Europe was being fought at high altitude, 20,000 ft, 25,000, 30,000, where the air was thin and cold, and American bombers fought for survival against Luftvafa interceptors. At those altitudes where thin air starves engines of oxygen and saps their power, the Mustang was merely good. Not great.

 Not good enough to escort bombers deep into Germany. Not good enough to challenge the Luftwaffer’s best fighters. The problem was physics. The Allison engine was not supercharged for high altitude performance. As air pressure dropped, the engine choked, lost power, became sluggish. Schmood had known this was a risk.

 But in April 1940, he had had no choice. The Allison was available immediately, proven, reliable, and the British needed fighters now, not in 2 years after developing a new engine. So, the Mustang flew low altitude missions over France, ground attack, tactical reconnaissance. It performed brilliantly. But it could not do the one mission that mattered most, escorting bombers to Germany.

 Meanwhile, over the Reich, American bomber crews were dying. The eighth air force was launching massive daylight raids, hundreds of B7 flying fortresses carrying tons of high explosives. But without longrange fighter escort, they were slaughtered. American escort fighters P47 Thunderbolts could only fly partway. When they turned back at the German border, the Luftwaffer pounced.

 Some missions lost 10% of the bomber force. Entire squadrons wiped out in a single afternoon. Something had to change. On April 30th, 1942, a Rolls-Royce test pilot named Ronald Harker was evaluating a Mustang at an RAF base in England. He took it up, put it through its paces, and landed, impressed, but frustrated.

The airframe was brilliant. The engine was the problem. After the flight, Harker wrote a memo to his superiors. What if we put a Rolls-Royce Merlin in it? The Merlin was the engine that powered the Spitfire, a supercharged masterpiece designed specifically for high altitude combat. It used a two-stage supercharger, essentially an engine-driven air compressor, that forced air into the engine at high pressure.

 At 30,000 ft, where the Allison gasped for air, the Merlin thrived. At around 25,000 ft, it could still deliver well over 1,400 horsepower. It was heavier than the Allison, more complex and more expensive, but it was exactly what the Mustang needed. The suggestion reached Schmood in California. He pulled out his original calculations.

 The Mustang’s airframe had been designed with structural margins for future modifications. The engine mounts could be adapted. The cooling system redesigned. It would work. Schmood and his team went back to the drafting tables. They redesigned the engine installation, enlarged and reconfigured the cooling duct and exit geometry, recalculated the center of gravity, strengthened the engine mounts, modified the fuel system.

 The British built a test bed called Mustang X that first flew on October 13th, 1942. In America, North American’s XP51B with a packed built Merlin engine took flight on November 30th, 1942. Piloted by test pilot Bob Chilton, Chilton climbed to 30,000 ft. At altitude where the Allison had gasped for air, the Merlin roared with power.

Chilton pushed the throttle forward. 440 mph at 30,000 ft. Chilton’s voice crackled over the radio, barely able to contain his excitement. This thing is unbelievable. It is a completely different airplane. The transformation was total. The Mustang had not just been fixed. It had been perfected. With the Merlin engine and drop tanks, the P-51 Mustang could fly over 1,600 mi maximum range.

 More importantly, its combat radius, the distance it could fly, fight, and return now covered England to Berlin and back with fuel to spare for combat. It could fly faster than any German fighter at altitude. Outmaneuver them, outfight them. Edgar Schmood had taken an impossible deadline and created an impossible aircraft.

 Now it was about to become the deedlest fighter in the sky. By spring 1944, P-51 Mustangs were rolling off assembly lines in California and Texas by the hundreds each month. The United States 8th Air Force based in England converted entire fighter groups to the Mustang and the air war over Europe changed overnight.

 For the first time, American bombers had escorts that could go all the way to the target deep into Germany into Hitler’s industrial heartland. And the Mustang pilots had fuel to stay and fight. The Luftwaffer veterans of 5 years of war, hardened by combat on multiple fronts, suddenly found themselves hunted. American fighters appeared over Berlin, over Munich, over Vienna, places they had considered safe, untouchable.

 The statistics became brutal. In the first 6 months of 1944, P-51 Mustangs claimed over 1,500 Luftvafa aircraft shot down. By wars end, United States Army Air Force’s P-51 Mustang groups claimed approximately 4,950 enemy aircraft destroyed in air combat and another 4,131 destroyed on the P ground, more than any other Allied fighter in the European theater.

 The Mustang maintained a remarkably favorable loss rate, especially given the deep penetration escort missions. It flew some of the most dangerous operations of the war. But the Mustang was not just an escort. It was a hunter killer ordered to strafe anything that moved airfields, locomotives, convoys, even parked aircraft.

 The Mustang destroyed nearly 4,000 enemy aircraft on the ground aircraft that never got a chance to take off. Luftvafer pilots later wrote in their diaries that they felt hunted like animals. Every time they took off, they knew they might not return. German ace Oberloidant Hines No, who survived the war with 33 kills, described the terror of facing Mustangs over Germany in 1944.

German fighter production could not keep up with devastating losses. Experienced pilots were irreplaceable, dead, captured, or too wounded to fly. Replacements were teenagers with 30 hours of training sent against American veterans with hundreds of combat hours. Captain Chuck Jagger, who would later become the first man to break the sound barrier, flew Mustangs over Germany in 1944.

 He later recalled that by mid 1944, American pilots owned the sky. Every time the Luftwaffer took off, they were rolling the dice. Most of them lost. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Luftwaffer managed only a few hundred sorties over the Normandy beaches. The Allies flew about 14,000. Estimates vary by source. The reason was simple. The Luftwaffer had been destroyed, and the P-51 Mustang had done much of the destroying.

 By the numbers, the Mustang was the deadliest American fighter of World War II. Approximately 4,950 claimed enemy aircraft destroyed in air combat. Approximately 4,130 unclaimed enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground. About 230 vone flying bombs intercepted. Combat radius sufficient to escort bombers from England to Berlin and return. 15,000 Mustangs were built.

They flew in every theater, Europe, the Pacific, the Mediterranean. Some remained in service with foreign air forces until the 1980s. But the real measure of the Mustang success is not in numbers. It is simpler than that. Before the Mustang, American bombers could not reach Germany’s industrial heart and survive. After the Mustang, they could.

Before the Mustang, the Luftwaffer controlled German skies. After the Mustang, they did not. The impossible aircraft designed in 117 days had one air superiority over Nazi Germany. And without air superiority, Germany could not win the war. There is one more detail about Edgar Schmood. Something that makes this story almost Shakespearean in its irony.

 Edgar Schmood was born in Germany, educated by German engineers, trained in German factories, some by the same men who would later train the engineers of the Luftvafer, the aircraft that destroyed more Luftwaffer fighters than any other. The fighter that won air superiority over Germany. The weapon that helped bring Nazi Germany to its knees.

 It was designed by a German Mesosmmit BF-1009s. Built by Willie Mesosid, Germany’s most celebrated aircraft designer, Faulwolf FW190s. Designed by Kurt Tank, one of the Luftvafer’s chief engineers. Both shot down in droves by an aircraft designed by a man who grew up in the Palatinate and learned engineering in Bavaria.

 In 1969, a journalist asked Schmoud how he felt as a German by birth about designing the fighter that destroyed the Luftvafer. Schmoud’s answer was quiet, measured, final. I am not a German. I left Germany in 1925. I became an American citizen by the mid 1930s. What I built, I built for America, for freedom.

 He never sought recognition, never wrote a memoir, never appeared on talk shows. While fighter aces became celebrities, Schmood remained in the shadows, an engineer, not a warrior. After the war, he continued working in aviation. He contributed to the design of the F86 Saber jet fighter and other aircraft, but he never pursued fame. Surviving Mustang pilots, men who flew hundreds of combat missions over Europe, have spoken with reverence about the aircraft that brought them home.

 Colonel Bud Anderson, who flew 116 combat missions in Mustangs and scored 16 aerial victories, later said the P-51 was the airplane that brought pilots home, a machine crews trusted with their lives, built by an engineer who gave them a fighting chance. Edgar Schmood died on June 1st, 1985 at age 85 in Oceanside, California.

 His obituary in the New York Times was brief. No military funeral, no medal ceremonies, just a quiet burial in California. But every time a restored P51 Mustang roars to life at an air show, every time that Merlin engine erupts into its unmistakable growl, every time that sleek laminina flow wing cuts through the sky, Edgar’s legacy takes flight.

 In April 1940, when the British asked for the impossible, most engineers said, “No, it cannot be done. Physics does not work that way. You cannot design a fighter aircraft in 120 days.” They were right. It was impossible. But Edgar had been preparing for that impossible moment for years. He had filled notebooks with calculations, sketched wings that did not exist yet, designed systems nobody had built.

 And when the world needed the impossible, he was ready. He solved three impossible problems. Speed without weight, range without size, and a deadline that defied logic. The result was the P-51 Mustang, the fastest, longest range, most effective fighter aircraft of World War II. the weapon that won air superiority over Nazi Germany.

 Approximately 4,950 claimed enemy aircraft destroyed in air combat. Over 4,100 claimed destroyed on the ground. 15,000 built decades of service. But the real legacy of the P-51 Mustang is not in the numbers. It is in the proof that impossible is just an opinion. that one person with vision, skill, and relentless determination can change the course of history.

 Edgar Schmood proved that genius does not require a committee. That innovation does not need two years of development. That when the world demands the impossible, sometimes the impossible simply requires someone willing to believe it can be done. He designed America’s deadliest fighter in 117 days.

 And in doing so, he helped win the war. The engineers were right. It was impossible. Edgar just did not