When it was first introduced, the Peashooter was one of the fastest fighters in the world, but it was quickly outclassed by better designs. Nevertheless, even though obsolete, it managed to hold on until the beginning of World War Two, when it scored some of the first air victories against the Japanese.
“Icons of Aviation History” is a diary series that explores significant and historic aircraft.
In 1931, designers at Boeing began work on a new fighter concept. At the time, the US Army Air Corps was flying the Boeing P-12, a rugged biplane fighter. But Boeing, like most warbird manufacturers, already realized that the days of the biplane were over, and the future lay with low-wing all-metal monoplanes. And so they drew up plans for a sleek futuristic-looking fighter that they designated the Model 248. It would be the US’s first metal mono-wing fighter. The prototype flew in March 1932.
At first glance, Boeing’s new fighter looked a lot like the Russian I-16 then being worked on in the USSR (though of course Boeing didn’t know anything about the Soviet design). But in many ways, the American design fell short—mostly due to the inherent conservatism of the US military. The Army, for instance, knew that retractable landing gear would reduce drag and increase the speed, but they feared that the complicated cranking mechanism would be prone to failure and that its added weight would impact the plane’s performance. So the Model 248 had fixed landing gear. Military experts were also unsure if a single cantilevered wing would really be able to withstand the stresses of high-speed maneuvering in combat, so Boeing placed a series of external bracing wires to strengthen it, though this produced drag. Boeing also knew that an enclosed cockpit would eliminate drag and help performance, but American military pilots wanted an open cockpit, both to help with visibility in searching for enemy aircraft and to make it easier to see hand signals from flight leaders and fellow pilots in these pre-radio days.
Despite all of these built-in limitations, however, the P-26 fighter, upon its introduction, still managed a speed of 235mph, faster than anything else in the sky (though soon to be eclipsed by the Soviet I-16). This was despite the fact that the P-26 used the very same engine as the P-12. The P-12, with its biplane wing, nevertheless had a faster climb rate and a higher ceiling than the new monoplane. The Army also did not like the rather high landing speed of the P-26, and ordered wing flaps to be retrofitted to all of them to reduce it. This in turn made the plane difficult to handle on landing, which ruled out any possible use as a Navy carrier-based fighter.
Most Army pilots simply didn’t like the stubby little fighter. It was fast and maneuverable, but it handled differently than the biplanes they were accustomed to. If the plane crashed upon landing and flipped over, the cockpit exposed the pilot to being crushed in the wreck: Boeing responded to this by adding a bigger protective “hump” to the fuselage just behind the pilot’s seat. Most of all, though, the pilots didn’t like the weak armament of two .30-caliber machine guns that were set underneath the floor of the cockpit and synchronized to fire through the propeller. And the gunsight worked by using a long blast tube mounted in front of the window, which looked like a schoolboy’s peashooter—thereby giving the little fighter its nickname. It was not meant as a compliment.
Ultimately, the design decisions that the military had itself insisted upon had doomed the Peashooter to an early grave. Within three years it was already being replaced by newer and better mono-wing designs like the P-35, P-36 and P-39. The Peashooters were demoted to the role of “advanced trainer”.
But a number of P-26s still remained operational in remote areas that were considered of lesser importance; at this time, the Army Air Corps considered the defense of the American mainland to be its primary role, and outlying areas like Hawaii, the Philippines, and Panama were neglected. By 1940, the American fighter force in the Philippines consisted solely of obsolete Peashooters.
When the Japanese invaded China, the United States shipped a number of P-26 fighters to help them. In one action, a flight of Peashooters intercepted a group of Japanese medium bombers that were flying without escort and shot most of them down. But when faced by Japanese Nate and Claude fighters, the P-26s were entirely outclassed. By the end of 1937, all of the Chinese Peashooters had either crashed, failed mechanically, or been shot down, and they were replaced with British Gloster Gladiator biplanes, which were even more obsolete.
During the summer of 1941, the US finally began to replace the P-26s in the Philippines with P-35s and P-36s. Most of the Peashooters were moved back to Hawaii, but on December 7, 1941, nearly all of those were destroyed on the ground during the Japanese attack. In the Philippines, the Japanese also caught most of the American planes on the ground. But during the ensuing weeks of air raids, a squadron of pilots flying P-26s managed to take off from Batangas Field and engage the Japanese. Despite the fact that they were flying an outdated relic, the Filipino pilots were able to score two victories, with one pilot shooting down a Betty medium bomber and another managing to score against a Japanese Zero. They were two of the earliest Japanese planes shot down during the war.
Meanwhile, a squadron of American pilots was still flying P-26s as patrol aircraft in the Panama Canal Zone. In 1943, the last 11 of these were sold to the Panamanian Air Force, which in turn sold them to Guatemala. The Guatemalans flew them until 1950, when the US replaced them with surplus P-51 Mustangs. The remaining Peashooters were returned to the US and refurbished. One of them was then donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington, and the other went to the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino CA.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)