Alfa engines in aircraft

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Cuadra wrote "I believe Alfa produced Daimler-Benz engines under license
for such fighters as the Macchi Veltro and Reggiane Sagitario - - ", and
Richard Welty, drawing on his 'Rand McNally Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft'
added "there were two waves of effective Italian fighters. the early ones got
Daimler Benz DB 601 A engines; the second wave ("Series V") got DB 605 A
engines. there is no mention of whether the motors came from Daimler or were
license built - - "

That question - from Daimler for Italian use, or from Alfa for both Italian
and German use - seems to be answered by quotations of Giampaolo Garcea by Don
Black. In a Feb.'00 letter mainly about the restoration of the Macchi 202 in
the NASM Black wrote "The DB601 was built 'under license' by A.R.  Most of
these motors produced somewhat higher output than their Nazi counterparts and
were promptly shipped off to Germania for use in the Bf109. The others were in
use in Macchi 202 'Folgore'.  Some trivia here is that at the time Ing
Giampaulo Garcea was in charge of the test cells (via Avio) in Portello and
was encouraged by the SS inspection officers to make sure that the most
efficient motors were tagged for the Bfs.  His 'encouragement' was a Walther
P-38 'scratching the back of my neck'".

Giampaulo Garcea was Black's mentor at Portello, his lifelong friend, and like
almost of the main engineering staff between the departure of Jano (who had
come out of Fiat in the early twenties) and Hruska (who came out of the
Porsche/KdF project), was an aeronautical engineer by training. Alfa, in the
late prewar period, was primarily an aircraft engine company, building a few
cars on the side. Some of the data is slippery- d'Amico & Tabucchi, both
highly respected historians with full access to company records, write (p.285)
that in 1939 the company employed about fourteen thousand workers ("Il numero
dei dipendenti era, nel frattempo, aumento considerevolmente: erano quasi
14.000") but the equally respected Angelo Tito Anselmi (in his 6C 2500 book,
p.10) gives the number as 6000. (Both are probably equally correct, just using
different baselines.) More important than the absolute number, however, is the
relative importance of car-building and aircraft-engine building by the
company in that period; Anselmi wrote "Occupa poco piu di 6.000 operai, meno
dell' 11 per cento dei quali e addetto alla costruzione di automobili." Six
thousand or fourteen thousand, roughly eleven percent building cars, this was
a year when Alfa built 372 cars - which works out to about two to four
man-years per car, not much of an economic base for a 'car company'.

Production of the DB 601, renamed the Alfa RA 1000 RC 41-1, aparently began in
'43 or possibly late '42 as Germany exerted increasing authority over waning
Italian aspirations to major power status. (The Fascist administration was
overthrown in July '43, Germany took over and installed a puppet government in
September '43; I don't know the chronology of the DB engine production at
Portello but it seems to have been in the same ballpark.)

I will stay out of discussions about how much of Alfa's earlier engine
production had been derived from Bristol designs, how much from Gnome-Rhone,
how much from Colombo, and how much original; aero engines are interesting but
generally beyond my knowledge. Herschel Smith's "A history of Aircraft Piston
Engines" seems to be a good starting point for viewing the Alfa engines in a
world context; Griffith Borgeson's "the Alfa Romeo Tradition" is still
unmatched, in English, as a background for viewing Alfa as a car company
within the broader contexts of the businesses, society, and culture of which
it was a part.

Trivia digression: the first ALFA-powered airplane flew just ten and a half
months after the company was formed out of the remains of SIAD, and barely a
year after Merosi was asked to design the engine which was used in both the
Santoni-Franchini biplane and the first ALFA car model. The first-year
production of the car was ten units, so the airplane's engine was probably
around the seventh or eighth engine the company built. Twenty years later a
blown twin-cam 6C 1750 was used in an Caproni biplane, but there was no
further development of its application.

John
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