How a British Turbojet Allowed Russia’s MiG-15 to Fight During the Korean War

By Sebastien Roblin,The National Interest

By the end of World War II, it was becoming clear that the huge fleets of piston-engine propeller planes used in the conflict would soon be superseded by much faster jet aircraft. Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom had deployed jets in combat, and the United States and Japan were close to doing so when the war ended. Only the Soviet Union seemed to lag conspicuously behind.

However, the Red Army captured numerous scientists, research facilities and prototype technologies when it rolled into eastern Germany—including Jumo 004 and BMW 003 turbojets designed for the Nazi’s Me-262 and wooden He-162 jet fighters [3] respectively. In 1945, the manufacturers Mikoyan-i-Gurevich and Yakovlev were instructed to develop the first Soviet jet fighters using the German engines.

By early 1946 they had developed the Jumo-powered Yak-15 and the faster BMW-powered MiG-9. However, the German turbojets had infamously short service lives and could not generate the necessary thrust, so for their next major jet fighter designs, Soviet engineers suggested acquiring British Rolls-Royce Nene centrifugal-flow compressor turbojets that could produce 5,000 pounds of thrust.

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“What fool will sell us his secrets?” Stalin is said to have commented on the idea. But when Soviet designer Viktor Klimov visited the United Kingdom in 1946, the British Labor government proved unexpectedly forthcoming. London was struggling to repay the United States for military equipment acquired through the Lend-Lease program, and Trade Minister Stafford Cripps appeared not to have grasped the escalating tensions of the Cold War. As a result, the United Kingdom sold dozens of Nenes to Russia in 1946 and 1947 under the condition that they not be used for military purposes.