The Macchi C.205 Veltro: Italy's finest fighter, and its great might-have-been

Take the elegant Macchi C.202 Folgore, give it a bigger German heart, and add cannon that finally let it bite — and you get the Veltro, the aircraft many historians rank as the best fighter Italy fielded in the Second World War.

By 1942 the Regia Aeronautica had a problem. Its best fighter, the Macchi C.202 Folgore, was a joy to fly and a match for most Allied aircraft in a turning fight, but it was chronically under-gunned — just two rifle-calibre-to-heavy machine guns firing through the propeller — and its licence-built Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine, while good, was being left behind by newer Allied types. The obvious fix was more power. Daimler-Benz had already produced the larger DB 605, and Fiat took out a licence to build it in Italy as the Fiat R.A.1050 R.C.58 "Tifone" (Typhoon). Bolt that engine onto a refined Folgore airframe and you had the Macchi C.205 Veltro — "Greyhound" — the lead aircraft of Italy's so-called "Serie 5" fighters.

The airframe those engineers were working with was itself a thoroughbred. It came from the drawing board of Mario Castoldi, the Macchi designer whose Schneider Trophy racing seaplanes had made Italy a byword for high-speed flight in the 1920s and 1930s. Castoldi's fighters carried that racing DNA: clean, low-drag lines, light and responsive controls, and a balance in the air that pilots loved. The tragedy of the line was that this world-class aerodynamic talent was for years shackled to engines and factories that could not keep pace. The Veltro is the moment the shackle briefly came off.

The transformation was dramatic. The prototype first flew on 19 April 1942, and the production Veltro reached roughly 642 km/h (399 mph) — competitive with the Spitfire Mk IX and the P-51 Mustang it would soon meet in combat. Just as important, the definitive Veltro finally solved the firepower problem by adding two 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon in the wings alongside the pair of 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT guns in the nose. For the first time an Italian fighter could hit as hard as it flew.

Give the Folgore a German heart and cannon that finally bite, and you have one of the war's great fighters — and one of its great might-have-beens.

The Veltro entered service in the spring of 1943 and drew immediate praise from the pilots who flew it. In skilled hands it could hold its own against anything in the Mediterranean sky. But it arrived very late in Italy's war, and Italian industry — hammered by bombing, short of materials and never geared for mass production — built only a few hundred. Commonly cited figures put total production at around 262 aircraft, a rounding error next to the tens of thousands of Spitfires, Mustangs and Bf 109s. However good the Veltro was, there were never enough of them, and they came too late to matter strategically.

Then history split the aircraft in two. After Italy signed an armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, the Veltro found itself flying on both sides of the same war — with the fascist Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana in the German-aligned north, and with the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force alongside the Allies in the south, while the Luftwaffe evaluated and used a handful of its own. After the war, Egypt bought Veltros and flew them in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a quiet coda to the career of one of the finest fighters almost nobody got to build in numbers.

The Macchi C.205 Veltro's war: 1943 to Egypt

The Veltro's combat career lasted barely two years, but it packed in more twists than most fighters see in a decade — a triumphant debut, an armistice that split it in two, and a strange post-war afterlife.

When the first Veltros reached the Regia Aeronautica in the spring of 1943, Italy was already on the defensive. The Axis position in North Africa had collapsed, Sicily was next, and Allied bombers were ranging ever deeper into Italian airspace. Into this desperate situation came a fighter that Italian pilots had been waiting years for: fast, beautifully balanced and — in its cannon-armed form — finally able to hurt the enemy. Units such as the 1° and 51° Stormo took the Veltro into action over the Sicilian Channel, Pantelleria, Sardinia and the approaches to the Italian mainland, and in the hands of experienced pilots it gave a very good account of itself against Spitfires and American fighters and bombers alike.

But there were never enough. A trickle of a few hundred aircraft, spread thin across a crumbling front, could not stem an Allied air force that operated in the thousands. The Veltro won dogfights; it could not win the air war. And then, on 8 September 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies, and the aircraft's story fractured along with the country.

In the German-occupied north, Mussolini's rump fascist state raised a new air arm, the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana (ANR). Its fighter groups, flying the Veltro and the closely related Fiat G.55, threw themselves against the massive USAAF daylight raids of 1944, fighting alongside the Luftwaffe and almost always outnumbered. Their war was a grinding, attritional defence of northern Italian cities and industry, and it burned through pilots and aircraft alike.

In the Allied-aligned south, meanwhile, the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force (Aeronautica Cobelligerante Italiana) flew its own surviving Veltros — now, extraordinarily, on the same side as the Spitfires and Mustangs they had recently been fighting. Their numbers were modest and their front-line role limited, but the sight of a Veltro in co-belligerent markings is one of the war's most poignant images of a nation and an air force torn cleanly in half. The Luftwaffe, for its part, evaluated and operated a number of Veltros itself, completing the aircraft's improbable service across all three combatant camps in Italy.

When production finally ended in 1944 with only a few hundred built, it looked like the end of the story. It was not quite. In the late 1940s Egypt turned to the international arms market and acquired Veltros — accounts differ on exactly how many and in what condition, with figures ranging from a dozen or so to several dozen — and flew them in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was a fittingly strange final chapter: an Italian fighter with a German engine, that had fought on every side of Italy's own civil war, ending its combat life in the deserts of the Middle East.

Armament & payload

The Veltro is where Italian fighters finally got cannon, about three years after they needed them

For six years the Regia Aeronautica sent its fighters to war with two rifle-calibre or heavy machine guns and no cannon, and the Veltro Serie III is where that finally stopped. Two German MG 151/20 in the wings with 250 rounds each, two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT in the cowling with 370 to 400 rounds each, and a combined throw weight on the order of 3 kg of projectile a second — more than a Spitfire IX and more than a standard Bf 109G-6 carried without gondolas. Against the B-17s and B-24s of the Fifteenth Air Force that mattered enormously, because the Mauser cannon fired the thin-walled Minengeschoss high-explosive shell and the Breda-SAFAT's 12.7 × 81 mm SR round did not meaningfully hurt a four-engined bomber. The bitterness in the story is the timing: the guns Italy needed in 1940 arrived in the summer of 1943, on an aeroplane built in numbers that would have embarrassed a single Luftwaffe Geschwader. Ammunition loads are quoted variously as 370 or 400 rounds per cowl gun; the Serie I fit and the number of Serie I airframes retrofitted with cannon are both poorly documented, and the postwar Egyptian aircraft were a different animal again.

Sourcing: ammunition loads, the Serie I fit, the number of Serie I aircraft retrofitted with MG 151/20 cannon and the scale of the Scorta and Grande Autonomia conversions all vary between Italian archival summaries, Macchi data sheets and English-language secondary works. Where they conflict the Italian figures are preferred here. Victory claims quoted are unit claims and have not been reconciled against Allied loss records; where a claim is known to be unsupported, that is said in the text rather than quietly omitted.

Variants

The Veltro was the aeroplane Macchi could build while the one it wanted was still being drawn

The C.205 exists because of an engine licence. In 1941 the Regia Aeronautica arranged for Fiat to build the Daimler-Benz DB 605A in Italy as the RA.1050 R.C.58 Tifone, and Mario Castoldi — the Schneider Trophy designer whose M.C.72 still holds the piston seaplane speed record — did the obvious thing. The DB 605 was close enough in size to the DB 601 already in the C.202 Folgore that he could hang it on the existing airframe and leave the fuselage identical aft of the firewall. The project was authorised on 16 December 1941 as the M.C.202bis; the first prototype flew from Lonate Pozzolo on 19 April 1942 with Guido Carestiato at the controls, and the designation became C.205 to place it among the Serie 5 fighters built around the new engine.

That placement flatters it. The true Serie 5 aircraft — the Fiat G.55 Centauro and the Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario — were new designs with new wings drawn around the Tifone from the start. The Veltro was a 1937 wing, a 1940 fuselage and a 1942 engine, and the Guidonia comparative trials of early 1943 said so plainly: the G.55 was the best-handling of the three at every altitude and won the tender, the Re.2005 was the fastest high up and the most exquisite and least buildable, and the C.205 was the best at low and medium height, excellent in the dive, and visibly out of ideas above 8,000 m. It was ordered anyway, alongside the G.55, for the reason interim aircraft always are: the tooling existed and it could be delivered now.

Castoldi knew exactly what the aeroplane needed and drew it. The C.205N Orione put the same engine on a wing of 19 m² with an 11.25 m span and a longer fuselage; 1,200 were ordered from Macchi and Breda. On 20 March 1943 that order was cancelled and converted into more C.205Vs, partly because the heavier Orione was slower and less agile than the aircraft it was meant to replace and overheated in the climb, and partly because Italy in 1943 could not afford to stop a running production line. The larger-winged M.C.206 and the DB 603-engined M.C.207 got no further than incomplete airframes. The Veltro remained the interim solution until there was no longer an Italian state to build a replacement for.

Then the armistice of 8 September 1943 split the type in two, and the split is the most interesting thing about it. Only a handful of Veltros reached Allied airfields in the south; the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force built its holding up slowly and used the type largely in southern Italy and on supply and escort work over the Balkans for Yugoslav partisans, with the 4º, 9º and 10º Stormi and eventually the 155º Gruppo, which still had about 30 Veltros and 19 of them serviceable on 8 May 1945. The far more active career belonged to the other side: the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana's 1º Gruppo Caccia at Campoformido, which took over 25 airframes the Luftwaffe had requisitioned plus new production, fought the Fifteenth Air Force over northern Italy from 3 January 1944, and re-equipped with Bf 109Gs during that summer once Allied bombing of Varese and Milan had killed the spare parts supply. Italians shot at Italians in the same aeroplane type over their own country for eighteen months.

M.C.205V prototypes (1942 / 2)

MM.9287 was a C.202 airframe re-engined with the Tifone; first flight 19 April 1942 from Lonate Pozzolo with Guido Carestiato, a second prototype following on 19 August 1942. Macchi had undertaken to deliver the first aircraft three months after receiving the engine, and very nearly did.

M.C.205V Serie I (Oct 1942–Jun 1943 / 99)

MM.9288 to 9386. Two 12.7 mm cowl guns and two 7.7 mm wing guns — the late Folgore battery. Deliveries began in September 1942 and the first three reached the 71ª Squadriglia of the 17º Gruppo at Pantelleria on 6 February 1943. Many were later retrofitted with 20 mm wing cannon.

M.C.205V Serie III (1943–44 / ~150 ordered, roughly 120–150 completed)

MM.92153 onward. Two MG 151/20 cannon replacing the wing machine guns: the definitive Veltro. Around 100 had been delivered by the armistice; Macchi built a further 72 or so for the ANR before Allied bombing stopped production in the spring of 1944.

Fiat-built Serie II (1942 / 300 ordered, none built)

The second and much the largest production batch was to come from Fiat. RAF raids on Turin on the nights of 9 to 12 December 1942 destroyed the tooling and the order was abandoned. That single week is why the Veltro is a footnote in production terms rather than Italy's standard 1943 fighter.

M.C.205V G.A. and M.C.205S Scorta (1943 / roughly 15 and 3–18)

Long-range conversions. The Grande Autonomia carried a 220 litre fuselage tank in place of the cowl guns, leaving cannon only; the Scorta escort variant is variously described as carrying jettisonable wing tanks or a 200 litre internal tank. The sources do not agree and may be describing one programme at two dates.

M.C.205V R.F. and Cinematografici (1943 / ~12 and 8)

Reconnaissance conversions with a Zeiss RB 50/30 camera, and a cine-camera fit using the FM-62 CineAvia, both serving with the 310ª Squadriglia. Six were operational at the armistice, three of them at Decimomannu.

M.C.205N Orione (1942–43 / 2 prototypes)

MM.499 and MM.500, first flown 1 November 1942. A 19 m² wing, 11.25 m span, 9.65 m fuselage; the N/1 with four 12.7 mm guns and an MG 151/20 firing through the propeller hub, the N/2 with three 20 mm cannon and two 12.7 mm. An order for 1,200 was cancelled on 20 March 1943. Both prototypes were destroyed, one in the bombing of Guidonia.

M.C.206 and M.C.207 (1943 / neither completed)

The M.C.206 took a new wing of about 21 m², cutting wing loading to around 190 kg/m² and aiming at 700 km/h; the single airframe was damaged by an accidental explosion on 22 October 1943, damaged again in the bombing of 30 April 1944, and scrapped. The M.C.207 was to have the 1,750 hp DB 603A and four 20 mm cannon; a fuselage was begun and the armistice ended it.

Luftwaffe requisitioned aircraft (Oct–Dec 1943 / ~23–25)

II./JG 77 flew seized Veltros for about two months from bases in northern Italy, with 23 on charge and only 11 combat-ready. German pilots liked the aeroplane and lost at least five to accidents, including two killed near Albenga on 27 September 1943. The survivors passed to the ANR's 1º Gruppo Caccia on 31 December 1943.

Royal Egyptian Air Force C.205V (1948–49 / 42 ordered)

The postwar export order, and a partly fictitious one: a minority were genuine new or refurbished Veltro airframes and the majority were surplus C.202 Folgores re-engined with the Tifone and left with only their two 12.7 mm cowl guns. Ten went on from Egypt to Syria, which flew them until jets arrived in September 1952.

Production, the Egyptian episode and survivors. Totals depend entirely on what is counted. Roughly 177 Veltros had been completed by the armistice of 8 September 1943, of which about 146 had reached Regia Aeronautica units and only 66 were serviceable on the day; Macchi built perhaps 72 more for the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana before bombing ended production, giving a wartime figure usually stated as about 250 to 265 including prototypes. Postwar the picture blurs deliberately. Around 30 survivors went to the 5º Stormo in Puglia and then to the flying school at Lecce-Galatina until about 1951. Egypt ordered 42 aircraft in 1948 and was sold a mixture: published accounts range from eight to twenty-one genuine Veltro airframes, with the balance — most credibly 31 of the 42 — being surplus C.202 Folgores re-engined with the Tifone and delivered with only two 12.7 mm guns, the lightest and fastest and least useful version of the type ever built. Deliveries ran from four aircraft on 16 September 1948 through further batches on 6 and 26 October and 24 November, so only a part of the order arrived before the fighting stopped. They flew from El Arish with No. 2 Squadron against Israeli forces; at least three were lost in combat between 28 December 1948 and 5 January 1949, one Veltro was credited with an Israeli P-51D Mustang on 7 January 1949, and Israeli pilots claimed two or three in return. Shalabi al-Hinnawi, later commander of the Egyptian air force in 1967, had his Veltro badly shot up by a Spitfire IX. Israeli agents also attacked the supply at source, destroying one C.205 and three MB.308s in sabotage at Venegono on 18 September 1948. Twenty undelivered Egyptian machines were taken onto Italian Air Force charge between February 1950 and May 1951 and sent to Lecce. Survivors: three airframes are usually listed and not one of them is an unaltered wartime-built Veltro. MM.91818, displayed at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia in Milan, began life as a Breda-built C.202 and was rebuilt to C.205V standard by Aermacchi; it flew again on 5 December 1980, appeared at the 1981 Paris Salon, and was permanently grounded after a take-off accident at Venegono on 23 July 1983, though some accounts have it flying at displays as late as 1986. MM.9546 at the Museo Storico dell'Aeronautica Militare at Vigna di Valle is a Breda-built C.202/C.205 composite shown as a Veltro. MM.92166 is a Serie III airframe associated with the Egyptian contract, held for many years by Aermacchi at Venegono and last publicly shown in 1998; sources disagree on where it is now and on whether it is currently presented as a C.202 or a C.205. The full-size aircraft outside the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica in Rome and the machine at Volandia at Vizzola Ticino are reproductions, not original airframes. Engine and cockpit wreckage of a crashed Veltro was recovered from eight metres down at Correzzola near Padua in November 2006. No Veltro is airworthy, and the only postwar flying done by the type was done by a converted Folgore.

The Macchi C.205 Veltro: a short, dramatic career

Macchi C.205 Veltro in photographs

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Where the Macchi C.205 Veltro flew

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