Hitler's Jet Plane (2 page)

At twenty-four years of age, Wendel was already the holder of the absolute world speed record, and had brought the propeller-driven aircraft as far as it could go. He didn’t claim all the credit of course, naturally some rubbed off on Professor Willy Messerschmitt and his magnificent design and construction team. It was a joy to fly for an aircraft manufacturer who recognised no boundaries when a question of progress was involved.

At 18,000 feet Wendel levelled out and looked below. He could see the extensive Messerschmitt works, nearby the angular mosaic of Augsburg with the narrow alleys of the Fuggerei inside the town. Beyond all the houses and factories lay fields, woodland and mountains – the broad hump of the Zugspitze and the bizarre rocky mass of its neighbours.

Instruments OK? Everything ready! Throttle forward, nose down and he went into the dive at full revs. As the bird hurtled earthwards he heard the roaring engine, the howl of the slipstream and watched the speedometer needle rise – 600 – 650 – 700 kph. Through the cumulus. Now the needle indicated 750. Almost his own world record! He detected nothing out of the ordinary, a few vibrations certainly but harmless, caused by disturbed air below the cumulus. That was normal.

At 3,000 feet he pulled out and climbed to 22,500 feet for a second dive. He had to be certain that the works pilot had merely encountered turbulence below cloud and misinterpreted the effect. On the second dive the machine had just passed the 750 kph mark at 9,000 feet when the left wing, contorting, began to vibrate violently. The frequency of the vibration was so powerful that the whole aircraft shook. The contours of the wing blurred and only the rapid wave-like motion of the wing-tip could be distinguished. Nothing more could be done. He pulled back the throttle, unbuckled his seat straps and in the same split second it happened. The wing bent, its metal skin peeled off, ribbons of debris whipped away followed by the wing itself, snapped off at the joint with the fuselage. Scarcely a second had elapsed.

The remains of the Bf 109 fighter began to spin wildly as it careered groundwards. Somewhere there was another crack. Not that they were any use now, but he noticed how the controls were slack. As if in a centrifuge he was forced back into the leather seat, imprisoned by the irresistible G-force. His nerve held and his mind was clear. He had gone through the same thing a year before. A good 6,000 feet still separated him from the ground. He tried to prise himself up against the cabin sides. It cracked again somewhere. His hand could not reach the lever to throw off the plexiglass hood. The right wing broke off, the aircraft nose jerked down, he levered the cabin hood open and the force catapulted him out, spinning his body through the air like rag doll, sucking out his breath. He saw the ground swirling below him. It was nothing new, he belonged up here.

Wendel spread his arms and legs to brake the speed of his fall. The tremendous velocity began to ebb away as air resistance took effect. Seconds later quiet fell, and he experienced a sense of weightlessness in the vertical descent. Twenty-one feet per second, 1,250 feet per minute. And a minute is a long time between life and death. But now he would survive, would carry on living to fly again.

His hand felt for the rip cord to open the parachute. It was supposed to be on the left side between hip and shoulder, but his fingers located neither the steel ring nor the strap to which it was attached. His fingers began to feel, to search, more hastily. They found only the smooth fabric of his overall.

He took fright. Suddenly he remembered the loose straps which he had not bothered to adjust before taking off. He felt for the parachute pack, found it together with the dangling webbing which had slipped from his shoulder and now hung below his left hip. He replaced it correctly, looked down, gauging that he still had sufficient altitude, waited two or three seconds and then pulled the D-ring. The wire cable jerked free a steel pin from its retaining bracket and so released the silk. It was as easy as that to stay alive.

The canopy came free with a rustle, flapped, deployed normally, tipped him upwards and swung him. And then he saw coming directly towards him – twisting and turning like the wings of a lime-tree seed – the starboard wing of his broken Bf 109, which had separated in one piece from the fuselage. If this piece of spinning junk hit him or tangled into the parachute shroud lines it would not be the first time that a pilot had lost his life to such a freak occurrence just when all seemed safe. There was nothing he could do now but wait... The wing hissed by a few yards below his feet. He landed in a ploughed field and when checking himself over noticed the blood for the first time. He had lacerations to his face and a foot. Not bad, but a nuisance.

At the hospital the foot injury had to be stitched. The ankle needed to be immobilised: bedrest was prescribed. The doctor spoke of two to three weeks: the piston-engined Me 262 maiden flight was listed for three days hence. If he wasn’t available it would be given to somebody else. There he lay, Fritz Wendel, undisputed holder of the world speed record, brimming with health and confined to bed.

In his hospital cot there was plenty of time for reflection. His mind wandered to the year 1938 when he first heard of the new machine which eventually would fly without a propeller and faster than his record-breaking machine, the Me 209 V1. For three years he had waited and watched almost paternally over the development of the new warbird, had pored over the blueprints, chatted with the engineers and later had often spent hours in the experimental hangar noticing how this piece or that was fitted to her. And now, from his hospital bed, he would be forced to put a brave face on it and listen to a colleague’s joyous account of what it had been like to fly his personal baby...

He spoke to the medic, who shrugged his shoulders. When the superintendent of the experimental hangar visited his bedside, Wendel begged him to delay the flight. The superintendent promised to do what he could. Privately he thought the man must be crazy, wanting to hobble from his hospital bed to fly a jet fighter airframe fitted with a piston engine and propeller. Wendel settled back, hands behind his head on the pillow. His mind was restless, but his thoughts always came back to when it began . . .

2

Messerschmitt AG Developments 1926 – 41

A
fter joining the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke as a young management assistant in 1926, Rakan Peter Kokothaki worked his way up through the organisation to become eventually the Member for Finance and Marketing on the Messerschmitt AG board. In 1928 Willy Messerschmitt had moved his small aircraft building business from Bamberg to Augsburg, integrating it into the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke but retaining for his design offices a measure of autonomy from the larger firm. Kokothaki thus became an interested observer at first hand of Messerschmitt’s relentless lust for aircraft designing from 1928 onwards.

A year before the move, Messerschmitt had developed the M 20, a ten-seater commercial aircraft. Deutsche Lufthansa, controlled at the time by Erhard Milch, later to become Goering’s Luftwaffe Secretary of State, ordered ten of the machines. Appointed as test pilot for the maiden flight at Augsburg on 26 February 1928 was Hans Hackmack, Erhard Milch’s personal friend and pilot. The flight took a most tragic course. Hubert Bauer, then an assistant at the works, later a Messerschmitt AG board member of long standing, was a witness to the accident and described it thus:

The aircraft flew for a considerable time over the aerodrome and surrounding district without any problems. After about twenty minutes it came back over the airfield and through binoculars one could see something bright flapping at the trailing edge of a wing. Shortly we saw the pilot emerge from the door at the rear of the fuselage and jump. His parachute canopy began to deploy immediately and tangled into the aircraft so that Hackmack was left dangling by the parachute straps. While he struggled desperately to unsnag it by tugging on the shrouds and kicking out, the aircraft continued serenely in level flight for quite some time before eventually the nose dipped and dived into the ground. Hackmack was killed instantaneously.

The investigation reported that some fabric had come loose at the trailing edge and this was the flapping seen by witnesses. It was assumed that the pilot had mistaken it for a fire or believed that the wing had fractured. Nobody was directly responsible for the accident. Hans Hackmack had probably lost his nerve, perhaps mindful of a test flight a few weeks previously in which he had narrowly escaped death. According to the report there should have been no problem landing the M 20 safely.

That Milch was deeply affected by the death of his friend was obvious. He blamed nobody but reacted very emotionally at Messerschmitt’s disinterest in his personal loss. Messerschmitt did not even deign to attend the crash site. This coldness in Messerschmitt’s personality was one of the causes for the split in the relationship between them.

Nevertheless Milch ordered two modified M 20a aircraft after they had been test-flown and pronounced problem-free. They proved successful on operations and when an M20b version became available Lufthansa also ordered two of these. Both crashed, one with only the pilot aboard, but the other involved passenger deaths. Initially, Messerschmitt was accused of having built M 20b in breach of safety regulations but after examining both wrecks, the German Test Institute for Aviation (
Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt
) rejected the accusations. The actual cause was put down to sudden turbulence. Little was known of this at the time although aeronautical scientists in Germany were studying the phenomenon.

Willy Messerschmitt – today an acknowledged pioneer of lightweight construction – spared weight wherever possible provided it did not contravene aircraft construction regulations. If the regulations themselves were inadequate, that was not his fault. The two M 20b accidents were thereafter always known as the ‘Turbulence Cases’. How widely known Messerschmitt had become for his successful lightweight airframes is exemplified by the following anecdote: The Academic Pilot Group (
Akademische Fliegergruppe
) Berlin had ordered from Augsburg the sporty M23. The Group’s leader, a Dr Leander, arrived at Augsburg to fly the aircraft to Berlin. Messerschmitt took this important client for a guided tour of the works and rounded off by asking if the customer had any request. ‘Yes,’ Leander said, ‘Show me how you scrape the wood off from beneath the varnish.’

The consequence of the three M 20 crashes was the cancellation of the Deutsche Lufthansa order. This meant administration for the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke. The negotiations were handled between Augsburg banker Friedrich Seider, an experienced liquidations administrator, and the BfW financial wizard Kokothaki, and lasted from 1931 until the Hitler government saved the firm with the first armaments contracts in 1933. Kokothaki despaired at the construction costs incurred from early on by Messerschmitt. Although the aircraft were outstanding, demand was slack. But Messerschmitt was not the only aircraft builder who paid scant heed to costs so long as others were going to be paying them.

During the Spanish Civil War another Messerschmitt design, the Bf 109 fighter, confirmed a superiority which had been self-evident for some time and in the summer of 1937 the Bf 109 left the aviation world in shocked silence. Dübendorf aerodrome near Zürich was the venue for an international flying tournament attended by entrants from France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. There were five competitions and the Bf 109 won all five. The machine flew and climbed faster than all its rivals. As a fighter it won the individual and team races. Never before had German aircraft even participated in an international competition. A few in the know might have been confident enough to place a bet on one or two victories. Europe was already bracing itself for war. To win all five races outright was almost a provocation. The Bf 108
Taifun
four-seater pleasure aircraft, and the Bf 109 fighter, his two excellent designs, elevated Willy Messerschmitt and his engineers, who numbered among the best in Germany, into the front rank of the world’s aircraft builders.

In the spring of 1938, they now faced a daunting task. Men who would later become household names in Germany – Lusser, Voigt, Degel, Hornung, Kaiser, Wackerle and Ludwig Bölkow, a young graduate engineer fresh from University who knew his subject, had talent and a store of ideas – wrestled at desk and drawing board with the mathematics and technical design of an aircraft which was certain to lead them into virgin territory. The problem confronting the team was to come up with something special in aircraft design. A machine to succeed the Bf 109 no less, and that was by no means going to be easy. Within a few months they had conceived project P 1065 for a twin-engined jet fighter. The files entitled ‘Me 262 – Pursuit Fighter’ were presented to the Reich Air Ministry on 7 June 1938. Six months afterwards, in December 1938, engineers and officials from the Ministry made their first inspection of the full-size mock-up. The contract for the construction of three experimental aircraft followed a little later.

Elsewhere a series of world records was now set and broken. On 11 November 1937 – shortly after Dübendorf – Dr Hermann Wurster, chief test pilot of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, the trade name of the Messerschmitt organisation, hence ‘Bf’, reached 611.004 kph in a souped-up Me 109E. The flight set a world record for land aircraft. On Whit Sunday 1938 the World War I fighter ace Ernst Udet flew at 634.73 kph over 100 kilometres at the controls of a Heinkel He 100, easily destroying the existing record of 554 kph held by the Italian Francesco Agello. On 30 March 1939 Hans Dieterle flying the Heinkel He 100 V8 set an absolute world speed record with 746.606 kph which Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel broke in turn on 26 April 1939 with 755.138 kph.

Wendel’s machine was not a souped-up Bf 109, from which it differed outwardly, but an aircraft designed specifically to set the world record, the Me 209 V1. It was shorter, had finer wings; the Bf 109 water-cooling system with its high frontal resistance had been replaced by a surface-mounted radiator and an evaporation device; the oil cooler was a circular intake set in the airstream behind the propeller. Seven litres of cooling water were consumed per minute. Propulsion was supplied by an 1,800 hp DB601 V10 12-cylinder liquid-cooled piston engine specially engineered by Daimler – Benz for record attempts and could manage 2,770 hp in a five-minute burst. The record was claimed at the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) for an aircraft designated Me 109R to give the impression for propaganda purposes that a modified Me 109 had taken the world record. No effort was spared to protect the machine from the camera to maintain the deception.