Hitler's Jet Plane (28 page)

6
On his own initiative, Oberstleutnant Bär decided to cleanse the airspace over Lechfeld of enemy aircraft so far as his role of EJG2 commander allowed. He had made it clear to his flight instructors that if they encountered enemy aircraft during training flights they were to attack. In company with his wingman Kaczmarek he had scored eighteen victories of his own as a fighter pilot. A total of thirty enemy aircraft, ranging from lone fliers to members of large formations, were shot down by his squadron.

7
All pilots arriving at operational stations in the latter years of the war were poorly trained. One cause of this was the shortage of fuel but the real reason was that the whole approach was wrong. An adequate training in the theory, entirely independent of the fuel situation, was lacking, and by this I mean the type of training that used to be provided in the German commercial aircraft school.

8
Pilots coming from Training Completion Groups, irrespective of whether these were fighter or bomber, needed ten hours flying the Me 262 before being made operational. Veteran pilots required a shorter training period. However, a veteran bomber pilot rarely turned into a good fighter pilot because the bomber man had had the necessary aggressive fighting spirit bred out of him. A bomber pilot was only a crew member whereas in a single-seater he was suddenly on his own and the many-sidedness of fighter operation was a burden which few were able to master. Ferry pilots underwent only the briefest conversion course, a fact made only too obvious by the large number of Me 262 aircraft which they managed to crash.

From a purely flying point of view, the Me 262 is no more difficult to handle than the Me 109. In some respects it is easier, when setting down, for example, the nose-wheel prevents the tail-up landing accident. All that is required is a longer conversion course to acquaint pilots with the novelty of jet-turbine propulsion.

The Luftwaffe lacked a theoretical induction course aimed primarily at teaching how the turbine works and covering the subject of flight difficulties such as flying with only one engine.

Modern flying machines are a fairly complicated creation. When we are dealing, as in this case, with a completely new type of aircraft altogether it is all the more essential that pilots receive an intensive introduction to the theory before their flight conversion course. The aircraft and how the engines function must be fully understood in all respects. It would easily be possible to spend a hundred hours on this. A useful number of good instructors might have been trained in co-operation with industry and a large percentage of later accidents avoided. The best proof of that is a comparison of the accident statistics between Me 262 operational fliers and our first test pilots.

In conclusion to your questions I would like to finish by mentioning the night-fighter career of Oberleutnant Welter. He was a man who approached his duty with great zeal and was given the task of forming a night-fighter wing. Within a short time his unit’s successes amounted to twenty enemy aircraft shot down at night using the Me 262 single-seater version without a single one of his own machines being damaged. Unfortunately the majority of his pilots were not possessed of the same élan and Welter himself could not devise a way of conditioning pilots for successful night operations. Nevertheless they achieved successes which in reality surpassed the victories of other single-engine night-fighter units. By the close his wing had suffered few losses because he used his own performance as an example for their operational training. His unit’s aircraft were no better equipped than those of JG7 and had not been adapted with blind flying equipment or the FuG 125 radar. Victories were achieved almost exclusively in the searchlight beams above Berlin.

Signed: Fritz Wendel
Augsburg 5 June 1945.

Notes

Chapter 4

1

Sources in addition to Irving: correspondence and interviews in June 1968 and 1976 with Oberst Petersen, former head of the Luftwaffe Test Centre, Rechlin; in June 1968 with Generalleutnant Vorwald, former head of the Technical Office, Ministry of Aircraft Production; and from a statement made by Professor Messerschmitt during a German television interview, channel ZDF on 17 February 1970.

Chapter 6

2

This statement seems incorrect. A two-seater bomber prototype Me 262A-2A-02 was completed at Augsburg as mentioned by Rust and Hess, and wrecked in the bombing raid of late February 1944. Another variant, Me 262A-2äU2, was a fast bomber having a plexiglass pulpit at the nose for the bomb-aimer. A Lotfe 7H bombsight was fitted together with bomb retention and release gear. Some authorities allege a long aerial along the fuselage for detonating bombs in mid air. Works no. 110484 was delivered to Rechlin in September 1944 and flew regularly until January 1944 when it was last logged and disappeared, possibly aboard the submarine U-234. Works No 110555 succeeded it. This aircraft was crashed behind American lines by a defecting pilot at Schrock/Lahn in March 1945.

3

The implication of this remark by Hitler appears to have been overlooked by the author. This fighter bomber was so fast that
it did not need guns
. A fighter bomber without guns is a bomber pure and simple. All explanations to the contrary were a deception to conceal the real purpose of why the Me 262 was a special-purpose bomber.

Chapter 7

4

Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Oberstleutnant von Below recorded in his memoir
At Hitler’s Side
(Greenhill Books, 2001) that Hanna Reitsch numbered among Luftwaffe pilots willing to fly kamikaze operations. Hitler was opposed to suicide missions but kept a list of volunteers. Von Below would have made Goering aware of this. The fact is, the Rhine bridges were not attacked by Luftwaffe kamikazes. Bearing in mind the date 7 March 1945 it may be that the intended purpose lay elsewhere.

5

Hitler had recognised his error at the latest by 9 January 1945 when, according to Toland J
The Last Hundred Days
(New York 1966) he comforted his secretary Traudl Junge, who had returned from a brief visit to Munich and described to him the horror of the heavy air raids on the city, assuring her that the nightmare would be at its end within a few weeks, because then the new jet fighters would have won back air supremacy over the Reich.

Chapter 9

6

Under international conventions to which all Western allies were signatories, the combat aviator descending by parachute is
hors de combat
and may not be fired upon until he lands when, provided he is not in neutral territory, he is fair game. (A paratrooper is not a combat aviator.)

Chapter 15

7

An alternative idea to supplementary fuel tanks developed originally for all fighters was to tow a fuel container with wings (
Deichselschlepp
). The aircraft drew on the fuel in the tank during the initial flight phase. These towed devices were proposed for the new jet bombers from 1943 onwards, and DFS trials with an Ar 234-B2 at Neuburg/Donau at the beginning of 1945 proved the value of the system. Heinz Bär flew the Me 262 Deichselschlepp trials. The fuel container looked like a one-tonne bomb fitted with wings and a tailplane and is generally described incorrectly as a towed bomb. (See Griehl,
Luftwaffe over America
, Greenhill Books, 2004).

8

This differs from the author’s account earlier where these nine aircraft were replacements for the twelve machines of 3rd Squadron/KG51 already operational from Northern France.

9

Officially, on 14 October 1947 Captain Charles E Yeager, USAAF, was the first man through the sound barrier flying the Bell X-1 but there have been claims, apparently not much disputed by the Americans, that a Luftwaffe-flown Me 262 achieved the distinction first. The statement by Kurt Wendel appears to be a non-controversial way of making the claim immediately postwar. A computer-based performance analysis carried out in 1999 at the Munich Technical University showed that the Me 262 could exceed Mach 1. The criteria involved commencing a descent with a minimum dive angle of between 40 to 70 degrees from above 30,000 feet.

10

The great mystery surrounding the Me 262 which remains to be resolved is why Hitler was so adamant that an obvious fighter aircraft was a bomber. If Major Walter Dahl IV
Sturmgruppe
/JG3 could talk about aircraft for three hours with Hitler and be ‘astonished at Hitler’s exact knowledge of technical details’, then Hitler knew the difference between a fighter and a bomber. Hitler decided to build the Me 262 fleet as ‘Blitzbombers’, a role so important for some reason that it outweighed all the advantages for the aerial protection of Germany provided by the machine as the world’s fastest fighter. It was explained by former Luftwaffe Generals Galland and Peltz that the Me 262 was a fighter aircraft and useless in the conventional bomber role. They put the whole affair in a nutshell by asserting that the Me 262 would only be useful as a bomber if required to carry a 50-kilo bomb of tremendous destructive effect capable of destroying a town, such that the bomb need not be aimed.

11

Oberstleutnant Christian is mentioned in the memoir of Oberstleutnant Engel, Hitler’s Army ADC, but oddly not in the memoir of von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC. On 26 November and 28 December 1942 at Führer HQ in the presence of Jodl, Christian argued strongly against Goering’s figures for a projected air drop at Stalingrad. Who gave him the figures, and who pulled the strings, remains unknown.

Selected Sources

Bekker, Cajus
Angriffshöhe 4000: ein Kriegstagebuch der Deutschen Luftwaffe
, Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling 1964 (
The Luftwaffe War Diaries
English translation Frank Ziegler, London: Macdonald 1964)

Dahl, Walther
Rammjäger: das letzte Aufgebot
, Heusenstamm: Orion Verlag 1972

Dieriech, Wolfgang
Kampfgeschwader 51 ‘Edelweiss’
, Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag 1973 (
Kampfgeschwader ‘Edelweiss’
English translation Richard Simkins, London: Allan 1975)

Ebert, Hans J
Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm: 111 MBB Flugzeuge 1913 – 1978
, Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag 1979

Freeman, Roger A
The Mighty Eighth: units, men, and machines, a history of the US 8th Air Force
, London: Jane’s 1986

Galland, Adolf
Die Ersten und die Letzten: die Jagdflieger im Zweiten Weltkrieg
Darmstadt: Schneekluth 1953 (
The First and the Last
, English translation Mervyn Savill, London: Methuen & Co. 1955)

Green, William
The Warplanes of the Third Reich
, London: Macdonald and Jane’s 1979