Hitler's Jet Plane (9 page)

With all these quirks of character and his poor grasp of technical matters Goering was unfit to command the Luftwaffe. Understandably, and probably knowing this, the job of ensuring that he retained office became his main preoccupation. Assuredly he knew that it was at Hitler’s whim that he stood or fell, and so he kow-towed and stayed in office. He was not an evil man: rather he may be compared to a pastor unversed in the Bible. Possibly that may be an important reason for his failure to argue the Me 262 to Hitler. By his sworn oath and without regard to whether it might lose him his office – supported mainly by Milch, Galland, Petersen, Gollob but also others – he was duty-bound to make known to Hitler his personal opinion and that of his technical experts. In the end he came up with a way to avoid biting the bullet by delegating his responsibility. There was a man who had been demanding a fast and effective bomber for years. And that man was General der Kampfflieger, Oberst Dietrich Peltz.

Peltz had been learning his trade since Udet advocated the dive-bomber and converted the Immelmann fighter squadron into a Stuka unit. The obvious problem from the outset was aiming at and hitting the target. World War I had provided little useful experience, for the leap of technology in the intervening years was too great. The premature outbreak of war in 1939 had interfered with experiments to establish a reliable method and then train the crews. Naval air units flying the He 60 over the Hela Peninsula during the Polish campaign carried two 25-kg bombs in the cockpit and tossed them out over the target, aiming by eye. Moreover the Luftwaffe was still considered as a kind of extended arm of the other two services and not as an arm of service with its own strategic objectives. The air-war which developed after 1939 was foreseen only by a few visionaries.

In the first years of Hitler’s war, it was Peltz who developed a viable dive-bombing procedure in which the flight leader went in ahead while the remainder of his formation circled nearby. After he had bombed he told them by radio how to approach the target. On account of the more reliable weather this method was taught at Foggia in Italy during the summer of 1942 using the reflecting gunsight. Somewhat later the firm of Zeiss came to Foggia with the new and more reliable BAZ-bombsight resembling a small computer which provided the aiming point from data including the angle of dive, airspeed, air pressure, wind strength and other factors.

Many difficulties were ironed out or at least reduced in training flights and by using filmed simulations. These exercises with the Ju 88 were followed by operations in Norway, North Africa and over England led by Peltz. It was mainly here that he accumulated the vast experience which caused him to view the planned deployment of the Me 262 as a fighter bomber or Blitzbomber with extreme scepticism.

In the summer of 1943 in the rank of Oberst he had been appointed General der Kampfflieger. With it he inherited a measure of responsibility for the future of the Me 262. The call for faster bombers was justified and there had been improvements. But bombsights were complicated instruments and nobody on operations knew that better than Dietrich Peltz. Shortly after his appointment he was summoned to Goering’s presence to render an account of his deliberations regarding the fitting-out of bomber squadrons with the Me 262 Blitzbomber. Peltz informed his commander-in-chief frankly of all the impediments identified to date and which had not been resolved. How was the target to be hit? What would the pilot aim with? In what manner would the one or two bombs be dropped? The Me 262 could not be dived! Bombing in level flight it would need luck to hit a field over a square kilometre in size. Pinpoint bombing was out of the question. Even if the two bombs had a shrapnel effect their effectiveness would still depend on luck. ‘Bearing all this in mind,’ he told Goering, ‘if you ask me if the Me 262 can be a bomber Yes or No, I would say No! At least, not without thorough preparation and – probably – completely new bombsights.’

Anticipating Hitler’s anger if he delivered such a depressing opinion, Goering was unrestrained: ‘I didn’t make you General of the Bomber Arm so that you can tell me it won’t work! You know very well that it is the Führer’s wish to use the Me 262 as a bomber and it’s your job to come up with something. So there!’

Peltz responded with still more reasons. ‘In bad weather we cannot keep Me 262 formations together. If we are flying blind, we cannot simply group up over a radio beacon and attack in formation. Individual aircraft will have to operate alone and attack alone, or at least in small flights, and that will ruin their effectiveness.’ Goering understood all this and took the point that Peltz was making. But Goering was no longer the man to tell Hitler that his plans for the Me 262 Blitzbomber wouldn’t wash, and perhaps Goering never had been. In conclusion Peltz suggested that the jet be used as an interceptor ‘to plug the leaky roof above Germany’, but Goering was not listening. From his weakened position he would only stir Hitler to anger preaching Peltz’ unassailable argument. His logical course of action in such a case was to abdicate his ‘throne’, but obviously the time was inopportune.

Peltz knew that nothing was required by the bomber squadrons more urgently than a fast bomber with the speed of an Me 262 but also diveable, equipped with a modern bombsight and endowed with long range. What he had been offered was a makeshift. Although fast, the Me 262 was never cut out to do any serious bombing. Even converted into an almost new type it would still not be useful in that role.

In mid-1943 every fourth to sixth Allied bomber either returned to base badly damaged or was lost over Germany. There is evidence that the US, and especially the RAF, bomber crews became so demoralised after the bloodletting over Schweinfurt, Hamburg, Berlin and other cities that they needed to be specially motivated for each fresh mission. This bore similarity to the situation in the German fighter arm, whose statistics were equally grisly, a large proportion of their casualties being sustained in the hail of fire from a bomber’s rear-guns. It was in the summer of 1943, when knowledge about the Me 163 rocket aircraft became widely known in fighter circles, that rumours also began to circulate about a jet coming into readiness. Nothing further was known. I was myself then attending the JG300
Wilde Sau
Night-fighter School at Alten-kirchen in Thuringia. The training was hard and claimed its victims. Almost every night one or other of us failed to return. And that was in training, as pupils. There were not a few Knight’s Cross holders among them who wanted to take an intensive course in blind flying and then dived blindly to their deaths. All were volunteers. The young ones came from fighter schools, the older ones from operational units on all fronts.

In July 1943 I was asked if I fancied flying the new rocket. I said ‘Yes’ without a moment’s hesitation and three weeks later reported to Erprobungskommando 16 at Bad Zwischenahn. Our aircraft was the Me 163. The rocket. Including the commander and flight instructors there were some thirty pilots, mostly boys still wet behind the ears with little or no operational experience. Two instructors and one pupil had the Knight’s Cross. The youngest of the three was killed the first or second time out. We received an introductory lecture about the dangers of rocket flight and were then offered the chance to return to the units from which we came. Only one man of the thirty stepped forward to accept the offer. The others remained even though we all now knew that a rocket could explode in flight. And not only in flight, but on the ground as well. On one occasion we put the human remains of a dead pilot – half a thigh – into a coffin ... and carried on flying. This was how the morale of German fighter pilots, doubted by Goering, looked in those days. Yes, we were frightened. Again and again the fear came, crept up upon us in the night as we slept. But it disappeared once we took off.

Almost a year since Galland had flown the Me 262 for the first time in May 1943 and had recommended its operational use at the earliest opportunity, Hitler remained obstinate that the aircraft was a bomber. A whole year had been wasted, a whole year in which something tangible might have been done to counteract enemy air superiority effectively. How bitterly serious this situation proved in the train of this lost year was portrayed by Galland at an armaments conference in April 1944. In his book
Die Ersten und die Letzten
(pp 354 – 5) he wrote:

The problem the Americans set the German fighter arm – I am only speaking here of our fighters – is simply one of air superiority alone. This has now progressed to the stage where it verges on air supremacy. The adverse ratio in aircraft by day is between 1:6 to 1:8 approximately. The standard of the enemy’s training is extraordinarily high. The technical standard of his aircraft is so notable that we have to say, something must happen soon!

The night-fighter arm has lost more than one thousand aircrew over the last four months. Among them was a number of the best flight leaders, group commanders and squadron commodores. It is very difficult to plug the gaps, not with numbers but with experienced pilots. In various addresses and reports I have spoken of the latest possibility: the danger of the collapse of the Luftwaffe! It has come to this because the enemy’s numerical superiority has reached the stage where one has to say that the struggle is becoming extraordinarily unproductive for us.

What path should we take to get out of this situation? First we must rectify the adverse ratio: that is, industry must turn out a guaranteed number of aircraft to enable us to rebuild the fighter arm. Secondly, because we are numerically inferior and will always remain so – of that fact we are perfectly certain – we must increase the technical standard. I hold the point of view that already with a small number of technically high-value aircraft such as the Me 262 and Me 163 we can achieve an enormous amount. This polemic between fighter men – which aircraft is best to bring down enemy bombers by day – is to a large extent also a question of morale. The enemy’s morale must be broken. With the help of the two components, numbers and technical advance, the fighting value of our squadrons and in retrospect the training standard are bound to be enhanced. I do not expect that we will ever manage to get on equal terms, but I do expect us to reach a reasonable ratio. In the last ten attacks we lost on average over fifty aircraft and forty pilots. This corresponds to five hundred aircraft and four hundred pilots in ten great raids. At such a tempo we cannot remedy a shortfall of such magnitude with the present standard of training.

I renew my plea that allied to an extraordinary effort to make up the aircraft numbers, the attempt will be made with the greatest energy to ensure that our technical advance is at least on a par. We must have such standards that the fighter arm regains the sensation of superiority even if their numbers are still less. And now as an example I state a value: at this moment I would prefer one Me 262 to five Me 109s . . .

This statement made the situation abundantly clear. One assumes that Hitler heard nothing of it and if it came to Goering’s attention he took no notice of it. Yet it signalled uniquely the departure from grace of the Me 109 which had outlived its usefulness in the struggle against its competitors and the enemy. Even Willy Messerschmitt seemed to have recognised the folly of his statement to Hitler in June 1943. According to Galland, from now on Messerschmitt argued for the deployment of the Me 262 as an operational fighter aircraft but, in common with Milch and Galland, his pleas fell on deaf ears.

6

‘Mein Führer, every child can see that that is a fighter and not a bomber!’

O
berst Edgar Petersen, former head of the central flight testing base at Rechlin, told me in 1976 that he still considered Messerschmitt’s impetuous and ill-advised statement to Hitler at Insterburg that the Me 262 could carry a 1,000-kg bomb to be a turning point in the air-war. From the point of view of what payload the aircraft could carry Messerschmitt was, of course, right, but as a conscientious aircraft builder he ought to have qualified his remark by mentioning the time-factor involved in converting the Me 262 into a useful bomber.

Petersen remained convinced that to carry a heavy bombload the jet would have needed the more powerful Jumo 004C turbine, and these were still on the Junkers test-rig. Oberst Siegfried Knemeyer, a talented engineer on Goering’s staff, gave the Me 262 a sporting chance as a fighter bomber, but with no more than two 50-kg bombs. Along with Galland, Milch, Gollob and others, Generalleutnant Josef Kammhuber, one of the most successful organisers of the night-fighter arm, believed that if the machine had been used only in the fighter role round the clock, the civilian population would have been spared the more devastating raids.

One of the main reasons for Hitler’s obstinacy was certainly the imminent invasion of northern France. The man who once had only waited for the opportune moment to land his troops in southern England was now haunted by the spectre of the invasion of Germany, something which he may have suspected that in the long run he was powerless to prevent, and he knew that it would betoken the end of all his great aims. On several occasions during his rise he had staked all upon a single card and won. Perhaps he saw the Me 262 fast bomber as his last ace.

Despite Hitler’s order to produce the Me 262 as a bomber, the Messerschmitt works turned out the fighter version and one bomber variant. In the week of 20 – 25 February 1944 the Augsburg factory was almost totally gutted in a bombing raid and the pilot production was lost. After the fearful bombing raids of January and February 1944 Hitler ordered that the output of fighter aircraft must be increased to the maximum possible. At the same time he approved the highest priority for the so-called ‘Jägernot Programm’ – the emergency fighter programme launched on 1 March 1944 aimed at a greatly increased output of fighter aircraft in underground factories. In addition to existing production centres above ground, protected plants for the Me 262 were set up at Budweis in Bavaria, Neuburg/Donau in Austria and the REIMAHG (the REIchsMArschall Hermann Goering enterprise) underground installation near Grosseutersdorf, south of Jena, also known as Kahla, on the thickly afforested Walpersberg mountain. This was being developed into the main aircraft production centre for the Luftwaffe. Run by the SS using concentration-camp labour, it was already turning out an estimated 50 aircraft per day from its warren of internal tunnels when it was overrun in April 1945. A 1,000-yard airstrip ran the length of the mountain top. Completed aircraft were hoisted to the summit by a steep cable railroad and flown off to their operational squadrons.