The Last Days of the Luftwaffe

Editorial Note: Phillip Andrews, editor of Air News recently returned from a five month ? tour with the USAAF Air Transport Command, follows his detailed summary of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces cam­paign with an analysts of German aircraft developments in the last months of the war. -information contained in this article is based on interviews with former Luftwaffe personnel and examination of abandoned enemy equipment Written last July, publication has been delayed for reasons of security and the original report augmented, corrected or confirmed by findings of the Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, to whom the editors are also indebted for many of the illustrations which appear On the following pages. 

USSAAF Press Camps Munich, Germany (Delayed) —Whether the German conception of air power was ahead of, or behind its time is difficult to say. The most plausible answer is that it was both.

The high command, or whoever else was responsible (and all fingers now point to Hitler), failed to comprehend either the negative or positive virtues of strategic bombardment Hitler not only disdained the use of this new weapon but believed implicitly that it could not be used against him.

Hitler was an amateur.  His technicians were not. They went about their business with traditional skill, precision and considerable foresight.  Hampered by inadequate production facilities, limited labor resources, inferior materials, erratic transportation, official stupidity, and bureaucratic interference, they proceeded to develop an air force, elements of which compare most favorably with the best that Allied engineers could produce under infinitely more favorable circumstances.

German jet- and rocket-propelled aircraft in particular constituted a potential challenge to the Allied plan of aerial interdiction. A turbine-powered He-178 had flown in the week before war began in 1939. That Germany had no jet planes for the Battle of Britain a year later was less the fault of German engineers than of Hitler’s myopic arrogance.

But even he, when presented with plans for the Me-262, could hardly fail to recognize its merit.  By this time, however, Hitler was so incensed, so intent on personal revenge that he would approve production only if it were fitted as a bomber for use against England.  When Goering replied that the removal of its four nose guns would so alter the center of gravity as to make the plane un-flyable,  Hitler suggested that the balance be maintained by installing fuel- tanks in their place. “Hitler, in his ignorance,” says Goering, “did not realize that, since this extra fuel would be consumed in flight, the original unbalance would return.  In your aerial warfare, you had a great ally—in the Fuehrer.”

The comparative simplicity of airframes and power units made the jets easy to produce and minimized the effect of Allied strategic bombing. The Me-262 is much less complicated in construction than a comparable twin-engine aircraft of conventional design and so can be manufactured with a relatively small complement of skilled personnel.

In one subterranean factory, virtually in-vulnerable from the air, hundreds of V-2s were found in various stages of completion and stock-piles of parts compared with those of any large American aircraft factory.  The tunnels were cold and damp, the light was poor, and the atmosphere reminiscent of a New York subway. Several hundred yards up the hill, the labor housing problem was perfunctorily solved by a concentration camp. Throughout the Reich there were a number of such factories. Had they been utilized for the production of jet aircraft rather than for retaliatory rockets and “buzz­bombs,” such crises as the Battle of the Bulge might have been concluded much differently.

In addition to the Me-262, Germany had developed several unconventional designs which showed considerable promise.  One of these, the Do-335, was finally put into production late in 1944, although it had been made available to the Luftwaffe at the beginning of the war. Distinguished by twin engines arranged in tandem, it was capable of extremely high speeds and, although subsequent examination has revealed some undesirable characteristics, these might well have been remedied through production and operational experience.

One of the fastest planes ever to appear over Europe, although extremely short on endurance, was the Me-163 “Alarm Fighter.” Rocket propelled, it has a vertical fin, no elevators. Originally reported as a flying wing, it too was based on a pre-war design. Its phenomenal rate of climb and remarkably high speed, utilized earlier in the war, might have made conventional British and American escort fighters obsolete. That it did appear on infrequent occasions is confirmed by reports of Allied airmen and by the apocryphal German tale that one Me-163 in two take-offs and two landings shot down two aircraft, all in the short space of seven minutes.

As there is no reported instance of combat between German and British jets (the use of the latter was largely restricted to the interception of V1's and, although at least “one Lockheed P-80 appeared briefly in Europe, it was not used in combat), it is difficult to make any conjecture as to what the results would have been of a more concerted jet production program.

Certainly no moderate increase would have prevailed. The numerical superiority of Allied fighters was overwhelming and their tactics infinitely superior. Outnumbered German jet pilots were in constant danger of being “boxed in” and frequently while jockeying for position would run out of fuel German pilots have expressed amazement at the range of American fighters and complained that their jets were misused by being started too early and often in the wrong direction.

Plane for plane, it would appear that the Luftwaffe had, or was close to having, fighter parity. The P-80 is only about 25 miles per hour faster than the Me-262. and pilots who have flown both suggest that this discrepancy could be compensated for by the elimination of certain extrusions on the German jet German scientists were ahead at the begin­ning but they were gradually losing ground. In a technological race, the pool of British American knowledge unquestionably would have won out over a country which for the past five years had been conducting its experiments in a tunnel of technical isolation. Specifically, British and American engineers working together succeeded in exploiting the intrinsic simplicity of turbine-powered aircraft while the Germans, hampered by metallurgical deficiencies and lack of a coordinated development program, sought to solve one complexity by adding another. German-built turbines, for example, due to a shortage of lightweight heat-resisting metals, were found to be much heavier than comparable units produced by the Allies, where as American metallurgical knowledge coupled with British experiments in jet pro­pulsion resulted in a more powerful engine for its weight than might have been produced by the same two countries working independently of each other.