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| Luftwaffe Aircraft Manufacturing, 1945. |
The death of the Luftwaffe as a effective force is dated by historians to Operation 'Baseplate', which happened on January 1st, 1945. This was the last large coordinated action by the Luftwaffe, and not coincidentally, also its single greatest day of losses.
Hitler was among other things a gambler, and the 'Watch on the Rhine' winter offensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge, of ‘44 and early ‘45 was his last “all in” bet, taking his last reserves of men and material to try and make a comeback. While the Luftwaffe was being ground down by constant losses in the fall of ‘44, General Adolf Galland, the Inspector-General of Fighters, was husbanding what fuel he could for “the big sweep”, a moment when the Allies would send a 1000 bomber raid at Germany, and every Luftwaffe fighter extant would take off to intercept the bomber stream, hopefully overwhelming escorts and doing heavy damage to the strategic bombing force. Hitler noticed these reserves and assigned them into the last roll of the dice. While understandable, this move caused consternation among Galland and the Luftwaffe Generals. The reserves Galland had been saving were fighters, ones made in the production emergency of the summer of `44, and most of the pilots were trained as fighter pilots. Hitler mashed all these reserves into ground support with literally no training in ground support.
“Baseplate” was a planned operation to support “Watch on the Rhine”. On the first day of the offensive, 1000 fighters would simultaneously attack the ten nearest Allied air bases, hopefully surprising aircraft on the ground and crippling the marauding fighter-bomber wings that had been such a drag on Army maneuvering. The plan also was timed to take place in the worst of the winter weather, that would hopefully ground the Allied air forces entirely.
The Germans, through strict operational security managed total surprise on the opening day of the offensive, December 16th, 1944. But the signal for “Baseplate” was never given. All day on December 16th, a heavy fog hid the ground, and “Baseplate” was put on hold. None the less, the Luftwaffe, flying extra-low to fox Allied radar managed some 600 sorties to support troops on the ground, and flew around 300 sorties that night, using even night fighters to attack Allied columns. The Luftwaffe also attempted to land paratroops that evening, and this was a fiasco, unless you like the phrase “literally scattered by the wind.” [footnote 1] Then the weather closed in completely.
When the sky cleared on December 24th, the Luftwaffe flew into action - as did the Allied air force. While the first ever jet bombing sortie happened that day with Arado 234s, this was a footnote to fleets of Allied aircraft counter-attacking. The Allies hit the nearest ten Luftwaffe airfields, causing severe damage. On the 25th of December 1944, Allied Ground forces went on the offensive.
That would have been the end of it, but on December 31st, teletypes chattered the opening signal to Baseplate. The Luftwaffe all-in bet was being played, as maybe it could turn the stalled offensive around.
While the Luftwaffe was going to muster all it could for these strikes, most of these were Bf 109s and Fw 190s. The actual raid itself took off at dawn, around 900 aircraft strong, and succeeded in tactical surprise. By the estimate of Alfred Price in The Last Year of the Luftwaffe, half the attacks were effective, with one field, Eindhoven, being surprised when RCAF Typhoons of 438th and 439th squadrons were taxing for takeoff - both squadrons nearly lost all their aircraft.
It is only in the immediate aftermath the pyrrhic nature of this victory became clear. The Allies had lost many aircraft on the ground - but fortunately very few pilots. While it might take January before affected squadrons were back up to strength again, this was a matter of getting new aircraft delivered. In stark contrast, the Luftwaffe lost a
third of its attacking pilots, irreplaceable at this juncture. Also irreplaceable were “experienced leaders, including three Geschwader commanders, six Gruppe commanders and eleven Staffel commanders. [...] The disaster was an object lesson in what happens if airmen are forced to do battle in a manner quite different from that for which their training has prepared them.” [Price, p96]
While individual units would fight on till German surrender, the Luftwaffe's ability to conceivably affect enemy strategic operations was now past. Whatever ground attack units survived were soon transferred back to the eastern front. Piston engine aircraft, needing 100 octane avgas, would find their operations severely curtailed by fuel famine as well as enemy operations. Some 3,000 Luftwaffe aircraft would in fact survive the war, carefully camouflaged and dispersed around hidden airfields. In fact, Price relates this anecdote:
“Leutnant Hans-Ulrich Flade, a Bf 109 pilot with II./JG 27, recalled that if a fighter were damaged it was simpler to get a new one than to make repairs:
We simply went to the depot nearby, where they had hundreds of brand new 109s - G-10s, G-14s and even the very latest K models. There was no proper organization any more: the depot staff just said, 'There are the aircraft, take what you want and go away'. But getting fuel - that was more difficult...” [Price, p.107]
As for fuel:
Hauptmann Roderich Cescotti, an Fw 190D pilot and Gruppe maintenance officer with II./JG 301, described the difficulty of obtaining aviation fuel for his aircraft during the early months of 1945:
Getting fuel for the fighters was not so much a logistics operation, more an intelligence battle. We would send tankers on circuitous journeys, picking up 5,000 liters in one place, 2,500 liters at another; sometimes it might take as long as a week to collect the twenty tons of fuel needed for a single fighter operation. (Price, p108)
This wastage of pilots and failure at pretty much all points precipitated more drama. General Galland, who apparently had stopped giving a fuck about decorum, was critical of high command - particularly Goering. Galland was dismissed from his post of Inspector General of Fighters on January 10th, and was presumably told to go die in a fighter. The General would form Jagdverband 44, a fighter unit that is sort of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup of Nazi Jet fighter formations. Meanwhile, the remaining fighter pilots were so disturbed by Galland’s firing that they presented a letter to Goering, requesting a restructuring of the fighter force, Galland’s reinstatement, and the shitcanning of some of the Reichmarshall’s appointees in high Luftwaffe positions - which Goering naturally took as a attack on himself, got very angry, threatened to have everybody shot as defeatists, and stormed out - in other words, the boilerplate fascist response to criticism at this juncture.
The point of this rather long intro is to tell you how badly the Luftwaffe is broken by 1945, which is to say more or less totally. While (in an irony) jets could fly on much lower quality fuel, even kerosene, their numbers would remain small. Other new aircraft were too late to be introduced. The Ta 152, the Do 335 ‘Arrow’, and the new Heinkel 162 Volksjager (folk fighter) jet were too late, and either saw extremely limited operational use, or no use at all.
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| A squadron of He 162s awaiting their new British owners. |
So, what about Amerika bombers?
The German aviation industry at this juncture is famous for cranking out ideas that spanned to spectrum from merely implausible to downright insane. This is, believe it or not, a feature, and not a bug. At this point, any warm male body was being seized and shoved toward the battle line. In an effort to retain valuable personnel, German aviation firms began to pitch projects that they knew would never see the light of day. As they had to get the Nazi they were pitching it to excited, pitched projects had to be able to shift the war back into Germany’s favor. In order to do those two things, implausible to insane was the order of the day. In a way, production of aerospace ideas continued, simply because that’s the part of the system that remained after the other parts of it had been destroyed. Thanks to constant investment in aerospace research, and early interest in turbines and rockets, the Germans had ideas, if nothing else. The fact that to implement the ideas would take things that the Third Reich no longer possessed, like time and resources, was irrelevant.
When it came to strategic weapons, now that the Amerika bomber was functionally dead, all that was left now were ideas. Interestingly, a lot of these ideas would be technically much more ambitious than merely an Amerika bomber. This further meshes with Germany’s secret weapons programs, which were stepping in to the role the non-existent Amerika bombers failed to fill.
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| Sketch of the Ho XVIII. |
Horten's Flying Wings
Oh, there was one other thing driving Amerika bombers at this point: Adolf Hitler."Hitler conceded defeat on “Watch on the Rhine” on January 20th 1945. Descending into his death bunker in Berlin, on Jan 25th, Hitler ordered “the immediate development of a giant high-speed bomber with great range and corresponding bomb load.” While several firms had ideas to that end, work really couldn’t be started - with one exception.
The Horten Brothers and their flying wing designs, constructed from wood, fabric, and steel tubing, were something close to a Deus Ex Machina as far as the constraints of the German aircraft industry were concerned. The Horten designs used non-strategic materials, and had a story, at least, as how to greatly shorten development times. Previously, they had been made heads of a multi-manufacturer attempt to make an Amerika bomber flying wing. The linking of Horten with Gotha, Messerschmidt, and Heinkel was necessary, as while Horten had a lot of experience in designing interesting prototypes, they had no experience at all in manufacturing, or that manufacturing difficult manufacturing subtype, manufacturing in the last days of the Third Reich. In addition to physical making stuff skills, the other firms could bring to the table their considerable engineering expertise to the table, revising designs, both to make them better and more suitable for mass production. Before, Horten had avoided partnering with large aviation firms simply because they didn’t want the patents or their ideas stolen, regardless of how well advised such a move would be. So, this shotgun marriage, officiated by the RLM and their new investor, the SS, (they were white knighting the German Luftwaffe! Get it?! [...] ok) didn’t sit especially well with the Horten Brothers.
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| Horten 9 V2 before a test flight. |
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| Another shot from that day. If you are tallying up firsts, the Ho 229
might have been the first jet aircraft to adopt a upward stance while
on the ground to improve its takeoff roll. |
Horten did retain one important advantage, though. Thanks to the Ho 229 reaching the prototype stage, the Hortens were way out in front of this hot new flying wing trend. Developed out of the RLM’s very ambitious “3x1000” goal, the Ho 229 was in some ways decades ahead of its time. By the start of 1945, the first, unpowered prototype had flown (and had been given to Gotha, who revised the design, and began doodling their own flying wings while Reimar Horten stood in the background, arms folded, scowling at them.) The second prototype, Ho IX V2, [note that I really despise Roman numerals and am after writing the recognized designation, I’m just going to use the Arabic numerals] was completed in December 1944, and first flew in February 1945 - making two successful test flights and then another one, which was not so successful in that one of the engines flamed out, and V2 crashed, killing its test pilot. The program rolled on, with a series of prototype fuselages being started at Gotha. The V3, a fighter with Gotha revisions, was almost completed when the Gotha factory at Friedrichrota was captured by American troops. [footnote 2] With knowledge gained from the 229, the Hortens were working on the larger Ho VIII [8] prototype. The Hortens were spinning a lot of plates.
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| Horten 18. |
So in addition to these projects, the Hortens now had to work on the Amerika bomber the SS wanted. The Horten brothers spent Christmas 1944 drawing up a super flying wing. It shared the same basic shape of the Horten 8 and 9, but was was called the Ho XVIII [18.] Aside from the speed and specified bomb load, the other guideline the Hortens had was "no aerial refueling.” So the vast flying wing emphasized efficiency as much as possible. The landing gear would be jettisoned after takeoff, and takeoff rockets would be used to shorten the takeoff roll. While the Hortens had several takes of even the basic design, it had four to six turbojets embedded in the wings, with the intakes and exhausts embedded into the wing structure. These turbojets were hoped to be the Heinkel S 011 turbojets, but this was seen as a want rather than a need, and the Jumo 004Bs were reckoned “good enough” for now. Another take used eight turbojets, Jumo 004Bs or BMW 003s. I think the Hortens, even at the first step of the design stage was trying to create contingencies in case it was found that a certain turbine was too weak or too fuel thirsty. It’s certainly something I would do if the SS was always looking over my shoulder. The stated goal was an aircraft that could fly four metric tons of bombs (or one ‘special weapon’ which the Reich, had not made but when they did it was obviously going to be under four metric tons) to New York and return without refueling. It had a pressurized cockpit and a crew of just three, with some provisions for defensive turrets, either one off the cockpit or maybe some sort of remote turret in the rear of the aircraft. It was also supposed to make extensive use of wood and steel tube structures. [footnote 3]
The fact that the Ho 7 was under development at the same time may strike you as confusing, and let me assure you, it is. Just trying to nail down what the aircraft was supposed to be is an exercise in frustration. Griel says there was both a Trans-Atlantic recon version, with a trans-ocean range of 6500 km – but with 4000 kg of bombs, this radius dropped to 4000 km. The configuration varies from jets to turboprops. Details that show up in the Ho 18 often migrated to the 7. In a rather astonishing contrast, other sources online describe the Ho 7 as – a transatlantic passenger/cargo flying wing. Facts agree on is that a prototype Ho 7 had flown in a scaled down form, both as a glider and with small engines by 1945 (much like the Bolton Paul Libelula [Dragonfly]).
I’m honestly unsure as to where the truth lies. The Ho 7 as a transatlantic airliner makes a limited sort of sense if you assume it was a prewar project. The Ho 7 was apparently going to be considerably bigger than the Ho 18 – though also much less advanced, using BMW piston engines with less than 1000 hp, and have a speed and altitude capability of a late 1930s airliner. The Griel take makes more sense in late war Germany. It could be that while the mission and size change drastically, the same basic shape was going to be used. Instead of hauling passengers on the trans-Atlantic, it became yet another technological hedge. If for some reason the Ho 18A was terminated, there was yet another project waiting in the wings (pardon the pun), with all sorts of proposed variants. In the fantasy world where the Third Reich was going to strategically bomb things in the late 1940s, the Ho 7 could have also performed the necessary recon over the US east coast/ the Urals.
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| Colorized photo of the Ho 7 scale prototype. |
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| Ho 7 in flight. |
You may have noticed I slipped an A into the Ho 18 designation. This is also confusing: a month after Hitler demanded a big ol’ bomber RIGHT NOW, a meeting happened between Horten and Heinkel, Messerschmitt and Junkers on February 25th, 1945. The Hortens had been sending details on their latest ideas about the flying wing Amerika bomber, and was surprised and displeased to find the other manufacturers had their own input as to what should be done, like those makers considered themselves partners rather than subcontractors, or something! Instead of adhering to Horten’s pure flying wing, they were worried about stability, and they wanted a tail (DRAG) and external engines instead of internal ones (MORE DRAG), and a bunch of other things the Hortens felt were just diluting their vision. How much of this feedback was inspired by those firms all working on their own bespoke flying wing designs is unknown, but I’d say it played a part
So something really silly happened.
The project split into two groups. One, still using the Horten name, was composed of all the manufacturers in the meeting who’d objected. They were focused on the cheap and cheerful intercontinental bomber made from stuff they could source locally from Bavaria, or the German Alps, or wherever wasn’t in enemy hands when construction started. This project was called the Ho 18 B. Meanwhile, Horten went off to their own corner and continued working on the Ho 18 as they saw it; this project was called the Ho 18 A. Why this was allowed, and the motives behind this decision are beyond me.
The Ho 18 A, big surprise, retained its commitment to its flying wing form, but grew twin rudder-esque shapes facing downward, which also held fancy retractable landing gear. It retained a span of about 40 m (131 ft), and a max takeoff weight of 44,000 kg (97,000 lbs). Its range was estimated to be 11,000 km, (6,835 miles) which gave the magic 5500 km number to hit New York - from the coast of France. (I don’t think the SS men noticed this little fly in the ointment.) With a maximum speed of 852 km/h, and a max altitude of 52,000 ft, the projected performance was better than, well, almost any fighter at the time. God only knows if these were realistic numbers: from here on out performance estimates should be considered *very* speculative, if not deliberately inflated to impress Nazis. With an endurance of 27 hours, the Ho 18 (if it was using Jumo 004s, anyway) would need to swap and rebuilt its turbines after every Amerika attempt. It was hoped that prototype construction could start by late 1945. The Ho 18 B had a very similar performance envelope. The main revision was a large fuselage/tail structure, that was reminiscent of Dr. Lippisch’s infamous coal powered ramjet. It also used what look like conventional jet inlets underneath the fuselage, as well as more remote operated weapon stations.
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| Ho 18 B. |
In March 1945, the Hortens ended up in an office of Goering’s, where he said the Ho 18A had been accepted for production. (An alternate version is that Horten sold Goering on his take and got permission to start production.) It was hoped that a factory in Stuttgart that had been contributing bits for the Ba 359 ‘Natter’ program could be used in Ho 18 construction but Stuttgart was judged likely to fall to the Allies before construction could start. A site was made in Kahla, near the Czechoslovak border, with two giant bomb proof hangers being dug, and large concrete runways being constructed adjacent. The Ho 18 B *may* have even started construction - but every source points out that this construction apparently started on April 1st, 1945, and thus has to be considered dubious. Both Horton projects ended with the war, as did a prototype full scale Ho 8, which was 50% complete when American troops seized the production facility at Gottingen, a town near Friedrichrota.
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| The Ho 229 V3 at capture. |
Gary 7
With Messerschmitt, Junkers, and Heinkel now working on a Horten project of their own, it shouldn’t surprise you that in the brief window between January and May, plans were sketched out for many new cutting edge bombers, but few of them were targeted at Amerika bombing. Well, they sometimes claimed enormous ranges, but with one exception, I think it was just cruff to keep some Nazi from sending the whole drafting and engineering departments into the
Volksturm.
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| A Messerschmitt P.1107 variant. |
Messerschmitt had created two more prototype series, once they had moved from Augsburg during November 1944 to Oberammergau, a town in the Bavarian Alps next to the Austrian border, and the site of a Messerschmitt factory complex sunk beneath the hills. P.1107 was notable in that it was probably the last place bits of the Me 264 program got recycled. P.1107 saved time by proposing to use a now pressurized Me 264 fuselage, but the rest of the aircraft couldn’t be more different. P.1107 has a lot of different takes, but the design concentrated on a bomber that could make ~1000 km/h (630 mph) while carrying a 4000 kg bomb load, using four HeS 011 jet turbines. Variants on the design include defensive guns/no defensive guns, T-tail / Butterfly tail, wings so large as to make the design tailless, others with swept wings in a conventional fuselage. Range is cited as ~ 3500 km / 4500 km. The dream had a bit of ugly reality around the edges: the wings, including the wing box, were to be made of wood, with the wing box being constructed from ‘glued pine.’ Still, it was what you’d expect from 1945 - a dream of a late ‘40s / early 1950s Nazi bomber. Series production in 1948!
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| One of many Messerschmitt P.1108 variants. |
Being worked on at the same time was a very similar project known as P.1108, another very fast jet bomber that carried a 4000 kg payload. The innovations were now that Dr. Lippisch [footnote 4] had whipped up a full flying wing variant, which made greater use of steel and wood in construction. It also had a Frankfurt to New York passenger version, which makes me think Messerschmitt was producing a ‘backdoor pilot’ while disguising it as just another episode in the existing Third Reich TV series. (You know, the way on the original Star Trek the last episode in season 2 was all about a perfect magic man saving the 1960s earth with a hapless secretary and a pet cat? You know, Gary 7? Yeah, that was Gene Roddenberry producing a new pilot disguised as another episode, a backdoor pilot. I know it is an old TV show. I know Kirk fought a rubber lizard.
It's called the Gorn, BTW. Ugh, sometime I don’t know why I bother…) The last work was apparently done on P.1108 on 12th March 1945, where it was a tailless bomber with a steep wing sweep and a blended fuselage. After this, maybe, Horten 18B was enough - or maybe the Soviets drawing close to nearby Vienna brought other concerns to mind. Oberammergau was captured by the US Army on April 29th, 1945, where the secret facilities were discovered and then mined for interesting aeronautical development.
Heinkel, too, was sketching out bombers with trans-oceanic range in 1945. Like Horten, Heinkels designers seem to have liked the idea of a basic fuselage design that could scale up based on need, and the largest design weighed 60 metric tons. In Heinkel’s case, it was a ‘tailess’ aircraft, an airplane with a rudder but with wings most of the fuselage length. The design, which lacks a name, looked similar to the later Avro Vulcan, but I’m thinking would be a fair bit bigger. I say that as while the aircraft would only have a 3000 kg bomb load, it would have a range of 7,000 km! (4350 miles.) Checking the physical stats, it appears that the design was actually close in size to the Vulcan, which just to compare, could carry 9500 kg (20,944 lbs) of bombs and fly very high, cruising at mach 0.86 - but had a range of ‘only’ 4,000 km (2486 miles). Also, the four Hs 011 jet engines of Heinkel’s prototype made a total 26,448 lb-ft of thrust - while the four Bristol Olympus turbojets on the Vulcan made a total of 44,000 lb-ft of thrust - what I’m trying to say here is that I doubt this thing could perform as claimed. It was a good idea, I suppose, insofar as a very similar aircraft was used for decades by the RAF.
Somebody built a good model of the Heinkel project
One other doodle worth mentioning is that this future bomber featured the very futuristic concept of variable geometry wings: the outer wing sections would vary their sweep between 30 and 40 degrees.
These projects ended with the war. When the Soviets approached Vienna in late March 1945, Heinkel’s engineers threw their plans and designs into steamer trunks, and then set out west, surrendering to the US Army a few days later.
The BV 238 was, improbably, still existing in 1945, so Blohm und Voss get one more appearance in this narrative. The carefully camouflaged prototype was still at Schaalsee, apparently fully fueled and ready to fly. It met its end when Allied fighter bombers finally spotted the enormous aircraft, and strafed and rocketed it into oblivion. That’s the point everyone agrees on. What people don’t agree on is the date this happened (it seems this happened only a few days before the war’s official end, May 8th 1945), or who did the strafing. Some people have the prototype strafed by American aircraft, P-51s or P-47s, while others say it was RAF Tempest fighter-bombers, and even say that the BV 238 was a sort of honeypot; a trap that was only attacked when some important Nazi finally was going to escape in it. Aside from the most basic point - “it was destroyed” - I’ve no idea who is right.
The wreck of the aircraft was so big that even while scrapping it postwar, it had to be blasted apart with TNT to make the pieces manageable to transport. It was a sad end to a baffling project, one that likely arrived functional and ready for production because the bumblers at the RLM ignored it completely, as a sop for the Kriegsmarine.
One manufacturer who has not appeared in this tale before (at least as an aircraft maker) is Daimler-Benz. Strange to say, but as the air war began to become a serious issue for Germany, more manufacturers saw an opportunity to get their foot in the door as military aircraft makers. Engine manufacturer Daimler-Benz was one of these, and they certainly get credit for ambition: they wanted to build a mammoth aircraft to attack industry in North America and beyond the Urals in the Soviet Union. (Considering the ad-hoc names this project series went under, I’m guessing that this was a initiative of private industry, and not the RLM.) Daimler also teamed up with Focke-Wulf and Dr. Kurt Tank to consult on the design and engineering; another smart move, considering Focke-Wulf had been studying ocean crossing aircraft prewar, and were absolutely, positively at the limits of their manufacturing capacity. One other thing I have to give credit for is Daimler-Benz correctly analyzed a problem for any would-be Amerika bomber.
To get an aircraft to fly trans-oceanic distances and return without in-flight refueling required an enormous aircraft. This aircraft might be very good at long distance flying, but would be huge and likely pretty slow, so it wouldn’t be very survivable once air defenses acclimated themselves to the enemy. The ideal attacking and bombing aircraft, in contrast, had completely different characteristics. It would be able to carry a large bomb load and be fast enough to survive attacking heavily defended targets. So, why not make a composite aircraft, one to fly to the target, and a second to actually bomb the target? German interest in parasite fighters and composite aircraft showed that aircraft launching and docking with each other was possible. An additional advantage here is that while the Grosser’s job would remain the same, and thus the design could be re-used. The bomber, meanwhile, could be re-designed as experience was gained, much easier and cheaper than redesigning a new Grosser. This was known by the sumptuous, evocative name “Project A.”
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| Project A with bomber. |
Project A was, no surprise, crazy enormous, with a wingspan of 94 m (308') and a similar fuselage length. (The B-36 had to make due with merely 70m (230 ft) - even the H-4 ‘Spruce Goose’ had only a slightly bigger span of 98 m (321 ft). Most of Project A’s mass were in its vast wings; the fuselage and tail were proportionally insect-like in their thinness. In order to help load and unload its payload (an entire second aircraft) Project A had non-retractable landing gear that made project A a kind of flying aircraft hangar when on the ground. Propulsion was very hopeful, as engineers figured the motors could be mounted in faring over the wing’s leading edge. While I imagine the initial spec was “LARGE ENGINES OF BIG POWER”, for form’s sake Project A could take six of whatever was on offer: the most basic of which was six piston engines making at least 2500 hp, or 4-6 turboprops making approximately 7000 hp each. Project A’s range was quoted as being 8500 km, enough to attack most of the Northern hemisphere from Germany. The underslung jet bomber was also quite impressive.
If the carrier aircraft was focused on traveling hemisphere spanning distances, then the bomber was going to be a fast, hard hitter. Its bomb payload was 30,000 kg, which once again must be compared to the B-36’s 32,000 kg of explosives. It now occurs to me that the Damlier-Benz decided that instead of dreaming up a B-36 like aircraft, they were dreaming up a much larger aircraft that was going to haul a jet bomber, which would take off and dock from the much larger aircraft while in flight, which *would* have a B-36 level of bombs. I can’t decide if this was madness or lateral thinking at its best. Anyway, the bomber would have jet turbines, two or maybe just one really big one [TBD] and would have a total weight of 60-70 000 kg, which means its weapon payload made up half its weight.
In 1942-43-44, this concept was played with in design studies only, as the whole thing relied on the development of better engines - almost explicitly jet engines or turboprops. By 1945, Hitler’s demands caused the design to be taken off the shelf again. The jet bomber was axed, and it was replaced by a small menagerie of suicide aircraft. As mentioned, the Third Reich had done a fair bit of research on very tiny fighters, and docking and launching aircraft from other aircraft. Any one of these, (like those Me 328 pulsejet fighters, or the manned version of the V-1 rocket [called the Fiesler 103R Reichenberg IV], which Hanna Reitsch had successfully flown) could have been adapted to this role. The Japanese of course, had already deployed suicide manned missiles, the infamous Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka, so making the suicide planes was one of the few things the remaining bits of the aviation industry could have produced. While most German “realistically this kills the pilot” schemes usually left some “hope” that the pilot could survive (see the next post), the attack planes were explicitly death devices, needing their pilots with them unto death to properly deploy their shaped charge warheads. This twist on the previously sunny Project A was known, fittingly enough, as “Project B.”
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| Evolution: a kink in the wings, suicide craft |
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| "You don't need an ejection seat!" |
The rest of the plan was comically implausible by 1945, starting with how something as large as the Spruce Goose could do anything in the face of total air dominance by the Allies except suck and die. Engineers were kept working on it, though, until surrender, knowing how implausible it was, as it kept them from being issued a rifle, two grenades, and pointed in the rough direction of the invading Allies or Soviets.
Aside from Horten’s wings, the other manufacturer who was doing slightly more than trying to look busy on this subject was Junkers. They too had a project that had a flying prototype, the Ju 287, but in the meantime they pursued a back-to-the-drafting-table revision of their prototype bomber, while at the same time worked on a improved flying wing transcontinental bomber, giving Junkers surprising number of futuristic bomber ideas to fiddle with while the Reich burned. As Dessau was in eastern, soon to be known as East Germany, and thus would inevitably be captured by the Soviets and not the Western Allies, maybe they wanted to make *really* clear how useful they could be to the new boss.
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| Two shots of the Ju 287 V1 test mule. |
The Ju 287, with the reverse swept wings, you may remember from the last post. After a series of test flights to confirm the reverse swept wings worked in reality, Junkers had started on a second prototype, made a bit easier as Junkers embraced the parts-bin approach that had made the Ju 488 possible. The V2 had more engines, the pressurized cockpit from the Ju 388, and a large remote defensive turret. The work came to a sudden halt in the fall of 1944, as when you’ve deactivated all your bomber squadrons for lack of fuel, the development of new bombers frankly isn’t fun anymore. Junkers was ordered to resurrect the Ju 297 project and begin prototyping for series production in March 1945 for reasons that can only be guessed at. This produced a nice, half finished prototype for the Soviets to capture.
In the meantime, Junkers design staff had teamed up with DFS (the German glider institute) to design flying wings. By 1945 they had a concept for a flying wing bomber that was really similar to Arado’s E555, called the EF 130 (cue Arado folding its arms and glowering at Junkers in the background) but also had a flying wing transcontinental bomber for 1945, because why the hell not. One of these projects was submitted to whatever remained of the RLM just weeks before the war ended. Unlike the Horten’s Brothers designs, Junkers flying wing had a tail and something like a conventional fuselage structure - but this structure was blended seamlessly into the wings, making it something like the Me 163. Like quite a few post war jet aircraft, it positioned its air intake at the nose, being powered by 4-8 of the usual jet turbines blended into the wing, like the Horten designs. Like Project A, it had a project hemisphere covering 8500 km, while carrying 8500 kg (18,734 lbs) of bombs. The aircraft also had a distinctly postwar top speed of 1,030 km/h, or 640 mph. Tipping Junkers hand slightly, the wing also had easy conversions to passenger liner or cargo hauler for “postwar” use. As the RLM never got back to Junkers, it carries internal names only.
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| The Junkers SUCK IT HORTEN |
In addition to this, Junkers had been dreaming of a state of the art jet bomber. Incorporating swept wings, jet turbines embedded in the wings, and the tail and the defensive emplacement of the Ju 287, the EF 132 was a sleek, modern design, visually a hybrid of the later DH Comet and the B-47. This design had undergone wind-tunnel tests in January 1945 - though accounts vary as to how much further development happened. One claim is that the plans for EF 132 were hidden for a few months after Soviet capture, but the Soviets later found them - but according to to Luft ‘46.com, Junkers had a full scale mock-up constructed when the Soviets took possession of Junkers facilities, which doesn’t strike me as something easily hid-able from the Soviets. At any rate, the Soviets were impressed enough with the Junkers ideas that they let Junkers continue working on them, as a hedge against Soviet designers having problems with jet turbine bombers. This interlude lasted until October 1946, when Junkers personnel and their families were woken at three AM by NVKD and put on trains to Moscow. Junkers was now a prison design bureau.
End Note
So, you can see why when people talk about Amerika bombers, they typically frame it as some sort of tense, ticking time bomb situation. It's a good story hook, but the the reality is that none of the 1945 ideas had any possibility of being made, let alone effect the war in any way. I'm kinda sorry that the narrative just up and dies, but I feel being fact based precludes fireworks. As I’ve made clear, I think quite a few of the 1945 ideas were so out there that we have to look to ulterior motives to make sense of them.
Horten’s plans are the outlier here, as I think their efforts were at least honest, but I don’t think their efforts would have changed anything. Assuming a situation where they could have worked on their flying wings in peace (!), they likely would have run into the same problems Northrop had with developing the YB-49 just a few years later. Pure flying wings are very efficient at subsonic speeds – but you pay for that with some aerodynamic problems that are...pretty absurd. It’s worth pointing out that while all sorts of tailless aircraft would continue to be developed, the true flying wing was only attempted when flight avionics and computerized fly by wire controls had been refined to the point that the instability problems inherent in a flying wing could be tamed in the 1970s.
When I started this series I read The Wages of Destruction. Recently, I read a in-depth academic essay on German strategy in both World Wars. One thing that I got out of it was that the Germans in World War 2 thought escalation was the way to secure themselves the Greater German Reich. What they failed to understand was that there were other players in this game; and escalation always brought counter-moves. Even before the war started, German arms buildup so alarmed other nations that they took steps to contain the German threat. Hitler, naturally thought this was the hand of the sinister Jewish cabal, but if he had any self-awareness, he could have understood that this was in fact a rational move on the part of other nations; they saw Germany (with now Austria and Czechoslovakia incorporated into itself) clearly preparing for war, and that caused the other nations to also prepare for war and otherwise slow down this soon to be declared enemy. A similar thing happened with the Japanese; the more aggressively they pursued their empire, the more alarmed other nations became.
This is despite the fact that Nazi ideology had a deep-rooted fear of the nations bigger than them, particularly the United States and the USSR. Their vastly greater economies, directly or supporting others, was an enemy that was driving the creation of a much larger German Reich in the first place. But the constant escalation made it more or less inevitable that both nations would become involved. The invasion of the USSR was the acme of unintended strategic consequences. To quote a German commentator I once read: "Thus, by his onslaught on the Soviet Union, Hitler worked three miracles at once: he turned irreconcilable enemies, the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Saxons, into allies; he transformed recalcitrant and sullen subjects into Soviet patriots; and he finally persuaded the world to look upon the Soviet Union as the last bulwark of freedom." Making the USSR and friggin' Stalin into a good guy to the west is political magic barely comprehenable, and something that, well, went against the whole "fanatical anti-communist" thing the Nazis (and their later apologists) would profess once the holocaust was recognized as a PR error.
The Amerika bombers were in the end kinda similar. On the one hand, (or the curled fist if you will) the Americans getting involved in the war called for escalations, strikes against American cities, burning down the whole eastern seaboard from Halifax to Savannah. Any sort of strategic or tactical consideration was secondary to vengeance. Realistically, any analysis of trans-Atlantic strategic bombing as actually having some effect was contingent on - having actually achieved that vastly expanded empire. On the other hand (another curled fist, but one the Nazis were often blindsided by) was what its enemies would do if they escalated this way. The practical lessons of defending against strategic bombing were completely ignored, even though the Luftwaffe had been on both the giving and receiving ends of those lessons. Nazi ideology and Hitler only had a few hammers (tyranny, vengeance, and inflicting pain) so it's perhaps not surprising even a topic as esoteric as trans-ocean bomber fleets was seen as yet more nails.
I’ve one or two more posts on this topic, the first one very relevant to "do you think you'd do this and the enemy would do nothing?" Next, I want to briefly cover the ‘alternatives’ the Germans had in striking America....
Part of the America Bombers Series
Part 1: Black Gay Hitler
Part 2: Vague Plans and Flying Boats
Part 3: Walking on Sunshine
Part 4: Stuffing arrogant mouths
Part 5: Eris is Goddess
Part 6: Ragnarocky Road
Part 8: Rocket-Powered Daydream Death Notes
Appendix: A4 Guidance
[footnote 1] Of ~750 paratroops that took off in Ju 52s, only ~125 actually fell in under Oberst von der Heydte, local commander. The rest were killed when one Ju 52 crashed on takeoff, or were scattered well outside the drop zone, or were killed or critically injured on landing, thanks to winds twice the specified safe maximum. The fact that for many paratroops, this was the first time they had jumped out of an airplane might have had something to do with the high casualties. Worse, in German paratroop drops, equipment was dropped separately from the troops themselves, and of course all that was gone with the wind, as well. The only weapons von der Heydte’s men had were pistols and their sub machine guns - and because the drop was supposed to have happened the previous night, the crossroads they were supposed to hold and capture was now strongly held by Americans. Heydte’s men would hide in the forest and make light raids, retreating to the German lines when their ammo and food ran low. (Casualty figures from The Last Year of the Luftwaffe.)
[footnote 2] The prototype was going to be called the Gotha 229; it was being built in Gotha's factory with Gotha's revision to the Horten Brothers design. In an irony, Gotha had decided the radical design was too radical, and wanted to revise the design to cure the prototype's lateral stability problems. The RLM forced their hand and ordered a prototype series as-is. The Ho designation seems to be the more accepted nowadays; just be chill and don't start slapfights on wikipedia. Here's a citation: Revell Germany uses "Horten Go 229" which is a nice intelligible compromise for people searching via the Internet.
The captured Ho 229 would obviously go on to be famous. Captured by America, the V3 was also shown to the British, who liked the design enough that they considered completing it, only stopping because refitting wider British turbines were judged to be too much work. The V3 would then travel to America, where it would spend many decades in a Government warehouse. In the 1970s and 1980s, Northrop engineers studied the design when work started on the B-2 flying wing. Fame would eventually see it brought out of storage, and the Ho 229 V3 is currently being restored at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy aviation museum.
[footnote 3] This link from the Smithsonian on the Ho 229 claims that the wood and steel tube structures were just how the Hortens had been building their aircraft up until that point - and this was kept up as these materials were much cheaper. I mention this as post war, Reimar began claiming that much of the flying wing's design details were actually to minimize the flying wing's Radar Cross Section, or RCS - the measure of how strong a radar return gives. The Germans knew one fact about lowering RCS - that the DH Mosquito, constructed of wood, was a lot harder to spot on radar - so it seems fair to say this would have been an advantage of Horten's wings as well. Reimar went on:
In 1983, Reimar wrote in Nurflugel: Die Geschichte der Horten-Flugzeuge 1933-1960 (Herbert Weishaupt, 1983) that he had planned to sandwich a mixture of sawdust, charcoal, and glue between the layers of wood that formed large areas of the exterior surface of the Ho 229 jet wing to shield, he said, the "whole airplane" from radar, because ""the charcoal should absorb the electrical waves. Under this shield, then also the tubular steel [air-frame] and the engines [would be] "invisible" [to radar.]"” [from the above link].
There were many other claims along this line, and it created quite a tizzy in the Black Gay Hitler world, even though historians think the claims (aside from the first one) as being self-aggrandizing bunk. National Geographic produced a special on the subject, that lead to an accurate reconstructing of the Ho 229 and a measuring of its RCS by Northrop-Grumman. They did claim there was something to it aside from the obvious; and these claims were aggressively debunked by the Smithsonian.
[footnote 4] Dr. Lippisch had left Messerschmitt by 1943, after he finished designing the Me 163 rocket fighter. He's credited with several Messerschmitt related projects after this, so perhaps he was still used as a contractor; or perhaps he ended up at Oberammergau as a nice bomb-proof place far away from the Mittelwerk factory/death camp, and was happy to pitch.
