The Story of the Fw 200 Condor (Part 2)

Fw 200 C-3. The brass exhaust pipes are the big visual clue for the later engine.

Two Condors over the ocean.

(Part 1 can be found here.) 

Attack of the Nazi Big Birds

    When the Condor crews of KG 40 returned in January, they picked up where they had left off, and sank 64,000 tons of shipping, while loosing only a single plane. A Condor C-3 had performed a strafing run on a tiny rescue tugboat, the HMS Seaman, and was totally surprised when the Seaman opened up with her quite modern AA armament: a 20mm Oerlikon cannon and two .50 machine guns. Running headfirst into this buzzsaw of fire, the Condor flopped into the sea, and its three surviving crewmen were captured. Intelligence gathered during interrogation of these POWs were the start of effective defenses against the Condors.

    In February 1941, a new tactic was tried. With U-boats nearby, Petersen sent five Condors against convoy HG 53, south of Portugal. Each Condor claimed a small ship, but the real advantage to this attack was that it caused the convoy to scatter. U-37 managed to slip inside the convoy during the night and sink three more merchantmen. Convoy OB 287 was spotted off of Iceland and was attacked by a KG 40 Condor daily for five days, sinking 2 ships and damaging three. And, in a first, a Condor managed to shadow a Convoy until a wolfpack could show up; the resulting attack that night claimed 9 merchant ships. On Febuary 26th, another multi-aircraft attack was launched on convoy OB 290. Only four Fw 200s were sent, but they somehow managed to bag seven merchantmen between them – and again the convoy scattered, and U-47, commanded by Gunther Prien, managed to get amongst the ships that night and sink three more ships. In two months, the Condor had managed to sink 173,000 tons of shipping – or if you prefer, 46 ships. During the same period, U-boats sank only 60 ships!

    Fortunately for the Allies, this was the apex of the Condor's success. In early march, the high sortie rate KG 40 had managed caught up with them, and flights were few. KG 40 also returned to direct Luftwaffe control. When Goering returned from his Christmas vacation, he immediately started to mewl to Hitler at how unfair it was that the Kriegsmarine got its own planes.  After two months Hitler, possibly just tired of hearing his bad lieutenant's endless bitching, decided on compromise. He returned control of the Condors to Goering, but created Fliegerführer Atlantik (“flyer command  Atlantic”) to help air co-ordination with the Navy.  General Harlinghausen was appointed the new head of this command, and it must be said he really did try his best to improve inter-service cooperation. Unfortunately, if some general above him got an idea as to how to use the unusual airliner-bombers, nothing much could be done, and the U-boats would find  themselves without recon aircraft. The fact that the Condor was also a transport would exacerbate this tendency, as the  Nazi war machine was going to have many emergency evacuations. Commander Petersen in March onward of 1941 was busy establishing new wings in KG 40, with KG 40/II using the new Dornier 217, and KG 40/III using He 111s. These conventional bombers were often reassigned from anti-ship operations to supporting other Luftwaffe ventures – often conventional bombing raids against the UK.  All in all, KG 40 was a low priority for resources, though they were first in line when an appropriate new bomber was deployed. They were the first squadron to get the Dornier 217 (in March 1941) and were among the first squadrons to re-equip with the He 177, once it became available.

    The convoys, on the other hand, were starting to get some resources to fight the Condor threat. The Royal Navy's first attempt at hunting Condors in late 1940 was to equip a Q-ship with many AA guns, and have it sail in the straggler position behind the convoy. This it did, seeing absolutely nothing for two months before being sunk by a U-boat. (I'm guessing they didn't tell Churchill about that one.) Another, much more desperate plan was considered: remember that the British had gotten their mitts on an pre-war Danish Fw 200? There was a plan afoot to disguise it as a Fw 200 C, fill it up with commandos and explosives, and then have this Cuckoo bird land at Bordeaux. Then, commandos would blow up as many Fw 200s as possible.  It never came off, probably because while there were plans for the commandos to escape in their plane, realistically, it was a suicide mission. The CAM (Catapult Aircraft Merchantman) ships were another risky improvisation. A normal merchant ship with an aircraft catapult, CAM ships were one-shot air cover: mounted on this catapult was an older fighter that the British could spare (usually a Hurricane Mk.1 or a Blackburn Skua) that would fling itself into the sky via rocket powered catapult. There, the  aircraft could hopefully shoot down the Condor intruder, and then ditch into the sea, where the pilot would (even more hopefully) be recovered by the convoy. While they would claim a few Fw 200s, the CAM ships in general were a poor use of resources – planes had to sit exposed on the catapult in all weathers, which meant pilots would sometimes be flung into the sky, only to discover their airplane wouldn't fly! It also tied up some 2 squadrons worth of pilots, who were elsewhere needed.

A CAM ship.

Meanwhile, after the roaring start to 1941, the Condors were having trouble. March was lost just recovering from the operational tempo of January and February, and April saw the Condors encounter for the first time foes in the air. A CAM ship made their first Condor kill, with the CAM pilot successfully ditching and being rescued, and Bristol Beaufighters provided air cover for the first time west of Ireland – one fighter bagged itself a Condor on April 16th. By May, the failure of KG 40 to provide useful intel so annoyed Donitz that he began sending his submarines further than the Condors could fly – and was rewarded immediately with a string of sunk merchantmen. In truth, while the Condor crews were mastering the difficult art of finding convoys for the U-boats, the jobs of shadowing and attacking were becoming steadily more challenging  for the modified airliner. After a five plane attack on a convoy came to naught off of Portugal in June, the order went out that Condors were to restrict their attacks to lone vessels, not convoys. From March to June, only four small ships would be sunk by the Condors.

       In June, Major Petersen performed his final flight with KG 40. He and the nine best Condor crews from KG 40 were sent to Greece, where they conducted a bombing raid against ships in the Suez canal. This is something the Luftwaffe had been doing for awhile, hoping to sink enough ships to render the strategic waterway useless to allied shipping, and apparently thought it worthwhile to try with Fw 200s. (It's also possible this mission was put together just to humiliate General Harlinghausen and/or Fliegerführer Atlantik. The failure of Fliegerführer Atlantik to support the Bismark on her sally into the Atlantic in any way was seen as egregious by High Command, and Harlinghausen found himself the target of many fingers pointing blame.) Three Condors were lost on the raid, and it did little aside interfere with Atlantic operations. Petersen was then sent to Berlin, where he was put in charge of trying to get the He 177 out of the "spontaneous fire" doldrums the program had been in. Performing well at this job, he spent the rest of the war in command of the Luftwaffe testing squadron, which flew the Me 262, the He 219, and the Me 410 before they saw combat. When the war ended, the unit was in the middle of testing the Dornier 335 'Arrow.'

       With Petersen gone and the operational environment toughening, the last 6 months of 1941 saw little success. Having sunk only four small ships for a total of 10,000 tons, the Fw 200 was having increasing trouble in accomplishing its mission, let alone act as an effective bomber. These troubles coincided with a new player in the Battle of the Atlantic. If previous bets the Royal Navy made were long shots that didn't pay off, then another idea now entering service would score the jackpot – one that would not only be an effective counter to the Fw 200, but would also be an enormous asset in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. The Hannover, a German merchantman captured at the start of the war, was turned into the appropriately named HMS Audacity, the first escort carrier. Only carrying 6 aircraft, which she had to carry on her flight deck as she had no elevators, the Audacity's Martlets (the British name for the Grummun Wildcat) were highly effective at shooting down Condors, claiming four in her very brief career. Once a Condor was shot down, KG 40 gave Audacity's convoys a wide berth, and convoy losses plummeted. HMS Audacity herself was soon a victim of the U-boats, and was sunk in the  battle of convoy HG 76 in December 1941. An important battle in its own right, HG 76 fended off a determined attacks by U-boat wolf packs  and marauding Condors overhead. After sinking several U boats, one submarine managed to close when Audacity was exposed and torpedo her. The next day after Audacity was sunk, a Condor returned to shadow the convoy again, only to find it was sharing the airspace with a new hostile – an RAF B-24 long-range patrol plane. While the Audacity's career was brief, her success against deterring the Wolfpacks and Condors was inarguable, and she was the first of an incredible 130 escort carriers the Allies would launch during World War 2. 

HMS Audacity, with her interesting naval camouflage.

Pining for the Fjords

    The end of 1941 saw two small additional events: the failure of Nazi Germany to destroy the USSR in six months, and the entry of the United States into World War 2. Donitz as always tried to get the maximum return on his submarine fleet, and sent his U-boats to the North American coast. The result was a second happy time for the U-boats. At the same time, nearly all the anti-shipping assets the Luftwaffe had in the west were relocated to Norway, where they would strike the Allied arctic convoys. KG 40/I and its Condors were relocated to Trondheim, and KG 40/III, still at  Bordeaux, began trading their He 111s for Fw 200s. Beaufighters had started to patrol the Bay of Biscay – and shot down a Condor on January 2nd – but it was hoped that a new Condor wing could continue in reconnaissance - even if Fw 200s over the Bay of Biscay now had to be escorted by fighter wings of Ju 88s. Reconnaissance continued through 1942, though the low level bombing attack that characterized the happy time of the Fw 200 was actually forbidden by command, to preserve Condor numbers.

This was also around the time two extra crewmen were added to man defensive emplacements full time. Not an assignment I'd relish if I were a airmen - 'Yeah, our planes are very vulnerable to enemy aircraft and keep getting shot down! We need you to man a gun turret on one of these planes which will hopefully help the situation.'

In Norway, KG 40/I Fw 200s reverted to it's original mission of scouting the seas, and did very little attacking. For a time, flights were made to recon Reykjavik harbor and its regular convoy departures. Predictably, this didn't take long to go wrong - a Fw 200 became the first plane shot down by the USA in the European theater, when a C-3 on the Reykjavik run was intercepted and shot down by a P-38 and a P-40 . KG 40/III meanwhile, spent early 1942 on training missions. In May, they started operations against the Gibraltar convoy. Like the Condors in Norway, they restricted themselves to recon, and did not attack. As summer started, it seems everyone had written off the Condor as a second-line aircraft. Letters from KG 40 and Fliegerführer Atlantik to central command all say “don't bother developing the Fw 200 anymore; just give us the replacement.” And frankly, they had a point. If a Condor was caught by a fighter, only handy cloud cover would let the Condor survive.

A Condor C-8 with distemper camo and radar in Norway, 1944.

The Condor had help in the recon role in Norway, frequently being assisted by the Blom & Voss 138 'Sea Dragon.' With three diesel powered engines and a look that gave the BV 138 the nickname 'the flying clog', it was one of Blom & Voss's more sedate designs.

In the fall of 1942, KG 40/I began to receive He 177s – but they were so unreliable that the wing was forced to stick with their  Fw 200s. The other potential replacement, the Ju 290, took its first flight in August, and it looked like everything Fliegerführer Atlantik had been dreaming of. The militarized version of the Ju 90 airliner Petersen looked at way back in 1939, the Ju 290 had double the range of the Condor and a 100 km/h faster speed. Perhaps most importantly, it had been properly modified for military flying. But once again, the plane-jane of the Luftwaffe was to have her heart broken: the first 10 Ju 290s were finished as unarmed transports. In the escalating military crisis the Third Reich found itself in, transport capability was so critical even the original Ju 290 prototype was pressed into service for evacuations.

    A slight consolation was the introduction of the C-4 variant in that same fall of 1942. In addition to the new bomb-sight, radar was finally being introduced to Condor units – though the same dearth of resources affected even that upgrade. KG 40 Fw 200s had been trying prototype radars for most of 1942 - even using a set salvaged from a crashed allied plane - but in the fall of 1942 at least half of the Big Birds at Bordeaux were still without radar. The U-boat campaign had moved far beyond the range of the Condor - first to America's east coast, then onto the Caribbean – which meant even recon missions were far less needful. This bordering on obsolescence is perhaps why KG 40/III would be remarkably aggressive in the attack role.

        In December 1942 KG/III used it's new C-4s on a daring bombing raid. By this time Operation Torch had started, and the United States had invaded West Africa. Despite command officially rejecting the plan, one plucky Major sent 11 C-4s from Bordeaux to attack convoy UGS 3 arriving at the port in Casablanca. Eight Condors made the harbor, a distance of some 2000 km from Bordeaux, and bombed ships there, though little damage was done. Flak damaged three Condors, one of which crash landed in the Canary Islands, with the other two wounded birds running out of fuel and landing in Spain. The crews were returned, minus their aircraft. (Quite a few Condors ended up crashing or landing on the Iberian peninsula. Initially, crews and aircraft (when possible) were returned to German hands. As the war began to go poorly for the Nazis, only the crews came back.)

A Condor C-4 with radar and the later turret; two C-4s start a convoy attack on the front of a model kit box.

Then, the Condors of KG 40/III – in fact, all the Condors the Luftwaffe could get into the air – were then sent to the Stalingrad airlift. Sending modified airliners through winter storm and stiff enemy defenses went as well as you can imagine, though Fw 200s did manage to bring in 36 tons of supplies, and evacuate 136 very lucky troops before the main airfield at Stalingrad was lost. After this, Condors dropped bomb-like resupply canisters by parachute. When Stalingrad fell at the end of January 1943, some Condors were used as deep-interdiction bombers, flying far behind enemy lines to bomb bridges and railways in a desperate bid to slow down the implacable Soviet advance. The Soviets around this time captured a Fw 200 on the ground, and put it on display in Moscow. The technical analysis of the Fw 200 left the Soviets somewhat disappointed – they noted the similarities between it and the DC-3, which they already had access to having licensed the design in the 1930s – and also noted that it was not what they were hoping for: a German B-17. The Germans could sympathize.

To be honest, Condor production should have ended at this point, at the end of 1942, when the Fw 200 served beside its replacements at the Stalingrad airlift. That it didn't was a common story in Nazi war production: by that time the need to make up losses was so desperate that obsolete designs were kept in production. The Ju 290 never materialized fully as a replacement. By the later part of '43, the battle in the Atlantic had swung decisively against the Germans, and Adm. Donitz wanted Ju 290 production prioritized. Donitz had gotten the Hitler fully on his side, and both of them requested more Ju 290s for maritime recon. Goering stood firm against production increases, essentially holding the Ju 290 hostage for petty political reasons. Goering wanted 'overall precedence in armaments production' which his rival, minister of armaments Albert Speer didn't want to do – at least with Goering in charge. When Hitler and Speer declined Goering's condition to do this, production was kept at a minimum, (only 50 throughout the war) and the Luftwaffe itself had many uses for the innovative transport. In fact, Ju 290 production was stopped at the same time as the Fw 200, for the same reason the Fw 200 was drafted in the first place: bad  planning. In 1944, Luftwaffe losses fending off Allied strategic bombers skyrocketed to untenable levels, and too late, aircraft production was shifted to fighters.                     

              

The End of a Fw 200, in the second picture: literally. I wasn't kidding about the tail tending to fall off.

Don't Call it a Comeback

    Back to 1943. After Stalingrad, the Condors returned to the Atlantic, though KG 40/I was now starting to get the hang of the He 177. Though the Norway wing of KG 40 would retain some Condors for scouting (using them operationally as late as 1944), they would be replaced by the 'Grief' heavy bomber.  KG 40/III at Bordeaux would become the primary Condor operator. The focus in 1943 was to be on the Gibraltar - Liverpool convoy, to try and disrupt the increasing Allied strength in Africa. No coincidentally, this convoy also ran the furthest from Allied air cover – while escort carriers and long range patrol planes could appear, most of coastal command was now focused on sinking U-boats crossing the Bay of Biscay.

    Returning to ship strikes in March 1943, the Fw 200 began to score kills again off the Portuguese coast.  A new tactic had been devised by the officers of KG 40/III: using the C-4's upgraded bomb sight, Fw 200s would attack from medium altitudes – about 10,000 ft. While bombing ships from 3000m sounds daft, even a near miss from a bomb could be fatal to a merchantman who's damage control abilities were marginal at best. The sinking of a 6000 ton freighter was the first kill a Condor had achieved in over a year. Several more cargo ships were sunk over the next two months by the birds from Bordeaux. The Fw 200, however, was not the only one who had gotten a radar upgrade; convoys now frequently had radar, and escort carriers could now detect the lumbering Condors with enough time to dispatch interceptors. KG 40 was scoring merchant ships, but was often trading ships for aircraft. In 1943, Fw 200s would sink eleven merchant ships...at the cost of 18 Condors shot down.  Beaufighters, carrier-borne Seafires, and for the first time, Mosquito fighter-bombers all claimed Condors. The Allies had more or less perfected their inter-service cooperation, as well. Signals intelligence officers were stationed aboard Navy warships, monitoring KG 40 radio traffic and passing early warning to Coastal Command.  The biggest success in this period was KG 40's attack on the “Faith” convoy. “Faith” was the codename for a fast convoy of three large troopships and three escorts. Condors attacked and managed to set on fire two of the three troopships, with 1,500 troops being transferred to the third vessel when the first two were abandoned. The third ship tried to make Gibraltar, when more Fw 200s returned to finish the job. Only the appearance of two PBY Catalinas drove off the attackers, saving at least 2000 troops in the process.

     For the rest of the summer of 1943, Condors continued to raid convoys and sink ships, but unlike the last period of success, these raids caused little panic among the allies. Increased air cover was recognized as the right solution, and Coastal Command now had Beaufighter Xs, Mosquitoes, and B-24s to do just that. In an example of how badly the Fw 200 was outclassed at this point, the B-24 became an effective interceptor of the Fw 200, as it was nearly 100 km/h faster than the Fw 200, stoutly built, and bristling with machine guns. On anti-submarine patrol off of Portugal, B-24Ds of the USAAF 480th Antisubmarine Group engaged Fw 200s seven times that summer, shooting down four. By the end of the summer of '43, Condor attrition was such that KG 40 was down to a dozen Fw 200s, and KG 40 threw in the towel. Long range naval recon would be done from now on by the newly formed Fernaufklärungsgruppe 5 (FAGr 5) equipped with the vastly superior Ju 290. This was not the end of the Condor's combat career: developments in other fronts had given the Germans new ideas as to what the fragile aircraft could do.

    Way back in the start of this story, you may remember the formation of Fligercorps X, the anti ship attack specialists. While they were formed to attack British shipping, most of X's formations seem to have served elsewhere, in the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black seas. In early 1943 in the Mediterranean, Fligercorps X had a string of successes using the first anti-ship missiles. The Fritz X anti naval ship missile sunk the modern Italian battleship Roma, the start of a sea change (if you pardon the pun) in naval warfare. The HS 293 was more of a guided bomb than a missile, and it had taken a heavy toll against Allied invasion ships supporting operations in Italy. Both of these devices had an excellent cost-to-return ratio, and didn't require naval bombers to be very close to their attacking targets.

    Flyer Atlantic looked at these operations and saw a new way to crimp Allied supply lines. With the current generation of U-boats conceding defeat in the battle of the Atlantic, KG 40 dreamed of smashing allied convoys with their rag-tag fleet of bombers, flying boats, and whatever else they had, all mounting the new bombs. As this was a fairly desperate project, any viable airframe would do; and once again, the Fw 200 was needed. Ditching its bombs, the Fw 200 was modified in later 1943 to carry two HS 293 guided bombs in under its wings, and had its gondola extended to handle the controller. It also had to share electricity and engine coolant with the new bombs, to keep the weapon perpetually 'warmed up' while in flight. The flaw in this plan, at least as far as the Condor was concerned, is that this stand-off weapon was not nearly stand-off enough. The Condor's previous attack method at least allowed aiming by radar, which allowed the Fw 200 cover in certain bombing conditions; the HS 293 had to be visually guided in by joystick by the bombardier, which stripped even this meager defense.

 Apparently the only picture extant of the Fw 200 mounting the HS 293s. Below, somebody else's 1/72 model Condor C-8 with HS 293s.

This new upgrade did little to render the Fw 200 a viable combat aircraft again, though as a larger campaign it had the potential to help. It seems that Condors would join massed bomber formations to attack convoys, one or two Fw 200s chucking their glide bombs amid the larger chaos of the attack. Fw 200s on several occasions attacked convoys in early '44 on their own, but the record records few, if any, successes. One problem now was by 1943, the veteran aircrews had decided that the Condor was obsolete, and if they were officers or had decorations, they transferred to more conventional Luftwaffe bombers. Another problem was even more familiar – diversion of scant resources. In early '44, most of the remaining Luftwaffe bombers engaged in anti-shipping operations were drawn into the last London Blitz, flying not against the massing Allied invasion fleet but against London as 'vengeance' for Allied air attacks on German cities. After the Normandy invasion in June, the Third Reich experienced a distinct decline of interest in Naval matters, and remaining Condors sat idle at the edge of airfields until the war's end.  As fuel was now even scarcer than transport missions in the thousand year Reich, quite a few of these idle birds were captured at the end of World War 2.

sad gallery of captured or abandoned Fw 200s. The first is from Norway, the second is a Fw 200B. The third is a C-8 rigged for the HS293, being examined by American troops.

Unlike some other captured warplanes, interest in the Condor was minimal. Western Allies put on display for a time Heinrich Himmiler's personal Fw 200, which apparently had some sort of escape pod rigged on it. The Soviets demonstrated the most interest in captured Fw 200s, using them as transports back in Russia in the late 40s, until accidents or lack of spares rendered them inoperative. Spain also had a small clutch of Condors they had interred when they had landed. Converting them back into airliners, they were used in the late 40s until, like the Russians, they were rendered inoperative due to lack of spares.

    Given the low production and distinct lack of sexiness in its design, it won't surprise you that no Fw 200 survives to this day. Happily, this may soon change: Lufthansa and the German Museum of Technology have been restoring one airplane made from two wrecks found in Norway. While still many years from completion, this one remaining Condor will be remade back into an airliner. That seems fitting. While the Condor as a combat plane had a short period of extraordinary success, this was followed by several years of pain and suffering, as the brief window of events that allowed the Condor that great success closed. Its whole career was an object lesson in both how ad-hoc and badly planned many Nazi procurement decisions were: the Fw 200 was drafted due to bad planning, had the majority of its unit run after it had become obsolete, and had its replacements neglected, simply because the Luftwaffe (particularity Goering) saw inter-service cooperation as a waste of resources. Given all that, rebuilding the last Condor as an airliner makes perfect sense: it is as an airliner alone that the Fw 200 was uniquely successful.