Chapter 4
1
Sources in addition to Irving: correspondence and interviews in June 1968 and 1976 with Oberst Petersen, former head of the Luftwaffe Test Centre, Rechlin; in June 1968 with Generalleutnant Vorwald, former head of the Technical Office, Ministry of Aircraft Production; and from a statement made by Professor Messerschmitt during a German television interview, channel ZDF on 17 February 1970.
Chapter 6
2
This statement seems incorrect. A two-seater bomber prototype Me 262A-2A-02 was completed at Augsburg as mentioned by Rust and Hess, and wrecked in the bombing raid of late February 1944. Another variant, Me 262A-2äU2, was a fast bomber having a plexiglass pulpit at the nose for the bomb-aimer. A Lotfe 7H bombsight was fitted together with bomb retention and release gear. Some authorities allege a long aerial along the fuselage for detonating bombs in mid air. Works no. 110484 was delivered to Rechlin in September 1944 and flew regularly until January 1944 when it was last logged and disappeared, possibly aboard the submarine U-234. Works No 110555 succeeded it. This aircraft was crashed behind American lines by a defecting pilot at Schrock/Lahn in March 1945.
3
The implication of this remark by Hitler appears to have been overlooked by the author. This fighter bomber was so fast that it did not need guns. A fighter bomber without guns is a bomber pure and simple. All explanations to the contrary were a deception to conceal the real purpose of why the Me 262 was a special-purpose bomber.
Chapter 7
4
Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Oberstleutnant von Below recorded in his memoir At Hitler’s Side (Greenhill Books, 2001) that Hanna Reitsch numbered among Luftwaffe pilots willing to fly kamikaze operations. Hitler was opposed to suicide missions but kept a list of volunteers. Von Below would have made Goering aware of this. The fact is, the Rhine bridges were not attacked by Luftwaffe kamikazes. Bearing in mind the date 7 March 1945 it may be that the intended purpose lay elsewhere.
5
Hitler had recognised his error at the latest by 9 January 1945 when, according to Toland J The Last Hundred Days (New York 1966) he comforted his secretary Traudl Junge, who had returned from a brief visit to Munich and described to him the horror of the heavy air raids on the city, assuring her that the nightmare would be at its end within a few weeks, because then the new jet fighters would have won back air supremacy over the Reich.
Chapter 9
6
Under international conventions to which all Western allies were signatories, the combat aviator descending by parachute is hors de combat and may not be fired upon until he lands when, provided he is not in neutral territory, he is fair game. (A paratrooper is not a combat aviator.)
Chapter 15
7
An alternative idea to supplementary fuel tanks developed originally for all fighters was to tow a fuel container with wings (Deichselschlepp). The aircraft drew on the fuel in the tank during the initial flight phase. These towed devices were proposed for the new jet bombers from 1943 onwards, and DFS trials with an Ar 234-B2 at Neuburg/Donau at the beginning of 1945 proved the value of the system. Heinz Bär flew the Me 262 Deichselschlepp trials. The fuel container looked like a one-tonne bomb fitted with wings and a tailplane and is generally described incorrectly as a towed bomb. (See Griehl, Luftwaffe over America, Greenhill Books, 2004).
8
This differs from the author’s account earlier where these nine aircraft were replacements for the twelve machines of 3rd Squadron/KG51 already operational from Northern France.
9
Officially, on 14 October 1947 Captain Charles E Yeager, USAAF, was the first man through the sound barrier flying the Bell X-1 but there have been claims, apparently not much disputed by the Americans, that a Luftwaffe-flown Me 262 achieved the distinction first. The statement by Kurt Wendel appears to be a non-controversial way of making the claim immediately postwar. A computer-based performance analysis carried out in 1999 at the Munich Technical University showed that the Me 262 could exceed Mach 1. The criteria involved commencing a descent with a minimum dive angle of between 40 to 70 degrees from above 30,000 feet.
10
The great mystery surrounding the Me 262 which remains to be resolved is why Hitler was so adamant that an obvious fighter aircraft was a bomber. If Major Walter Dahl IV Sturmgruppe /JG3 could talk about aircraft for three hours with Hitler and be ‘astonished at Hitler’s exact knowledge of technical details’, then Hitler knew the difference between a fighter and a bomber. Hitler decided to build the Me 262 fleet as ‘Blitzbombers’, a role so important for some reason that it outweighed all the advantages for the aerial protection of Germany provided by the machine as the world’s fastest fighter. It was explained by former Luftwaffe Generals Galland and Peltz that the Me 262 was a fighter aircraft and useless in the conventional bomber role. They put the whole affair in a nutshell by asserting that the Me 262 would only be useful as a bomber if required to carry a 50-kilo bomb of tremendous destructive effect capable of destroying a town, such that the bomb need not be aimed.
11
Oberstleutnant Christian is mentioned in the memoir of Oberstleutnant Engel, Hitler’s Army ADC, but oddly not in the memoir of von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC. On 26 November and 28 December 1942 at Führer HQ in the presence of Jodl, Christian argued strongly against Goering’s figures for a projected air drop at Stalingrad. Who gave him the figures, and who pulled the strings, remains unknown.