5
Tens of thousands of bombs fell on German cities and centres of industry in the six months between General Galland’s first flight in the Me 262 jet and the Insterburg airfield exhibition of November 1943. The German people were exposed to a rain of fire which claimed its victims young and old without mercy. The neglected Reich air defences were poorly equipped to prevent it. Many former leading senior Luftwaffe command and fighter-arm officers maintain today that the deployment of the Me 262 could have reduced substantially the extent of the catastrophe, and not a few of them consider that it would have turned the tide. The jet fighter success in the last months of the war proved that the Me 262 might have brought the incessant flow of Allied bombers over the Reich largely to a halt.
Unceasing operational missions and a high casualty rate had made the air-war critical for both sides. Initially the Allies were short of fighter escorts and suffered almost intolerable losses on bomber operations. As time progressed it became clearer that the Luftwaffe was short of materials and fuel. Its ability to defend Reich air space was weakening, and this gave Allied fliers the hope that total air supremacy was just around the corner.
On the German side, fighter and bomber crews alike operated as a force hopelessly inferior in numbers and stretched to the limit by the excessive demands made upon them. Enemy bomber streams were becoming ever larger, fighter escorts faster and by virtue of longer ranges able to protect the bombers far deeper into Germany than hitherto. The Luftwaffe fleet of obsolete bombers and mainly obsolete charismatic fighters was simply no match for their opponents. They knew it and it affected their morale: only a flier who has experienced the sensation personally can know the sickening dread before a hopeless mission with the odds stacked against him.
To put it in a nutshell, there were too few pilots, too few machines, those machines in service were too slow and fuel was scarce. In the air Luftwaffe fighters had to chance the enormous field of defensive fire of the four-engined bombers, yet they knew the enemy’s airborne radio and radar technology was superior. But despite it all a miracle happened and in these six months hundreds of enemy bombers were destroyed in raids on Berlin, Schweinfurt, Bremen, Münster and Marienburg.
Regarding the American losses alone Galland commented in Die Ersten und die Letzten:
Of course, with the increase in squadron strengths the losses also rose. According to US statistics their bomber arm lost 727 aircraft over Europe in the first ten months of 1943 . . .
This notable success was achieved by German fighter men operating under the severest combat conditions, and most of them were not flying the modern Fw 190 but the Me 109 and at night the slower Me 110 two-seater. It is difficult to estimate how much greater their success might have been if throughout they had had faster fighters with longer range, the Me 262 especially, which though present in smaller numbers was certain to have swelled Allied bomber losses. But the wrangling over the aircraft went on and on. By the time that Erprobungskommando 16 was testing the Me 163 rocket fighter operationally at Bad Zwischenahn near Oldenburg in July 1943, there was still no talk of series production let alone operations.
There was a number of reasons for this state of affairs. Hitler’s trust in Goering had wavered. When the Reichsmarschall obtained an audience with Hitler, he no longer had his former influence. It was therefore not to be expected that Goering might achieve a higher priority for Me 262 series production. Probably the most telling blow against the aircraft, however, came from a most unexpected source, Willy Messerschmitt himself. In a conversation on 27 June 1943 at Obersalzberg with Hitler, Messerschmitt warned him of Milch’s planning errors particularly with regard to the latter’s ideas about future aircraft production and choice of types. He even went so far as to caution Hitler against mass-producing the Me 262 on the grounds of its enormous fuel consumption. It seems incomprehensible that he would have offered such advice but the fact is confirmed historically by two sources: Rakan Kokothaki, who was present when Messerschmitt reported back to his directors on his conversation next day, and David Irving (Die Tragödie der Luftwaffe, pp 294 – 5) quoting Kokothaki and the Soviet interrogation of Messerschmitt postwar.
After Messerschmitt’s statement to the board, Hitler and Speer expressed doubts about making the Me 262 the mainstay of the German fighter arm. Actually there had never been talk of such a thing. What was being asked for was the addition of this superfast and superior machine to the Reich air defence force alongside the Fw 190 and the Me 109 as soon as possible. Neither Milch nor Galland nor anybody else from the Reich Air Ministry or Luftwaffe could have intended to make the Me 262 the mainstay of the fighter arm overnight. It would have been in any case many months ahead, for the opportunity simply would not have existed to retrain fighter squadrons for the new jet nor create the infrastructure for the aircraft at squadron level. The assertion about the fuel was correct so far as it went, but jet fuel is not costly kerosene but a type of diesel oil requiring less refining and so subject to less reduction in preparation.
Though not referring to it specifically, Rust and Hess argue cogently in their article ‘The German Jets and the USAAF’ (1963) that Messerschmitt’s outburst of 27 June 1943 was undoubtedly the turning point for the aircraft’s future. Hitler’s primary fear was that a lightly damaged Me 262 might make an emergency landing in enemy-held territory whereby the secrets of the aircraft’s construction and its turbojets would be forfeited. It was not known in Germany at the time that the United States and Britain were only one year behind in the development of similar jet aeroplanes. When Hitler was informed what difficulties were to be expected from operational flying at low level, such as reduced speed, high fuel consumption, vulnerability to enemy fighters and so on, this would explain his decision that the Me 262 was not to be used as a fighter, they say. Unfortunately for the argument, the Me 262 fighter would not have run the risk of crashing on enemy-held territory if it had been operational over Berlin, for example.
Obviously there was some other reason why the aircraft was wanted in the bomber role. On 2 November 1943 Goering went to Augsburg to investigate whether the aircraft was suitable for use as a fighter bomber. Three weeks later at Insterburg Hitler enquired of Messerschmitt about the aircraft’s bomb-carrying capability and he used the term ‘Blitzbomber’ specifically. Rust and Hess then continue:
Hitler saw the Me 262 as a Blitzbomber. He did not realize that converting the Me 262 into an effective two-seater bomber aircraft with the necessary bomb-aiming apparatus and bomb-release gear, not to mention adequate range, involved completely redesigning the aircraft. A conversion of this kind would have put back the operational readiness of the Me 262 by many months – certainly beyond when the invasion was expected.
This assumption by Rust and Hess seems to go a little too far, for being informed of all the complaints about the Messerschmitt set-up and their causes, Hitler had Goering issue an order of the day on 5 December 1943 to the effect that:
The Führer wishes to draw our attention urgently to the enormous importance of the production of jet aircraft to be deployed as fighter bombers. It is imperative to ensure that by the spring of 1944 the Luftwaffe has a sufficient number of these fighter bombers operational. Any difficulties caused by raw-material and manpower shortages are to be overcome by the transfer of Luftwaffe supplies and personnel so that anything which might lead to a prolongation of the manufacturing period is removed. The Führer makes it known that all delays in our jet-fighter programme will be tantamount to irresponsible negligence. The Führer requires that with effect from 15 November 1943 a written report is submitted to him every two months regarding the current progress on the Me 262 and Ar 234 programmes.
This order, though not the result of Goering’s visit to Augsburg, signified the final classification of the Me 262 as a fighter bomber and not the pure fighter which Messerschmitt had constructed and which the German fighter arm needed so desperately. After the loss of North Africa, the end of the alliance with Italy and the shrinking perimeter of the various fronts, the most powerful weapons of attack were now necessary on land and in the air to defend against the enemy. One of these weapons would have been the Me 262 fighter.
The only plausible reason why Messerschmitt might want to protect himself against a full-scale production run of the Me 262, or at least to defer it, lay elsewhere.
The fantastic success of the Me 109 had made Willy Messerschmitt into a celebrity worldwide. Its victories in 1939 and 1940 had endowed the machine with a kind of mystique. For its builder and his factory it brought almost a monopoly on fighter production confirmed semi-officially in a conversation between Udet and Ernst Heinkel reported in the latter’s memoir Stürmisches Leben.
Heinkel, whose doubtlessly more efficient He 112 had been completed a little later than Messerschmitt’s Bf 109, must have been bitterly disappointed to lose out when in 1936/1937 the Bf 109 was chosen for the standard German fighter. A year or so later Heinkel observed to Udet, with whom he was on the friendliest terms, ‘The next fighter is Heinkel’s!’ Udet demurred. ‘The official view now is that aircraft manufacturers should specialise in particular types. It is a rationalisation. On account of his success with the Bf 109, Messerschmitt will take over the fighters. And, after the He 111, you will develop only bombers. The Bf 109 will keep us going for at least four years. It will soon have the 1000-hp Daimler – Benz engine. That will give it about 550 kph, and with the improved version, 600. Meanwhile Messerschmitt is working on a new twin-engined fighter. We have no more fighter problems...’
Nobody could then have anticipated how heavy a cross to bear this last sentence would later become. No wonder therefore that Messerschmitt might feel as though his back were to the wall when the Me 209 and Me 309, successors to the Me 109 in 1942 and 1943, both drew the short straw and lost him the battle for the series contract. And he lost it not only to Kurt Tank’s better Fw 190, but also to his own Me 109G and the Me 262.
From the beginning of his career, Messerschmitt was known as an avid aircraft designer, an engineer whose inspirations gave him no rest. A fund of anecdotes depicts him in a coffee shop, on a train, in a car at traffic lights, fumbling through his pockets for a scrap of paper on which to scribble down a concept or draft a rough sketch. His staff had dozens of such stories to tell, but they also reported how the expenditure of capital for his work at Bamberg made his family nervous wrecks. After the move to Augsburg, under the partnership agreement with Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, the company’s accounts office picked up the tab for his numerous wide-ranging projects. It was a trait of his character that Messerschmitt would generally find the way to offset personal financial risk. The Me 210 disaster for which he was personally responsible cost Messerschmitt AG at least RM 30 million, a sum which would be difficult to claw back even in an epoch when the company was buried under an avalanche of armaments contracts.
Messerschmitt saw it as his moral obligation to recoup this vast sum but he was imbued by now with a greater degree of caution. Whereas the Me 262 was an outstandingly advanced machine, how it would behave operationally once it was in series production was an unknown factor. Moreover as yet the jet engines were not fully reliable nor had the airframe been tested to the parameters: test speeds had been restricted to the normal limits of propeller aircraft.
It had been a similar story with regard to the Me 163 which – contrary to many assertions – was designed and built by Alexander Lippisch. By his own admission Messerschmitt never had a finger in the pie and treated the project with disinterest if not disdain. The Me 163 airframe had proven flawless in tests over the range of speeds of which it was capable. The rocket motor on the other hand had some diabolical traits and occasionally incinerated the pilot. As an Me 163 glided in to land it was at the mercy of any lurking enemy fighter, a problem which would be shared by the Me 262 on its landing approach. Additionally if an Me 262 engine had to be shut down the aircraft could fly home but no evasive manoeuvres were possible if attacked.
Piston-engined aircraft were not vulnerable in this way. These drawbacks could not be lightly glossed over, least of all by Messerschmitt. Therefore preparation of the Me 262 for operations would not follow the same course as a typical propeller aircraft such as the Me 209 and 309 had done.
Unencumbered by problems of high finance, fighter men, their commanders and senior officers like Galland saw the situation more soberly and thus in a truer light. By 1943 they could probably have proved that the Luftwaffe was likely to lose out entirely to the endless stream of enemy bombers if Reich air defences were not strengthened significantly very soon. Many eye-witness accounts of the time, letters, file notes and diary entries, provide a confusing and grotesque picture of the altercations at Luftwaffe High Command and in the General Staff which by-passed Goering and went directly to Hitler. The Reichsmarschall of the very battered German Reich was already its saddest figure.
He had finished the World War I as a fighter pilot with an impressive twenty-two kills. He had taken command of the famous Richthofen fighter squadron (although not to the universal acclaim of its officers). A member of the NSDAP from 1922, he was one of Hitler’s ‘Old Guard’, became the most senior SA-chief and was seriously wounded in that role during the march to the Feldherrnhalle on 9 November 1923. As the ‘true Paladin of the Führer’ he became Prussian Minister – President after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, Prussian Interior Minister, the Reich Minister for Aviation, the Reich Minister for Forestry and Hunting and finally Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe.
It is clear that this vain and occasionally drug-dependent man never fulfilled his true potential. His staff, fighter men and officers who knew him or had conversations with him often spoke highly of his intelligence and good judgment. Nobody took amiss his extrovert personality, his fantasy uniforms, the theatrical arrivals, the extravagance of his title with the prefix ‘Reichs-’. They smiled and accepted him as he was. Among the people he was even loved, for he brought something of a monarchic flair to the otherwise spartan customs of Adolf Hitler. He had insisted that he be called ‘Maier’ – peasant farmer – if so much as one solitary bomb fell on German soil, but even when the air-raid sirens howled incessantly the people were not aggrieved at Goering. They simply called him Maier and left it at that.
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.