Luftwaffe - Secret jets of the Third Reich.pdf

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Dan Sharp
ISBN: 978-1-909128-70-5
£6.99
Preface
T
he story of the aerial battles of the Second World War
and the aircraft used during those battles has, for the
most part, been very well known for a very long time.
Until the early 1990s however, few in the English
peaking world, including myself, gave much thought to
aircraft designed during the war that never saw service
– either because they were flawed or simply because the
circumstances did not allow it.
Having been brought up on tales of Spitfires and
urricanes defending Britain from the Messerschmitt
menace, it came as a surprise to me in 1991 when George
Lucas’s LucasFilm Games brought out a videogame called
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe for the PC.
The image on the cover showed a pair of flying wing
aircraft – they looked like something out of Star Wars – in
German markings attacking a formation of high-flying
merican bombers.
I was intrigued. Did the Germans really have weapons like
is? With no books being readily available on the subject I
ad to wait until the arrival of the Internet to find out.
In 1998 a friend of mine, with whom I had discussed the
q estions raised by Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, directed
e to a website called Luft46.com and I was stunned to discover
e vast and bewildering range of ‘secret projects’ apparently
designed by German aircraft companies during the war.
There were flying wings, rammers, tiny bombers, parasite
aircraft, types with a propeller at either end, twin-fuselage
esigns, tail-first designs, aircraft where the wings were
swept forward, aircraft where the wings span around like the
blades of a fan – a cornucopia of oddities.
Now books began to appear which elaborated a little on
what the website’s creator, Dan Johnson, had written. Many
of these were translations from German titles and it soon
became apparent that something had been lost during that
rocess or else had not been there to begin with.
There were many inexplicable inconsistencies, projects
hat did not seem to fit in, projects with names that seemed
wrong and nearly all without any real context. The projects’
elationships with one another were confusing.
There had clearly been competitions run to find an aircraft
esign which best suited this or that set of requirements,
d rival companies clearly supplied their own entries to
ese competitions, but what exactly these competitions
ere, when they were held, and which company entered what
design to meet which requirements was a mystery.
Later books tended to lump designs together and
state that they were part of something called the
Jägernotprogramm or ‘Emergency Fighter Programme’.
ut no one writer seemed able to quantify exactly what this
programme set out to achieve, when it started or how it had
progressed. Or to prove that it even existed at all.
This publication sets out to clearly show which designs
were intended to do what, when they were created and how
they fared against their competitors.
Rather than relying on the works of established authors
for answers, I have attempted to base my work as far as
possible on original German documents and contemporary
llied reports.
My starting point was a document which resides in the
National Archives at Kew in London – German Aircraft: New
and Projected Types. Compiled by British air intelligence
staff in 1945 from captured German documents and publishe
in January 1946, it includes drawings of 174 types from the
full range of manufacturers and amounts to a factually
reliable ‘greatest hits’ of secret projects.
The same document also includes the minutes of two
meetings of the Entwicklungs-Hauptkommission (EHK)
that took place towards the end of 1944. This was the main
development committee for German aircraft and the minut
offer a dependable ‘status update’ on many of the otherwise
obscure projects that were in progress at that time.
Onto this foundation dozens of other documentary
sources, many of them apparently previously unseen, have
been overlaid to build up a history of German jet or ‘TL’
(Turbinen-Luftstrahltriebwerk) aircraft development
during the Second World War.
I have concentrated on jet fighter design and development
primarily for reasons of space but also because fighters
preoccupied the German aircraft manufacturers to a far
greater extent than types designed for other roles.
It was generally accepted that a truly effective jet fighter,,
if one could only be designed and built, had the potential to
alter the course of the war. Details of numerous jet fighter
designs proposed by the German manufacturers have
survived, though many undoubtedly have not. In addition,
many were just ideas and were never submitted to the
government for consideration.
Jet fighter designs submitted to meet government
requirements, and those identified as having merit in EHK
meetings, are examined here in the greatest detail.
Brochures, reports, construction proposals and a thousand
other documents of the time are filled with charts, graph
and tables showing predicted performance data, dimensio s,
weights and innumerable other parameters. Where these
have no bearing on the background or story of the design,
they have been excluded.
Similarly, the German aircraft company chief
designers, whose names appear frequently elsewhere, are
seldom mentioned here. The likes of Kurt Tank, Willy
Messerschmitt, Woldemar Voigt, Ernst Heinkel, Siegfried
Günter, Walter Blume and Richard Vogt were high level
executives and were seldom involved in the day-to-day
business of designing their companies’ aircraft in detail.
The actual designers remain a shadowy group whose
names often appear on their work only as an illegible
signature. When they wrote reports, their first name was
often omitted or given only as an initial. Even today, little is
known about the full complement of designers present at
each company.
Finally, it must never be forgotten in whose name all of
this work was carried out nor in what circumstances. The
need to simplify designs so that the resulting aircraft coul
be manufactured in large part by unskilled slaves was ever
present in the minds of these designers during the later
stages of the war.
The vast sums of money required to bankroll all of this
research and development work came from the coffers of the
Nazi Third Reich. And the end product, the jet fighters that
flew, were designed with the express purpose of destroying
Allied aircraft and killing their crew.
•
Luftwaffe: Secret Jets of the Third Reich
003
006
Introduction
012
Jagdflugzeuge mit Strahltriebwerk (1939)
Heinkel He 280
Messerschmi t Me 262
Messerschmi t Me 263 (Junkers Ju 248)
Messerschmi t Me 262 with supplementary
rocket propulsion
Bachem BP 20 (Ba 349) Na ter
044
Schlechtwetter und Nachtjäger (1944)
024
Arado Ar 234 (1940)
028
Messerschmitt Me 163 (1940)
034
Verschleissflugzeug (1944)
Messerschmi t P.1104
Heinkel P.1077 ‘Julia’
Junkers EF.127 ‘Walli’
004
Luftwaffe: Secret Jets of the Third Reich
Messerschmi t Me 262B-1a/U1
Arado Ar 234B-2/N
Dornier Do 335A-6 and P.254
Messerschmi t three-seater night fighter
Arado Ar 234P-5
Focke-Wulf I and II
Heinkel P.1078
Junkers EF.128
Messerschmi t P.1101
Messerschmi t P.1106
Messerschmi t P.1110
Messerschmi t P.1111
Messerschmi t P.1112
074
Volksjäger (1944)
Arado E.580
Blohm & Voss P.211
Focke-Wulf Volksflugzeug and
Einheits-T-L Jäger
048
1-TL-Jäger (1944)
Blohm & Voss P.212
Contents
FRONT COVER:
Focke-Wulf Triebflügeljäger
in combat with Northrop
B-35s of the 94th BG
over Germany by Ronnie
Olsthoorn. For more
information about
Focke-Wulf ramjet
projects see page 98.
AUTHOR: Dan Sharp
DESIGN: atg-media.com
REPROGRAPHICS: Jonathan Schofield and Paul Fincham
PUBLISHER: Dan Savage
MARKETING MANAGER: Charlotte Park
COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR: Nigel Hole
PUBLISHED BY: Mortons Media Group Ltd, Media Centre,
Morton Way, Horncastle, Lincolnshire LN9 6JR.
Tel. 01507 529529
THANKS TO: Hamza Fouatih, Simon Fowler,
Paul Martell-Mead, Ronnie Olsthoorn, Alexander Power,
Chris Sandham-Bailey, Stephen Walton and Tony Wilson
PRINTED BY: William Gibbons and Sons, Wolverhampton
ISBN: 978-1-909128-70-5
© 2015 Mortons Media Group Ltd. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage retrieval system without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOVE: A Messerschmitt P.1070 shoots down a luckless
De Havilland Mosquito. The tiny P.1070 was considered as a
lightweight alternative to the Me 262.
Art by Ronnie Olsthoorn
Junkers Volksjäger Projekt
Heinkel P.1073 (He 162)
Heinkel ‘Romeo’
Heinkel He 162 with Argus tube
112
Lippisch P.12/13 and P.15
120
Arado E.381 Kleinstjäger
080
Schlechtwetter und Nachtjäger (1945)
Arado I and II
Blohm & Voss P.215
Focke-Wulf II and III
Dornier P.256
Gothaer P-60C
096
Skoda-Kauba P.14 and Me 262
with ramjets
124
Unknown!
Messerschmi t Schwalbe
Messerschmi t Wespe
Messerschmi t Libelle
Messerschmi t Wildgans
Blohm & Voss Ae 607 and MGRP
Focke-Wulf Super TL and Super Lorin
Heinkel Lerche I-III and Wespe
Henschel projects
BMW single jet projects
Luftwaffe: Secret Jets of the Third Reich
005
098
Focke-Wulf Triebflügeljäger
Focke-Wulf Strahlrohrjäger
102
Heinkel P.1080
092
Pulse jet projects (1944-1945)
Messerschmi t Me 328
Blohm & Voss P.213
Junkers EF.126 ‘Elli’
104
Horten 8-229
108
Lippisch P.11 / Delta VI

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