Hitler's Jet Plane (12 page)

The ten months of despair at the gates of hell between July 1944 and April 1945 were those least blessed by fortune and the most sacrificial in terms of casualties in the twelve years of existence of KG51 (formerly KG255, known as ‘Edelweiss’). Nevertheless the exemplary fighting spirit of the entire squadron never faltered. I think it right to say that one should never identify, in any war, those who were ‘the bravest’, for the term cannot be applied to some without doing injustice to others. Bravery is a conquest of the fear with which we are all born. For some, great bravery is required just to be near the fighting front. The bravery of KG51 is chronicled in sixteen pages of the unit’s War Diary.

When the squadron received orders to fly the Me 262 as a fast bomber, neither the commanders nor the pilots had had any preparatory training. Their joy over the undisputed advantages of the much praised new turbojet warbird was soon overshadowed by the suspicion which accompanies every unexpected boon. From the beginning of the war, bomber units had been in desperate need of an aircraft with adequate speed, a strong defensive armament and above all long range. Despite all the conversion work and modifications, the Me 262 was neither a Stuka nor a recognisable bomber aircraft. At low level it was so greedy on fuel that only targets over a short range fell within its ambit, and its speed, reduced by the bombload, no longer provided any significant advantage.

On 6 June 1944 the Allies landed on the coast of Normandy. Contrary to Hitler’s plan and Goering’s interpretation of how it would be on the night, the total number of bombs dropped by Me 262s was nil. The loading operations on the English side had proceeded unmolested, and there were no jet bombers ‘smashing up all these heaps of material on the beaches’ on the French side either. The reason was that all 3rd Squadron/KG51 pilots were undergoing conversion training to the Me 262 bomber at Lechfeld, following the completion of which they would deploy to the invasion front. The unit was known as Erprobungskommando Schenk after its commander, Major Wolfgang Schenk, holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.

The KG51
Edelweiss
War Diary records:

Quite a number of problems arose during the fitting out of the aircraft for bomber operations. At Schwäbisch Hall the undercarriage and tyres were strengthened and supplementary fuel tanks added. If care was not exercised in filling this tank it led to a hopeless shift in the centre of gravity leading to tail-heaviness and instability. There was no properly tested bomb retaining and release gear nor bombsights. In a shallow dive accuracy was poor. By order of the Führer, it was forbidden to dive-bomb, exceed 850 kph or descend below 12,000 feet over enemy-held territory. The last restriction was to provide enemy anti-aircraft batteries with less opportunity for a hit and thus to prevent any jet aircraft falling into enemy hands. It meant, however, that the project was doomed to fail from the start, and the poor bombing results were unavoidable and depressing. The infantry called us the ‘Damage-the-Fields Squadron’. It was humorous but did not do much to raise our spirits. The restrictions were finally lifted in December 1944. Many Me 262 aircraft flown to Schwäbisch Hall for conversion fell victim to Allied air raids. At every step the
Sturmvögel
[storm petrel, a descriptive term for the Me 262 bomber] was hunted down. Every take-off, flight and landing was a minor suicide mission and gnawed away at the nerves . . .

While Erprobungskommando Schenk was re-training at Lechfeld, sixty Me 262 bombers were destroyed on the ground in an air raid, which introduced a lengthy delay to full operations. Not until 20 July 1944, six-and-a-half weeks after the invasion, did these twelve pilots of 3rd Squadron/KG51 complete the conversion course. Each had flown the aircraft four times, these being solo flights because it was a single-seater. The curriculum did not allow for bombing practice or even an introduction to fighter tactics. In this deplorable state of preparedness the unit was ordered with nine machines to Chateaudun from where it would fly operational missions against the English coast immediately upon arrival. The base was close to the French coast because the fast bomber only had a radius of action of 200 km, there being no latitude in fuel for the aircraft to fly out from a more rearward airfield. And it was at Chateaudun that the unique and miserable odyssey of 3rd Squadron /KG51 began – a unit obliged to pay in full for the Führer’s obstinacy.

After six weeks of bombing the English coast, the squadron was forced back from Chateaudun to Etampes: from there three days later to Creil, where it stayed six days. This withdrawal seems to have been particularly hectic. Ground personnel were on the road day and night, constantly harassed by enemy fighter bombers. According to the KG51 War Diary, a lorry transporting several Me 262 jet turbines and spare parts was captured by an Allied unit. Thus it would appear that German turbojet engines were in American hands by August 1944. This was a serious loss to the unit, for engines had to be exchanged after eight hours’ flying time for overhaul.

On the seventh day the Squadron arrived at Juvincourt where, on account of its losses, Schenk was obliged to request another nine pilots and aircraft. Of these, only five arrived at Juvincourt. Two crashed on take-off at Lechfeld because of pilot error, a third crashed landed at Schwäbisch Hall and the fourth set down in a meadow just short of the destination.

On 28 August 1944, Schenk’s gradual homeward journey took another step eastwards to Ath-Chièvre in Belgium, from there on the 30th of the month the unit reached Volkel and Eindhoven in Holland for a five-day stay and after a flight in overnight fog put down on a Reich airfield at Rheine, Westphalia, on 3 September. Erprobungskommando Schenk was here upgraded to I/KG51. As a squadron its operational aircraft had only been identified by a single capital letter on the fuselage but now also bore the tactical marking 9K before the black fuselage cross. Schenk was promoted to Oberstleutnant and took over command of the squadron, Major Grundmann led II/KG51 at Schwäbisch Hall. To consolidate the jet-bomber force the unit transferred next to Achmer and Hesepe where sections of KG76 flew operations against Allied targets in Belgium and Holland with the first twin-turbojet bomber, the Ar 234.

On 13 November 1944 the Allies mounted air raids on the bases at Rheine and Hesepe which took their toll of pilots and the almost irreplaceable engineers and technical support staff. Little mention is ever made of the part played by the men and women in these and other unglamorous roles such as radar direction. Such servicemen, for whom no better name has been found than ‘ground personnel’, served with a devotion to duty no less laudable than that of the pilots.

Many Me 262 fliers were cruelly cut down in a fiasco following the early morning attack known as Operation Bodenplatte on New Year’s Day 1945. At 03:00 800 German aircraft took off to bomb Allied airfields, bases, anti-aircraft emplacements and bridgeheads in France, Belgium and Holland. 810 enemy aircraft were destroyed together with workshops, fuel dumps and valuable materials. It made no difference to the outcome of the battle, and 293 German machines shot down was a high price to pay for a surprise raid which the enemy side had not expected. The attack had been carefully prepared and kept secret until immediately before take-off. The plan was so secret that it omitted instructions to inform the German flak batteries of what was afoot and these gunned down no fewer than 200 German aircraft returning from the mission. ‘Points glowing red in the snow marked where they crashed,’ was the laconic observation of the KG51 War Diary.

After US forces captured the bridge at Remagen on 7 March 1945, Goering telephoned the I/KG51 orderly officer that night ordering him personally to comb through the unit without delay in search for ‘volunteers who, following the example of Japanese kamikaze pilots, would dive their aircraft into the Rhine bridges so as to deny these valuable bridgeheads to the Americans.’ Two pilots actually did volunteer but fortunately for them nothing came of this pointless notion, nor of the suggestion to Me 163 squadron JG400 made at about the same time when volunteers were invited to come forward as ramming pilots. This order also came from Goering.
⁴

In the last eight weeks of the war, the senselessness of using a fighter aircraft like the Me 262 as a bomber proved itself to the full. The only positive thing to come of it all was that the devotion to duty and the fighting spirit of pilots and ground personnel alike continued to the last day. The epitaph to the Me 262 as a bomber aircraft appears in a single sentence of the KG51 War Diary:

During the relatively short operational period flying the Me 262, 172 Squadron members were killed: 53 officers, 91 NCOs and 28 men.

The early reported shortcomings of the Me 262 as a fast bomber reinforced the concerns over its obvious unsuitability as a conversion for the role, but there was still a long way to go before Hitler finally recognised it. The useless early sacrifices confirmed the opinion long held in the offices of General der Jagdflieger Galland, and his more recent converts Speer and Himmler. Meanwhile enemy bomber streams flowed in and out of the Reich day and night. In a single attack on Lechfeld alone, sixty operational Me 262s were destroyed on the ground.

Kommando 262 Thierfelder, now reduced to a very small team of six operational pilots, could claim twenty-five enemy aircraft shot down, a noteworthy achievement. Günther Wegmann was Thierfelder’s adjutant. While Wörner saw to the conversion training of newly arrived men, Thierfelder, Wegmann and four other pilots made the operational test flights. The prime target was enemy reconnaissance machines and successes proved the Me 262 to be an excellent fighter aircraft once its peculiarities had been mastered. Within the framework of the Reich air-defence system as a whole, the successes of these first Me 262 fighter pilots were not significant. It was only when the statisticians measured the victories per aircraft and expressed the figure proportionally that it was at once evident why the aircraft merited the trust of fighter pilots and their command staffs. And more than that, it suggested how much greater the overall successes would have been had Hitler and Goering given the machine the highest priority from its debut.

In July 1944 Galland managed to obtain authority to operate a second small Kommando 262 over central Germany. That this was possible was due in no small measure to the successes of Thierfelder’s unit and not least to Alfred Schreiber. Wegmann was appointed to lead it and once Kommando Wegmann was in existence, it was to transfer to Erfurt-Bindersleben.

On 18 July, a fine summer’s day, Thierfelder took off for a test flight. Onlookers watched his aircraft gather ever more speed along the runway, lift off about two-thirds of the way along and, after a few seconds of level flight, soar into the almost cloudless sky at a steep rate of climb. The Me 262 was then not visible until condensation trails began to form behind it. After a while it was observed that the aircraft was put into a shallow dive which gradually became ever steeper. At this point a witness stated that he thought he saw flames. The jet was in a virtual nose-dive when an object came free – possibly the cabin hood – and quickly afterwards a dark bundle emerged. Within three seconds the silk of a parachute began to inflate and then both the aircraft and pilot were lost to sight.

They found Hauptmann Thierfelder in a field near Buchloe. He was dead in the harness of his parachute. The canopy was in long ribbons, the material apparently having failed to withstand the opening stresses at deployment. The team puzzled over the possible cause of this accident for many days, for Thierfelder knew the Me 262 in all its moods and had proved himself an exceptionally apt pilot for the machine. The best explanation seemed to be fire in one or both turbojets which Thierfelder had perhaps tried to extinguish by diving the aircraft at high speed. It might then have wandered into an almost vertical dive from which there was no hope of recovery. On the other hand, possibly the trim was wrong. There were many possibilities. Thierfelder’s successor as commander was Hauptmann Horst Geyer.

Wegmann’s new unit was of squadron size, about ten aircraft. At Bindersleben they had their hands full with adapting the aerodrome for the Me 262. Both runways had to be extended from 1,200 to 1,500 yards, mechanics’ equipment rigged up in the hangars and a radar direction centre built on the northern fringe of the airfield. The work lasted into September 1944 when the Kommando was suddenly ordered to Achmer, the airfield at Rheine north of Osnabruck from where Kommando Schenk’s Me 262 bombers operated. Wegmann’s annoyance can be imagined, for he and his men had spent a great deal of time and energy expanding and fitting out Bindersleben.

The purpose of the move was to merge the two units at Lechfeld and Bindersleben into a single larger Kommando of which Major Nowotny was to be the unit leader. Whereas Goering had ordered the transfer, the order certainly did not originate from him, for he did not have the authority to arrange a change of this nature at the time without Hitler’s express approval. Accordingly it seems probable that Hitler had caved in slightly to Galland’s persistence. The Führer had not actually changed his mind: the events of recent months had forced him to bend a little. These events can be summarised as follows.