Hitler's Jet Plane (6 page)

On 18 April 1943, the V2 was back in service. Späte drove with test-team leader Gerhard Caroli to the runway while the Me 262 was towed to the starting position by an aircraft-tug. This procedure was followed not only to save fuel but also to ensure that flying time was not reduced by wasting fuel taxiing to the runway.

At the starting position, Caroli offered Späte a cigarette. The two men conversed while smoking, eyeing the tug with the V2 in tow trundling slowly up the approach lane. When the aircraft arrived, Caroli signalled for his guest to get in, but Späte wanted to finish his cigarette (at the time cigarettes were rare in Germany). Just then a young test pilot, Wilhelm Ostertag, who was responsible for the maintenance of the V2, climbed into its cockpit and began to secure the straps of the aircraft’s parachute pack over his shoulders. When Späte made a questioning gesture to him from the ground, Ostertag pointed an index finger to his head as if to say ‘I just want to check the machine over.’

Späte was annoyed but could hardly complain about the flight-sergeant’s sense of duty and so he finished his cigarette while the V2 started up, took off and shortly disappeared below the horizon. Caroli, Späte, the ground technician and the tug driver waited patiently for Ostertag’s return; it would not be more than twenty minutes before he reappeared. He had enough fuel for twenty-five minutes, but had to keep five minutes’ worth in reserve in case the landing went awry and he had to go round again.

By the fifteen-minute mark they were watching the horizon with keen interest. After twenty minutes a certain disquiet had begun to creep in. After thirty-five minutes there could be no doubt but that Ostertag’s flight had run up against some kind of snag. They revised the possibilities: emergency landing, baled out by parachute, landed at another airfield. Nobody wanted to suggest the fourth possibility.

Forty minutes had passed when the flight control vehicle came racing up the approach road to the starting point. A young man leapt out in haste. ‘Are you missing a Ju 88?,’ he shouted to Caroli. ‘No, an Me 262,’ Caroli answered, his face as white as chalk. ‘You’d better follow me then!’ The car sped back while Späte, Caroli and the technician bundled themselves aboard the slow aircraft-tug. Soon they knew the worst: young Ostertag had crashed. A vertical dive into the ground from 1,500 feet at full throttle.

The crash site was a deep crater with numerous scattered pieces of engine, ribbons of fuselage and bits of wing. The remains of Wilhelm Ostertag had already been collected by the ambulance people. Späte stood wordlessly before this picture of utter destruction. He had over one hundred kills to his credit as a fighter pilot and had seen dozens of such craters. He knew that any day it could be his turn. ‘A few less puffs on a cigarette and they would have been picking bits of me out of there,’ he muttered.

In May 1943 Späte and Willy Messerschmitt both contacted General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland in Berlin, Späte to report his impressions of the new aircraft, Messerschmitt to invite Galland to fly the machine himself in the hope that it would inspire his advocacy in high places where it mattered and bring about the production of an Me 262 pre-series. He added that should the General obtain a positive feeling about the aircraft, perhaps he might then recommend to the Reich Air Ministry an order for one hundred. These could be delivered relatively quickly and would serve for conversion training and trials with operational units.

It was about this time that the idea became current – put forward in the main by Hitler himself – that the new jets should be used as bombers instead of as fighters. How this came about at a time when nothing was more urgent than an effective defence against enemy bombers will be explained in due course.

Galland accepted Messerschmitt’s invitation and flew at once to Augsburg to try out the Me 262 for himself. In his book
Die Ersten und die Letzten
[The First and the Last] he described his first encounter with a jet aircraft:

I will never forget the 22 May 1943 when I flew a jet aircraft for the first time in my life. Early that morning I met Messerschmitt at the Lechfeld experimental airfield near the Augsburg factory. Together with his aircraft designers, engineers and the Junkers engine specialists were the commander of the Rechlin Luftwaffe Test Station and the head of his fighter testing team, Behrens, killed shortly after the war in Argentina when he crashed a Pulqui II jet fighter. After introductory lectures by the expert engineers involved in the design, there was tense expectancy as we drove to the runway. There stood the two Me 262 jet fighters, the beginning and centrepoint of our future and at the same time our great hope. A strange sight, these aircraft without a propeller. Hidden in two streamlined cylinders below the airfoil were the jet turbines. None of the engineers could tell us exactly what horse-power they developed. In response to our questions they got busy with their slide rules and would only commit themselves to such-and-such hundred kilos of thrust at this and that airspeed at a given altitude which was equivalent at the corresponding flight weight to an expenditure of so much horsepower airscrew propulsion. This made us piston-engine pilots very sceptical at first, for we were not yet tuned in to the peculiarities of this unknown thrust. But the engineers and their bizarre calculations were right. Essentially there really was no comparison with the power output for propellers. If the data they fed us, based on their calculations and to some extent already proven in flight, was even only more or less correct, then it opened up undreamed of possibilities. And everything depended on it!

The – at the time – fantastic speed of 850 kph in level flight meant a jump of at least 200 kph ahead of the fastest piston-engined fighter anywhere. Moreover, the aircraft could stay up from fifty to seventy minutes. For fuel it used a less costly diesel-type oil instead of the highly refined anti-knock kerosene which was becoming ever harder for us to obtain.

First the works chief test pilot demonstrated one of the two warbirds in flight. After it had been refuelled I climbed in. With numerous hand movements the mechanics started up the turbines. I followed the procedure with great interest. The first engine ran smoothly. The second caught fire. In a trice the turbine was in flames. Fortunately we fighter pilots are used to getting in and out of a cockpit rapidly. The fire was soon extinguished. The second Me 262 caused no problem. We set off down the 50-yard wide runway at ever increasing speed. I had no view ahead. These first jet aircraft were fitted with a conventional tail wheel in place of the nose-wheel gear which the type had in series production. Additionally one had to step on the brake suddenly. I thought, the runway is not going to be long enough! I was going at about 150 kph. The tailplane rose at last. Now I could see ahead, no more feeling that you are in the dark and running your head into a brick wall. With reduced air resistance the speed increased quickly. I was over 200 kph and some good way from the end of the runway when the machine took off benignly.

For the first time I was flying under jet power! No engine vibrations, no turning moment and no whipping noise from an airscrew. With a whistling sound my ‘turbo’ shot through the air. ‘It’s like having an angel push you,’ I said later when asked what it was like. But war-conditioned, sober reality allowed me little time to savour the new experience of jet flight. Flight characteristics, turning ability, top speed, rate of climb – in just a few minutes I had to form an opinion of this new aircraft.

Just then the four-engined Messerschmitt [by this Galland must mean the prototype Me 264 transatlantic bomber then undergoing flight trials.
Translator’s note.
] came lumbering over Lechfeld. She became the target for my first practice jet-fighter attack. I knew that I had been put into the air more for a technical opinion than a tactical one and that my manoeuvres would be viewed with some disquiet from the ground. Raw eggs were handled with less circumspection than these products of a hybrid technology. But already I knew that what these aircraft promised surpassed all previous notions and ideas to such an extent that whatever uncertainties might still remain could be utterly disregarded.

After landing I was impressed and inspired as never before. What was decisive was proven capability and character. This was a great leap forward!

We drove back to the factory for a closing discussion. There behind us on the apron, glinting silver in the sunshine of this May day, stood the Me 262. And it was like ‘a ray of silver on the horizon’ in the figurative sense too.

Today I remain convinced that my optimism was not misplaced in expecting that the deployment
en masse
of the Me 262 would have brought about a fundamental change in German air defence. My only fear was that the enemy would catch up or even beat us to it. This worry was one of the few which were unfounded. The deployment of the Me 262
en masse
failed to take place for other reasons. I could not have anticipated those reasons as, immediately after my first test flight, I sent the following telex to Feldmarschall Milch:

‘The Me 262 aircraft represents an enormous leap which secures for us operationally an unimaginable advantage if the enemy continues with piston drive. In the air the machine makes a very good impression. The engines are completely convincing except at take-off and landing. The aircraft opens up fully new tactical possibilities.’

Shortly before Galland’s arrival, Späte had also experienced a fire when starting up. Perhaps he had moved a thrust lever injudiciously. After the Me 262 flights by Opitz and Galland in May 1943, Milch changed his opinion about the jet and at a conference in Berlin on 2 June he agreed to run an Me 262-0 pilot series ‘because of its superior speed as well as its many other qualities’. When Milch announced that fighter manufacture would be increased to 4,000 machines per month, Galland pleaded for a production ratio of 3,000 conventional Fw 190 and 1,000 Me 262, extra capacity for the jet being created by rejecting the less promising Me 209. Milch stated that he could not approve developing the jet in such numbers at the expense of conventional fighters because ‘the Führer considers the risk to be too great’. Personally he would heartily welcome a planned series production of such magnitude but as a soldier he had no option but to follow orders and ‘if the Führer orders caution, we must be cautious’.

A few days after this meeting Hitler watched an Me 262 exhibition flight and saw the aircraft’s impressive qualities for himself. On 27 August 1943 the Ministry contracts division ordered Messerschmitt AG to set up the Me 262 in series production.

Substantial delays occurred in the execution of the order. On 17 August, USAAF bombers had attacked the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg. The factories were severely damaged and the valuable rigs for the Me 262 fuselages destroyed. Junkers had advised that the Jumo turbojet 004, 109 – 004B of 900 kilos thrust, would not be ready for fitting in the engine nacelles until October. Finally there were concerns about the known weaknesses of the Messerschmitt AG management – the works had already found itself in difficulties over smaller contracts and with its inadequate structure might fail altogether with a major order. In this regard senior officials at the Reich Air Ministry were aware that Professor Messerschmitt often made promises about developments and delivery schedules which he was subsequently unable to keep. This would ultimately prove to be the case with the Me 262.

On 2 November 1943 Hitler involved himself directly in Me 262 production by sending Goering in person to Augsburg to find out from Messerschmitt whether the aircraft could be fitted out as a bomber. In response to the Reichsmarschall’s question, Messerschmitt stated categorically that the original plans contained bomb retention and release gear for two bombs of 250 kg or one of 500 kg. Goering – surprised by Messerschmitt’s welcome answer – responded by saying that the Führer had only mentioned two bombs of between 50 kg and 100 kg, but it would be so much the better if the Me 262 could carry two bombs of 250 kg or one of 500 kg. In conclusion he enquired when the machines of this type would be available.

The question embarrassed Messerschmitt. He was anxious to avoid provoking a controversy during Goering’s visit but a mealy-mouthed answer would not now avail him and he was forced to resort to the truth. The fact of the matter was, he said, that the bomb gear had not actually been developed yet, adding hastily that there would be no special difficulty fitting it to the test aircraft immediately after the device had been manufactured. Annoyed at this sudden change in the situation, Goering retorted, ‘You said that the aircraft was to be fitted with the bomb gear from the beginning!’

Messerschmitt struggled vainly to extricate himself by rephrasing his original statement. What he had meant to say was that all accessories had been provided for in the production plans, he said. The now sceptical Reichsmarschall demanded an unequivocal answer to his question exactly what the delay would be. Messerschmitt made the unconvincing response: ‘Oh, not very long. Perhaps two weeks. It’s not a big problem, we still have to make a sort of cover for the bomb claw.’

Here was the conflict: the machine was entering series production as a fighter bomber, i.e., based on original plans containing bomb retention and release gear. This gear was not available although Messerschmitt had implied that it was. Goering received another shock when he learned that not a single model from the pilot series was available for test flight as a bomber. There were only two original prototypes still extant, Messerschmitt said: one of the first three had been destroyed in a crash and the other two were both badly damaged. From this moment on, Goering realised that the production management team at Messerschmitt AG needed to be closely monitored and accordingly he appointed Oberst Petersen, head of the Rechlin Test Centre, to form a commission which would have responsibility for Me 262 development.