Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Alfred Price mentions that Hitler wanted to use the Me 262 as a bomber against the expected landing of Allied troops in Europe, implying that Hitler was right and Adolf Galland was wrong (who wanted to use the Me 262 exclusively as a fighter). Its use against bombers or fighters of the USAAF was a waste of its potential, because, ironically, its high speed would make it clear away past its opponent without giving it much time to fire and inflict lethal damage. Why not, therefore, add, that the Me 262 should have been used offensively against ground air targets in Britain, where it could have attacked and then escaped its pursuers with ease? Remember that the Me 262 was used in Operation Bodenplatte.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Only I./KG 51 took part in "Bodenplatte".
The use of fighter-bombers against Britain had no effect on the outcome of war. Why would have the Me 262 been more effective than the Fw 190 or the Bf 109 (or even the V-2) in this rôle?
Pinpoint bombing could not have won a war that was already lost everywhere else.
That's just not realistic.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Hitting the UK would have had little effect, not least because of the shortage of airfields. Whenever the Germans did try to gather a bomber force capable of hitting British targets, Allied airpower concentrated on their airfields to knock them out. Read the writings of Roly Beamont for an example. Had a large number of Me 262 bombers, with trained crews, been available to penetrate the Allied fighter cover over the beaches and hit the landing ships and troops hard, in co-operation with Panzer divisions in the right place at the right time, then maybe the invasion would have failed and opened possibilities for the Germans. That's a lot of suppositions, and such a fleet of Me 262s belongs in Dreamland. You might also bear in mind that the likeliest result of a failed invasion and protracted war would have been an atom bomb on Berlin or Hamburg.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

It was not Hitler who first envisaged the Me 262 as a bomber, but Willy Messerschmitt, who at least twice told Hitler what a great bomber the Me 262 would make and that it would take just a few weeks to convert the a/c to a bomber. After the 2nd time he told this to Hitler, Hitler gave a Fuehrer Directive for this to be done, but Messerschmitt did nothing. I think that was in either late 1943 or very early 1944. Then in April 1944, when Hitler asked about this Blitz bomber, and found out that Mtt had done nothing, he gave his order that no more fighters would be built until the bombers were completed, and even this order was partially ignored.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The refusal to allow the 262 below 4000 metres over enemy territory until late October 1944 didn't help (and then only for "important targets"). At that altitude without a bomb sight, effectiveness would be rather limited, I'd guess.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

This is a difficult topic. Hitler actually already ordered in the first quarter of 1943 that every fighter aircraft must be capable of carrying bombs. Due to this order Messerschmitt engineers planned a maximum capacity of 500 kg for the Me 262 already in early 1943 (project drawing II/141). Hence, the optional use of the Me 262 as a fighter bomber was planned long before the famous Insterburg "Airshow" in November 1944 or the meeting on 23 May 1945. Messerschmitt told Hitler at the Insterburg airshow that the Me 262 could be used as a fighter bomber. The reasons are that first he knew that at least some work had been done already to use the Me 262 as a fighter bomber and secondly he wanted to avoid that the program Me 209 was stopped in favour of a fighter aircraft Me 262. His estimations for conversion time were very optimistic, however: 14 days (2 Nov 1944). However, the electrical wiring diagram and the bomb racks were not designed yet. A Messerschmitt memo of 30 April 1943 mentions that it was decided to install the necessary equipment only in V-9 and later V-aircraft in order not to disturb the construction of V-aircraft and to assure useful starting conditions at the introduction of the Me 262 at operational units. In July 1943 the preparations for the pre series production were almost completed and the focus should - according to another memo from July 1943 - be on the fighter bomber conversion. At the beginning of 1944 work on the bomb installations were progressing and it was intended to introduce bomb installations from the 6 serial production Me 262 onwards. Hence, in my opinion it was just a matter of priority. Messerschmitt did work on the bomb system for the Me 262 but only after the preparations for the pre series production were completed and probably also then not with full capacity as there were still a lot of other problems to be solved (e.g. the feeding mechanism of the Mk 108 had severe problems). It might have been possible to have the bomb system ready earlier if Messerschmitt focused 100% on this, but then the pre series production might have been delayed and with it also the operational use of the Me 262.

The problems later arose due to technical and tactical shortcomings: the two main tanks of the initial design did not hold enough capacity and the range of the Me 262 with bomb load would have been too little. This required a new fuel tank (600 liters). Through this increased weight the landing gear had to be strengthened and two of 4 MK 108 had to be removed. Since the 600liter tank was in the rear and the weight of 2 MK108 in the nose was removed the aircraft was now extremely tail heavy after releasing the bombs. In addition, an appropriate gunsight had not yet been developed and in the end led to the use of the standard Revi 16B and the development of the Lotfe Me 262 with a seperate bomb aimer.

To come back to the original question: The range was too low without the additional fuel tank to fly it over England. Even with the fuel tank, it hardly flew longer than 1 hour. And even if it was possible the result would have been almost nothing.

Regards
Roger Gaemperle

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

This discussion has made me consider something I've never seen discussed anywhere. Given that Hitler did see the need for a fast bomber to hit the Allies in the first stages of the landing, why wasn't the German industry devoting time to answering this call?

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

I have a question too: why did the Germans introduce the R4M so late?

Was there some technological barrier to be overcome or did they spend time on more complex anti-bomber ideas (big guns, bigger guided rockets) before coming back to the relative simplicity of an unguided rocket?

Supplementary question: does anyone know what kind of smoke trail an R4M left, if any? Dense, thin, black, white?

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Graham,

It interested me the targets. Were there hypotheses about use of atom bomb(s) against Third Reich that far ?

Regards,
Michal

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The atom bomb was developed to be dropped on Germany, but the targets in my posting were from my own imagination.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Thanks for that, Roger. It adds a great deal of clarification to the topic.
George

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The real question is Could it be operational earlier, nd in qty ???

When war hs been "completed", should not the allies give some medals to Prof.Messerschmitt ??

Rémi

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

I have a question too: why did the Germans introduce the R4M so late?

I read that the german were more confident on cannons, more accurate cost lower...internal weapon..
The rocket seems to more some kind of saturation weapon, not for a scarce-materail country like germany

remi

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

RT: your "real question" has been answered before: No. The introduction of the Me 262 into service was dependent on achieving an acceptable production standard for the Jumo engine. The most that could perhaps have been achieved would be to have a few more fighter pilots in a few more aircraft, a little bit sooner. This would not have been significant.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

I imagine, Nick, that the R4M was simply the result of a slow evolution of air-to-air rocket design, and that evolution just got the R4M into service too slowly. They had the RZ65 in 1942/43, and then seemed to go into larger rockets rather than to stay with massed smaller rockets. Perhaps, to increase the amount of propellent. So, perhaps the propellent burn rate, and thrust were the problem. And that's the problem with these things, there are so many aspects to them.

It's not much, Nick. But, maybe a start.
George

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The Me 262 couldn't have been introduced into service earlier for the simple fact that there were not enough turbines. BMW and Junkers experienced a lot of troubles with this new technology and lack of nickel and chrom for the turbine blades had a negative effect on the mass-production.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

But they invested a lot of effort in other weapons to break up formations, rather than hit individual aircraft. It seems to me that the R4M would have served that purpose very well if the bombers could see it coming (e.g. smoke trails). Other advantages were small aerodynamic penalty from carrying them (at least I guess so) compared to a big gun or the WGr. 21 and that they were "fire-and-forget" weapons unlike, say, the X-4.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

I agree completely, Nick. And, I find it amazing that they were still using WGr. 21s on the Me 262. I find both that installation and the rearward firing WGr. 21 installation beneath the fuselage of the Fw 190 as to be little short of madness. With all the back blast, I can see real problems in firing both sets of rockets, with the one beneath the Fw 190 possibly causing real damage to the propeller, and the Me 262 ones causing damage along the entire bottom of the fuselage.

I can't see the X-4 as anything more than a gimmick since who would want to sit there stearing a rocket while there are escort fighters all around. So, yes the fire-and-forget rockets would be necessary.

The RZ 65 installations on the 109F and 110F were just too elegant, and would have been more effective in multi-shot tubes beneath the wings. And, with the multiple rockets great for downing a single bomber at a time.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

I surely missed an episode. Were WGr. 21 fitted to 262s?

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

You are right difficult to understand the non use the low technology weapon like rockets, if we use the cumbersome Wgr.21, but further against bombers after the satisfactory use at year end of the R4M, during for example the Korean war it was used cannons. Before the advent of the guided-rockets the cannon was certainly the best compromise, the americans re-introduce it in the F4 even.

An other explanation is that idot-rockets are not german-weapons, Germany in the first part of the century was the show-window of the world science they stole 60 % of the nobel prices in the scientific categories, the french quite achieve this figure too ...but in litterature.

rémi

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Dear All,

Guess I can't resist putting in my two cents worth. Actually, another researcher, Daniel Uziel, has proposed that the Me 262 was a mistake and that Germany should have concentrated on building improved piston engined fighters instead. I sure hope I've got that right. Anyway, on first blush, one might think what a crazy idea. But, I've given it some thought and I think he has a point.

I recently downloaded an American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics paper, no. 80-3039, Evolution of the F-86, by Morgan M. (Mac) Blair of Rockwell International back in 1980. On the very first page Mac gives a bar chart with figures I find pretty unbelievable. Mac shows that 968 P-51's were shot down during the war by Axis airplanes. In contrast, he claims that 55,514 Axis airplanes were shot down by P-51's. Is that anywhere near close to accurate? Even if we cut that number by a factor of 10, it is still an overwhelming number of Axis losses to P-51 losses. There is no way the Me 262 could have been produced in time and in sufficient numbers to make a difference and, regardless, it wasn't any good in close air-to-air combat with a P-51 or P-47 anyway due to its wide turning radius. As we have seen, its forte, only discovered late in the war, was to knock down Allied bombers and did so effectively with the R4M. But, by this time, the war was long over for the Axis in Europe.

However, if one plays what if, the story might have been different. Suppose that early on it was recognized in Germany that, with America's entry into the war, and projecting an almost unlimited American manufacturing capacity to turn out bombers, that a strategy was needed to prevent the Allies from even getting going on a bomber campaign in the first place. Perhaps Germany was lulled into a sort of complacency when early escort fighters had to turn back short of the target, leaving the bombers to fend for themselves. Losses of bombers in those days were likely near the tipping point of being simply too high for sustained operations. The advent of the drop tank changed all that.

Had Germany concentrated on making superior piston engined aircraft in large quantities in 1942, that tipping point would have been reached. It would also have allowed Germany to build up its forces even further, making the life of the escort fighters, even with drop tanks, miserable.

As for the Me 262, the latter half of 1942 was probably its lowest ebb in terms of priority. It was only in 1943 that the program gained momentum and by the second half it was extremely bullish. At the same time, a huge amount of effort was being wasted on the development of the V-2, a weapon whose efectiveness didn't warrant the huge expenditures being applied to it. Only mated up with an atom bomb in future developments did the concept of an IRBM or ICBM make any sense.

As to the inevitability that, had Germany resisted, it would have seen the first atom bomb, well, that presupposes that an Allied bomber carrying one could actually have made its way to the intended target. If, on the other hand, Germany simply had developed air defenses that made bomber losses prohibitive in the first place, then one can't assume that the atom bomb would have been employable. Even if the Allies were willing to risk huge losses to deliver the weapon, there was also the possiblity that, rather than exploding as intended, the aircraft would have become disabled and the bomb then fall into German hands. This same reasoning prevented the first Meteors arriving on the continent from flying over German-held territory. It was only when the Luftwaffe was clearly not a threat, nor ground fire, that this restriction was eased.

Anyway, there are some thoughts to ponder.

Regards,
Richard

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Yes they were Chris, but I was asking about air-to-air weapons in general, not specifically on the Me 262. Another case of threads straying off-topic, I'm afraid!

55,000
 

The 55,000 axis airplanes seems unreasonable. Without checking numbers, lets think:

Total WWII P-51 production - about 10,000. (guessing here. The B-24 was the most produced US aircraft at 15,000).

Number of those getting to front line service: 50% - 5,000.

That means each P-51 in front line service would have to destroy 10 Axis aircraft.

That seems unbelievable.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Total USAAF claims in air-to-air combat in WW2 by all types is on the order of 15,000. That is from AF Historical Study 85. I would very much doubt that total air-to-ground claims for USAAF in WW2 amounted to 40,000. So the 55,000 number has to be very suspicious. Total German losses in air-to-air combat? But certainly not by the P-51 alone.

Frank.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Richard, I don't know where he got his number from but the P-51s of the 8th made 5276 aerial kills.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The Achilles Heel was engines. The Jumos apparently proved unreliable - at least during early operations during the time to which the initial poster of this thread refers. Fritz Wendel's comments following his visit to Ekdo 262 and/or Kdo Nowotny are relevant. Plus the fact that Junkers just proved unreliable in delivering - both in terms of quantity and quality. It was a problem which plagued Professor Messerschmitt in his championing of the Me 262 to Hitler. As late as 1945, pilots of JG 7 complained bitterly - and regularly - about flames-outs at low altitudes. Its prospects as a fighter-bomber were thus dubious. As others have already stated, the aircraft was intended as an interceptor and it peformed relatively well in that role, though the P-51 proved an admirable adversary - a result of a a lethal pilot and aircraft combination.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Here is <Green 3 of JG 7 with a pair of WGr. 21s attached to the bomb racks. The photo is an often published one, in this case from page 569 of Volume 3 of the excellent four volume Me 262 series by Classics. On page 568 is a coloured side view of that a/c.

Attachment 1269

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Everything that goes around, comes around, and some factors may be important, enev when not evident. A case in point - the Jumo engine and the alloys needed to get it to run dependably for more than 10 hours. The fact that crucial metals were not available in quantity to make those alloys was a triumph of the Royal Navy, which ended blockade-running from the Far East before the end of 1943 and had, in fact, reduced it to near-zero proportions well before that.

As of January 1944 the Luftwaffe had a substantial bomber force which, if maintained, might have made a crucial intervention on 6-7-8 June 1944, and might even have inflicted considerable damage on ships in port a month before D Day. But it was thrown away in "The Little Blitz". Twenty-odd Me.262 fighter-bombers could never have had the impact of 200 well-directed Ju.88s.

That said, if D Day had failed, what would the probable outcome have been ? American A-bombs on Germany ? Or the Red Army "liberating" Europe right up the the Atlantic coast. Germany was beaten even before D Day. The only way she could have salvaged even a stalemate in the East was for the British and Americans to suddenly decide that they feared Stalin more than they hated Hitler !

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Even if we kind of forgot the original question, this is a most interesting debate.
Adding my two cents to Richard T. Eger's, I will eventually go further and claim that the Me 262 was a waste of resources. It should not have gone beyond an experimental role. If two jet engines were necessary to deliver the require thrust, they were a real handicap in air-to-air combat.
The Germans should have concentrated much earlier on a single-engined jet fighter. The He 162 would have (probably) been more efficient had it been pitted against Allied fighters, even though it was not an easy aircraft to fly.
Another waste of resources was the Do 335, the last of the dinosaurs. But at that time, it did not really matter. And yes, strategical materials used in the V-1 and V-2 would have been more useful if employed to build hundreds more of Fw 190s and Bf 109s.
Germany delayed the building of a heavy force of fighters because when their leaders realized that the figures and statistics of US aero industry output and power were right and not propaganda, it was just too late.
To concentrate on building superior piston-engined fighters in large quantities in 1942 means that the programs should have been initated in 1940. At that time, Germany had every good reason to believe they would win the war. US were out of the game and still flying inadequate P-36s and P-40s with few promising new programs. The Germans had absolutely no reason to start a mass-production of new generation fighters they had no use of.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Somethng they were actually trying to do in the last weeks of the "Little Blitz", a major raid on Portsmouth proving a complete failure for example (see Kampfflieger Vol. 4 in the Classic colours series) and other attacks on Torquay and Falmouth dong little damage.

The bomber force in Italy got very poor results as well in repeated raids (about 100 Ju 88s each time) on Naples from late 1943 to mid-1944. The Bari Harbour attack in December 1943 and the Corsican airfields one in May 1944 were their only major successes.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

To describe the He 162 as "difficult" is understating the case. It was difficult (though not exceptionally so) to fly in normal flight. In extreme combat manoeuvres it was a killer. It suffered from a problem, unknown at the time of its design, called inertia coupling, caused by having large masses offset from the aircraft's axes of manoeuvre (in this case the engione). This problem was first analysed in the UK after the death of a test pilot in the UK, in a classic report by W.G. Pinsker of the RAE. It was also analysed in the US after the death of NAA test pilot George Welch in an early F-100.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

It was a naturally unstable aircraft which could have been an advantage in dogfights, but it had no automated systems to compense its unstability in normal flights. I guess it was "difficult" to land (probably with a high landing speed - by the standards of the time) with a great sensibility to gusts because of its engine positionning.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

As an afterthought - what would it have mattered if the Germans has built thousands more conventional fighters ? What use would they have been without the fuel to fly them ?

Gasoline was the Achilles heel of their war effort. Hitler deprived them of their largest, most reliable source by attacking Russia in June 1941 (almost to the eve of the invasion, Stalin had been delivering on his treaty obligations with blind regularity). After that, the Wehrmacht had to make do on what could be squeezed from coal and from Roumania. Moreover, by July 1944 the Roumanian oil fields had been taken out of production - by the Red Army. From then on, the panzers and Luftwaffe were literally out of gas (think of the Battle of the Bulge, when the armoured divisions were hoping to capture the fuel stocks that would top off their tanks ! Can you imagine Patton driving forward, hoping that the Germans would conveniently leave fuel stocks for him ?

Fuel shortages had reduced Luftwaffe flying training to a joke. The average pilot starting combat in 1944 had less time than an Allied pilot newly "winged" and still with operational training ahead of him.

As to the He.162 - it was not "difficult to fly" - it was a deathtrap which killed at least one skilled German test pilot and one British test pilot after the war. The idea of Hitler Youth taking glider lessons and then going on to flying '162s into combat was criminal and ludicrous.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

As an afterthought - what would it have mattered if the Germans has built thousands more conventional fighters ? What use would they have been without the fuel to fly them ?

Right.
But let's push the reasonning to its limits.
Had they had thousands more fighters, maybe they would have prevented the 8th AF from shattering their synthetic oil plants?
But we are on the brink of a new "what if?" and I am not into that kind of game. What did really happen is complex enough to understand, we don't need to look for what could have happened.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

And what did happen if Hitler had shaven off his moustaches?

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

The face of the world might have not been changed, but his would!

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

Back to the original question. I think the answer is yes. The role of the fighter bomber, from Erprobungsgruppe 210 in 1940 to the modern jet fighter-bomber, is fairly simple. Get in quickly (and undetected if possible), hit the target, and get out quickly again, with the capacity to defend yourself if needs be. The only variable being 'hit the target', as even with all of the modern laser guided systems, the present-day jet fighter-bombers appear to be no more successful in hitting designated targets than the pioneers in 1940. The 262, in its time, was as good as anything before or since in fulfilling that role. No more, no less.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

No chance, the 262 should have been developed as a fighter and only a fighter, mainly as a bomber destroyer.
I firmly feel that with the strong Allied fighter cover offered late war,the 262 even in large numbers would still have not acheived anything.
As we now know many 262's fell in action, more 262's would just have been more kills for the Mustangs and Thunderbolts.

Just wish the Meteor could have met it in combat

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

By 1944 the Luftwaffe had just as great a need for a daytime close support aircraft that could survive in the West. The Fw 190 F wasn't it (see what happened to SG 4 in Italy) since German resources weren't great enough to provide it with escorts on the necessary scale. The 262 on the other hand had a better chance without escorts.

Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
 

On the return leg, yes. But how fast and manoeuvrable was the 262 with two bombs?
And why not build more Ar 234s in this case?