Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?

[Richard T. Eger]

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

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by CJE

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

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!

[Dick Powers]

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.

[Frank Olynyk]

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.

[Kutscha]

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

[Robert Forsyth]

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.

[George Hopp]

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

[HAHalliday]

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 !

[CJE]

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.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by HAHalliday

As of January 1944 the Luftwaffe had a substantial bomber force which, if maintained, might have ... inflicted considerable damage on ships in port a month before D Day.

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.