Focke-Wulf Fw 190

By 1938 the Luftwaffe's fighter strength rested entirely on the Messerschmitt Bf 109, and the Reich Air Ministry prudently sought a back-up design. Kurt Tank at Focke-Wulf answered with a fighter built on a wholly different philosophy. Where the Bf 109 was a highly-strung thoroughbred, Tank set out to build a robust 'cavalry horse' — a tough, simple aircraft that could be flown hard from rough fields by ordinary pilots and serviced under field conditions.

His boldest decision was the engine. Against official scepticism Tank chose the big air-cooled BMW 801 radial, accepting its bulky frontal area in return for ruggedness and freedom from vulnerable cooling systems. The prototype first flew on 1 June 1939, and the production aircraft introduced a wide-track inward-retracting undercarriage, heavy armament and an electrically-operated systems suite far in advance of its rivals.

When the Fw 190 entered combat over the Channel in 1941 it came as a brutal shock to the RAF. The margin was not a matter of impression: when the British finally got one to test, the trials found it faster than the Spitfire Mk V at every height by 25 to 35 mph, superior in the dive, in the climb and in the rate of roll, and better in acceleration under all conditions of flight. Its roll rate in particular let it flick out of trouble in a way no Spitfire could follow. For a year, until the Spitfire Mk.IX appeared, it held a clear edge over Fighter Command.

It was also used in a way the Bf 109 could not be. From 1942 Fw 190s flew tip-and-run raids against the English south coast — single aircraft or small formations crossing the Channel at wave height with a bomb, climbing to attack a town or a port and gone before the radar plot could be turned into an interception. The airframe took the loads and the radial engine took the salt air, and the raids were stopped in the end by standing patrols rather than by anything that caught them in the act.

For a year the Fw 190 was the RAF's nightmare precisely because it was a mystery: nothing captured, nothing to test. That ended on 23 June 1942, when Oberleutnant Armin Faber, disoriented after combat over the West Country, mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and landed his intact Fw 190A-3 at RAF Pembrey in Wales.

The windfall was flown against every Allied type within weeks, and the tactical trials report was published in August 1942. It confirmed the 190’s superiority over the Spitfire V in every column that mattered, and it found the boundary of that superiority against the new Spitfire IX rushed into service that July: above 22,000 feet — about 6,700 m — the Fw 190’s climb fell away rapidly while the Spitfire IX’s improved. Below that line the German fighter could still escape almost at will, rolling into a diving turn the opposite way, a manoeuvre the Spitfire could not match. Rarely has a single navigation error mapped an air war so precisely.

The radial-engined A-series was the Fw 190 that most people mean, and it grew steadily heavier and more heavily armed as the war it was fighting changed. The definitive version was the A-8 of 1944, and it was built in a quantity that no other German fighter variant matched: 5,102 aircraft of one mark, out of a total Fw 190 production of 20,001 new-built airframes of all types.

What the A-8 carried tells you what it was expected to do. Two 13 mm MG 131 over the engine and four 20 mm MG 151/20 in the wings was standard, with factory kits — Rüstsätze — that could add underwing gondolas, rocket tubes, extra fuel or armour. It was no longer an aircraft optimised to dogfight a Spitfire. It was an aircraft optimised to bring down a four-engined bomber, and the weight of the guns and armour it needed for that job cost it the agility that had made the 1941 aeroplane so dangerous.

The most extreme version of that logic was the Sturmbock, the A-8/R2 flown by the assault Gruppen. Against the B-17 the problem was arithmetic: to be sure of a kill a fighter had to close to a few hundred metres, and at that range the massed defensive fire of a combat box was lethal. The answer was to armour the fighter and accept the fire. The R2 carried an armoured-glass windscreen with triangular glass side panels and steel plate around the cockpit, traded the cowl machine guns away — removed and faired over — to claw back some of the weight, and put a 30 mm MK 108 in each outer wing, a gun whose shell could destroy a heavy bomber with a handful of hits.

The pilots of IV.(Sturm)/JG 3 under Hauptmann Wilhelm Moritz flew these aircraft in line abreast into the bomber boxes, opening fire from behind at minimum range, and had undertaken to ram if their ammunition ran out before the bomber went down. On 7 July 1944 a force of 1,129 American heavy bombers came over central Germany, and the Sturmgruppe fell on the 492nd Bombardment Group near Oschersleben. The formation was cut to pieces in a single pass. The tactic worked exactly as designed, and it could only be flown by men who had agreed in advance to the terms.

The other great career was at low level. The F-series was the Fw 190 rebuilt for ground attack, and the F-8 was built in almost the same numbers as the A-8 fighter: 4,346 aircraft. It carried 360 kg of armour — steel plate behind the pilot’s head, under the engine cowling and on the wheel-well doors — gave up the outer wing cannon for hardpoints, and took a strengthened undercarriage to survive being operated from field strips at heavy weights.

Loaded, it could lift up to 1,800 kg of bombs, and the F-8/R2 hung six Panzerblitz rocket rails under each wing for use against armour. The Schlachtgeschwader — SG 1, SG 2 and SG 10 among them — flew these on the Eastern Front as the successors to the Ju 87, which is the quiet answer to why the Stuka disappeared: the Luftwaffe did not stop doing close support, it started doing it in a fighter that could defend itself on the way home.

The design’s one persistent weakness was falling performance at altitude, where the BMW radial lost its breath. The cure was to change engines. The D-9 — the Dora, universally the “long-nosed 190” — put the liquid-cooled Jumo 213A in a lengthened nose, balanced by a plug inserted in the rear fuselage, and produced 1,750 PS normally and about 2,100 PS on emergency power with MW 50 water-methanol injection. It reached 686 km/h at 6,600 m. Production began in August 1944 and it entered service that September with III./JG 54.

How many were built is genuinely unsettled. Published figures run from about 650–700 to 1,805, and the spread is not carelessness: the Dora was assembled by several firms besides Focke-Wulf, and authors differ over which plants, sub-blocks and late conversions belong in the column. Its pilots had no doubt about the aeroplane. Flown by men who still knew how to fly, the D-9 was a match for a P-51D at the altitudes where they met, and by the time it arrived there were not many such men left.

The last step was a different aircraft with a familiar shape. The Ta 152H — given Kurt Tank’s own initials, an honour the Ministry granted to few designers — stretched the Dora’s wing to a long, high-aspect span for thin air and fitted the Jumo 213E with a two-stage, three-speed supercharger, MW 50 and GM-1 nitrous injection. It was credited with 748 km/h at 9,000 m and about 760 km/h at 12,500 m, with a ceiling near 14,800 m: on paper, one of the finest piston fighters ever flown.

Almost none were finished. Focke-Wulf completed something between 40 and 67 aircraft between October 1944 and February 1945 depending on whether prototypes, the pre-production H-0 and the C-1 are counted and whether one counts completions or deliveries. They were pooled into a single Stabstaffel of JG 301 at Alteno and then Neustadt-Glewe, which never had more than fifteen on hand. The fighter built to fight above 12,000 m never flew a combat at that height: the American escorts it had been designed to beat were down at the bomber’s altitude, and so, in the end, was it.

The Fw 190 gave the Jagdwaffe in the East some of its highest-scoring pilots, among them Otto Kittel, who claimed 267 victories, most of them on the type, before he was shot down and killed in February 1945. Against a Soviet air force that was expanding faster than the Luftwaffe could kill it, individual scores of that size were a symptom rather than an achievement: they meant a small number of pilots flying until they died.

By 1945 even the Dora and the handful of Ta 152s flew in a sky owned by the Allies. German fighters were hunted on take-off and landing by roving Mustangs and Thunderbolts that had the fuel to loiter over the airfields. And the aeroplane had stopped being the constraint: German aviation-fuel output fell from 175,000 tonnes in April 1944 to 16,000 in August and 7,000 in September, and between the 11th and the 19th of that September the Reich produced no high-grade aviation fuel at all.

Versatile, heavily armed and immensely tough, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the Bf 109’s indispensable partner. Kurt Tank’s insistence on ruggedness and simplicity gave the Luftwaffe a fighter that could serve as interceptor, bomber-destroyer, ground-attack aircraft and night-fighter, from the Atlantic coast to the Russian steppe, flown hard from rough fields by pilots the Bf 109 would have punished.

It is usually called the better of the two German fighters, and the claim needs a qualifier that the aircraft’s reputation has worn away. The 22,000-foot line the Farnborough trials drew in 1942 was where the American bomber battles would later be fought, and the radial-engined A-series was on the wrong side of it — which is why the Jumo-engined D-9 was needed in 1944, and why the Bf 109, which kept its performance in the thin air, stayed in production to the very last day and was built in far greater numbers: some 34,000 against the Fw 190’s 20,000. The Luftwaffe did not choose between them. It needed both, and it flew both until there was no fuel left to fly either.

• Peter Rodeike, Focke-Wulf Jagdflugzeug Fw 190 A, Fw 190 “Dora”, Ta 152 H (Struve).
• William Green, The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 (Macdonald).
• John Weal, Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Aces of the Russian Front (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• Robert Tate, Fw 190 Dora, Vol. 1 (Eagle Editions).
• Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough — tactical trials of the captured Fw 190A-3, report published August 1942.
• Dietmar Hermann, Focke-Wulf Fw 190 “Long Nose” (Schiffer) — the D-series and the production dispute.
• A.F.D.U. Farnborough, Tactical Trials — Fw 190 (Faber aircraft), August 1942.