Junkers Ju 88

The Ju 88 was born from the mid-1930s Schnellbomber concept: a bomber fast enough to simply outrun the fighters sent to intercept it. The Junkers design, led by Ernst Zindel, first flew on 21 December 1936, and an early prototype set international speed-with-payload records in 1939. On its own terms the formula worked.

Then the requirement changed. In October 1937, Ernst Udet — impressed by what the Ju 87 was achieving in the dive-bombing role — ordered that the Ju 88 be developed as a heavy dive-bomber too. It meant extensive structural and aerodynamic change: the wings and fuselage were strengthened, dive brakes were added, the crew rose to four, and the forward fuselage was redesigned as a compact glazed compartment. Weight climbed, the speed advantage that had been the entire point shrank, and the programme slipped — only a handful of Ju 88s were operational when war broke out in September 1939.

The Ju 88 A was powered by two Junkers Jumo 211 liquid-cooled inverted V-12s — about 1,400 hp each in the definitive A-4 — housed in annular radiators that made them look like radials at a distance. The entire four-man crew was concentrated in that single glazed nose, a German design philosophy meant to keep the crew in physical contact with one another under fire.

The A-4 could reach roughly 470 km/h, carry a maximum of around 3,000 kg of bombs in internal bays and on wing racks, and defend itself with a battery of flexible 7.92 mm MG 81 machine guns. Slatted dive brakes under the outer wings allowed steep diving attacks of surprising accuracy for an aircraft of its size — though crews often removed them later in the war, when speed mattered more than precision.

Over Britain in 1940 the Ju 88 was the fastest of the Luftwaffe’s three main bombers and correspondingly the hardest to catch. It made no difference to the outcome: no bomber survived unescorted against Fighter Command, and the Ju 88 units took heavy losses alongside the Heinkels and the Dorniers.

It went on to serve wherever the Luftwaffe fought — over Malta and the Mediterranean, through the Balkans, and on the Eastern Front from the first day of Barbarossa to the last weeks of the war. More Ju 88s were built as bombers than any other German type, and it was the aircraft the Luftwaffe reached for when a target had to be hit at range and at speed.

The Ju 88 was also the Luftwaffe’s premier anti-shipping aircraft. Flying from Norway, the Ju 88s of KG 26 and KG 30 — with bombs and later air-launched torpedoes — were among the main executioners of the Arctic convoys. PQ 17 lost 23 of its 34 merchant ships to combined air and submarine attack in July 1942, after the Admiralty ordered it to scatter; PQ 18 followed in September, by which time the convoys were sailing with escort carriers and were far costlier to attack.

Far to the south the type fought a different sea war. Ju 88 heavy fighters patrolled the Bay of Biscay, covering the U-boat transit routes against RAF maritime aircraft. Between July 1942 and July 1944 the Ju 88s of KG 40 and ZG 1 were credited with 109 confirmed aerial victories — against 117 of their own aircraft lost.

The Ju 88’s most consequential second career began when the glazed nose was replaced by a solid one. The C-series carried a 20 mm MG FF cannon and three 7.92 mm MG 17 in that nose; about 900 C-6 were built on the A-4 airframe. Radar made them lethal: first the FuG 202 Lichtenstein BC with its 32-dipole Matratze aerial, then the FuG 220 Lichtenstein SN-2 and the eight-dipole Hirschgeweih — the stag’s antlers that became the silhouette of the German night war.

The decisive weapon was far simpler than the radar. Schräge Musik — two 20 mm cannon mounted to fire obliquely upward — let a night fighter settle into the blind spot beneath an RAF heavy bomber, which carried no ventral turret, and fire into its wing tanks from a position no gunner could answer. A field-conversion kit was available during 1943. The definitive G-series added four forward-firing MG 151/20, and the men who flew it included Helmut Lent, Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and Heinz Rökker.

The same airframe absorbed almost every other job the Luftwaffe had. The D-series flew long-range reconnaissance, the S-series were stripped high-speed bombers, the P-series carried heavy cannon for ground attack, and torpedo-carrying versions armed the anti-shipping units. The design also evolved into the improved Ju 188 and the high-altitude Ju 388.

Its strangest incarnation was the Mistel. A war-weary Ju 88 had its crew compartment removed and replaced with a large shaped-charge warhead; a piloted Bf 109 or Fw 190 rode on struts above it, flew the pair to the target area, released the unmanned bomber and returned alone. The first combination, Mistel 1, paired a Ju 88 A-4 with a Bf 109 F.

The totals are large and not perfectly agreed. Kay gives 15,183 aircraft; the German production programmes held in the Bundesarchiv record 14,882 newly built and delivered through 31 March 1945, plus at least 1,547 conversions of existing airframes. Bomber and reconnaissance versions accounted for 10,774 of them — just over 60 per cent — and more than 9,000 were built as bombers, a figure equal to the production of every other German bomber type combined.

By the end there were some 60 versions and more than 100 prototypes. What Germany had come to need of it shows in the last month for which the figures are clean: in January 1945 the factories completed 188 Ju 88s, and almost every one of them was a G-6 night fighter.

• J. R. Smith & Antony L. Kay, German Aircraft of the Second World War (Putnam).
• William Green, Warplanes of the Third Reich (Macdonald & Co.).
• Gebhard Aders, History of the German Night Fighter Force 1917–1945 (Jane’s Publishing).
• John Weal, Junkers Ju 88 Kampfgeschwader on the Western Front (Osprey).