Messerschmitt Me 262

As early as 1938 — before the war had even begun — Messerschmitt was studying a fighter powered not by a propeller but by the revolutionary new turbojet engine. The concept promised speeds far beyond anything a piston aircraft could reach, but it was hostage to a technology in its infancy: the engines simply were not ready. The airframe, in fact, flew first under a conventional piston engine in 1941, the jets following only when Junkers and BMW could deliver them.

On 18 July 1942 the Me 262 made its first flight on turbojet power alone, and the result was electrifying. Here was a fighter some 150 km/h faster than the best Allied piston aircraft, with a swept-leading-edge wing and two axial-flow Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets slung in nacelles beneath it. The age of the jet fighter had arrived, and Germany would spend the next two years failing to bring it to the front in numbers that mattered.

The limit was metallurgical, not aerodynamic. Heat-resistant turbine blades need nickel, chromium and cobalt, and Germany had none to spare, so the Jumo 004 was built from substitute low-alloy steels. The penalty was brutal and it is the single number that explains the aircraft’s career: production engines averaged about 25 hours of life and needed overhaul after roughly 10. A fighter whose engines expire in ten flying hours cannot be operated like a fighter — it has to be nursed, and the men nursing it were being asked to fight the largest air force in the world. The engines were also temperamental in the air, prone to flameout and to fire if the throttle was moved carelessly.

The politics are the part everyone remembers and the part that matters least. Hitler did insist the aircraft be fielded as a fast bomber rather than the interceptor its designers intended, and the order diverted roughly 30 per cent of production airframes to the Me 262 A-2a. But the delay is popularly laid at his door, and the record does not support it: the binding constraint was the engine from first to last.

The dates make the case. The BMW turbojet originally chosen promised 1,300 lb of thrust and delivered 570 on the bench in late 1940; when the Me 262 first flew on those engines on 25 March 1942, both failed in the air and the aircraft got down on its auxiliary piston engine. The Jumo 004 that replaced them was still being wrestled into production two years later. At the end of the war there were more than a hundred finished Me 262 fighter airframes standing on the ground with no engines to put in them.

The fighter version, the A-1a Schwalbe, carried four 30 mm MK 108 cannon grouped in the nose, with 100 rounds for each of the upper pair and 80 for each of the lower — 360 rounds in all. The gun was built to a single specification: destroy a four-engined bomber with the fewest possible hits. Firing trials put the average at four, and some accounts at three.

The price was velocity. The MK 108 threw its shell at only about 500 m/s, so it dropped fast and had to be fired close, and a jet closing on a bomber at over 800 km/h had a firing window measured in seconds. The aircraft was too fast for its own gun — the pilot had to fly through the formation’s defensive fire to reach a range where the weapon was accurate, then break off before he overran the bomber he was shooting at.

The answer was to strike from beyond the bombers’ reach. The R4M was a simple 55 mm spin-stabilised rocket, twenty-four of them carried on wooden racks under the wings and fired in a single salvo; one warhead was enough to destroy a heavy bomber, and the designers expected an 80 per cent hit score at 500 to 600 m, which is outside the effective range of a B-17’s defensive fifties.

They were used for the first time on 18 March 1945, when III./JG 7 put up some 37 Me 262 against an American force of 1,200 bombers and 600 escort fighters. Six aircraft of 9./JG 7, each with two racks, intercepted over Rathenow and fired 144 rockets into the formation from between 400 and 600 m. Twelve bombers and one fighter were claimed for three Me 262 lost. It was the tactic the aircraft had needed from the start, and it reached the front seven weeks before the surrender.

The A-2a Sturmvogel was the fast bomber Hitler had demanded: two 250 kg bombs on racks under the nose, two of the four cannon deleted to compensate for the weight, and a bomb sight the pilot could not usefully aim through at the speeds the aircraft flew. It went to KG 51 and made its operational debut over Normandy in the summer of 1944.

As a weapon it achieved almost nothing. Ordered to bomb from shallow dives at high speed to survive, its pilots could not hit point targets, and the aircraft delivered a bomb load a Ju 88 could carry three times over. Its real cost was the 30 per cent of airframes it consumed, at the exact moment the interceptor force was being counted in dozens — which is the one place where the political interference did measurable damage, and it is not the place the popular account puts it.

The RAF’s Mosquito was effectively immune over Germany at night: nothing the Luftwaffe flew could both find it and catch it. The Me 262 could catch it. Three B-1a two-seat trainers were converted into B-1a/U1 night fighters with FuG 218 Neptun radar, two MK 108 and two MG 151, the aerials costing enough drag to hurt but not enough to stop the aircraft outrunning a Mosquito.

The first of the three crashed on its maiden flight. The other two went to Kommando Welter, the small unit run by Kurt Welter that flew jets against the night raiders over Berlin and was later regularised as 10./NJG 11. Welter flew most of the unit’s sorties himself in single-seat A-1a fighters, directed onto the Mosquitos by ground control and searchlight beams, because the radar-equipped machines never numbered more than two.

The Me 262 was concentrated in a few elite units, most famously Jagdgeschwader 7 and the all-star JV 44 led by Adolf Galland, which gathered some of the Luftwaffe's finest surviving pilots. When they could get into the air, the jets inflicted sharp, sometimes shocking losses on American and British bomber formations, slashing through escort fighters they could simply outrun.

Their weapon was overwhelming. Nearly 190 km/h faster than a Mustang, the Me 262 carried four 30 mm cannon and, later, racks of R4M rockets that could shred a bomber formation in a single pass. In the hands of aces like Galland and Heinz Bär it offered a glimpse of the future of air warfare — and scored the first jet-versus-aircraft kills in history.

Even the first entry needs correcting. The victory usually cited as the first ever scored by a jet fighter was claimed on 26 July 1944, when Leutnant Alfred Schreiber of Erprobungskommando 262 attacked a Mosquito PR XVI of No. 544 Squadron over Munich at around 8,500 m. Schreiber made repeated passes, saw pieces come off the aircraft and was credited with it. The Mosquito, flown by Flight Lieutenant A. E. Wall, dived into cloud and landed at an Allied airfield in Italy. The first confirmed destruction by an Me 262 came on 8 August 1944, when Leutnant Joachim Weber shot down a Mosquito of No. 540 Squadron over Ohlstadt.

The scoreboard needs reading with care, as every air-combat scoreboard does. Me 262 pilots claimed some 542 Allied aircraft destroyed against about 100 jets lost in air combat, and that ratio is the one usually quoted. The gap between claim and record is not evidence of dishonesty — in a single high-speed pass several pilots fire on the same bomber and each of them watches it fall out of formation. A detailed check against British and American loss returns puts the real total in the fighter role at no more than 150, roughly a quarter of what was claimed.

But the aircraft was desperately vulnerable at its weakest moments — slow and heavy on take-off and on the landing approach, its sluggish-spooling engines unable to provide quick power. Allied pilots learned to patrol over the jet airfields and pounce as the Me 262s climbed out or came in to land, and many were destroyed in exactly those phases. Chronic fuel shortages, the wreckage of Germany's airfields and rail network, and a trickle of barely-trained pilots meant that the revolutionary fighter spent most of its days grounded.

The airfields themselves became the target. The jets needed long, hard runways, of which Germany had few and the Allies knew where all of them were, so the approaches were patrolled and the runway edges were lined with light flak and with Fw 190s kept purely to cover Me 262s taking off and landing. A fighter that could not be caught in the air was destroyed on the eight minutes at either end of its sortie.

Around 1,430 Me 262 were completed and only a fraction ever flew operationally — the fleet was short of engines, fuel, runways and trained pilots simultaneously, and the shortage of any one of the four was enough to keep it on the ground. It was the first jet aircraft to enter operational service anywhere in the world, and in the right circumstances it was very nearly untouchable.

For all that, the design itself was visionary. Its swept wing — adopted partly to solve a centre-of-gravity problem, but aerodynamically prescient — and its podded turbojets pointed directly at the shape of post-war jet aviation. Captured Me 262s were pored over by Allied engineers, and their influence can be traced in the first generation of jets on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

• J. Richard Smith & Eddie J. Creek, Me 262 (Classic Publications) — the definitive multi-volume study.
• Manfred Boehme, JG 7: The World’s First Jet Fighter Unit 1944–1945 (Schiffer).
• Robert Forsyth, Jagdgeschwader 7 “Nowotny” (Osprey).
• Walter J. Boyne, Messerschmitt Me 262: Arrow to the Future (Smithsonian).
• Christer Bergström, The Ardennes 1944–1945 and companion studies of Luftwaffe claim records — for the reconciliation of claims against Allied loss returns.
• Robert Forsyth, Me 262 Bomber and Reconnaissance Units (Osprey) — for the A-2a and KG 51.