With Wings Like Eagles (8 page)

Like Mitchell, Messerschmitt was a man who always sought simple, elegant solutions to technical problems. He was not as successful in his business dealings, however. Milch had made it very clear that Messerschmitt’s reconstituted company would get orders only to build other companies’ aircraft as a subcontractor, but Messerschmitt went ahead and designed several innovative training and small transport aircraft, which, since it was clear that Milch would never buy them for the
Luftwaffe
, he proceeded to sell abroad, securing contracts for the trainer from Romania. Milch chose to treat this as something like an act of treason, precipitating a Gestapo investigation—after all, who could predict on which side Romania might be, if it came to war?—which caused another crisis, requiring the intervention of Göring himself to smooth things over.

A series of misfortunes continued to plague Messerschmitt. He designed a plane to compete in an air speed race, the Challenge du Tourisme Internationale, only to have two of the prototypes crash in succession. Then, changing plans, he turned the Romanian trainer into a high-speed, all-metal tourer, with a flush-riveted, stressed skin of exceptional strength and smoothness. The Bf 108A, as the aircraft came to be known, was full of technical innovations, elegant, fast, and easy to fly. It was admired by everyone who saw it, and looked, in fact, exactly like a scale model of the Bf 109 to come. Enthusiasm for the Bf 108A was in fact so great that it survived despite a crash in which one member of Milch’s own staff was killed while flying the airplane, and even the fact that it was beaten in the 1934 Challenge du Tourisme Internationale by a Polish airplane. It did, however, record the fastest speed reached in the race, and won the praise of experienced pilots like Theo Osterkampf, who had initially been a fierce critic of the aircraft (and who would later go on to become one of the most beloved
Luftwaffe
commanders in the Battle of Britain—he was known as “Uncle Theo” to his pilots).

In 1934, when the
Reichsluftministerium
(RLM), the German air ministry, sent out a request to manufacturers for a single-seat, all-metal monoplane fighter, with retractable undercarriage and a minimum of two machine guns, to be powered by a V-12 liquid-cooled aero engine—essentially similar, except for the number of guns, to British Air Ministry Specification F37/34, which produced the Hurricane and the Spitfire—Milch deliberately excluded Bayerische Flugzeugwerke from the list of firms invited to submit a design. Messerschmitt’s admirers, of whom Göring was one, finally persuaded Milch to relent, but even then the most Milch would do was to offer Bayerische Flugzeugwerke a chance to submit a fighter design at its own expense, as a “developmental project”—that is to say, if the design was accepted, it would be manufactured by another company. Messerschmitt was tempted to give up designing aircraft altogether and take a teaching job instead, but he finally swallowed his pride and sat down to design a fighter, which would have to be so good that it would surpass every other aircraft company’s entry by a clear margin, and which, even then, he knew Milch would probably try to sabotage.

There are people who work best under life-or-death pressure, and Messerschmitt was apparently one of them. In record time he sketched out a new fighter design, the smallest and lightest aircraft he could build around the proposed new twelve-cylinder engine, all metal, and designed so that it could be mass-produced in sections by relatively unskilled labor (a feature it shared with Dr. Porsche’s Volkswagen, which dated from the same period), with a pair of thin rectangular wings tapering to squared-off wingtips, an enclosed cockpit, two machine guns in the engine nacelle and—a daring novelty—a twenty-millimeter cannon firing through the propeller hub. The Bf 109 benefited from the same innovations as the Bf 108A: a sleek, flush-riveted metal skin; leading and trailing edge slats that would open automatically to increase the aircraft’s maneuverability and lift; and, above all, the thinnest possible wing, supported by a single spar, as revolutionary as Mitchell’s elliptical wing for the Spitfire, but much easier to manufacture.

The wing was both the curse and the blessing of Messerschmitt’s design. Its perfection was the central feature of the design, but to achieve that narrow, knife-edge thinness required putting everything that would add weight or bulk to it into the fuselage—hence the armament was all placed ahead of the pilot, and the landing gear and its operating mechanism were fixed to the fuselage, only the strut and wheel retracting outward into the wing. The wings themselves would have to bear the weight of the aircraft only when it was actually in the air. This gave the Messerschmitt fighter its characteristic narrow track and pigeon-toed look on the ground, and contributed to the very high accident rate during taxiing that plagued it throughout its long service life (and was, to a lesser degree, a problem with the Spitfire as well). Ironically, power in the prototype was to be provided by an imported Rolls-Royce Kestrel twelve-cylinder engine, the precursor of the PV XII Merlin, since neither the Junkers nor the Daimler-Benz engine intended for the new generation of
Luftwaffe
fighter had as yet completed its trials.

The aircraft that emerged caused considerable controversy. Pilots disliked the thin wings and delicate tail structure,
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both of which they predicted would break off in violent maneuvers; the hinged cockpit canopy, heavy and shaped like a greenhouse, which opened to the starboard side so that there was no way of sliding it back in flight; and the wing slots, over which the pilot had no control. The plane was startlingly small, too, as if Messerschmitt had carved away every unnecessary square inch of metal. In any event, the general assumption was that this particular horse race was fixed—Milch would never allow Messerschmitt to win it, and that was all right anyway, since most pilots preferred the robust Heinkel (He) 112, which, with its reassuringly thick wings and its superwide track undercarriage, was visibly the better (and sturdier) aircraft.

Messerschmitt continued to produce modified prototypes, the third one at last giving up the Rolls-Royce engine for the Junkers Jumo engine; and as test followed test, the plane that couldn’t win became the one to beat. Two of the three contenders (from Arado and Focke-Wulf) dropped out, leaving only the He 112 as the competition, and, embarrassingly for Milch, Messerschmitt’s fighter consistently out-classed the Heinkel in every possible way—speed, maneuverability, climbing ability, ceiling, high-speed diving ability. There was simply no comparison.
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Ernst Udet, Göring’s old war comrade from the Richthofen Squadron in World War I, now promoted to colonel and technical director of the
Luftwaffe
, and converted into a fervent supporter of Messerschmitt’s fighter, put on a surprise demonstration of it in front of Göring at Rechlin, the
Luftwaffe
test center. Udet managed to “shoot down” in mock combat not only a flight of bombers, but all the fighters accompanying them. Göring was not much interested in technical details, but as a former fighter pilot himself, he could recognize superior performance when he saw it with his own eyes, and from that moment on the He 112 was a dead duck.
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Udet was a brilliant pilot, and in a way his brilliance was his misfortune, since he tended to judge aircraft designs by the seat of his pants, in the air—unlike the patient Dowding, who left that side of things to the test pilots. Another misfortune for Udet was that he was a rival of Milch’s for Göring’s attention. There was bad blood between Udet and Milch, which was made worse by Udet’s fame and glamour. Udet had barnstormed in the early days of German aviation after the war; had flown in numerous German movies about mountains and airplanes, a popular genre in the 1920s, when he had collaborated with Leni Riefenstahl (and, some said, been her lover); and was both a bon vivant (as mentioned earlier) and a brilliant cartoonist, with a gift for mordant caricatures of his fellow senior
Luftwaffe
officers—a talent which often pricked their vanity. It did not help either that although Udet and Göring had both won the Pour le Mérite, imperial Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, Udet’s score of kills was almost three times the size of Göring’s. Göring’s envy of his old friend was as dangerous as Milch’s enmity, and would cost Udet his life in 1941 when he committed suicide.

Despite the political and personal quarrels that surrounded the
Luftwaffe
’s new fighter, it went through its protracted trials with no more than the usual problems of any innovative high-speed design. The Daimler-Benz engine having been selected over the Junkers engine, it was at last introduced into the early production models, and would power the Bf 109 for the next eight years. Messerschmitt had placed a prominent “chin” radiator under the engine nacelle, but like all fighter plane designers, he was obsessed with reducing drag, and eventually was obliged to place a smaller, aerodynamic radiator under each wing—with great reluctance, since it was the first step back from the perfectly “clean” wing he had in mind.
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A more serious problem was his inability to make the twenty-millimeter cannon firing through the propeller hub work—the cannon tended to overheat quickly and jam; and when it did work, the recoil tended to create dangerous vibration (Messerschmitt would eventually get all this right in 1941, with the Me 109G).
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This left the Bf 109 with only the two fuselage machine guns—not enough firepower, especially in view of the RAF’s decision to ask for an eight-gun fighter. The only solution was to put a machine gun in each wing, eventually to be replaced in time for the Battle of Britain by a twenty-millimeter cannon in each wing. Once again, Messerschmitt’s perfect wing was degraded—the gun added weight to the wing, and required a streamlined raised blister to house the ammunition drum. (Aircraft designers fight a constant battle against increases in drag because of operational requirements—additional weaponry, radio antennae, cooling vents, and worst of all, exterior bomb racks, all of which inevitably add to drag and reduce speed.)

Messerschmitt had one great advantage over Mitchell and Camm. In late 1936 and early 1937 several of the preproduction Bf 109s were shipped secretly to Spain, to be tested by
Luftwaffe
pilots of the Condor Legion in combat, in the Spanish Civil War. Valuable lessons were learned—among them the absolute need for the additional two wing machine guns, and a rush program was undertaken to replace them as soon as possible with cannon
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—and many modifications were made to correct the kind of flaws that only real combat can reveal. Like the Hurricane and the Spitfire, the Bf 109 progressed from a fixed-pitch wooden propeller to a metal constant-pitch propeller to a three-bladed variable-pitch propeller, changes that progressively increased its performance.

That said, the Bf 109E, with which the
Luftwaffe
would fight the Battle of Britain, was a formidable and well-designed weapon, and in some respects better equipped for combat (largely as a result of the Germans’ experience in Spain) than its British equivalents. Dowding had been concerned with preserving the integrity of the fuel tanks in the event of a crash, and as a result did not pay enough attention to the new technology of self-sealing fuel tanks, which might have prevented many of the fires that killed or disfigured his pilots. Nor were RAF fighter aircraft fitted with a rubberized one-man life raft that automatically inflated and bobbed to the surface in case of a crash at sea, with the result that many RAF pilots found themselves dogpaddling in the frigid water of the English Channel in their Mae West life jacket, hoping against hope to be seen and picked up by an RAF launch, instead of sitting in a life raft with a vastly better chance of surviving.

The fact that the Daimler-Benz engine had fuel injection instead of carburetors was a plus for the Bf 109—Rolls-Royce engineers, with their taste for the tried-and-true, had preferred to stick with carburetors, which, in sudden, violent dives, sometimes starved the Merlin of fuel. Experienced British fighter pilots learned to perform a quick “flick” of the aircraft before diving to fill the float of each carburetor, but it was an unpleasant experience for less proficient pilots when the engine suddenly cut out in the middle of a dogfight.
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On the other hand, Dowding, with his usual dogged persistence, had browbeaten the Air Council and Rolls-Royce into using 100-octane aviation fuel in the Merlin, whereas the Germans stuck to lower-grade eighty-seven-octane aviation fuel. This was a big and risky decision, since there was at the time no refinery in the United Kingdom producing 100-octane fuel. The fuel had to be imported from the United States, making Fighter Command in 1939 and 1940 dependent, among other things, on the Treasury’s supply of dollars, on the prowess of the German U-boat commanders, and above all on the willingness of merchant sailors to man tankers filled with thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel that one torpedo would turn into a white-hot explosion incinerating in a second both ship and crew.
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The gain in performance by the decision to use American 100-octane fuel in British fighters to some degree offset the advantage of German fuel injection, but it was another one of those things that only a man as objective, determined, and sure of himself as Dowding could have brought off in the face of a skeptical Air Council and Treasury. As in the
Luftwaffe
, early combat experience also led to the addition of armor plate behind the pilot’s seat, and many a pilot would owe his life to this plating.
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The “glamour boys” of the
Luftwaffe
from September 1939 through May 1940 were not, as it happened, the fighter pilots, who had very little to do—much of the Polish air force was destroyed on the ground—but the Stuka pilots. The ungainly Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, instantly recognizable by its gull-shaped wings and fixed undercarriage, was Udet’s brainchild, inspired by the experiments the United States Navy had been making with shipborne Curtis dive-bombers. Overnight, the Stuka became, along with the German tanks, the trademark of the blitzkrieg and the darling of the filmmakers producing war documentaries at the ministry of propaganda, devastating enemy formations far behind the front lines and sowing panic among soldiers and civilian refugees along the roads (a siren fitted to its wing created a piercing screech as it dived, increasing the fear of those on the ground). With regard to the Stuka, Udet got it right—it was cheap to manufacture, simple to fly, and a very effective weapon. Above all, it solved one of the German army’s problems in mobile warfare: the heavy artillery was still mostly horse-drawn and moved forward at much slower pace than the tanks and motorized infantry of the panzer divisions. The Stukas could, when necessary, play the role of heavy artillery—indeed, the reason why the French high command thought that the German army could not come through the Ardennes in May 1940 was that it saw no way the Germans could bring their heavy artillery over the narrow mountain roads, not realizing that the Germans would rely on the Stuka squadrons instead to replace their big guns as they emerged toward the Meuse.