Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (34 page)

On September 30, 1938, during the Czech crisis, Goering ordered the Ju-88 into mass production, despite the fact that testing had not yet been completed. Mass production began at a half-dozen factories, but by the time the war broke out not one had reached the squadrons. When the first model (the Ju-88A-1) did enter service in September, 1939, it was slower than the He-111s it had been designed to replace. It also had difficulties taking off with full tanks, was difficult to fly, and some of the Ju-88A-1s caught fire in mid-air from no apparent cause. Its range was limited to 250 miles when fully loaded with two tons of bombs. This version was plagued with technical problems until it was taken out of service. Other models were better, but all caused early pilot fatigue, and none really lived up to expectations. Nevertheless more than 15,000 were manufactured during the war (because the Technical Office could develop nothing better), and they were used in a variety of roles, including horizontal and dive-bombing, long-range reconnaissance, torpedo bombing, and night-fighting. They were effective in some roles, but this did not make up for the fact that Germany had no modern bomber by 1942.

If the Ju-88 was a disappointment, the He-177 was a disaster. In early 1938 Udet apparently decided that the Luftwaffe might need a long-range bomber after all (for a possible war against Russia), and he issued specifications for such an aircraft. It would have to carry two tons of bombs and have a range of action of more than 1,000 miles. In the early spring, Ernst Heinkel submitted a proposal, and a few weeks later Udet and Jeschonnek saw a mock-up of the He-177. It featured four engines joined to two propellers by a coupling arrangement. Both Udet and Jeschonnek had requested a four-engine, four-propeller construction, only to defer to Heinkel’s enthusiasm for the tandem-engine arrangement.
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A few months later Udet, with the agreement of Lucht, Reidenbach, and Jeschonnek, issued the requirement that the He-177 be capable of diving at a 60-degree angle. Udet told Heinkel: “The He-177 must be capable of diving at all costs.”

“You can’t make a dive-bomber out of an aircraft that size!” Heinkel responded. The He-177 weighed 30,000 pounds at that time.

“For all practical purposes it’s a twin-engine aircraft,” Udet replied. “If the twin-engined Ju-88 can dive, why shouldn’t the He-177?”
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The new requirement forced Heinkel to increase the weight of the He-177 to thirty-two tons, at a sacrifice of speed and maneuverability.
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On November 19, 1938, it was test-flown at Rechlin. The results were unsatisfactory, due to high engine oil temperatures. Udet nevertheless authorized the production of the He-177, but at a very low rate and priority. In June, 1940, only three of these bombers were being produced per month.
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The weaknesses of the He-111 and Ju-88 had been amply demonstrated in the Battle of Britain. Udet’s failures were also made public for the entire world to see. Clearly Germany had lost its lead in military aviation technology. To regain it quickly, Udet gambled. In October, 1940, he ordered the He-177 into mass production, despite its negative test results. This order demanded a time-consuming reorganization of the aircraft industry. The He-111 was taken out of production, the factories were retooled, and the mass production began. All of this took months. Only when it came off the production lines were the defects of the parallel-coupled engines discovered. Most serious was its tendency to explode in mid-air for no apparent reason (apparently the fuel lines dripped on the hot manifolds) or to break apart during dives. Its connecting rods were also prone to breaking, penetrating the crankcase and letting hot oil fly everywhere. Even if fire was avoided, the valves fouled after a maximum of six hours’ flying time. Everything was so jammed together that it was almost impossible to install fire walls.
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Wood and Gunston described it as “possibly the most troublesome and unsatisfactory aircraft in military history . . . no engines in bomber history have caught fire so often in normal cruising flight.”
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The He-177 became known as the
Luftwaffenfeuerzeug
—“the Luftwaffe’s lighter.” More than fifty prototypes broke up during dives or turned into giant Roman candles in level flight. Despite the fact that 1,446 were manufactured during the war,
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only 33 had been accepted for service by late 1942. Of these, only two were still operational a few weeks later.
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Because so many prototypes went down in flames, crews and all, the He-177 had to be withdrawn from the production lines. The aircraft industry had to reorganize and retool again, at the cost of tens of thousands of hours, so it could resume the production of bomber models that were already obsolete. The waste of raw materials was tremendous.

The Me-210 was another of Udet’s failures. It was designed by Willi Messerschmitt as a multipurpose replacement for the Me-110, the Ju-87, and the Hs-123. The plans for this aircraft were submitted to RLM and approved in the summer of 1938. Jeschonnek had such confidence in the designer’s abilities that he requested 1,000 airplanes, even before the first prototype was completed. Udet was also taken in. Udet was “no match for the tricks of the industrialists,” his adjutant, Col. Max Pendele, noted later.
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The Air Ministry’s order was based solely upon performance forecasts and Messer-schmitt’s effective sales pitch.
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Delivery of the Me-210 was scheduled for mid-1941. The first prototype flew on September 5, 1939. It was unstable and unpredictable and whipped into spins at high angles of attack. Nevertheless, the airframes of the Me-210s were being assembled in mid-1940, even though no solutions to its shortcomings had been found. The progressive phasing out of the Me-110 had already been ordered; reliance on the Me-210 was total.
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Finally brought into production in 1941, the Me-210 proved to be a total failure. Airplane after airplane crashed, and pilots looked upon it as a death-trap. Milch finally cancelled the program altogether and called for Messer-schmitt’s resignation (which he did not get). Milch estimated that the Me-210 program cost the Luftwaffe 600 aircraft.
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It was conceded even by his enemies that Ernst Udet was a charming man. He was also a good actor and deceiver. When French Air Marshal Joseph Vuillemin visited Germany, Udet led him around “by the nose.”
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He convinced the French air force commander-in-chief that the Luftwaffe was much stronger than it really was. Later he did the same thing to Goering and Hitler.

On July 3, 1939, Hitler visited the Luftwaffe’s experimental testing station at Rechlin. The purpose of the display was to win Hitler’s support for the allocation of the economic resources necessary to fulfill the Hitler Program. Hitler saw the new Ju-88, the Me-110, the Me-209, the He-100, an air-to-ground missile, an early warning radar, a 30mm cannon, rocket-assisted take-offs, and other miracle weapons (by 1939 standards). Most of this equipment still required further testing and some of it was never developed, but Adolf Hitler did not know that, and Hermann Goering did not know it either. Udet, in fact, made very uncautious predictions about when this equipment would be ready. This time, however, Udet’s showmanship backfired on him. To deceive one’s enemies can be a service to one’s country; to deceive one’s own leaders is the height of irresponsibility. Later, in May 1942, Reichsmar -schall Goering moaned that Hitler made the most serious decisions on the basis of this visit, implying that the decision to invade Poland and risk a second world war was predicated on the assumption that the Luftwaffe was much stronger than it actually was.

Ernst Udet was still a complacent, happy-go-lucky man in the summer of 1939. He had the good will and respect of the Fuehrer and his old buddy Goering, and his life was a happy one. He ate at the best restaurants, drank the best liquor, and had all the women he wanted. The Luftwaffe’s technical situation could have been better, of course, but in the summer of 1939 it didn’t look too bad. To maintain its technological superiority, the Luftwaffe was depending on the arrival of the “next generation” of aircraft: the Ju-88, the He-177, and the Me-210. The Ju-88 was a year behind schedule, the delivery date of the He-177 was set for late 1940, and the Me-210 was to appear on the flight lines in mid-1941. There were problems in the He-177, to be sure, but Heinkel was reporting steady progress, and Junkers was already working on an updated Ju-88 (designated the Ju-188) and a new transport aircraft, the Ju-288. There was no reason to believe that war would break out before 1942; indeed, all of the Luftwaffe’s plans were predicated on this assumption.

The assumption was all wrong. The outbreak of hostilities took Ernst Udet totally by surprise. He was very uneasy after Great Britain declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939. Udet had never counted on this possibility. Still, he did not call for a total war effort. German industry continued to produce on a peacetime basis, while British industry was accelerating its production of war goods as rapidly as it could. Udet, the “Old Eagle,” was exuberant over the Luftwaffe’s victory over France in June, 1940. “The war is over!” he exclaimed. “All our plans can be tossed into the waste basket! We don’t need them any longer!”
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Some of his former cheerfulness returned to him, especially after his own promotion to colonel general on July 19, 1940, but his optimism soon faded. When Heinkel met Udet in the Hotel Bristol in Berlin in late October, 1940, he hardly recognized him: “He looked bloated and sallow . . . as if he were heading for a nervous breakdown. He was suffering from irremedial buzzing in his ears and bleeding from his lungs and gums.” Udet told Heinkel that Goering wanted to send him off to Buehlerhoene, a sanatorium in the Black Forest, but he refused to go.
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A week or two later Udet actually did go to Buehlerhoene, but he only stayed a few days, apparently because he felt Milch would try to undercut him if he stayed longer. Udet knew the ambitious and ruthless state secretary was aware that all was not well in the Technical Office. Even so, Udet could not bring himself to deal firmly with the industrialists. He wrote harsh letters to Heinkel, Dornier, Messerschmitt, and others, but never mailed them. He just didn’t have the heart to send them.
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Meanwhile, technical problems mounted. The He-177 and Me-210 projects floundered, the Ju-88 was not what it was supposed to be, and the deliveries of the new BMW-801 air-cooled engine, which was supposed to power the new Focke-Wulf 190 fighter and Do-217 bomber, were far behind schedule, resulting in further production delays. In February, 1941, Hitler sharply criticized Goering and demanded to know why the German Air Force was so far behind its production schedules. In keeping with his character, Goering turned on Udet—their first argument.
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Udet, of course, saw disaster coming—and he knew why. Without a single strong and competent subordinate behind him, he took to the bottle for support. He also chain-smoked, took pills with depressing side effects, and ate only meat. Cajus Bekker later wrote: “After spring, 1941, Ernst Udet became a mere shadow of his former self. Though he drove himself to the limit, as chief of supply, he became the scapegoat for every failure, and the weight of responsibility broke him.”
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On June 20, 1941, Goering turned to the man who had plotted to replace him: Erhard Milch. He ordered the state secretary to effect a quadrupling of production levels in all sectors of armament in the shortest possible period of time. Milch was given full powers to shut down and requisition factories, seize and expropriate construction materials, requisition workers, confiscate raw materials, and remove from office or transfer key personnel within the entire air armaments industry, regardless of existing contracts. He was given permission to ignore any existing regulations that might interfere with the attainment of the highest possible increase in production. Goering stopped short, however, of giving Milch permission to replace Udet or making Udet directly subordinate to Milch.