LW Jet Bombers

[Bluefish]

Took a quick off-line jaunt in an AR. It was hell of a lot of fun, seemed EXTREMELY capable and caused me to wonder:

I'm no WWI expert, but I've read enough about the ME 262 to have heard how Hitler severely delayed development by insisting that it be equipped to fly bombing missions.  Why would he insist on this when a dedicated bomber like the AR was also coming along (other than the fact that he was mad as a hatter and loved tinkering with weapons development)?

Any experten have any other explanations or details?

[Ripsnort]

Read several accounts on this subject, and every author seems to have a different opinion, but one opinion that seemed common across the board was Hitler's obsession with 'paying Britain back' with bombing the Isles, as his country was getting rained upon by bombs.  To attack the people, in Hitlers mind, would bring a quicker end to the war since the peoples will might be broke.

[flakbait]

Here's what I know. Hitler wanted the Me 262 to be produced as a Jabo once he learned it could in theory carry a bomb. Once production started showing noticable delays he relented and said one out of 20 Jabos could be a fighter. The clause was added that the fighter variants had to be capable of carrying a bomb in an emergency. Naturally this emergency clause was completely ignored. When a rare strike of logic nailed Hitler he finally said produce 262s as fighters. That's when the Arado finally got a huge production priority boost.

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High
"For yay did the sky darken, and split open and spew forth fire, and
through the smoke rode the Four Wurgers of the Apocalypse.
And on their canopies was tattooed the number of the Beast, and the
number was 190." Jedi, Verse Five, Capter Two, The Book of Dweeb
 

[R4M]

 

Originally posted by Bluefish:

I'm no WWI expert, but I've read enough about the ME 262 to have heard how Hitler severely delayed development by insisting that it be equipped to fly bombing missions.  Why would he insist on this when a dedicated bomber like the AR was also coming along (other than the fact that he was mad as a hatter and loved tinkering with weapons development)?

Any experten have any other explanations or details?

Because for the time when Hitler ordered the 262 to be a schnellbomber (not to bomb Britain as some people say, but to crush the invasion of France on the beachhead with planes wich could be not intercepted), the arado Ar-234 was a recconaisse plane only, and had still not flown on jets.

[Bluefish]

Thx for the replies, guys!  BTW, in a fairly light-weight but entertaining book called "Sky Battles" by one Alfred Price, the author contends that Hitler's order that the 262s be equipped for JABO did not materially affect their availability at all. Rather, he maintains that delays in manufacturing the jet engines and difficulties in transporting (mostly by rail) engines and finished airframes to operational units, along with the difficulties in training pilots, were mostly responsible for the delay in LW's deployment of the jets.  

Would you all agree?

[R4M]

To say it in short:

No Me262, Jabo or fighter, would've reached something near an operative effective status before November 1944.

Hitler order was an stupid one. But the 262 was a plane full of engine problems, and was grounded almost all the time. Even if no Jabos had been produced, the 262 would've had the same effect on the WWII than they did.

[flakbait]

After doing some digging through a few books, I found out some info about the Jumo 004B engine. It took between 12 and 15 seconds for it to respond to a throttle change. If the pilot pushed the power forward too quickly the engine either conked out or (more often) erupted in flames. Due to the lack of high-temp metals the engines were only good for 5 hours of flight time. After that they had to be changed. Later models increased the engine change time to 15 hours. By contrast, a DC-10 can use the same engines for about 20,000 hours.

BMW 003 D jets produced more power (2,425 lbs vs. 1,980 lbs) and were a LOT less tempermental. You could rapidly change power settings and it wouldn't complain much.

As for why the Luftwaffe never had more than 200 operational Me 262's, that's easy. Nearly all 262's were transported by rail and not flown to their new homes. Since Allied aircraft found trains really fun things to shoot up, hardly any got to front line units. As the book Warbirds Tech Series Vol 6 states "In one instance, a local Autobahn was used as a test field before the airframes were packed up and sent by rail to their parent units".

Finding info about the Arado isn't easy, but Pyro mentioned the Wings episode about it.

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High
"With all due respect Chaplian, I don't think God wants to hear from me right now.
I'm gonna go out there and remove one of His creations from this universe.
And when I get back I'm gonna drink a bottle of Scotch like it was Chiggy von
Richthofen's blood and celebrate his death."
Col. McQueen, Space: Above and Beyond