Hitler's Jet Plane (21 page)

Hauptmann Schleicher of the Rechlin Test Centre heard of these problems in conversation and discussed with Major Christl, head of Weapons Testing Kommando 25 at Rechlin and Parchim how best to overcome them. Christl was running trials with an air-to-air rocket designated R4M developed jointly by Messerschmitt AG and Rheinmetall Borsig. The battery consisted of twenty-four solid-fuel rockets weighing 3.85 kg each and fitted with a 520-gram HE warhead. A dozen would be rigged in a wooden firing rack slung below each wing. They were fired by depressing a button on the control column and the normal reflex gunsight was sufficient for aiming purposes. The great advantage of the R4M rocket was its great accuracy, substantially greater effect and, most importantly, that they could be fired from 1,500 metres, a much longer range than the standard machine-gun. Velocity of the rocket was 525 m/sec. This was exactly the thing required by Me 262 fighter pilots to maximise fully the speed advantage of their aircraft.

There was no time to lose, and this meant sidestepping bureaucracy. Major Christl agreed to supply two rocket sets with racks. Oberst Gollob, Galland’s replacement as General der Jagdflieger, gave the scheme his unofficial blessing without mentioning it to Goering. Friedrich Schwarz, to whom the Messerschmitt weapons division was directly answerable, sent his young representative Will Langhammer to Parchim and soon the first R4M-armed Me 262 fighter stood ready in the hangar.

Who would test-fly it? A number of volunteers presented themselves, others warned against it, for there was no knowing how the aircraft would react to the extra loading. The apparatus with 100 kilos of rockets slung below the wings might easily cause a problem of aerodynamics and then who knew what might follow? It was agreed to seek the advice of Wendel, for he was ultimately responsible for all kinds of test flights. He came at once, looked over the machine, climbed in, taxied to the runway and took off. Upon landing he had no observations to make regarding influences affecting the flight characteristics of the jet and gave it the thumbs-up. The extra weight reduced the aircraft’s speed by 5 kph, he said, but there was no reason why the jet should not fly with the rocket fitment. Subsequently he made two flights to nearby Müritzsee, fired a salvo while on an inclined dive and observed no irregular response by the machine.

The question now arose where the rack assembly for the remaining aircraft of the Group would come from. The weapon was not yet being mass-produced and there was no workshop or factory. Schwarz and Langhammer would provide the rockets but the wooden racks could not be turned out at Messerschmitt’s.

Sinner and Wegmann decided to take matters into their own hands. After a brief search they enlisted the help of the Gauleiter of Schwerin and soon came across a large furniture factory prepared to make the racks on the existing drawings. A second carpentry firm volunteered to make the rails and retention assembly. In this simple manner two harmless woodworking businesses were transformed into an armaments-producing factory of a special kind.

The test flights were made at Parchim, where all of 9th Squadron had been fitted with the new equipment by 10 March 1945. General der Jagdflieger Oberst Gordon Gollob gave his approval without even consulting Goering. On 17 March, the new Inspecteur der Jagdflieger, Oberstleutnant Walther Dahl, Trautloft’s successor, visited Parchim in order to watch a demonstration by an Me 262 using the new weaponry. The aircraft was piloted by Günther Wegmann, 9th Squadron commander. On the west side of the airfield was the burnt-out remains of an Italian Savoya transport aircraft. Diving in a light incline, Wegmann shot the wreck of the old machine into a thousand pieces from 1,000 metres. No more eloquent argument in favour of the new weapon could possibly have been made. And the final proof, if it were needed, came the very next day.

Just after five on the morning of 18 March 1945, a large bomber formation was reported to be assembling over London, its expected target Berlin. Wegmann’s 262 had gone into the repair hangar the previous afternoon and was not operational and he accepted a substitute machine. Meanwhile 1,200 bombers escorted by fifty P-51 fighters were reported en route for Berlin.

Wegmann took off with a seven-strong squadron. Before the wave of bombers reached the Reich capital, the squadron made contact with the enemy. These were aircraft of US 457 Bomber Group. It was to be the last great air-battle of the European war, and the first in which air-to-air rockets were used operationally.

The German jets were flying in a loose, strung-out formation and made a wide banking approach to engage the heavily laden four-engined bombers. Wegmann picked out a formation consisting of about sixty enemy machines and signalled to attack. To his right was Oberleutnant Seeler, to his left Schnörrer with Oberfähnrich Windisch on the outside. They were at 6,000 metres when Wegmann fired salvoes from 1,000 metres. Within seconds the others had fired off their rockets too. The effect of 144 projectiles fired into the midst of a tight bomber formation was devastating. Flying above the melee in order to get clear of the enemy fighters, Wegmann saw only bits of aircraft, flame and smoke as he looked down. The remainder of his squadron had gone, dispersed to all points of the compass. He concentrated on the homeward flight, was given the course to steer by his controller and kept a close watch for enemy fighters. While doing this he spotted another formation of bombers and turned to attack with his machine-guns. There was a kind of agreement in force that two kills per flight per man was to be aimed for. He had definitely already destroyed one bomber, perhaps two; in the heat of battle it was difficult to see exactly. Now with a bit of luck he could score a definite second victory. As he came up on the new formation from astern, while still out of MK 108 range he selected the Flying Fortress on the right extremity of the wave and came in for the kill. At between 500 and 600 metres he opened fire, felt the typical hard jerks as the rapid stream of bullets left his guns, saw almost at once the cowling of one of the bomber’s engines right side rip away. Jubilant he pressed the W/T transmit button to report his success, but at that moment a hail of fire hit his fighter forward. A heavy blow struck his right leg. Before his eyes the armoured windscreen splattered, the instruments fell from their sockets, and wherever he looked were bullet holes and rents. Then it fell quiet. He felt his leg. There was a numbness. He knew that something was wrong but at first he hoped it might have been just a hard blow from the control stick when it was hit, or from the foot pedals. He groped down the limb gingerly: just below the knee his fingers discovered a large, deep wound of about ten fingers’ width. He found his hand covered with blood when he raised it. His first thought was: I have lost the leg. But he still felt no pain.

Wegmann’s aircraft was at 6,000 metres. So far as he was able, he watched the skies for enemy fighters while weaving with irregular left and right turns. The enemy had gone, the bomber formation had moved on towards its target. His first thought was to bale out, but he was still too high to do so. To be used for firing practice while dangling from a parachute, especially as a jet pilot, was no longer a rarity in the increasing bitterness of this air-war. Leutnant Schall’s experience had proved it.

Wegmann attempted to make a W/T transmission but the set was no longer working. He was chilled to the marrow: the cause was shock and probably loss of blood. It was another reason for the time being not to abandon his aircraft since he did not want to run the risk of hypothermia during the long descent. Thoughts chased through his mind in rapid succession. And then suddenly he became anxious.

He knew he had to shed height at all costs and headed for Parchim in a light dive in the hope of coming under the protection of the home fighter defence. He was controlling the engines by ear since all instruments had been shot to pieces. When he got to an altitude which he estimated at 4,000 metres, he noticed small flames stabbing from the starboard engine. The port turbine seemed intact. Now he had no choice, with a serious leg wound and one turbine aflame he could not risk a crash-landing. He still did not know if it would actually be possible to evacuate the machine, but the parachute was his only hope.

He was still too high and with time on his hands went through the procedure mentally. He had never baled out before and had only verbal desciptions of the procedure to go by. Throw the cabin hood off, force yourself from your seat, and leave the aircraft upwards, don’t do a sideways roll. One could push the control stick forwards to be catapulted free by centrifugal force. Another method was to put the aircraft upside down and fall out. Since he tended by nature to follow the conventional path, Wegmann chose the first method despite the known danger of coming into contact with the tailplane.

He took off his flying helmet and throat microphone, raised his gloved hands and unfastened the clasp of the seat straps. He felt sick: the stink of raw fuel had penetrated the still-enclosed cockpit. Just in time! he thought, and he removed the bolt securing the cabin hood, which whipped off immediately, and pushed up with his arms to get his head above the leading edge of the windscreen. A fraction of a second later the maelstrom sucked him from the cockpit at 350 kph. He bounced against the tailplane on his uninjured left side but got free unscathed. He counted five long seconds before pulling the release cord of his pilot ’chute to ensure he did not fall into the path of the hurtling machine, or allow the canopy to become ensnared in the airframe.

He drifted slowly to earth. There was plenty of time to consider his strategy of how to land with a serious leg wound. Would his good leg alone be able to withstand the impact? When he was low enough to estimate his approximate touch-down point, he recognised the town of Wittenberge which he knew well, having overflown it on many occasions. He still scanned the skies for enemy fighters, but apparently they had gone off with the bombers to the target.

He had drifted beyond Wittenberge, was only a few hundred metres up and was gliding towards a wood extending to the edge of a small village. He had to pray that he would skirt the tall trees, there was nothing he could do to avoid them. Luck was with him. He was just high enough to brush the tree tops with his feet before sinking towards a clearing among the pines adjoining a meadow. With his good leg leading he powered into the trunks of the saplings, toppled into a depression on his injured side while the canopy spilled into the meadow. He felt no pain. The wounded leg was as dead as if it were anaesthetised.

The first person to reach him across the meadow was an elderly woman. ‘German pilot!’ he cried to her, for he was wearing, as many German airmen did then, an American leather flying jacket with fur collar which bore across the shoulders in yellow characters the unit of its original owner. Wegmann had obtained the garment from a shot-down American flier. It sometimes happened nowadays that German civilians, hardened and vengeful over the devastation of their cities and the terrible casualties, took the law into their own hands when capturing Allied bomber crews. Günther Wegmann had no wish to become the victim of a fatal misunderstanding on account of his fur-collared jacket. Less than a hundred metres behind the woman several men were running across the meadow towards him

The woman had been a nursing sister and knew how to apply emergency first aid. She bound the thigh above the right knee and applied a tourniquet before making Wegmann comfortable in the grass. She then sent one of the men to the nearby village of Glöwen to summon an ambulance from the hospital at Wittenberge.

‘Four hours later my leg was off,’ Wegmann wrote in conclusion to his combat report.

In this last great air-battle in Europe of the Second World War, the Allied air forces lost 41 four-engined bombers and five fighters before reaching their target, Berlin. 16 bombers were hit by flak over the approaches to the city and either crashed or – seriously damaged – made emergency landings behind the Russian lines. 9th Squadron III/JG7 destroyed 25 bombers for the loss of Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz Seeler, who had attacked on Wegmann’s right and was shot down by B-17s west of Perleberg, and the two aircraft.

12

Last Gestures of Defiance

T
he months of March and April 1945 drew the war pitilessly towards its conclusion. Endless streams of refugees from the eastern provinces of the Reich made their way westwards almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Stalin’s advancing divisions. Penetrating ever deeper into Germany from the West, not quite so impetuously but still conscious of approaching victory, were the Americans, British and French. For German forces there was really no point in fighting on, in dying for the cause: it served no useful purpose to offer further resistance, but yet they did. They fought on, not knowing why, defending a Reich that no longer existed. They defended it on land, at sea and in the air, as soldiers always have. The air was full of bullets, shrapnel and splinters as was the ground, but it was more dangerous in the air because things happened faster and gave you no time to reflect.

Enemy fighters roamed as if in peacetime the skies of the land they had been taught to hate. Rarely did they come up against opposition. Enemy bombers dropped their bombs, and carried on the killing while the fighters machine-gunned any useful target that presented itself. The nation below them had forfeited its right to live. Kill them then!

The months of March and April 1945 were the hardest in the short career of the Me 262, those crowned with the greatest success and mourned for the most losses. III/JG7 was now joined by Jagdverband 44, whose brief existence will be described towards the end of this chapter. JV44 was commanded by Adolf Galland, deposed General der Jagdflieger.

Wherever the gaze fell in Germany, in whatever province, something could be seen exploding, burning or smouldering. Military order within a Luftwaffe squadron or group community was no longer possible. The enemy dictated the course of events. Supply, maintenance, repair, the number of operational machines, training, trials, delivery flights – over them all hovered the need to improvise, and this was successful if the hour favoured the undertaking.