Me262 – Why It Was Rubbish

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Description
00:00 – 00:22 – Trailer
00:22 – 01:49 – Introduction
01:49 – 05:14 – Willy Messerschmitt’s World Falls Apart
05:18 – 08:03 – Udet’s Flying Circus
08:07 – 11:26 – Me262’s Development
11:26- 11:32 – Popcorn
11:33 – 13:37 – the Me163 Affair
13:42 – 19:30 – Milch Tries to Break His Willy
19:33 – 30:18 – Hitler’s Big Brain Moment
30:21 – 42:03 – Speeds and Feed of the Me262
42:05 – 46:53 – Operational History
46:54 – 48:50 – Survivor’s Club

Summary
A brief and sober discussion of the multi-faceted nature of aircraft development in the 3rd Reich, and an assessment of the aircraft itself in context of the political and organisational challenges and changes from 1939-1945. Or to put it another way, why it was rubbish from start to finish.

Selected Sources
Dan Sharp – Messerschmitt Me262 Development and Politics
Mano Ziegler – Hitler’s Jet Plane
Adolf Galland – The View from the Cockpit and The First and the Last
Martin Kitchen – Speer

Gusen II Concentration Camp Details which I had to cut to please YouTube https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gusen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusen_concentration_camp

Yeah yeah that is me on my beautiful 262 in the spring of 1945 W that behind me that is a kilogram bomb tiny little wings toar and some skateboard wheels you’re probably wondering how I got here yeah well quite historian we will need to go back to the

Beginning sorry can uh can we drop the accent now hello hello hello my name is Lord har winner of most creative use of a secondhand adult toy the 1999 hellar Club annual supper and sometime commentator on history on YouTube today we’re going to spend some quality time

Looking at the development of the me262 which was certainly one of the Jets of World War II the problem with looking at something like this is that basically every single Source you look at is either a lying Nazi or an apologist for a lying Nazi and you can’t trust

Anything that any of them say also every hack historian commentator on the internet have become completely obsessed by the supposedly Advanced Technologies that the Allies fan in the wreckage of the Nazi State the 262 is touted variously as the first jet in the world which it wasn’t the first fighter jet in

The world which it wasn’t the first operational fighter jet in the world which it wasn’t and a weapon which could have turned the tide of the war which it couldn’t and didn’t because Germany lost because the Nazis committed atrocities on an industrial scale because Millions died opposing Hitler’s war of Conquest

Because no one quite wanted to admit that they supported the war or God forbid enjoyed it literally every single record you touch is Tainted in some way being written or said by someone with an agenda a mile long many of whom are lying about what they did and why they

Did it a bit like a couple who’ rented a lonely cabin in the woods today you and I are going to descend into the basement of World War II law and look at the native burial ground that lies therein we are not going to do speeds and feeds

Nor the 100 most dangerous missions of the war we are however going to look at the politics and the development of the me262 look at whether it was actually much cop as a jet and what impact it actually had by the late summer of 1943 vly mmid was

Having what might reasonably be called a bit of a bad day in the office kicked off the board of his company staring down the ass hand of a $900 million settlement Bill and on the Casp of accidentally making his entire product range Obsolete and it had all been going

So well up to this point in the mid1 1930s vly had been behind both the BF 109 and then the bf110 the two most iconic fighters of pre-war Germany the problem was that by 1943 both of them were complete shite compared to to pretty much every single Allied Machine

In the sky in fact the 110 had been shite when the war started in 1939 so villy had been working very hard to create its successor the me210 believing his own hype he converted his entire Factory to making the 210 before it even flew for the first time so when it

Turned out to be absolutely the worst aircraft of World War II by almost every measure he was as [ __ ] as a sock in the teenager’s bedroom after killing off five test pilots in quick succession the ler and aart Milt specifically took great pleasure in cancelling the project

And demanding the astronomical sum of 40 million rice marks in compensation although a huge sum had that been the only issue it might have been manageable but it was far from the only issue mmi’s wartime record was abysmal in 1940 following the horrific losses in the

Battle of Britain mmid AG had tried to adapt their pre-war me29 racer into a successor for the bf19 and failed in 1941 he got an order for a theoretical bomber the m264 longrange America bomber and then that program had promptly folded in 1942 they tried to get the me

309 to work and that failed the end of 1942 vly had then gone for the new high-speed bomber contract and taking a leaf out of Hinkle’s magic mushroom inspired design for the twin h111 Z he’d submitted the BF 109 ZW presumably thinking that because it was two BF 109

Strapped together no one would notice that it was well two 109 strapped together sadly for him their powers of perception saw through this cunning ruse and they awarded the contract to Donia in a bit of a Panic at this point and facing bankruptcy of his beloved company

Villy managed to change the 210 into the 410 which sort of worked for a bit but by late 1943 it was already looking rather outdated and then again in 1942 villy had tried to cover off the string of unfolding disasters by revamping the 209 into the imaginatively titled 2092

Which the luffer had ordered canceled ordered canel again and In late 1943 was trying to cancel for a third time a few facts were beginning to slowly Dawn on villy and indeed a great deal of the people that work for him firstly Germany was um uh what’s the term Germany was

Going to lose the war secondly the m262 jet plane that he’d been building for the last three years basically on a shooring made everything else that he manufactured obsolete third the margins on the 109s that he was still churning out at quite the rate he’d make 34,000

Of them before the war was over were quite nice and he didn’t really want to lose that cash flow on the plus side however the ler High command and the rlm that’s the r air Ministry were beginning to absolutely [ __ ] themselves and were demanding new ideas from organizations

Just like billies this might just give vly the room to pull off a little bit of a Blinder get it right he could save his company keep making 109’s and Curry favor with the fua all he needed to do was to get the 262 into the [ __ ]

Air back in the day before Hitler had decided to test the old adage everything is a sex toy if you invade it hard enough there was a slightly dim rather nice chap called Ernst udet Ernst was sadly for him but rather brilliantly for the Allies wildly bad as the chief of

Procurement and supply for the LT buffer and before that he’d been wildly bad as chief of technical staff to the L buffer so from 1936 to September 1942 really anyone with a creative mind a plane that could potentially dive bomb a willingness to bribe udet with drugs and

Alcohol and pretty girls could get funding for pretty much any new design that they had on the drawing board and guring had tried to stop all of this madness in 1940 getting everyone to focus only on projects that would come to fruition by the middle of 1941 but

This was Nazi Germany a bribe here an accusation of jury there a case of homosexuality over there and before you know it there’s a new order a few million R marks and udet signature particularly pre-war this had led to all manners of absolutely batshit crazy ideas emerging from the German design

Bureaus most noticeably for our narrative Jets and Rockets but few of these ideas had actually turned into anything that you know flew or was usable in any way 1943 from the Nazi point of view was a total [ __ ] car crash between January and may of that year more than 500,000 of their troops

Had surrendered to various enemy forces lotas losses over the Risha and elsewhere were beginning to become unsustainable the RAF was burning down cities almost at will and as an onore sank 60% of their huo Fleet in just two weeks in May the US daylight bombing effort wasn’t doing a lot of actual

Damage but it was there and it was getting stronger and it was becoming more serious by the day if he’ll excuse the pun suddenly the aircraft industry was the the center of Hitler’s attention up until his cities began to disappear into fire and Ash Hitler had spent most

Of his time farting about on tanks approving things like this and uh this and whatever one of those is look I mean look the massive metal boxes with a gun on the front of them I don’t see what the attraction is here but but whatever Hitler [ __ ] loved him one of those

Giant metal boxes with a big gun on the front and he spent many a happy hour making them bigger and heavier and more and more complex and more and more expensive and more and more difficult to make and progressively less and less useful as he went but in 1940 three that

Changed and suddenly his Focus was on aircraft and villy knew this just like everyone else he was working towards the fura so he did the sensible thing he got his pictures of his jet plane he got some of the prototypes together and he started to present them to Hitler on a

More regular basis but what villian basically every other samean person in Germany hadn’t quite clocked was just how childish and stupid Hitler was going to be about this Fighters are for defense and bombers are at least in theory about offense therefore Hitler having a toddler view of the world where

Bigger is always better the fura was completely disinterested in protecting his civilians and even his Industries and fixated far more on smashing the enemy with bombers a fact we will come back to in a minute initially code named the p1065 or p65 what would become the me262 project

Had begun under ett’s Wacky Races regime pre-war to try and see if jet propulsion could really be used for serious applications firstly as a fighter then a fighter Interceptor and then as a fighter bomber jet aircraft design at this point was as you might imagine somewhat rudimentary and even basic

Stuff was a real challenge initially mesm was actually going to W up using BMW’s engines that’s the p3302 and the P 3304 for those nerds that are out there but um there was a a slight hitch with this plan when BMW said knew what they actually meant was entirely theoretical

And every time anyone asked them how big or how heavy or how much power these things would have the engineers at BMW sort of of mumbled incoherently and shuffled their feet the weight in particular kept climbing and this left the The Lads at mmid with a bit of an

Issue they actually planned originally to try and enclose the engines in a pretty standard pair of wing NE cells on a straight Wing but the weight uncertainty meant sweeping the wing slightly for extra strength and dropping the engines underneath them a bit like bombs on a pylon thus the Revolutionary

Swept Wing which every bloody video on Earth seems to bang on about was there not so much to make it go faster but because it was a design [ __ ] up as a result of BMW’s failure to provide engines this then presented a bit of a further problem the new underwing

Engines would throw exhaust gases back over the delicate little tail wheel and potentially melt it and also if the plane was on an angle it might bang those rather sensitive new jet engines on the ground and banging experimental jet engines on tarmac at a few hundred

Kilometers an hour seemed like a a bad idea which meant a a whole new underc carry system had to be designed so in December of 1940 mes schmidtz redesigned the body to accommodate this new system and turned it into a tricycle setup because the jet was expected to be

Pretty fuel hungry and because of the new undercarriage setup there wasn’t a lot of room left in the wings for fuel tank tanks now obviously the correct response to this is to Simply weld two giant fuel tanks on top of the Wings as God and King intended but for some weird

Reason no one ever does this except us Brits so in fact what the Germans did is they filled the wings space as best they could with the fuel that they could get in there and put the rest of it around the pilot and then instead of putting

Guns in the wings they shoved 430mm cannon into the nose the problem was that by 1941 all this redesign work had massively slowed the project down which didn’t actually have a lot of people working on it in the first place the air Ministry the rlm had initially been Jo

Excited about jet programs generally and the me262 was one of them and in mid1 1940 it had ordered 20 prototype Jets from mmit and 20 from hle but by January of 1941 neither company had been able to deliver a single one of those Jets and by the spring the rlm was beginning to

Lose interest focusing instead on the BF 109f and the me29 successor programs now for all his flaws villy knew how to work the Nazi system he knew that he needed to Showcase something flying as soon as possible the problem was that BMW couldn’t get their engine into work so

Instead The Lads of mmid had a rumage around looked in the spares bin and came up with an ex Spanish Civil War jumo 210 piston engine which they stuck into the nose as a kind of stter for 10 and sadly for the posterity the pair of 750 kgam

Rockets that they proposed to Simply fling under the wings to see how fast it would go weren’t available nonetheless the test mule flew in April of 1941 and flew pretty well and it was good enough to try and get a few quid back from rlm to keep the project alive but there

Things kind of stopped because for the next few months vly was distracted by a cuckoo in his nest Jenkins Jenkins grab grab some popcorn the Nazis are going to start fighting again on the 13th of August 1941 the me163 V4 rocket powered fighter made its first successful flight

Using an hwk 203 rocket engine now this should have been a joyous and Order filled occasion for villy but there was a slight problem all that spring and early summer as the 262 engines failed to turn up the 209 project was canned and the 210 project was imploding the

Nazi High command was circling around villy Willie with a cigar cutter in hand meanwhile the me163 had been performing impressive looking Glide tests over the Factories at Regensburg and this had been ging enough but then came the transfer to Pam mundan the addition of a proper rocket engine in the first test

Flights and things went maximum Nazi really quick the problem was the me163 project was actually nothing to do with villy at all it was a car bunkle that had been foed onto mes Schmid by udet and the rlm as a price for doing business effectively it was an incubator

It got cash and facilities and a line of credit and villy got well [ __ ] all back really the designer and the Project Director was a guy called Alexander lipes who loathed M Schmid and the feeling was entirely Mutual now that the 163 could fly and the 262 couldn’t he

Went into full takeover mode and attempted to rip mesm a away from vill’s grasp now udet was inclined to agree until villy sent his chief designer Voit over to go and talk to him about how the two programs were really very separate and there couldn’t be any question of

One taking the other over udet being quite pliable at this point agreed but as vo was about to leave a little bit like Columbo he mentioned oh there’s one more thing sir he’d been having a look at lip’s drawings for the me163 and frankly he was a little surprised that no one had

Suggested building a giant tailess International bomber rocket thing on the back of it what if we could go to America with rockets how cool would that be actually he casually mentioned look I’ve done some specifications maybe give them to lipice to build and udet agreed next day he sent orders to Alexander for

A new massive bomber and lipich had a mental breakdown having to spend two weeks in hospital in September of 1941 udet finally did the decent thing for any high-ranking Nazi and he shot himself much to everyone’s relief this was very very bad for vly mmid because it meant

That ud’s rightand man aart milk was promoted in his place and milk absolutely [ __ ] loes mmid pre-war milk had run Germany’s totally innocent and absolutely not a front for rearming national airline lft buffer sorry lft hanser sorry sorry he ordered a few M20 transports off villy villy was a good

Manufacturer of aircraft the M20 looked like a fairly decent thing on paper he bought a couple makes sense like many Mees Schmid aircraft however in this story The M20 could best be described as a bit crashy when one of the aircraft went down the pilot Hans hakak tried to

Bail out only to be dragged to a fiery death by an entangled parachute and Philly being villy didn’t really care about this sort of thing it happened all the time and he was off to the next project so he didn’t you know investigate the crash or go to the

Funeral or whatever he just kind of shrugged and carried on the problem was that Hans was milk’s best mate so not just had Willie sold milk a crap aircraft he’d also killed ahart’s best pal the ensuing lawsuit would have crushed mishit were he not bail out in 1933 by the massive appearance of

Defense contracts owing to a certain Mr a Hitler’s new government from that day forwards milk made it his life’s work to [ __ ] vly mmid as milk and lipes and mmid carried on their various feuds work on the me262 sort of limped along BMW finally admitted defeat on their brahmo

Engines and Yuna stepped up stepping into The Fray with their T1 and then their A1 engines which were both better than the BMW ones on account of being you know Real by early 1942 yunus had agreed to the production of a new engine imaginatively titled the B1 which would

Be ready in August fortunately for us but unfortunately for all the Nazi asses in our story it was about now that the me210 program really started to fall apart now I firmly believe that alongside the H 177a the me210 was one of the greatest aircraft of World War II

At low speeds it would stall without warning if it banked it could either enter into a flat spin or do the turn you never knew which it was going to do the engines would catch on fire at startup in level flight and sometimes on shutdown apparently at random it would

Even with very gentle maneuvering sometimes simply turn itself upside down and dive into the ground the weight distribution was so completely wrong due to its various bits of armor plating that level flight sometimes required as much a 70% starboard stick until suddenly it didn’t anymore the wings

Were not really strong enough so now and again they’d simply rip off moreover when it was finally and I feel completely unfairly canceled in April of 1942 the r was committed to buying vast numbers of them from subcontractors in Hungary and it couldn’t cancel the orders resulting in hundreds and

Hundreds of completely useless aircraft being made over the next 3 years hence the 40 million kmas that’s roughly $900 million in today’s money that was demanded by milk and the L offer off mmid you might want to refresh your popcorn at this point because it’s about

To get even worse now that the 210 had gone to [ __ ] milk felt that it was the right moment to turn the screws firstly he attempted to Outsource production of the me262 to junas then he brought in his SE plane experts that’s Blom and Vos to build all the tooling so that they

Could steal all of Vil’s knowhow by proxy then under the pretext of preventing Allied bombers damaging the program he ordered the whole production line to be broken up and distributed across Germany finally in June of 1942 he fired M Schmid from his own board this actually wound up hurting milk more

Than he might have expected for two reasons firstly Hitler thought that mmid was a genius and vital to the war effort and secondly because of the capital structure of m Schmidt AG the thing is that villy owned 38.5% of the stock and since 1939 he’d actually been banging

The lovely baroness Lily Von MIM rulu who by happy coincidence controlled the other 61.5% meaning that you now have the main shareholders out of the board but effectively still in power a recipe for complete disaster raising new capital for the firm became impossible without vly Soo and each new Nazi board member

That was parachuted in or new boss that was brought in to run a particular Department without vill say so was easily and quickly sidelined whilst the rest of the company stagnated under this hilarious new kind of management that milk had accidentally created and to make matters even worse mil didn’t stop

There he really shoved the knife in Reviving The lipsick Saga and setting up a separate office still within mmid for lipik to work with the other tailess Wonder Brothers the Hortons and this move was purely vindictive and it slowed down the entire company even more really wrecking the 163 program in the process

Taken together it looked for all the world like milch was prioritizing screwing over winning the war because he was and this fact was not lost on Hitler or anyone around milk meanwhile in about June but the dates are altogether unclear the first jumo T1 engines appeared at oxburg and the me262 flew

For the first time on jet power on the 18th of July 1942 and then it promptly crashed nonetheless the plane could fly I mean sort of the takeoff distance was vast about 790 M fully loaded and they had to do a terrifying dab of of the brakes

Halfway down the runway to lift the tail off the ground which if you got wrong you would catapult yourself straight through the fence at the bottom of the runway which happened on the first time that an rlm test pilot gave it a go not that any of our protagonists really

Cared because they were too busy stabbing one another in the back at the time flying or not there was still a vast amount to do over the next year and change there would be 10 different prototypes eight of which were crashed yunas continued to work on their engines

And over the following year they got a pair of jumo 004 b1s finally ready after an exhaust exive redesign and rebuild and that then is when the proverbial [ __ ] hit the actual fan of Hitler’s oratory now this next bit might be a tad controversial in March of 1943 the

Office of chief designer vo released a paper adrc t226 45156 and I’m sure we all know precisely what that says so we can just move on right no no for [ __ ] sake people keep up now just before we go any further with this just remember that everybody

Here has an agenda and quite a lot of them are lying quite a lot of the time so here’s the thing if you basically know anything at all about the me262 it’s that Hitler ordered it to be converted into a fighter bomber and that delayed production for like 12 months or

Something had he not done this then they would have been on D-Day I don’t know the resounding whistles and whines of me262 Downing Allied aircraft or some such nonsense the fact is that the me262 was always going to be a figh of Boman and document arc2 2645 156 proves it by November 1943

Guring was a shadow of his former self well he wasn’t he was massively fatter but with day bombing and night bombing happening on the on a daily basis and cock-ups on basically every front his political influence was really over ging being ging decided that what was really required here was less competence and

More putting a bit more R into the r Marshall so on the 26th of November 1943 at inberg in East Prussia guring assembled the cast of luua wacky racist designs that he got on the go and he brought Hitler along to take a look here was the fritz X guided bomb the me163

The ta1 152 the ta1 154 the H 219 and of course the me262 in fact there were two of them but being the bombastic tosspot that he was guring decided that this needed to be his show not anyone else’s so he literally stole the notes off the

Speakers and read them out loud and this was a problem because he hadn’t really got a [ __ ] clue what he was talking about and some of the aircraft were missing standing in front of an me 410 he proudly proclaimed it to be a do335

So here is an m410 and here is a do335 see if you can spot the [ __ ] difference because Hitler sure a [ __ ] could and he tore a strip off guring in front of the assembled G fan of the Nazi High command by the time they got to the

Me262 it was fair to say that guring was having a bit of a day of it Hitler looked at the jet the jet looked at Hitler well okay I mean of course it didn’t because it was an inanimate object but maybe the machine Spirit did whatever Hitler says tell me rmel can

This thing carry bombs and there’s a freeze frame and the narrator says and nothing would ever be the same again or something in reality guring paused and quick as a flash vly mmid piped up with Yes Man F either two 500 kgam bombs or one 1,000 kgr bomb now what Philly had

Just done was essentially to massage Hitler’s enlarge rhetorical prostate with a 262 shaped sex toy because he came hard Hitler apparently went all glassy eyed and started ranting about this aircraft that he The Genius of the German people could clearly see that this was no WR her it was a blitz bomber

That as the Allies assembled over in England or as they unloaded in France this fine bomber would unleash death and destruction it would wipe the Allied invasion off the map even though Goring thought it was a fighter he Hitler he alone could see that this was a bomber a

Blitz bomber this was the aircraft that they’ve been talking about craving for years and now here it was and oh God I’m a [ __ ] Bor it’s a Hitler an no one took it that seriously the thing with vly mmid is he had always had urges okay

Well no no not like that well I mean maybe I don’t know not not the point I mean he had urges for making new stuff I mean his whole life was about designing aircraft and if that meant paying the rent whilst lying on his back and thinking of the Fatherland well he was

Kind of okay with that provided that he could carry on designing more aircraft manufacturing them though well that was where it all started a get bit shaky he wasn’t great at turning Concepts into actual products he couldn’t really help but to continue to design long after everything was supposed to been locked

Down as a for instance a file from the 11th of September 1943 that’s just 4 weeks after the basic design for the A1 and the A2 had been nailed down there are plans for not one not two not three but 10 new variants you’ve got fighters you’ve got rocket boosted interceptors

You’ve got Recon planes you’ve got rocket boosted bombers not one of each of these by the way but multiple types and it was a recipe for disaster this proliferation of types never stopped and just eight weeks before the end of the war he was still going there was still

New ideas being examined the last experimental variant made an appearance in March 1945 and none of this helped to focus on the problem at hand of actually trying to build you know the basic aircraft that he had ready in vly September 1943 FS there are three versions of what he called the Schnell

Bomber he’d shown his ideas for a fighter bomber to Hitler months before this meeting at inberg so when he said Yes Man of course it can carry bombs he was actually saying yeah boss we talked about this and document adrc stroke T2 Stoke 2645 Stoke 156 clearly shows it

Villy wasn’t talking total bollocks but that’s not quite the whole story on the plans that you can see on from the 11th of September and indeed from earlier times there are you a couple of small bombs there’s not a dedicated bomber variant and it didn’t have a bomb site

Of any kind or anywhere to put one the me262 couldn’t dive bomb because it would crash into the ground at well north of a th000 kilm an hour even on shallow runs it still wouldn’t work because it risk going too fast bombing from say 20,000 ft would render the whole exercise absolutely pointless

Without m massive further development but flying at low altitude wasn’t really an option either as the thicker air and crappy aerodynamics of the externally stored bombs and the SWAT Wings would combined to give the me262 the range of an anemic sloth in fact the only advantage that 262 really had was going

Very fast and lading down with all those bombs would render the whole exercise pretty bloody pointless to carry any bombs at all the plane would need new jumo C1 engines which didn’t exist in November of 1943 so why did vly do a villy and the answer is he was a lying collaborating

Tosspot who like guring and almost every other sycophantic [ __ ] around Hitler couldn’t help themselves from obeying the Hitler precept and telling the boss whatever the [ __ ] he wanted to hear at whatever moment he felt he needed to hear it because doing so meant he could

Carry on earning a [ __ ] ton of money and keep redesigning aircraft moreover lots of delays to the 262 meant more BF 109s which meant more cash for his business which he really needed at this point in fact with enough delays the onag again off again me 209 program might be bought

Bra and vly really wanted to make the me 209 plus all of this would seriously piss milk off what he perhaps wasn’t quite ready for was triggering the switched Mark psychotic rant in Hitler’s tiny little brain but Hitler ranted all of the time and he rarely remembered precisely what he’d said unless Martin

Borman was there to remind him so you know why worry problem was in this particular instance Hitler really did remember what he’d said and he walked away expecting to see only fighter bomber versions being made and vly walked away thinking he could make the fighters and at some vague undefined

Point in the future he would make a blitz bomber for sure it wasn’t that hard but it’s probably a couple of years of work and Goring just just walked away I swear to God only the Nazis can [ __ ] their [ __ ] up quite like this over the

Next six months or so lots of people became aware of the me262 as a fighter ging and Gand andir and mil and many others all tried to change Hitler’s mind but to no avail it got so bad at one point that Hitler actually issued a fura edict prohibiting anybody to discuss the

Me262 with him mil committed political suicide when he shouted at Hitler midc conference for God’s sakes a child can see that that’s a fighter not a bomber the net result is that over the years various writers most notably David [ __ ] Irving Adolf Gallant Mano zagler and even Max Hastings have merily gone

Around saying that had this meeting in November not happened then they would have been flying me 262s shooting down Allied Fighters out of the sky in early 1944 and it cost the Germans maybe 12 months of development but the thing is this is actually total bollocks the

Aircraft was a death trap in November of 1943 it was more problematic than Jeremy Clarkson in a vegan restaurant and the project had basically been rudderless for more than three years the massive shortage of critical production Metals meant that the aircraft was months behind already and none of the flight

Systems were properly developed the jumo b004 B1 and B2 engines were exploding due to design compromises that were there to reduce the nickel consumption because of the aforementioned shortage of metals the design parameters would continue to shift well into 1944 and almost nothing about the aircraft was ready for production when the assembly

Line started to be pulled together in February of 1944 the whole schedule for building prior to inberg had allowed for just 40 units to be delivered to front line by December of 1944 the problem was in no way ready and it could not be made ready and although the fighter bomber

Stuff was a complete distraction the basic project was never going to see 2 to whizzing around over Normandy when the first examples did start to filter down to Frontline units the basic flaws in the program would reveal themselves in dramatic fashion testing and development continued for the next 6

Months boosted in March 1944 with the development of the yashab or the fighter staff under Albert spar’s right-and man and all round Nancy [ __ ] Carl SAR it was concluded by Carl and his team that it was impossible to see gan’s desire to have thousands of me 262s

Flying through the air next month it just simply couldn’t be fulfilled or at least not really before 1946 but also that some production of me 262s was crucial there Then followed a frankly hilarious few months where ging and milk and SAU and various others tried to get

The elusive vly mmid to explain why his fighter couldn’t be a bomber and whose fault all of this was and have hell to mount a second seat and a bombsite and an aircraft which had never been designed to take either of those things none of which was really ever properly

Resolved for the entirety of the war sah who had absolutely no experience of building aircraft but an awful lot of experience at using slave labor to advance his political career had managed by September of 1944 to produce 111 me262 out of a projected 150 that he’

Promised that he was going to make when he took over almost all of which suffered from massive build quality problems that we look at in a minute none of this helped to actually sort out the basic fundamental design flaws that still existed in the airframe and then

To sort of kyash all this talk of bombers there was of course the a234 coming up on the rails which had a significant advantage of as a bomber on account of it having been built as a bomber from scratch but then it had the disadvantage of being made by anando who

Were basically a tiny little outfit and before the war had ended they only managed to make 230 aircraft however Hitler used the existence of the ar-234 to start being able to walk back from his original position and to deal with the blindingly obvious fact that that me262 over there really was a [ __ ]

Fighter it’s not a bomber and patently so so you’ve been very patient let’s actually have a look at the plane and see what flew in late 1944 and early 1945 and if it was any good most people like Jets I mean unless they’ve suffered some kind of serious head injury or

They’re they’re blind or they’re just sick in their souls Jets Zoom around the sky they make loads of noise they go really really fast much faster than piston engine planes just the idea of them brings me to half mast so when someone turns around and goes to you you

See that F22 there the Germans basically had one of those in World War II it’s hardly surprising that everybody absolutely shits their pants and talks about how amazing and technically Advanced the Germans were and completely forgets that the me262 is utterly irredeemably crap as an aircraft and it

Always has been crap and it was crap at the time so let’s talk about the good points cuz there are a couple of them it was seriously fast the me262 A1 the dedicated fighter version was capable when it was clean Laden of a shade over

540 mph at 16,00 ft in level flight and that for World War II that is [ __ ] fast I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the hawk of Tempest was probably the fastest Allied piston engine aircraft of the war but in level

Flight it was nearly 100 Mil an hour slower at the same altitude the do335 push me pulley thing was supposed to be able to get to about 475 miles now but I will be absolutely [ __ ] if I believe a single word of the propaganda that those

Guys pushed out one of you nerds will know far more about that monstrosity than I do whatever to use a the bristolian turn of phas normally associated with the soup out fox or Nova of the late 1990s the n262 was G Forest most of the time and I stress most of

The time Pilots reported that it was fairly easy to fly comparable to an fw190 or an me 109 which is probably good it was able to climb incredibly fast especially from medium to high altitude which was excellent in an Interceptor it had great visibility from the bubble cabin perhaps not as good as

Say a Mustang but it was pretty good at the time an awful lot of piston engine aircraft were reaching the edge what’s known as compression this is where you start to get to the point where wind over the surfaces becomes transonic it means that things get locked up it’s

Incredibly hard to say move your flaps and it causes a lot of crashes and the me262 because of its swept Wings was able to control this better than other contemporary aircraft which is which is good the jumo engines could run off less refined fuel basically a kind of a

Diesel s kerosene kind of compound which was good because bomber command and the United States Army Air Forces said nice oil you’ve got there be a shame if someone bombs all of your synthetic oil facilities but oh God the buts in June of 1945 Fritz vendel the first man to

Fly an me262 with jets installed wrote an after action report for the Americans at Curtis field a batch of nine were about to be sent over to the United States on the decks of HMS Reaper as part of something called operation Lusty we we’ll pick that up another day he

Called out many many faults of the me262 at the end of the war in short it was still basically a prototype aircraft which really should wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the front lines I mean first of all let’s have a look at those GMO engines they were a very decent

Theoretical design for a first generation jet engine but the r was being choked harder than Jeffrey epsin in a jail cell the various compromises and shortages in the design meant that the engines themselves had a lifespan of a mayfly on paper they could theoretically go about 50 hours before

Needing to be stripped down and serviced but a bit like me they actually needed to have it much more often roughly every 20 hours of normal flying at a minimum when the plane went into combat it was between 4 and 8 hours before each of those engines would need to be rebuilt

And that assumed that the pilot was lucky throw the throttle forward at the wrong moment or cut back too fast at the wrong second and the engine would flood and it would promptly catch fire on the ground this was a problem in the air it was fatal as Boeing is currently

Learning the hardware build quality on jet planes is kind of important testing them is key engineers at mmid and the rlm reckoned that the me262 would need about 3,000 hours of testing before it went into production and it actually got less than 10% of that time a combination of rushed effort constant bombing

Dispersed factories bad machine tooling cost counting me Bild quality was already completely shitty but from February 1944 70% of the workforce on the me262 were either forced foreign workers or concentration camp victims as the bombing by the RAF and the US aaf intensified pressure on Germany’s economy and the aircraft industry in

Particular the Nazis attempted to disperse their manufacturing into multiple underground locations and who says that area bombing doesn’t work in reality this only partially happened and Manufacturing continued at various sites throughout Germany but there was a plan to have a single hardened plant which was supposed to become the final

Assembly for the majority of me 62s from January 1945 15,000 slaves were coralled into a former wburg sand mine under a mountain to begin production of the me262 the the site code named salmon was the scene of almost unimaginable horror starvation was used as punishment hangings occurred

On a daily basis torture with barbwire and electricity were routine and in a few short months of operation more than a thousand prisoners died there effective it was not other sites less dramatic in nature but only fractionally less barbaric in action were established using Force labor and slave laor

Elsewhere meanwhile the ver Mar’s massive losses on both the Western and the Eastern Front created panicked waves of conscription from the various competing bodies of the skilled labor that might otherwise have been used far more productively in factories was sent direct to die on the front pointlessly unsurprisingly all of this meant that

The me262 did not exactly have the finest build quality in the world throttle stops that went to different distances seals that broke canopies that blew off at random mid-flight glues that came unstuck dials that just failed or fell out of the panels that they were supposed to be in in power that varied

From one engine to the other apparently at random control surfaces that fell off Foo holds that shattered electrics that failed fuel systems that caught fire undercarriage arms that collapsed or went clean through the wings on Landing nose wheels that threw dirt into the engines causing explosions and so on and

So on and so on such was the price of being a bunch of Nazi [ __ ] my absolute favorite of all the failures they managed to do was when they decided to put some rocket assistance onto the 262s engines and they sort of ran a cable from the cockpit past the pilot

Seat out to the wings and this is all fine I guess it was done in a bit of a hurry though so if the pilot decided to adjust their seat up it pulled the cable and sometimes this was fine but at least twice me262 Rockets suddenly fired and propelled the unsuspecting pilot towards

The horizon with the engines off killing one and burning another one half to death even when built properly the me262 range wasn’t good initially it was only about 120 mil massively limiting their potential use and even by War’s end and even when fitted with drop tanks they

Could only fly for about 2 hours or so assuming that is of course that the engine survived that long because that was not a given the undercarriage as I mentioned a minute ago was a constant source of problems having had to be redesigned multiple times due to

Collapses and the inability to take the weight of the aircraft a problem not helped by the extra weight of the A2 bomber version the MK 108 and 105 Cannon constantly had issues jamming refusing to eject cartridges or misfiring without warning and then they were on mountings that were never really fully sorted that

Meaning they were often highly inaccurate the amount of ammo 360 rounds for the 108s for example was Tiny and muzzle velocities weren’t exactly high and that meant hitting targets was pretty tricky unless you were perfectly lined up and it required Pilots to get far closer than you might have expected

Before they actually opened fire balance was a continual problem because of the fuel tank distribution and as the tanks drained that became progressively worse so it required constant trimming to maintain level flight in the A2 version when the bombs were added the weight shifted far far to the AR pushing the

Tail down and making the plane incredibly hard to get off the ground to help kind of fix this they fitted an auxiliary fuel tank but the problem with this is they did it in a bit of a rush so there was no fuel gauge in the

Cockpit the pilot had to judge how much weight was left in it manually and guess how far it had left and if he forgot to drain the tank prior to dropping the bombs the plane would go nose up Suddenly and the wings would be ripped

Off in order to try and avoid this sort of everyday common household accident they developed something called the schlep Hat this was a small V1 Wing that was attached to either a 500 kg or 2,000 kg bomb or indeed occasionally a fuel tank and attempted to tow that behind

The aircraft this went incredibly badly in October 1944 one unfortunate test pilot had to land with a live 2,000 kg bomb still attached to the aircraft after an electrical failure aside from the balance problems and the range issues all the fuel tanks suffered from feed problems with pumps that didn’t

Work or went too fast lines that got blocked or would feed erratically into engines and suddenly cause them to catch fire or stop without warning the me262 was Heavy including fuel is about 14,500 lb that’s about 15% more than the p47d or about 40% heavier than a P-51D a

Combination of weight and swep wings and engine issues meant that it had serious issues taking off and Landing making it highly vulnerable around its airfields when it was operating and a goodly number was shot down in taking off or Landing climbing below 5,000 ft used a massive amount of fuel limiting the

Range even further than usual so although it had clear advantages over Allied Fighters near the deck it couldn’t stay there very long up high it had very serious problems touching the throttle over 20,000 ft would almost always cause the engines to stop and operational ceilings were about 30,000

Ft theoretically about 5,000 ft lower than the top of a B17 service ceiling to fix this some genius came up with the idea of adding a Vala rocket to the back of the aircraft ready to be fired Wy coyote style if the engine’s packed in to my knowledge this was never actually

Tried but it’s kind of a shame that it wasn’t most of the time it flew fine and was pretty forgiving until suddenly it wasn’t anymore the combination of a teeny tiny tail plane which is sort of stuck on as an afterthought and a weird power delivery from its engines could

Cause sudden instability especially above 10,000 ft Without Really any warning at all using the throttle pushed the nose around in unpredictable ways that were novel to those that hadn’t flown a jet before and if it was you know called on to turn it just couldn’t do it really every single piston engin

Fighter could turn better than it could meaning if it got into a dog fight unless it dived away or climbed it was totally [ __ ] and Spitfires and tempests p-51s p-47s p38s and mosquitoes all got kills on me 262s in turning fights it was heavily weather limited if

There was Heavy moisture in the air it tended to flame out and at high altitude the engines could sometimes shut down in Cloud going up high presented quite significant problems with the deicing processes they essentially reduced to bodging something requiring Pilots to hand pump fuel directly onto the canopy

And then they told Crews to wear us flying jackets to protect against the cold snaking where an aircraft can slip sideways the whole time is often a problem on two engine Jets the gluster meteor F1 for example had the same kinds of issues but unlike on the meteor it

Was never eliminated from the 262 meaning it was a very poor gun platform in short it was basically a bit shite at most things other than going very fast and it might have been developed a bit further but a lot of what villy and vo had chosen to do meant that they’d sort

Of gone down some technological called Dead ends and you can kind of see that with the lack of 262 features turning up on later aircraft like say I don’t know the lightning or the star fighter or the saber and so on it swept wings and that’s kind of

It the most used headline for the me262 is the fighter that almost won the war or some other crap like I don’t know the plane that nearly turned the tide of World War II and both are absolute horseshit the proof of how Bobbins The me262 was is in the statistics it’s

Credited with something like 540 kills through its operational history from Summer 1944 to its demise in 1945 and about 450 airframes actually wound up at the front being used operationally it’s worth noting here that Shar claimed that he come up with about 1,500 but that’s just spare being spare and talking shite

Or at least if he did make that many they disappear before getting anywhere near the front so very crudely each airframe accounted for about 1.2 enemies which if this is really the aeronautical equivalent of the Umba mention is is pretty [ __ ] it’s especially [ __ ] when you start

To consider that on any given day in like 1944 and spring 1945 The Eighth Air Force alone was sticking up 1,200 bombers in a raid and probably about the same again in Fighters 540 kills is completely rubbish even if it’s true and I remind you that everyone in this story

Is lying about the numbers here you’ll regularly come across somebody saying something like well if they’d made thousands of them they could have won well first off We’ve Just sh that this damn thing was probably two years from being ready as it was so they were never

Going to be able to make thousands of them even if giring at Al hadn’t played silly buggers with a development cycle on the manufacturing processes but even if the Germans had got it all right which was never going to happen it wouldn’t have saved the K or Come Close

Through out the operational life of the me262 squadrons were able to keep at best just 15% of their aircraft flying at any one moment in time and that’s just not good enough lufafa squadrons running piston engine planes even at this point in the war were still in the

Mid 60s if you only have slightly better than one machine in 10 that’s actually airworthy then that aircraft is as crap as a Porsche gear box in a big metal clanky box and essentially useless as a weapon of war the German pilots in 1944 more however weren’t really capable of

Taking on their opposite numbers even in much Superior Equipment the me262 wouldn’t have helped them new German Pilots going into combat had about 10 hours of flying time on Jets and probably another 50 to 60 hours on piston engine aircraft Allied fighter pilots going into combat had hundreds of

Of preparation and then probably 50 to 100 hours in the combat zone as familiarization flights even had they not outnumbered the Germans by 20 or 30 to1 Allied Pilots were just better flyers and if there had been a real need then the gluster meteor could easily have been rushed into combat the other

Great claim is that an me262 shot down azzi on the 20th of August 1944 which is usually put forward as the first kill and it might have been the only problem here is that there’s not actually a record of a Mozzy being lost that day in

Fact of the 25 MO is that 262 Pilots would claim during the course of the war there are only three losses which match RAF records a fact which is perhaps explained by the cash bonuses that L buffer Flyers were offered for shooting down mosquito aircraft I will because I

Am British and smug just point out that the first meteors were operational in July and they made their first kill on the 3rd of August 1944 on a V1 flying bomb so no the me262 was not the first operational jet nor the first jet fighter nor did it get the first kill we

Will do a thing on the meteor one day but uh for now let’s just recognize that the me262 was neither the best nor the first really at anything other than going fast in a straight line in fight a bomber format 25 aircraft were made operational from August of 1944 to

October of 1944 of which more than half were shot down or crashed without achieving basically anything another 40 operated for the rest of the war out of German airbases and so far as we can tell they never actually hit a single Target to the extent that f for HQ

Stopped giving them targets after a while and it’s not like they were shorter things to shoot at as Fighters most likely the first kills were as part of experimental squadrons developed in about September but the first proper JG Squadron known as Commander novotney commanded by and I know this is going to

Come as a bit of a shock a chap called novotney went online in November of 1944 in four weeks of flying they lost 26 out of the 30 aircraft that they were given before being disbanded during which time they got 22 kills and lost seven Pilots those are [ __ ] sucky numbers and they

Are pretty typical at least initially over time groups like 3 jg7 got some more kills with r4m a toar Rockets under the wings which significantly boosted their kill to loss ratio but for supposedly all conquering Jets years ahead of its piston engineed opponents it was well it was rubbish and after

Years of effort and so many deaths these damn things didn’t make a bloody difference and the whole thing was really a giant waste of effort and energy energ that achieved nothing for the re come in Lads come in come in take off your flying overalls take a DSO from the

Box have a nice cap of tea and a chat you’ve made it to the survivors club and Jenkins and I are very glad that you’re here in all of this I can see how us Flyers who came across me 262s might have been very shocked indeed and I can

See how the pilots of the LT buffer might have felt that the happy times would come again if only they could get the 262 up into the Skies over Germany but the reality was it was a pretty mediocre fighter it was outclass by the meteor in almost every respect it was

Designed badly built even worse and handled badly and fighting for an evil cause in a war that it couldn’t hope to win so there frankly that’s my conclusion on the me262 I imagine that there might have been one or two people during the course of this who disagreed

And if they’re still here well then fair play to them I have drawn extensively from Dan Sharp’s book mes Schmid 262 development and politics Fritz fangles after warar fightings particularly his notes to Curtis field Mano zagler Hitler’s jet airplane out of gan’s books the view from the cockpit and the first

And the last and Martin kitchen’s Shar and all of these sources are problematic to some extent Zigler for example is an unreconstructed Nazi and he writes like one galland lies constantly Shar has a quote for All Occasions Vandal shot himself in 1959 and so on and so on and

So on however I think as best as one can I’ve Drawn Together the sources that there are into something broadly cohesive and my conclusion stands the me262 was a bit of [ __ ] Nazi kit if you enjoyed this and you’d like me to do more then please feel free to like And

Subscribe and maybe even consider joining my patreon we have a super secret Discord and you can help me fund my book habit and a massive thanks to those of you who’ve already signed up I really couldn’t do this stuff without your help if you’d like to send me an

Email absolutely feel free to it’s Lord Hearth gmail.com couldn’t be simpler well we will leave things there this time and thank you once again and I hope to see you all very very soon