Free Secret Weapons by Brian Ford

Olympics were cancelled, and the project lost both urgency and direction. By August 1939, work had come to a standstill. Within a year, however, it was plain that the war would be no walkover for Germany, and the Luftwaffe began once again to involve long-distance bombers in their strategy. The Adolphine suddenly had a part in these plans, so work was resumed under conditions of urgency and the first prototype flew in December 1940.
    It seemed highly promising and, with the DB-606 engines, the range was predicted to be as much as 12,000 miles (20,000km) for the production aircraft. The engines were in short supply, however. They were being produced as fast as possible, but all were needed for established, successful planes like the Heinkel He-177. The second version was flown in 1941, but Messerschmitt realized that the fuel-carrying wings posed a radical problem: there was no room in the wing structure for weapons. There was a plan for the aircraft to fly over New York, dropping propaganda leaflets, but this public relations scheme was abandoned when Allied bombing destroyed both prototypes. There was a third prototype, fitted with two DB-610 engines and with space for two further crew members. It first flew in early 1943 and in April 1943, the Me-261 V3 flew for 10 hours over 2,790 miles (4,500km), the distance from Europe to America across the Atlantic. It was an unprecedented achievement. Three months later the prototype crash-landed, damaging the undercarriage. The plane was used for several long-distance reconnaissance missions but the need for an aircraft to catch the public attention no longer existed, and the project was finally scrapped in 1944.
    The idea of a plane that could cross the Atlantic had remained a continuing preoccupation of the German High Command throughout the war. The Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, often spoke of his wish to have a bomber that could curtail the ‘arrogance of the Americans’. One scheme had been to use the mid-Atlantic Portuguese islands of the Azores as a stop for fuel. The Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar had allowed the Germans to obtain fuel for their U-boats and Navy vessels from São Miguel in the Azores, but in 1943 he signed leases with the British, allowing them to use the islands as a base from which to patrol the North Atlantic by air.
    The other designs were all for high-specification aircraft that could fly across the Atlantic and back without touching down. Those that were hurriedly prepared were the all-new Messerschmitt Me-264, upgraded versions of the existing Focke Wulf Fw-200 known as the Fw-300 and the Ta-400, an improved version of the Junkers Ju-290 (the Ju-390) and the Heinkel He-277. Messerschmitt were quick to produce a prototype of the projected Me-264, though in the event it was the Ju-390 which was chosen to go into production. In early 1944, the second prototype Ju-390 reportedly made a trans-Atlantic flight and came within 12 miles (20km) of the coastline of the United States. Another Ju-390 is also claimed to have flown from Germany to south-west Africa (present-day Namibia) early in 1944. These reports are all post-war, however, and are impossible to substantiate.
    Many German aircraft companies investigated the problem of bombing the United States of whom Junkers, Messerschmitt, Heinkel and Focke-Wulf were the principal players. Long-distance aircraft were generally seen as impossible to construct in the time-frame, so the plans involved the capture of facilities on the Azores and the use of these strategic islands as a stopping-off point in the middle of the ocean. Bombers including the Ju-290, He-277 and Me-264 would then be within reach of United States targets with a bomb payload of up to 6.5 tons. Targets were listed in detail, and included American producers of light alloys, aircraft engines and optical equipment. Other targets were Canada and an Allied base in Greenland. It was calculated that attacks on