Free Hitler's Jet Plane by Mano Ziegler Page B

the short straw and lost him the battle for the series contract. And he lost it not only to Kurt Tank’s better Fw 190, but also to his own Me 109G and the Me 262.
    From the beginning of his career, Messerschmitt was known as an avid aircraft designer, an engineer whose inspirations gave him no rest. A fund of anecdotes depicts him in a coffee shop, on a train, in a car at traffic lights, fumbling through his pockets for a scrap of paper on which to scribble down a concept or draft a rough sketch. His staff had dozens of such stories to tell, but they also reported how the expenditure of capital for his work at Bamberg made his family nervous wrecks. After the move to Augsburg, under the partnership agreement with Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, the company’s accounts office picked up the tab for his numerous wide-ranging projects. It was a trait of his character that Messerschmitt would generally find the way to offset personal financial risk. The Me 210 disaster for which he was personally responsible cost Messerschmitt AG at least RM 30 million, a sum which would be difficult to claw back even in an epoch when the company was buried under an avalanche of armaments contracts.
    Messerschmitt saw it as his moral obligation to recoup this vast sum but he was imbued by now with a greater degree of caution. Whereas the Me 262 was an outstandingly advanced machine, how it would behave operationally once it was in series production was an unknown factor. Moreover as yet the jet engines were not fully reliable nor had the airframe been tested to the parameters: test speeds had been restricted to the normal limits of propeller aircraft.
    It had been a similar story with regard to the Me 163 which – contrary to many assertions – was designed and built by Alexander Lippisch. By his own admission Messerschmitt never had a finger in the pie and treated the project with disinterest if not disdain. The Me 163 airframe had proven flawless in tests over the range of speeds of which it was capable. The rocket motor on the other hand had some diabolical traits and occasionally incinerated the pilot. As an Me 163 glided in to land it was at the mercy of any lurking enemy fighter, a problem which would be shared by the Me 262 on its landing approach. Additionally if an Me 262 engine had to be shut down the aircraft could fly home but no evasive manoeuvres were possible if attacked.
    Piston-engined aircraft were not vulnerable in this way. These drawbacks could not be lightly glossed over, least of all by Messerschmitt. Therefore preparation of the Me 262 for operations would not follow the same course as a typical propeller aircraft such as the Me 209 and 309 had done.
    Unencumbered by problems of high finance, fighter men, their commanders and senior officers like Galland saw the situation more soberly and thus in a truer light. By 1943 they could probably have proved that the Luftwaffe was likely to lose out entirely to the endless stream of enemy bombers if Reich air defences were not strengthened significantly very soon. Many eye-witness accounts of the time, letters, file notes and diary entries, provide a confusing and grotesque picture of the altercations at Luftwaffe High Command and in the General Staff which by-passed Goering and went directly to Hitler. The Reichsmarschall of the very battered German Reich was already its saddest figure.
    He had finished the World War I as a fighter pilot with an impressive twenty-two kills. He had taken command of the famous Richthofen fighter squadron (although not to the universal acclaim of its officers). A member of the NSDAP from 1922, he was one of Hitler’s ‘Old Guard’, became the most senior SA-chief and was seriously wounded in that role during the march to the Feldherrnhalle on 9 November 1923. As the ‘true Paladin of the Führer’ he became Prussian Minister – President after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, Prussian Interior Minister, the Reich Minister for