Famous Bombers Of The Second World War, Volume One

By William Green

Originally published in 1959 to much acclaim, William Green’s Famous Bombers Of The Second World War, provides the most accurate and comprehensive view of the bomber aircraft that were used by both the Axis and the Allies. In this first volume, the author covers 18 different aircraft and their variants in their approximate order of introduction to operational service and provides a brief developmental and operational history of each type. Included are: Heinkel HE111, Savoia-Marchetti Sparviero, Boeing Fortress, Junker JU87, Dornier DO17, Vickers Wellington, Junkers JU88, Consolidated Liberator, North American Mitchell, Martin Marauder, De Havilland Mosquito and the Avro Lancaster.

Widely regarded as a pioneering ground from author William Green, it is particularly noted for the many excellent illustrations by G.W. Heumann and comprehensive side profiles of major sub-types, this volume also includes a highly detailed 3-view artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
• Release date: Mar 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786258700

William Green

William Green has written for many publications in the US and Europe, including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The New Yorker, The Spectator (London), and The Economist. He edited the Asian edition of Time while living in Hong Kong, then moved to London to edit the European, Middle Eastern, and African editions of Time. As an editor and coauthor, he has collaborated on several books, including Guy Spier’s much-praised memoir, The Education of a Value Investor. Born and raised in London, Green studied English literature at Oxford University and received a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife and their two children.

Book preview

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

FAMOUS BOMBERS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR,

VOLUME ONE

BY

WILLIAM GREEN

Illustrated by G. W. Heumann

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

INTRODUCTION 6

THE HEINKEL HE 111 8

THE SAVOIA-MARCHETTI SPARVIERO 38

THE BOEING FORTRESS 59

THE JUNKERS Ju 87 99

THE DORNIER Do 17 SERIES 127

THE VICKERS WELLINGTON 166

THE JUNKERS Ju 88 SERIES 200

THE CONSOLIDATED LIBERATOR 234

THE NORTH AMERICAN MITCHELL 269

THE MARTIN MARAUDER 301

THE DE HAVILLAND MOSQUITO 325

THE AVRO LANCASTER 346

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 380

DEDICATION

To my wife, Marianne, whose complete indifference towards all things aeronautical I find so refreshing.

Til min kone Marianne, hvis fuldkomne ligegladhed med alt flyvevæsen jeg finder så forfriskende.

INTRODUCTION

What was the most famous bomber of the Second World War? Many British readers will insist that the Lancaster, which spearheaded R.A.F. Bomber Command’s night offensive against Germany from mid ‘forty-two, can justifiably lay claim to this title; others are staunch adherents of the Wellington, the mainstay of that same Command during the most desperate period of the war in so far as the Allies were concerned, which repeatedly proved its ability to absorb a fantastic amount of battle damage and still get its crew home. Perhaps even more will unhesitatingly point to the nimble little Mosquito, the wartime exploits of which are legendary. American readers may well vociferously deny such claims, and insist that the versatile Liberator or the aesthetically more appealing Fortress is entitled to this distinction, while German readers will possibly select the ubiquitous Junkers Ju 88.

It is, of course, all very much a matter of opinion, but the preparation of this book has been complicated by the fact that, within the number of pages specified by my publishers, I could not tell adequately the stories of all the bombers of the Second World War, which could conceivably be considered as famous. I was faced with the problem of deciding which of many worthy aircraft should be omitted. In making my selection I unashamedly exercised my personal preferences. This selection may not meet entirely with the approval of all readers, for there are a number of deserving warplanes that find no place in the pages that follow. For these omissions I apologise, and before champions of the Superfortress, the Halifax, the Blenheim, or the Douglas A-20, reach for pen and paper to take me to task for omitting their favourites, let me hasten to assure them that these, together with other well-known bombers of the Second World War, will appear in a companion volume.

The bombers that have their wartime careers recounted in this book were famous; several of them were truly great. All suffered their vicissitudes and few were not subjected to adverse criticism at some time during their operational careers, but with the passage of time it has been possible to place their shortcomings and their successes in perspective. Early in its operational career, the Wellington achieved the dubious distinction of disproving the belief that large bombers could individually and in small formations make daylight sorties against heavily defended targets without fighter escort, yet it went on to build up a brilliant battle record. The Marauder, during the early stages of its service life, was labelled the Widow Maker along with less printable epithets, yet by 1944 it enjoyed a lower rate of loss on operational missions than any other American aircraft in the European Theatre of Operations. The Liberator was found to be alarmingly prone to catching fire as a result of superficial combat damage during operations in Northern Europe, yet in the Pacific it reigned supreme. And though the Fortress certainly failed to live up to its popular name during the early stages of the war, it finally emerged as perhaps the outstanding heavy day bomber. Each bomber endeared itself to some crews and was abused and vilified by others, but liked or disliked, and whatever their nationality, the bombers appearing in the following pages made an important contribution to aerial warfare and wrote their names indelibly on the pages of military aviation history.

In conclusion, I should like to record my gratitude to Peter M. Bowers, who supplied some of the photographs appearing in this book; to Giorgio Bignozzi, who contributed much valuable factual detail to the chapter on the Sparviero; and to my good friends John Fricker and Gert W. Heumann—the former for his tireless labours in assisting me with research into the American bombers appearing in this book, and the latter for his drawings which continue to set new high standards in detail accuracy.

WILLIAM GREEN

THE HEINKEL HE 111

Few were the inhabitants of England’s capital and southern counties to whom, in the dramatic months of 1940, the distinctive and disagreeable note of the Heinkel He 111’s engines was unfamiliar, for this machine, the first modern medium bomber to be acquired by the Luftwaffe, bore the major burden of the German bombing offensive against the British Isles during the main phase of the Battle of Britain. Despite its shortcomings, which became more marked as the war progressed and which were in no small part due to the continual process of modification and extemporisation to which the bomber was subjected, it retained its place as a standard Luftwaffe combat aircraft throughout the war. Produced in infinitely greater quantities than its compatriot and contemporary, the Dornier Do 17 and its derivatives, the He 111 was twice taken out of mass production but returned to the assembly lines when the new types with which it was to be replaced failed to materialize.

During the opening phases of the war the Heinkel He 111 was undoubtedly a formidable offensive weapon. An elegant, well-built, well-planned aircraft with good flying characteristics, the He 111 was certainly a thoroughbred, inheriting its shapely contours from its single-engined predecessor, the He 70 Blitz, which, at the time of its appearance, had been justifiably acclaimed as the most aerodynamically efficient aeroplane to have flown. Like so many other German warplanes of its era, the He 111 was first revealed to the world in civil guise. The machine publicly displayed for the first time on January 10, 1936 at Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, was ostensibly a ten-passenger commercial transport, but its sleek, beautifully streamlined fuselage and low-drag elliptical wing were obviously designed for maximum performance at the expense of passenger comfort. Indeed, passenger accommodation was extremely cramped, a forward compartment between the wing spars providing seating for four passengers, a further compartment aft of the rear spar accommodating six passengers. The aircraft’s more lethal intent was patently obvious, and what was not publicly revealed on that January morning in 1936, when the headlines of German newspapers were proclaiming the existence of The Fastest Machine in Civil Aviation, were the facts that the first prototype, which had flown nearly a year earlier, had been built as a bomber, and that the first pre-production models of the bomber variant had already left the assembly lines at the Rostock factory of the Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke!

It was to be claimed that the conception of the Heinkel He 111 had been inspired by a specification issued by the German airline, Deutsche Lufthansa, for an airliner suitable for high-speed passenger and mail services, but the Günther brothers, Walter and Siegfried, who were responsible for the design of the new aircraft, were well aware that any order for such a machine placed by D.L.H. would be extremely limited, and that the development of a machine suited only for the commercial role would not be an attractive commercial proposition. Accordingly, they designed a dual-purpose aircraft; one that would also be suitable for use in the bomber role by the Luftwaffe, the existence of which was shortly to be revealed to the world. In fact, so much more suitable for a militant role than for civil purposes was the design that they evolved that it is surprising that Germany made any attempt to disguise its true function beneath civil markings.

Development of the He 111 design was commenced early in 1934, only one year after the appearance of the internationally successful He 70, and the first prototype, designated He 111a, was completed during the following winter. Powered by two BMW VI twelve-cylinder Vee liquid-cooled engines of 660 h.p., the He 111a, or He 111V1 as it was subsequently to be known, was flown for the first time early in 1935 from the partially completed runway at Ernst Heinkel’s new Marienehe factory by the company’s chief test pilot, Gerhard Nitschke. The initial flight test programme revealed that the flying characteristics of the new machine were far superior to those of the He 70, which had left much to be desired, and a speed of 214 m.p.h.—closely comparable with that of any of the world’s standard fighters at the time—was attained at an early stage in the testing. Structurally, the He 111V1 was an orthodox cantilever low-wing monoplane of metal stressed-skin construction in which excrescences had been kept to a minimum. The long, slim nose terminated in a transparent cone for the bombardier, and provision was made for the installation of a single 7.9-mm. machine gun in this cone, mounted in a traversing slot. It was proposed to take care of attacks from behind and below by a gun position in a retractable dustbin ventral turret and a dorsal position protected by a small windscreen, each of these positions housing one 7.9-mm. MG 15 machine gun. Offensive armament was to comprise a 2,200-lb. bomb load, the bombs being housed vertically in what was to be the smoking compartment of the civil variant. Empty and loaded weights were 12,764 lb. and 16,755 lb. respectively, range was 930 miles and service ceiling was 17,720 ft.

The second prototype, the He 111V2 (D-ALIX Rostock), and the first prototype of the commercial version, followed closely on the heels of the bomber prototype, and differed from its predecessor primarily in providing accommodation for ten passengers with a mail compartment in the nose. Minor changes included the provision of fillets at the wing trailing edge roots and the replacement of the tail skid by a wheel. The third prototype, the He 111V3 (D-ALES), flown in the spring of 1935, was again a bomber and intended to serve as a prototype for the initial production He 111A, while the He 111V4 (D-AHAO Dresden) was the second commercial prototype and the aircraft publicly revealed at Tempelhof in January 1936.

By mid-1935 the bomber variant had entered production at Rostock, and by the end of 1936 the first pre-production He 111A-0 bombers were being evaluated at the Luftwaffe’s Research Establishment at Rechlin. The service test pilots’ reports on the bomber were not entirely favourable as they considered that, with its two BMW VI 6.0Z engines it was seriously underpowered. In fact, the pre-production model could hardly attain 190 m.p.h. with the ventral gun dustbin retracted! It was decided that the bomber would be re-evaluated when re-engined with either the Daimler-Benz DB 600A or the Junkers Jumo 210Ga. By the time this decision had been reached the Heinkel concern was well advanced with the completion of a batch of He 111A-1 bombers, and as a result of the Luftwaffe’s refusal to accept them Ernst Heinkel sought permission to export these aircraft. As Germany was short of foreign currency, permission was granted and, stripped of the standard Luftwaffe bomb sight, radio equipment and self-destroying charge, ten of the He 111A-1s were sold to the Chinese government. Simultaneously, one of the pre-production He 111A-0 bombers was re-engined with two of the then new Daimler-Benz DB 600A twelve-cylinder inverted-Vee water-cooled engines rated at 1,000 h.p. for take-off, and re-designated He 111V5 (D-APYS); this aircraft attained a maximum speed of 255 m.p.h.

In the meantime the He 111V1 had been converted as a transport, and two further civil transport machines had been built (D-AQYF Leipzig and D-AXAV Köln) under the designation He 111C, but D.L.H. displayed little interest in the potentialities of these aircraft, claiming that they were underpowered and too expensive to be commercially practicable. In fact, despite the general belief that D.L.H. did employ these machines—a belief fostered by the appearance of numerous photographs of the type bearing D.L.H. insignia and the numerous route-proving flights purported to have been carried out by this airline with the He 111C—no machine of this type was accepted for commercial operations, both airliner prototypes and the two He 111Cs having been transferred to a special and highly secret Luftwaffe unit which, led by Oberst Rohwehl and based at Staaken, undertook long-distance reconnaissance flights over Britain, France and the Soviet Union under the guise of commercial route-proving flights. One of Rohwehl’s civil He 111s actually crashed during one of its photoreconnaissance flights over foreign territory, but its secret was never revealed.

The remarkable success of the He 111V5 with DB 600A engines was immediately rewarded by substantial quantity production orders for the fledgling Luftwaffe, and in the years that followed this one aircraft type was to do much to place Germany in the vanguard of international bomber design. It may even be said that until the commencement of the Second World War the He 111 was probably supreme among medium bombers. The first pre-production He 111B-0 and production B-1 bombers were delivered to the Luftwaffe during the closing months of 1936, and after extensive testing the pre-production aircraft were returned to Heinkel to serve as test-beds for new equipment and as prototypes for later variants. The He 111B-1, which offered a notable advance in striking power over the Dornier Do 23G and Junkers Ju 52/3Mg 3e which it supplanted, was generally similar to the He 111A-1, apart from its power plants, but it soon gave place on the production lines to the He 111B-2 which featured improved DB 600C engines and a new hemispherical nose gun mounting. This, in turn, was supplanted in 1937 by the preproduction He 111D-0 and production D-1 with the 1,050 h.p. DB 600Ga engines with enlarged ventral radiators in place of the earlier wing surface radiators. The drag-producing exhaust stubs were carefully faired over, and the maximum speed was increased to 254 m.p.h., representing a 24 m.p.h. increase over the B-2 variant. In battle condition, with the ventral dustbin extended, maximum speed was reduced to 230 m.p.h.

Despite the military success of the He 111 and the failure of the He 111C to arouse the interest of D.L.H., Ernst Heinkel still entertained hopes of selling a civil variant and, accordingly, the He 111G was evolved. The elliptical wing which characterised all early variants of the He 111, although attractive from the aesthetic viewpoint and also aerodynamically efficient, left much to be desired from the production viewpoint, and the Günther brothers had designed a new wing of simplified construction and straight taper which was eventually to be adopted for the bomber. In the summer of 1936 this new wing was fitted to the He 111V7 for flight testing, and was also adopted for the He 111G, the first two examples of which (D-AEQU Halle and D-AYKI Magdeburg) retained the BMW VI engines of the He 111C. The third G-series aircraft (D-ACBS Augsburg), which was under test at Rechlin during the summer of 1936, was powered by 800 h.p BMW 132A radials, while the fourth and fifth machines received DB 600Ga engines. D.L.H. still refused to accept the type, despite the very much improved performance of the last two machines, and the aircraft were eventually taken over by the Luftwaffe (the fourth machine, the He 111V16 D-ASAR, was eventually used as a personal transport by Erhard Milch), one being sold to the Turkish government. With the completion of the five He 111Gs, the civil career of the design came to an end; and although the full circle was to turn towards the end of the He 111’s production life when it was produced once again as a transport, its subsequent career was to be almost entirely of a more lethal nature.

On May 4, 1936, work had commenced on a new factory at Oranienburg. This plant was intended specifically for the production of the He 111 bomber and was to have a capacity of one hundred machines per month. A year to the day after the first work on the factory had commenced, the first bomber rolled off its assembly line. The year 1937 also saw the abandoning of any further attempt to disguise the true purpose of the He 111, for squadrons equipped with this type were demonstrated in public at Nuremberg on the Reichsparteitag of that year; He 111B-1s were sent to Spain to re-equip the bomber element of the Condor Legion, and on November 22, 1937, an He 111 was reputedly flown by Flugkapitan Gerhard Nitschke and Flugzeugführer Hans Dieterle over 621 miles with a 2,200-lb. load at the remarkable average speed of 313 m.p.h. The aircraft performing this flight was, however, a prototype of the radically different He 119.

The inability of the Daimler-Benz A.G. to produce sufficient DB 600 engines to keep abreast of He 111D airframe production resulted in the adoption of another power plant of generally similar power, the 1,050 h.p. Junkers Jumo 211A, and with these engines the bomber was designated He 111E. A pre-production He 111B-0 had been converted to take two Junkers Jumo 210Ga engines under the designation He 111V6 (D-AXOH) and served as a prototype for the He 111E, later being transferred to Junkers, by which concern it was employed as a test-bed for variable-speed airscrews. It is of interest to note at this juncture that the He 111V9 (D-AQOX) and V10 (D-ALEQ), although bearing later prototype numbers, were actually prototypes for the D-series bombers. The He 111E-0 was powered by the Jumo 211A-1 and the production E-1 was similarly powered. In order to reduce drag, semi-retractable radiators were adopted, the oil coolant radiator was relocated on the upper part of the engine cowling, and the He 111E-1 had a maximum speed of 267 m.p.h., a cruising speed of 202 m.p.h., a service ceiling of 22,950 ft., and a loaded weight of 23,370 lb. The He 111F differed from the E-series in having the straight tapered wing of the He 111V7 and He 111G, first leaving the assembly lines in the autumn of 1937. The He 111F-0 retained the Jumo 211A-1 engines, but the F-1 had the improved Jumo 211A-3.

The use of the He 111 in Spain was to have a marked and, for Germany, unfortunate effect on the shaping of future German air strategy. The bomber element of the Condor Legion, K/88, which had been sent to the aid of General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the principal leader of the insurgents, initially operated with Junkers Ju 52/3Mg aircraft. These were supplanted by He 111B-2, D-1, E-1 and F-1 bombers which were fast enough to evade most of the fighter aircraft employed by the Republicans, and Kampfgruppe 88 evolved the technique of unescorted daylight attacks. The first operational sortie made by the He 111B bombers of K/88 took place on March 9, 1937, when they bombed the airfields of Alcalá and Barajas. The comparatively light opposition encountered by the bomber squadrons inclined the German High Command to the belief that they could continue to operate