Despite around-the-clock bombing by British and American heavy bombers, the Germans during World War II produced an ever-increasing volume of advanced military materiel right up until the end of the war.
Even though they had terribly limited resources and were being squeezed on all sides, they still managed to field the first true assault rifle, genre-defining attack submarines, and surface-to-surface missile systems that the rest of the world would take a generation to best. However, what they really excelled at was jet airplanes.
The Americans had the P59 Airacomet, and the Brits the Gloster Meteor. The P59 never amounted to much. The Meteor did see limited service during WWII, mostly in chasing down V1 buzz bombs. By contrast, the German Me 262 was a veritable scourge in the skies over Western Europe in the latter days of the war.
The Me 262 had a top speed of 560 mph and sported four bomber-killing 30mm automatic cannon in the nose. To put that in perspective, the vaunted P-51 Mustang topped out at 440 mph. The Me 262 badly outclassed everything in the skies at the time.
It was indeed the swept-wing Me 262 that got all the press. However, the Germans also produced a corresponding twin-engine bomber that actually earned more love from Hitler. The Arado Ar 234 Blitz was a unique design powered by a pair of Junkers Jumo 004B-1 axial flow turbojets, the same powerplants that drove the Me 262.
Blitz is the German word for Lightning. Der Führer envisioned the Ar 234 as a war-changing wonder weapon that would seize the initiative and, once again, take the fight to the Allies. Fortunately for us all, the Ar234 was too little, too late.
Arado Ar 234 History
Development of the Ar 234 began in the latter days of 1940, when the Third Reich’s rampaging legions seemed unstoppable. The airframe was developed in short order, but it was February 1943 before the unique Junkers Jumo turbojet engines first became available. The Ar 234 saw its maiden flight on 30 July 1943.
The original plan called for a max production of 500 airframes per month by 1945. The Luftwaffe envisioned bomber, night fighter, and strategic reconnaissance versions of the plane. However, the exigencies of total war curtailed those projections drastically. Overall production by war’s end was only 214 machines.
Early versions of the plane did not include conventional landing gear, per se. These variants used a discardable wheeled trolley for takeoff akin to the Me 163 rocket plane. Landing was effected via a set of retractable skids that took up very little space in the cramped fuselage. However, in addition to having no braking ability at all, the prospect of having a dead airplane resting on the runway until somebody could get out, jack it up, and drag it into a revetment was obviously not tactically viable. Test pilots who landed these machines on damp grass described the experience as setting the airplane down atop a bar of wet soap.
Later versions did indeed include conventional landing gear. They also experimented with a variety of different engine configurations, predominantly driven by a chronic lack of Junkers Jumo powerplants. Regardless, by the time the Ar234 was ready for prime time, the Nazis were desperate. They had to make do with what they had.
Details of the Ar 234 Blitz
The Ar 234 was actually a really weird airplane. With a top speed of 461 mph and a practical payload of 3,300 pounds’ worth of bombs, the Ar234 offered significantly better performance than any comparable medium bomber then in service. However, the Blitz bomber certainly had its eccentricities.
For starters, the revolutionary turbojets drank a whole lot of gas at a time when the Germans were chronically short of the stuff. Around-the-clock strategic bombing prioritized petroleum processing facilities, making the production and delivery of quality fuels increasingly difficult.
Additionally, the Ar 234 was designed for speed and high performance. The plane’s slender fuselage left no room for internal weapons once the landing gear and prodigious fuel tanks were accounted for. As a result, the Ar 234’s weapons were carried externally on racks underneath the plane.
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The really strange bit, however, pertained to the crew arrangements. The Ar 234 was a single-pilot aircraft. There was no gunner, bombardier or navigator. Toward the end of the war, producing competent, trained pilots became one of the weakest links in the German logistics chain.
However, it is asking a lot to expect a single aviator to fly an advanced twin-engine jet bomber through hostile skies infested with Typhoons, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Spitfires and then accurately drop bombs on a well-defended target. As a result, German engineers developed some truly exotic tools in a failed effort to help those hapless guys out.
Forward visibility in the Arado Ar 234 Blitz was actually quite good. The entire nose of the plane was glazed for an exceptional field of view. However, the pilot still could not readily see the ground where he was dropping his bombs. Additionally, early models included a pair of rear-firing guns intended for use as defensive weapons. In an effort to allow one crewman to do all that stuff, the Germans included a curious periscope system that was meant to perform several different functions.
When directed rearward, this periscope was supposed to allow aiming of the two defensive machine guns. Doing this effectively while flying the airplane evasively was found to be quite literally impossible. The rear-firing weapons were deleted from later variants.
The periscope could also be rotated forward and used to control the aircraft during dive-bombing missions. That looks great on paper. However, when used in this capacity, the image seen by the pilot was vertically reversed. That meant that the controls responded in reverse of what the pilot saw, but only in the vertical plane. Up was down, and down was up.
As I said, that’s asking a lot of a guy managing a machine all by his lonesome with half the planet trying to blast him out of the sky. Additionally, egressing from the plane in an emergency involved unstrapping and exiting via a cramped hatch in the floor. Nobody ever was quite sure who was supposed to be controlling the stricken airplane while the pilot tried to pull this off.
Operational Use of Ar 234
There were never enough qualified pilots or engines, and the gas issue became critical in the war’s final months. However, the Arado Ar 234 was used to attack the Brussels train station as well as the Antwerp shipping docks. A few examples were encountered in the ground attack role around Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
The most high-profile missions of the war for the Ar 234 involved a maximum effort on the part of the Luftwaffe to drop the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. Though this effort was ultimately successful, Allied engineers bridged the river nearby in short order, rendering these efforts superfluous.
The Ar 234 was used as a fast reconnaissance platform. Accurate intelligence was critical to allow the German high command to allot dwindling defensive resources, and the speedy Blitz bomber excelled in this role. Regardless, most completed Arado Ar 234 Blitz bombers still never saw action for lack of fuel, engines and pilots.
Ruminations
The real limiting factor in the use of the German jets was actually metallurgy. The tendency of a metal part to elongate or stretch when subjected to heat and stress is called creep. Turbine blades in modern jet engines are good for thousands of thermal cycles and tens of thousands of flight hours. By contrast, the Junkers Jumo 004B-1 turbojet engine typically had to be replaced every 10 flight hours or so. As soon as the turbine blades stretched to the point where they contacted the engine housing, they were done.
The Ar 234 Blitz was nonetheless a truly groundbreaking design. Sleek, fast, and well ahead of its time, had the logistics and engineering been up to the task the Blitz bomber really could have had an outsized influence on the war. The Germans still would have lost, but it might have taken a bit longer. We should all, therefore, be thankful for the primitive state of 1940s-era German materials science.
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