Dan Sharp - Heinkel He 162 ('Secret Projects of The Luftwaffe')

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" ...The first prototype He 162 was flown on December 6, 1944 and reached a top speed of 522 mph. The aircraft handled well except for some longitudinal stability problems. The flight ended when one of the wooden main gear doors separated from the aircraft, due to defective bonding of the plywood. Four days later, the aircraft crashed after the wooden leading edge of the right wing delaminated, killing Heinkel’s chief test pilot, Flugkapitan Gotthard Peter. The wing failure was a result of defective bonding after the Goldschmitt Tego-Film factory was bombed and an alternative bonding agent was used. As it turned out the new bonding method was too acidic causing the wooden structure to deteriorate.8 Despite the crash, the He 162 program continued. To correct longitudinal stability, Dr. Alexander Lippisch suggested adding small downward turning winglets on the wing tips. This corrected the problem and the winglets became known as Lippisch Ohren or Lippisch Ears..."  (Larry Dwyer, Aviation History Museum on-line)

"...Much has been written about Heinkel's last wartime aircraft yet in studying the wealth of surviving primary source material it became evident that certain misconceptions have become ingrained in these writings. It is my hope that this publication, fully referenced with primary sources, will offer a degree of clarity and transparency that may be relied upon.." 

 Dan Sharp, November 2020    

While recently perusing a 'new' compendium of Luftwaffe types that featured no references or notes  I found myself wondering how was it possible to judge what was reliable information and what was not.  A friend of mine has been saying it for a long time -the lack of proper reference listing and noting is a serious shortcoming of most aviation books! Someone who appreciates this is author Dan Sharp. According to his publisher's blurb, Dan Sharp has developed an unhealthy obsession with primary and archival sources. In a previous post on his 'Jet fighter projects' you may recall that Dan wanted to know whether anyone had written on any of the topics covered in his jet fighters book in more detail. Well, they have now - and that some-one is Dan Sharp himself. While some of the projects mentioned  in his previous book amount to a handful of drawings or notes, others are backed up in  the archives by large quantities of paperwork. So while the broad outline of what happened concerning the 'Volksjäger' competition is covered in the 'Jet Fighters' book, Dan's new 172-page He 162 book is very much a 'deep dive' into the type's development, with a new level of detail only possible using the copious primary sources available. 

Dan Sharp's latest work is not a complete history of everything to do with the He 162 - it only barely touches on the production side and efforts to get the type into Luftwaffe service. Rather, it looks primarily at the design and development of the type. It is without doubt - over its 172 pages - the most detailed and accurate developmental history to the type to yet appear in print.

I've been buying books on German WW2 aircraft and on other types for a long time. When you buy and read  a lot, you notice a fair number of inconsistencies among sources- one will give one reason for the He 162 V1's crash and another will come up with a different reason. It's a pretty glaring inconsistency and it is very difficult to know what is correct and what isn't, especially when the book in question fails to give any decent references. Obviously some volumes do provide this - for example Uziel's 'Arming the Luftwaffe' is one. Even the gold standard books such as Classic Publications don't usually tell you where the documents are to be found though. 

One area of inconsistency that Sharp highlights in relation to the He 162 concerns the 45-degree wing end caps, commonly referred to as 'Lippisch ears'. There is a single flight test report where the pilot refers to them simply as 'ears'. Someone has presumably taken this and spun it into 'Lippisch ears'. That's not to say that Lippisch didn't develop them - he did. According to the new timeline in the He 162 developmental history that Dan Sharp has written, Lippisch wrote to Heinkel technical director Carl Francke offering his sympathies following the crash of the He 162 V1 on Dec 10, 1944, and offering to help, if he could. Francke wrote back to say that he would welcome Lippisch's input and offering to show him the aircraft in person as soon as possible. The earliest (and only known) blueprint drawing of the new 'end cap' is dated January 6, 1945 (and also Jan 9). The 'end cap' is then flight tested later in January - and is found to successfully cancel out the longitudinal instability which caused the V1 to crash. Incidentally, the longitudinal instability was caused by the wings' 3-degrees of dihedral (according to Heinkel). A permanent solution of reducing the dihedral to 1-degree - negating the need for the end caps - was planned but never implemented. The bigger problem was lateral instability, the curing of which required the fuselage fuel tank to be significantly reduced in size (as the fuel drained, it altered the aircraft's centre of gravity mid-flight, causing pitch-up/pitch-down movements that were nearly uncontrollable), the tailplanes to be lengthened, different ballast weights to be tried in the nose etc. etc.

This in a nutshell is very much the motive behind Dan Sharp's research efforts - a return to the source documents. As well as attempting to clarify the timeline, Dan Sharp also provides a more accurate analysis of the He 162 prototypes, what variants of the aircraft were proposed and what decisions were made about them. Richard A. Franks' 'The Heinkel He 162 - A Detailed Guide to the Luftwaffe's Volksjaeger' tries to do a similar job - it is essentially a list of the different prototypes and what their features are supposed to have been. Many of Franks' listings are carefully 'corrected' in this new work, citing the source of the correct information so that, should anyone wish, they can check it themselves. 

To this end  I found the seven pages of footnotes slightly more edifying this time than I did the pages of footnotes in Dan Sharp's previous book on the BV 155 - since most of them nicely expand on what is written in the main text rather than just being document references.

Dan Sharp neatly sums up the He 162 project - while it has become axiomatic that the He 162 was symptomatic of the desperation that beset late-war German aeronautical developments, the machine was probably the 'perfect' aircraft from a number of stand-points for the resource-constrained late-war German economy - ease of construction, cheap to build, utilising a single-jet with wooden wings - operating perfectly well on cheap, unrefined fuel - that conferred decent performance not far removed from that of the far more expensive, resource and labour-intensive Me 262. 

Recommended! For readers in the UK this publication is available from WH Smiths. 

Junkers Ju 390 V-1 "GH UK", LG 2, JG 53, JG 77 Emil, Motorwechsel, Kran -daily ebay photo find #247

Junkers Ju 390 V-1 "GH+UK" vermutlich Winter 1943/44 in Merseburg, Rechlin oder Dessau.

The Junkers Ju 390 was a rare bird - only two constructed - intended to be used as a heavy transport, maritime patrol aircraft, and long-range bomber, a long-range derivative of the Ju 290. It was one of the aircraft designs submitted for the abortive Amerika Bomber project, along with the Messerschmitt Me 264, the Focke-Wulf Ta 400, and by February 1943, the Heinkel He 277. Two prototypes were created by attaching an extra pair of inner-wing segments onto the wings of basic Ju 90 and Ju 290 airframes, and adding new sections to lengthen the fuselages..

Below; Junkers Ju 290 A vermutlich im Winter 1943/44 in Merseburg, Rechlin oder Dessau.

Ju 88 C-2 of I./NJG 2 on Sicily

Me 110 E der III./ZG 26 Catania 1941/42

Latest from Michael Meyer here

More JG 53 from Marko Auer here

Above; Bf-109E-7,W.Nr.6503, Stammkennzeichen PU + CQ, 3./JG 77,Eastern Front 1942 prior to being taken on charge by JG 103. Plane crashed 31.3.1944 ,Germany. See the supercharger intake from Bf 109 T.

Well-known line-up of JG 1 He 162 at Leck here

I./JG 1 surrender their He 162 jets at Leck on 8 May 1945

I./JG 1 surrender their He 162 jets at Leck on 8 May 1945 (according to the inscription on the reverse of these images currently on offer via Heiko Fuchs Ebay sales). Personal accounts document the mix of resignation and relief felt by those stragglers from JG 4 who had managed to fall back to Schleswig Holstein to surrender to the British alongside their comrades from JG 1. This extract from the JG 4 war diary for Sunday 06 May 1945 taken from my own translation of Eric Mombeek's history of JG 4 (Vol II)..

"..Our aircraft, vehicles and other equipment are lined up as if for one last parade. The sight is an impressive one and will certainly give the British food for thought. We are proud to show off more than one hundred of our aircraft like this - from the ultra -modern Me 262 and He 162 that have flown only limited numbers of combat sorties - to the Bf 109 and Fw 190 fighters that have returned victories in thousands of successful air battles. All will pass into enemy hands. This afternoon several light tanks and trucks bring RAF ground forces onto the airfield. Oberst Nordmann, and then the Kommodore and Kommandeure, have to go before the Colonel commanding the RAF forces. To our great surprise they receive a handshake by way of greeting! However while we are airmen together we remain sceptical as to what may follow the courtesies that our extended to us: what will happen when the other occupation forces arrive? The first orders are to draw up an inventory of all our matériel. All weapons must be handed in apart from the officers side-arms...."

Late-war fighter production - the He 162 underground factory at Hinterbrühl

The 'Seegrotte' or 'subterranean lake' at Hinterbrühl in the Mödling Bezirk south of Vienna in southern Austria is a leading tourist attraction in that part of the world. In 1912 an underground blasting operation in the gypsum mine "Hinterbrühl" went awry resulting in millions of litres of water flooding into the lower galleries of the mine creating a huge underground  lake.  As a consequence the mine remained closed for years until a team of cave explorers discovered the unique natural spectacle in the 1930´s.

Towards the end of WWII the Seegrotte was requisitioned by Heinkel as an ideal 'bomb-proof' location for the production of the  the He 162 jet with upwards of 2,000 workers/slave labourers being employed  in the 'factory'. Many came from the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp, one of the first to be constructed from stone outside of Germany and one of the last to be liberated. The oft-reproduced picture above is published in the work ' Mauthausen, Horror on the Danube'. After the war the Seegrotte was re-opened as a tourist attraction. The following views are/were available as postcards..


Me 262 construction at the REIMAHG underground facility
http://falkeeins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/me-262-in-reimahg-plant.html
Me 262 'forest-factory' production
http://falkeeins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/waldwerke-late-war-luftwaffe-fighter.html

Ebay rarities He 162, Ju 388, Mistel, Junkers Ju 88

Ebay seller of the JG20 album (see previous post) is offering many more interesting Luftwaffe images at his shop address here A small selection follows, including Hs 129, He 162, Ju 388, Mistel combination, and Me 410. The He 162 images are familiar (WOTBC perhaps.?). As is the Hs 129 image, the example that tested the SG 113A  - tubes of explosives that were triggered by light-sensitive cells. Note the installation that can be seen on the fuselage. Although  captioned as 'nightfighters' the Junkers Ju 88 Cs with the large camouflage mottles appear to be KG 40 machines ...click on the images for a closer view.

Heinkel He 162 Volksjäger

My review of the Forsyth/Creek Classic Pubs title devoted to the He162

The story of the so-called Volksjäger (the 'People's Fighter') project is told here in perhaps the most comprehensive work yet to appear on the type in English. The He 162 was a last throw of the dice by the Nazi leadership in mid-to-late 1944. Powered by a single BMW turbojet, the He 162 achieved notoriety by going from drawing board to prototype flight in just three months, often at considerable human cost. Robert Forsyth and Eddie J. Creek offer a unique insight into the workings of the Nazi production system in the late-war period through many rare photographs, facsimile documents, detailed text and colour artworks. Development and deployment of the He 162 were compressed into the most restricted time frame possible - with almost inevitable consequences. No aircraft can go from drawing board to combat service without a prolonged period of developmental testing - the fact that the He 162 did so, in no way attests to any inherent brillance in the design or conception of the type. There was virtually no factory flight testing - this was to be carried out at unit level and this book exploits author Erik Mombeeck's considerable research into the history of the only fighter unit to have flown the type in combat Jagdgeschwader 1. The discussion surrounding the He 162's supposed combat successes also relies heavily on research carried by Rick Chapman in 1989 and I have to say that I think the authors conclusions, based on pilot reports and a translation of some German text to be erroneous.
Of particular interest though is a detailed photographic overview of the famous JG 1 line-up at Leck, the text documenting the mix of resignation and relief felt by the men of the last Luftwaffe Jagdgeschwader who had managed to fall back to Schleswig Holstein and who were able to surrender to the British. Much of this passage is drawn from my own translation of Eric Mombeek's forthcoming history of JG 4 (Vol II), e.g. this extract from the JG 4 War diary for Sunday 06 May 1945;


"Our aircraft, vehicles and other equipment is lined up as if for one last parade. The sight is an impressive one and will certainly give the British food for thought. We are proud to show off more than one hundred of our aircraft like this - from the ultra -modern Me262 and He162 that have flown only limited numbers of combat sorties - to the Bf109 and Fw190 fighters that have returned victories in thousands of successful air battles. All will pass into enemy hands. This afternoon several light tanks and trucks bring RAF ground forces onto the airfield. Oberst Nordmann then the Kommodore and Kommandeure have to go before the Colonel commanding the RAF forces. To our great surprise they receive a handshake by way of greeting! However we are airmen together - we remain sceptical as to what may follow the courtesies that our extended to us: what will happen when the other occupation forces arrive? The first orders are to draw up an inventory of all our matériel. All weapons must be handed in apart from the officers side-arms."

Was the type a 'dazzling success' as previous authors have referred to it. Hardly.. In my view the authors go too far here in referring to the He 162 as '"an unprecedented aeronautical achievement". Quoted in French aviation magazine 'Le Fana' in 1997, French He 162 test pilot Raphael Lombaert (briefly quoted in the Classic book) states that the He162 was 'anything but a success' & only 'dazzled' in the brevity of the conception process. The a/c itself as depicted by Lombaert was "pedestrian and dangerous". This was not a machine of sparkling performance by any stretch of the imagination. The most basic of fighter manoeuvres could in the He162 become "terribly vicious". Although not discussed in the Classic book, French He162s were never flown post-war for longer than 15 minutes due to concerns over the rate of fuel consumption and the horrendous noise from the jet engine right next to the pilot's head! Many died in crashes directly resulting from short-comings in the design. We can perhaps only agree with Lombaert when he states "whenever I see this a/c now preserved in museums I cannot help but spare a thought for all those that fell victim to this machine, truly a tool of desperation ..".

An essential reference work to all students of Luftwaffe World War II airpower and kudos to the authors & designer for putting it all together in this superb package.