The Amerikabomber project

On 27 April 1942 the German air force staff completed a 33-page plan for air attacks on the United States. It set out with which aircraft and from which bases the Luftwaffe might reach the armaments industry on the east coast of North America. On 12 May the document was sent to the commander of the Luftwaffe and Reich Minister of Aviation, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring. It was produced in ten copies: six were distributed to various Luftwaffe offices and four were kept in reserve. After the war one of them was found in an archive in Potsdam by the East German aviation historian Olaf Groehler. The plan is the best-documented evidence of the undertaking that the literature calls the “Amerikabomber” (“America bomber”) project.

The document is sometimes described as the final version of a design submitted to the Reich Air Ministry (RLM) in a competition for a transatlantic bomber. That is a simplification. It was not an aircraft design entered in a competition by one of the manufacturers but a staff study: a survey of the aircraft that existed or were being developed, their possible range and payload, the bases from which they might operate and their targets. The aircraft themselves were developed separately, to RLM orders placed in various years, and it is hard to speak of a competition in the strict sense. The studies do not agree on exactly who prepared the plan.

From the “Ural bomber” to America

The idea of a bomber capable of flying deep into enemy territory appeared early in the Luftwaffe. Its first chief of the general staff, General Walther Wever, supported the construction of a four-engined “Ural bomber” (Uralbomber) that would be able to reach Soviet industry beyond the Volga. After his death in June 1936 the programme was abandoned in 1937 in favour of cheaper and faster medium bombers suited to a war in Europe. The Dornier Do 19 and Junkers Ju 89 prototypes never went into production.

America came into the German airmen’s field of view in 1938. In August of that year a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor airliner flew non-stop from Berlin to New York in less than 25 hours. According to a surviving record, on 8 July 1938 Göring told representatives of the aircraft industry that he “completely lacked” bombers capable of flying to New York and back with a 4.5-tonne bomb load, and that he would be happy to have such an aircraft, which would at last “shut the mouths of the arrogant people over there”. Since the 1930s Willy Messerschmitt had been developing a design for a four-engined aircraft of extremely long range, originally conceived as a transport for carrying goods quickly across the Atlantic.

The Canadian historian Holger H. Herwig links the beginning of the plans to Hitler’s conversations of November 1940 and May 1941, when the dictator spoke of the need to use long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores and called the Portuguese islands the “only possibility” of attacking the United States from a land base. At the beginning of 1941 the RLM, under Ernst Udet, ordered thirty examples of an aircraft designated the Me 264 from Messerschmitt: according to German studies, it was a “four-engined long-range aircraft with a 2-tonne payload for nuisance raids over the USA”. After Udet’s suicide in November 1941, his successor Erhard Milch halted the work in January 1942, regarding it as a waste of resources. It revived when, after Germany’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, America became an enemy.

The plan of April 1942

By the spring of 1942 German U-boats had for three months been sinking ships off the US coast, and on 18 April American bombers attacked Tokyo for the first time, showing that even a symbolic raid on the enemy’s capital had political weight. The April plan proposed something similar against America. As a staging point it named the Azores, which lie about 4,000 kilometres from New York; a flight from continental Europe to New York and back amounted to some 11,600 kilometres. According to descriptions of the document in the literature, three types of aircraft could reach targets in America with a bomb load of 3 to 6.5 tonnes, the largest being attributed to the Me 264. Some of these figures and designations (especially the Ju 390 and He 277) date from later years, so exactly what the April 1942 survey looked like remains uncertain.

The plan contained a list of 21 military targets. Nineteen lay in the United States, one in Canada (the aluminium works at Vancouver) and one in Greenland (the mine at Ivittuut producing cryolite, essential for smelting aluminium). Almost all were plants working for aviation: the Pratt & Whitney engine factory at East Hartford and the Allison factory at Indianapolis, the Alcoa aluminium works, the Sperry Gyroscope instrument factory in Brooklyn, the Curtiss-Wright and Chrysler plants, and the Bausch & Lomb optical works in Rochester. The aim was therefore not to terrorise the population but to strike at the sources of American air superiority. The historian James P. Duffy points to a second purpose: even a few raids would have forced the Americans to keep at home anti-aircraft artillery and fighters that would otherwise have gone to Britain. Albert Speer recalled years later that Hitler was fascinated by the vision of New York in flames.

The aircraft

In May 1942 Milch asked General Eccard von Gablenz to assess the available aircraft. Von Gablenz concluded that the Me 264 could not be turned into a true transatlantic bomber, but that it could serve as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft working with U-boats off the American coast. Work on the Me 264 resumed precisely as a reconnaissance aircraft. The first prototype flew at Augsburg on 23 December 1942. It was fitted with neither gun positions nor a bomb bay, and in October 1943, after a conference between Göring, Milch and Messerschmitt, design work was ended. The aircraft was destroyed in an Allied air raid in July 1944, and two further prototypes were damaged while under construction.

Other manufacturers put forward designs of their own. Junkers converted the Ju 290 transport into the six-engined Ju 390, which did not fly until 20 October 1943; the order for further prototypes and a production series was cancelled in mid-1944, and the only flying example was destroyed in April 1945 before the Americans arrived. Stories of an alleged flight by a Ju 390 to the vicinity of New York in 1944 have been rejected by researchers. Kurt Tank of Focke-Wulf designed the six-engined Ta 400 in 1943, of which only a wind-tunnel model was built. The Heinkel He 277, a development of the troublesome He 177, never got beyond the prototype-construction stage. Makeshift solutions were also considered: an He 177 was to carry across the Atlantic a Dornier Do 217 fitted with an additional ramjet, which after the attack would ditch off the American coast, with its crew to be picked up by a U-boat. The project collapsed because the Kriegsmarine could not guarantee a submarine.

Why it failed

The reasons were technical, industrial and strategic. The Germans had no reliable piston engines of 2,000 hp or more; the Jumo 222, on which several designs relied, was a particular failure, and the coupled engines of the He 177 were notorious for catching fire. There was a shortage of raw materials, fuel and production capacity, and from 1943 the Luftwaffe had above all to defend the Reich against Allied air raids. In the summer of 1944 the emergency fighter programme put an end to practically all programmes for large combat aircraft. The plan also depended on the Azores, and Portugal, despite its neutrality, agreed in August 1943 to make the bases there available to the British, who landed on the islands in October. A small number of aircraft able to reach America with a few tonnes of bombs would not, in any case, have changed the outcome of an industrial war in which the United States was producing tens of thousands of aircraft a year.

Place in the war

The Amerikabomber project produced only prototypes, and no German aircraft ever attacked the continental United States. The Germans reached America only by submarine: in June 1942 U-boats landed the saboteurs of Operation Pastorius on the coasts of Long Island and Florida, where they were quickly caught by the FBI. The project was revisited in 1943–1945 in the form of ever more fantastic ideas, described in popular literature as further “America bombers”: Eugen Sänger’s rocket-powered Silbervogel glider and the jet flying wings of the Horten brothers and Arado. None got beyond the study stage. Historians such as Richard Overy see in these plans evidence that the Reich leadership never abandoned the idea of an air war against America, but had neither the means nor the time to wage it. The strategic bombers that decided the war in the air were built by Germany’s enemies: from 1944 American B-29 Superfortresses bombed Japan, and in 1945 they dropped atomic bombs on it.