The first jets in combat

On 26 July 1944 the first air combat in history in which one side was a jet-powered aircraft took place over Bavaria. Leutnant (Second Lieutenant) Alfred Schreiber of Erprobungskommando 262 – the Luftwaffe test unit bringing the Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter into service – intercepted a British de Havilland Mosquito PR XVI reconnaissance aircraft of No. 540 Squadron RAF, flown by Flight Lieutenant A. E. Wall, in the Munich area. Two days later, on 28 July, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket fighters of I Gruppe of the fighter wing JG 400 attacked American bombers over Saxony for the first time in regular combat service. A few weeks after the first V-1 flying bombs, the Germans had brought into action another weapon that their propaganda presented as proof of the Reich’s technical superiority – and the day between these two episodes, 27 July, also saw the first operational sorties of a British jet fighter.

Popular chronologies describe the event of 26 July as the “first aerial victory by a jet fighter”, in which the Me 262 “damaged” the Mosquito. This wording needs a caveat. The unarmed Mosquito evaded Schreiber’s repeated attacks and landed at an Allied airfield at Fermo in Italy. According to British studies a hatch door came off during its violent manoeuvres, but it was not shot down: the next day it returned to its base at Benson in England and was still flying after the war. Some German sources credited Schreiber with a kill, but in the light of both sides’ records 26 July was the day of a jet’s first combat, not of its first victory. The first kill confirmed by the British side was scored by a pilot of the same unit only on 8 August 1944 – his victim was likewise a reconnaissance Mosquito of No. 540 Squadron, both of whose crew were killed.

The aircraft that was meant to be a bomber

The Me 262 was the fruit of work begun before the war. Its first flight on jet power alone took place on 18 July 1942, and in May 1943 the Inspector of Fighters, General Adolf Galland, after flying a prototype, called for it to be put into production as a fighter as soon as possible. The aircraft reached some 850–870 km/h, making it more than 150 km/h faster than the best Allied piston-engined fighters, and it had a powerful armament of four 30 mm cannon.

Development, however, was held up by the engines. The Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets were built from substitute steels low in nickel and chromium, since the Reich was short of these metals. They lasted a few dozen hours, and if the throttle was moved sharply they easily caught fire or flamed out. On top of this came political interference. Adolf Hitler, who saw the Me 262 at a demonstration at the end of 1943, asked whether it could carry bombs, and in the spring of 1944, expecting the invasion of France, demanded that it serve above all as a fast bomber (“Blitzbomber”) to fight the landings and to retaliate against Britain. According to Galland, for a time it was even forbidden to call it a fighter. Galland and the armaments minister Albert Speer claimed after the war that this decision cost many months. Today’s historians of technology are more cautious: in their view the main cause of the delays was the immature engines and production problems, and Hitler’s order slowed above all the delivery of aircraft to fighter units rather than production itself.

Erprobungskommando 262 and 26 July

The first production Me 262s reached units in the spring of 1944. On 19 April Erprobungskommando 262 was formed at Lechfeld near Augsburg under Hauptmann Werner Thierfelder to test the aircraft under combat conditions and train the first pilots. In parallel, pilots of the bomber wing KG 51 were being prepared to fly it as a bomber. Training was hard going: pilots used to piston-engined machines had to learn to handle the engines gently and cope with a long take-off run and high landing speeds, and breakdowns were frequent. On 18 July 1944 Thierfelder himself was killed when his Me 262 caught fire in flight.

Eight days later Schreiber, flying the machine with works number 130 017, came across Wall’s Mosquito on a photographic sortie over southern Germany. The reconnaissance Mosquito was one of the fastest Allied aircraft and had until then been able to fly over the Reich in safety, trusting that German fighters could not catch it. This time the British crew were astonished to see an aircraft without propellers closing in at tremendous speed. Schreiber made three attacking passes, and Wall evaded his fire with violent turns, exploiting the fact that the Me 262, faster in a straight line, was less nimble in a tight manoeuvre. In the end the British pilot managed to shake off his attacker and fly south, across the Alps, to Italy.

The episode mattered more as information than as combat. The reports from No. 540 Squadron confirmed what Allied air forces had known for months from intelligence and aerial photographs: the Germans were bringing jet fighters into action. The response was to be more escorts, attacks on airfields and factories, and faster work on Allied jets. In time Allied pilots learned that the most effective way to destroy an Me 262 was during take-off and landing, when it was slow and defenceless.

Fuel – the Reich’s new weakness

The jets went into action just as the Germans were beginning to run out of fuel. On 12 May 1944, as part of the bombing before the invasion, the American Eighth Air Force attacked synthetic fuel plants in central Germany for the first time, including the huge complex at Leuna near Merseburg. From June raids on refineries and synthetic fuel plants became a permanent feature of the American offensive. Albert Speer wrote to Hitler in June and July that the output of aviation fuel had fallen within a few weeks to a fraction of its spring level; in his memoirs and in post-war Allied analyses this campaign is regarded as the most effective part of the strategic bombing offensive.

For the German air force this meant that even the best aircraft had to stay on the ground if there was nothing to fuel it with, and the training of new pilots was cut short to save petrol. The Me 262’s engines did not burn aviation spirit but a fuel similar to diesel oil (J2), which was easier to produce – but this too depended on the shattered synthetic fuel industry. Leuna, one of the Allies’ most important targets, also became the place that the rocket-powered Komets were to defend.

Komets over Leuna

The Me 163 Komet was an even more extraordinary design than the Me 262. Alexander Lippisch’s small, tailless aircraft was powered by a Walter HWK 109-509 rocket motor in which the oxidiser T-Stoff – concentrated hydrogen peroxide – reacted with the fuel C-Stoff, a mixture of methanol and hydrazine. The Komet climbed to bombers’ altitude in a few minutes and exceeded 900 km/h in level flight, but its fuel lasted only a few minutes of powered flight. After that the aircraft glided and landed without power on a skid, and the pilot had only one chance at an approach.

The fuel was as dangerous to the pilots as the enemy. T-Stoff reacted violently with organic matter, dissolved tissue and could set clothing alight, and the two components must never mix outside the combustion chamber. A hard landing with fuel left in the tanks often ended in an explosion. The pilots wore special suits made of acid-resistant materials, but these gave no protection against an explosion. According to post-war tallies, more Komets were destroyed in accidents during take-off, landing and handling than by the enemy.

From 1942 the aircraft were tested by Major Wolfgang Späte’s Erprobungskommando 16, which flew the first combat sorties in May 1944 from Bad Zwischenahn. Späte then organised the first rocket fighter wing, JG 400, whose I Gruppe was based at Brandis near Leipzig, within the Komets’ range of the Leuna works. On 28 July 1944, when American B-17 bombers attacked Merseburg and Leuna, several Me 163s took off from Brandis and attacked the formation. According to studies cited by aviation historians, the pilots fired on at least two B-17s but obtained no confirmed kill. For the American crews it was their first encounter with a rocket aircraft, which climbed faster than the air gunners could track it.

The Meteor against the V-1

The Germans were not the only ones with jets. The British, building on the engines of Frank Whittle, produced the Gloster Meteor fighter, cleared for service on 17 July 1944. The first unit to receive it was No. 616 Squadron RAF; on 21 July its first Meteors moved to Manston airfield in Kent. They were not sent over enemy territory – the command did not want to risk the secret design falling into German hands – but against the V-1 flying bombs that had been falling on London since mid-June.

On 27 July 1944 the Meteors of No. 616 Squadron flew the RAF’s first jet combat sorties over Kent. The first successes, however, came only after several days of trouble, especially with jamming cannon: on 4 August the squadron’s pilots destroyed two V-1s, one of them – according to British accounts – by tipping it over with a wingtip when the guns failed. By the end of the war Meteors had shot down some fourteen flying bombs. The same week in July thus brought the first combat operations by jets on both sides of the front – although the Me 262 and the Meteor never met in air combat.

Significance

The July episodes did not change the course of the air war. The Me 262 was the most advanced fighter of its time, but only about 1,400 were built by the end of the war, and only some of them saw combat. There was a shortage of fuel, trained pilots and durable engines, and Allied fighters hunted the jets near their airfields. Hitler agreed to the production of the Me 262 as a fighter only in the autumn of 1944. The Komets scored, according to various tallies, between nine and a dozen or more victories, losing roughly as many aircraft in combat and far more in accidents.

The significance of the summer of 1944 lay above all in what it foreshadowed. German work on swept wings and on jet and rocket engines became spoils for the victors after the war, and within a few years the jet fighter had replaced the piston-engined machine. In the context of the war itself, the first jets showed the paradox of the Reich in 1944: a country that could design an aircraft a generation ahead of its enemy’s was no longer able to supply it with fuel or defend the factories in which it was built.

Place in the war

In August 1944 the Me 262s scored their first confirmed victories, while the few jet bombers of KG 51, sent to northern France at the end of July, could achieve little in the chaos of the retreat. In mid-August, according to German tallies, the Komets of JG 400 shot down their first B-17s. In the autumn Erprobungskommando 262 gave rise to Kommando Nowotny under the fighter ace Walter Nowotny, who was killed in November, and in 1945 the fighter wing JG 7 and Galland’s unit JV 44 fought the biggest battles between jets and Allied bomber streams. The most frequent enemy of the Me 262 and Me 163, however, remained the shortage of fuel and spare parts: hundreds of finished aircraft were standing in hangars when the Reich surrendered in May 1945. The Meteors of No. 616 Squadron reached the Continent in January 1945 and fought until the end of the war, mainly against ground targets.