Indoctrinated Teenagers Piloted This Wooden Nazi Jet

By Sebastien Roblin, The National Interest

By the summer of 1944, the German Luftwaffe had a lot of problems. Huge Allied four-engine strategic bombers were pummeling Germany’s industrial base daily, escorted by long-range fighters that were frittering away the German flying arm’s elite cadres of combat pilots nurtured since the 1930s.

While the bombing campaign failed to prevent German industrial output from increasing in 1944, due to increased mobilization and use of slave labor, attacks targeting petroleum production proved extremely effective. By the end of the year, the advanced new tanks and warplanes coming out of German factories were often grounded for lack of fuel.

Such was the Luftwaffe’s decline that Allied fighter bombers were frequently able to roam over the front lines unopposed as they wreaked havoc on German troops.

The Nazi leadership had hoped that Messerschmitt Me 262 Sturmvogel (“Storm Bird”) jet fighter — the first fighter jet to see combat in the summer of 1944 — would swing the air war back in their favor. But despite the Sturmvogel’s 100-mile-per-hour speed advantage and powerful armament, the twin-engine jets were expensive to produce and consumed tons of fuel.

Furthermore, pilots required extensive training to master the advanced jets — but the Luftwaffe’s situation had grown so desperate that trainees were being thrown into combat after minimal instruction, with predictable results.

Above — the Me 262. U.S. Air Force photo. At top — the He 162. San Diego Air and Space Museum archives

These crushing realities led Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring and industrial minister Albert Speer to conceive of an Emergency Fighter Program to produce a cut-price advanced fighter that would not tax the Nazi Germany’s increasingly limited industrial and human resources.