ME-262 Sturmvogel

"I am the first, but I shall not be the last, for I am a herald of a new age."

The Messerschmitt ME-262, also known as the Schwalbe, was the first fully operational jet-powered fighter aircraft and features as a unit in Flames of War in it's fighter-bomber form as the ME-262A-2, the Sturmvogel. Equipped with twin 30mm cannons, as well as a pair of 500kg bombs.

Flames of War

Late War

Die Statisken

IRL

By the early 20th century internal-combustion engines were reliable and powerful enough to be adapted for flight, and so aircraft with piston engines and spinning props soon populated the skies. Over time this concept was successively refined so that a WWII-era fighter possessed nearly-magical capabilities compared to the laughably primitive designs used just 25 years earlier. Even so, many engineers thought they could do even better by building a high-power fuel-burning jet turbine that would suck in air and shoot it out the turbine's backside. There was pie-in-the-sky discussion about this concept in the 1920s, but it wasn't until the the 1930s that designers in Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan were coming close to making jet power a reality. In Germany a fellow going by Ernst Heinkel managed to put together the He 178, which first flew days before the invasion of Poland. Hitler and the Luftwaffe brass were impressed, but there was a long way to go from that to a practical warplane.

Among the Germans, there was a fair bit of resistance to military jets in the early years of the war and for some admittedly good reasons. This was an unproven technology unlike anything the Germans were using and it would inevitably have a lot of bugs in it, which was a problem since the German aviation industry preferred to build large numbers of just a few proven designs. Therefore, jet research competed with next-generation piston design for manpower and resources. Eventually though, the Germans developed the Junkers Ju-004 jet engine, which worked reasonably well on the ME-262.

While revolutionary in the field of aeronautics, the ME-262 was not without its problems. For starters, the ME-262 came late in the war when Germany was running out of critical materials, and this impacted the performance for the fighter. The engines had to be refitted after 10 hours of use, and replaced entirely after 35 due to the lack of heat-resistant materials. Still, the ME-262 was the most advanced fighter on the battlefield and was more than a match for any allied fighter it came across - it’s just that so few of them were made that they hardly made an impact. Most Me-262s were destroyed while they were still on the ground, or when they were taking off or landing, which is when they were most vulnerable. Still, the Me-262 marks an important development in the field of aviation, as after the war, jet power became the standard for nearly all aircraft.

It is also a slight exaggeration to say that the Germans did jet fighters first. Britain had flown a jet-propelled Glostor Meteor prototype a few months ahead of the first jet-propelled ME-262 test flight. However, the Germans started fielding their jets first because they were desperate to get them into combat. This resulted in many teething issues with the ME-262 that were never resolved, particularly the reliability problems mentioned earlier. Meanwhile the Meteor went on to become a fairly capable fighter in the early jet era.

After the war, the ME-262 was placed on a pedestal in the mythology of WWII. After all, it was a state-of-the-art fighting machine used by the arch-enemy of the 20th century, and when used correctly it was highly effective. On the other hand, it's also overblown as a potential war-winner.

Near and after the end of the war, the Americans, British and Soviets were all really keen on getting whatever ME-262s they could for evaluation and study. In particular, the Czechs continued to make ME-262s and operated them after the war. The Soviet Union had lagged behind in jet-tech, and so made a copy of the ME-262 just to see how it worked. However, they didn't pursue the ME-262 concept beyond this. Instead they decided to take the airframe design of the Yak-3 fighter, removed the piston engine, slapped in a JU-004 clone engine, and smoothed out the airframe a bit. The result was the YAK-15 and it's follow-up the YAK-17.