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

Motorized heavier-than-air flight was first achieved by the internal combustion engine. IC Engines were previously been used to power farm machines and automobiles and adapting them for planes was not particularly hard. Planes with piston engines spinning props would soon populate the sky and would be ruthlessly refined. Even so, there were engineers who thought they could do better by building a big high-power fuel-burning turbine that would suck in air and shoot it out it's backside. There was pie-in-the-sky discussion about it in the 1920s and in the 1930s there were guys in Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan trying to make it 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.

There was a fair bit of resistance to military jets in the early years of the war 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. Especially since the German aviation industry would eventually push for economies of scale of a few airplane designs. People were pushing for next generation piston planes for some time, though work continued on Jets in the backgorund. Eventually they had the Junkers Ju-004 engine which worked reasonably well and they used them on the ME-262.

While revolutionary in the field of aeronautics, the Me-262 was not without its problems. For starters, because this was late in the war, 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 could be made that they hardly made an impact for the Axis. 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 an exaggeration to say the Germans did jet fighters first, as Britain had prototyped and fielded the Glostor Meteor several months ahead of the Germans. The Germans just started fielding them earlier because they were desperate to get them to the field.

After the war, the ME-262 was given a specific place in the mythology of WWII. Most notably several German figures said that it could have introduced sooner and if it had been it could have changed the course of the war on it's own. This is a really dodgy claim given the state of everything else in Germany at the time.

Near and after the end of the war, the Americans, British and Soviets were all really keen on getting whatever ME-262s could for evaluation and study. In particular, the Czechs continued making ME-262s and operate them after the war. Similarly Soviet Union who'd lagged behind in jet-tech also made a copy of the ME-262 just to see how it worked, but decided against it. Instead they decided to take the airframe design of the Yak-3 fighter, remove the piston engine, slap in a JU-004 clone engine and smooth out the airframe a bit. The result was the YAK-15 and it's follow-up the YAK-17.