“Amerika” bomber

In contrast to Britain and the United States, Germany never produced in quantity long-range heavy bomber aircraft. Nevertheless, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, the Reich Aviation Ministry, in charge of aircraft production for the Luftwaffe from 1933 to the end of the war in 1945, sought to develop a very large, very-long-range bomber capable of a round-trip transatlantic mission to strike the United States from Germany. Early in the war, before the United States even became a combatant, the ministry requested design proposals from all the major German aircraft manufacturers. The goal was to create what was generally dubbed the "Amerika" bomber. Messerschmidt, Focke-Wulf, and Junkers all submitted designs that were quite sound and quite conventional, similar to the heavy bombers of the United States and Great Britain. Focke-Wulf 's Fw 300 was based on the existing Fw 200 Condor, a four-engine bomber often used as a transport and capable of a 2,210-mile range. Junkers's Ju 390 was a development from the Ju 290, an existing fourengine maritime patrol craft, transport, and bomber, capable of an impressive range of 3,843 miles. In contrast to these two companies, Messerschmidt presented the Me 264, an entirely new design. Like the other proposed craft, the Me 264 was driven by four engines and was designed to make a roundtrip flight from Germany to New York City. One prototype was built, but the aircraft never went into production because the Reich Aviation Ministry announced its selection of the Ju 390. This aircraft was first prototyped in 1943 and had a range in excess of 6,000 miles. The largest aircraft ever built in Germany—112 feet, 2 inches long and with a wingspan of 165 feet, 1 inch—the prototype flew on October 20, 1943, and performed so well that the ministry ordered 26 of the craft. None, however, were produced before the "Amerika" project and the Ju 390 were cancelled in 1944. Although ultimately abortive, the "Amerika" bomber project also elicited a number of proposals for highly forward-looking, radical designs. The aeronautical scientist Dr. Eugen Sänger was well known in German aviation circles for his speculative articles on rocket-powered aircraft. At the behest of the German government, he worked at a secret aerospace laboratory in Trauen to design and build an aircraft to be called Silverbird. Propelled by liquid-fuel rocket engines and piloted by a single aviator, the Silverbird was to be capable of great speed and of attaining low Earth orbit. For the "Amerika" program, Sänger modified the Silverbird design as an aircraft capable of supersonic flight in the stratosphere. Often called the Sänger Amerika Bomber and, alternatively, the Orbital Bomber and the Atmosphere Skipper, the aircraft design featured a flat fuselage, a very advanced lifting body design that allowed for short, wedge-shaped wings. This reduced drag and the structural hazards inherent in supersonic large-wing designs. As designed, the main rocket engine produced 100 tons of thrust and was flanked by a pair of smaller rocket engines. The pilot was housed in a pressurized cockpit. A single, centrally located bomb bay would have held 52 "Amerika" bomber just one 8,000-pound bomb, perhaps laced with nuclear material to create what today would be called a "dirty bomb" (not a true atomic weapon, but a bomb packed with conventional explosive and designed to scatter radioactive material to contaminate its target area). Because the aircraft would operate far beyond the range of any interceptors, it was fitted with no defensive armament. Sänger imagined that his rocket plane would take off down a 1.9-mile-long rail, boosted by a rocket-powered sled developing 600 tons of thrust for 11 seconds. Assuming a 30° angle, the aircraft would attain an altitude of 5,100 feet at 1,149 miles per hour before its own main rocket engine would be fired for eight minutes. This would bring the craft to a speed of 13,724 miles per hour and loft it to an altitude in excess of 90 miles. At this point, the accelerating aircraft would descend due to gravity, but, in so doing, would encounter denser atmosphere at about 25 miles, which would cause it to skip back up, much as a stone does when it is skimmed across a lake. The flight would consist of a series of gradually shorter skips, until the plane would glide back into the lower atmosphere and, ultimately, to a landing, having covered, according to Sänger's calculations, 14,594 miles. Sänger's project was cancelled in the summer of 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The German military, it was decided, could not afford to expend time, effort, and cash on theoretical and experimental work. After the war, Sänger worked briefly for the French Air Ministry. Further reading: Georg, Friedrich. Hitler's Miracle Weapons: Secret Nuclear Weapons of the Third Reich and Their Carrier Systems; Havertown, Penn.: Casemate, 2003; Herwig, Dieter, and Heinz Rode. Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Ground Attack and Special Purpose Aircraft. Leicester, U.K.: Aerofax Midland, 2003; Hyland, Gary, and Anton Gill. Last Talons of the Eagle: Secret Nazi Technology Which Could Have Changed the Course of World War II. London: Headline Books, 2000; Neufeld, Michael J. The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. New York: Free Press, 1994.