Few arguments are more futile–yet more perennially enticing–than the question of which was the greatest fighter of World War II. What criterion does one use to define ‘great?’ Performance? Versatility? Combat record? Don’t ask veteran fighter pilots to settle the matter. They have their own opinions, best expressed by the late Soviet ace of aces Ivan Kozhedub’s answer to the question: ‘The La-7. I hope you understand why.’ The Lavochkin La-7 was indisputably a great fighter. More important, it was his fighter.

One mark of a great fighter was the loyalty it earned from its pilots, and aircraft such as the Hawker Hurricane, Grumman F6F Hellcat, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, North American P-51 Mustang, Yakovlev Yak-3 and Mitsubishi A6M Zero still have their die-hard partisans. Aviation enthusiasts’ attachment to some planes, like the Supermarine Spitfire, transcends loyalty and can best be described as outright affection.

To that list must inevitably be added the Messerschmitt Me-109. Perhaps it was not the best performer of the war, and even its pilots would admit that it was not the safest or most comfortable plane to fly. But its combat record, from beginning to end, was monumental, and it was the weapon of choice for the greatest fighter pilots in history. Comparing the Me-109G with the Brewster B-239 that he had flown previously, Finnish ace of aces Eino Ilmari Juutilainen said that ‘while the Brewster was a gentleman’s airplane, the Messerschmitt was a killing machine.’

That impression was echoed by Eric Brown, a Royal Navy pilot who test-flew an Me-109G in 1944: ‘The Bf-109 always brought to my mind the adjective’sinister.’ It has been suggested that it evinced the characteristics of the nation that conceived it, and to me it always looked lethal from any angle, on the ground or in the air; once I had climbed into its claustrophobic cockpit, it felt lethal!’

Anyone who flew the Me-109, and anyone who faced it in battle, would be inclined to agree. The P-47 inspired awe. The Zero earned loyalty. The Spitfire gained devotion. The Me-109 commanded respect.

The man behind the machine, Wilhelm Emil Messerschmitt, was born on June 26, 1898, in Frankfurt-am-Main, the son of a wine merchant. By 1931, he was co-manager of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke Allgemeine Gesellschaft (BFW), which underwent bankruptcy proceedings on June 1 of that year. BFW was eventually revived on May 1, 1933, but by then one of Messerschmitt’s chief detractors, Erhard Milch, had become the newly empowered Nazi Party’s undersecretary of aviation.

In mid-1933, Messerschmitt began work on a four-passenger light transport of cantilever low-wing monoplane design, with retractable landing gear. Completed in the spring of 1934, the BFW M.37, later redesignated Bf-108 Taifun (’typhoon’), was entered in the fourth Challenge de Tourisme Internationale. Although the Bf-108 did not win any of the events, its performance was impressive, and it earned a production contract.

Even before the Bf-108 had made its first flight, Messerschmitt learned that the RLM (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, or air ministry) was about to issue a specification for a fighter, to be powered by the Junkers Jumo 210 engine and to be capable of at least 280 mph. Officially, most German airplane manufacturers were invited to submit designs; unofficially, only the established firms like Arado, Heinkel, Fieseler and Focke Wulf could expect serious consideration. Milch did not even inform BFW of the competition, but unknown to him, his superior, Aviation Minister Hermann Göring, had forwarded a confidential message to Messerschmitt, asking him to develop ‘a lighting-fast courier plane which needs only to be a single-seater.’ It was obvious to Messerschmitt that Göring was actually alluding to a fighter.

Messerschmitt and the design team at BFW’s Augsburg factory–principally Robert Lusser, Richard Bauer and Hubert Bauer–set about incorporating the Bf-108’s features into a low-wing monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear, an enclosed cockpit, leading-edge slots and trailing-edge flaps in the wings. While work proceeded on the Versuchs (prototype) Bf-109 fighter, Germany officially established the Luftwaffe on March 1, 1935, and Adolf Hitler publicly renounced the Treaty of Versailles restrictions on German rearmament on March 16.

The prototype Bf-109V-1 was completed in August 1935, and evaluation flights began at the RLM’s test center at Rechlin, initially using a 675-hp Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine in place of the Jumo. The Bf-109V-2, completed in October, introduced the 610-hp Jumo 210A as well as a strengthened undercarriage, and the Bf-109V-3, delivered in June 1936, was the first to be armed with an engine-mounted 7.92mm MG 17 machine gun.

In spite of its high wing loading, which limited its maneuverability at low speeds, the Bf-109 yielded such outstanding performance that the RLM quickly eliminated the Arado Ar-80 and Focke Wulf Fw-159 from consideration. That left only the Heinkel He-112 as a possible competitor. Ten preproduction Bf-109B-0s were ordered, but then two events occurred that would affect the Bf-109’s fate.

June 1936 saw the issuance by Britain’s Royal Air Force of production contracts for 600 Hawker Hurricane fighters and 310 Supermarine Spitfires. The latter, first flown on March 5, had characteristics similar to the Bf-109V-1’s. The potential threat posed by those new British fighters added urgency to Germany’s fighter development efforts, and armament on the Bf-109V-4, introduced in November, was increased to three MG 17s.

The other pivotal event was the revolt of Spain’s conservative elements under General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde against the Republican government, followed by the dispatch of German aircraft to Franco’s aid, all of which occurred in July 1936. The following November, eager Luftwaffe volunteers were formed into the Condor Legion to fight for Franco’s Nationalists. By then the Soviet Union had sent aircraft and pilots to aid the Spanish Republic, including the Polikarpov I-15 biplane and the I-16, the world’s first low-wing monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear and an enclosed canopy. To the Germans’ alarm, both Soviet fighters completely outclassed their Heinkel He-51 biplanes. In consequence, the Germans rushed the Bf-109V-4 to Spain in December, to be followed by Bf-109B-1s (aka ‘Berthas’), the first of which left the production line in February 1937. Spain would provide a combat environment in which to refine the Bf-109 as a fighter–and the tactics to use it to best effect.

The first operational unit in Spain, 2. Staffel of Jagdgruppe 88 (2.J/88) under Oberleutnant Günther Lützow, began receiving its new fighters in March. Operations were initially plagued by accidents, but its pilots soon overcame the challenge of taking off and landing on a narrow-track undercarriage in an airplane that tended to drop its left wing, by applying plenty of compensation with the rudder. Once they had overcome the Bf-109B’s eccentricities, they commenced operations over the Brunete salient on July 10, 1937.

The Bf-109B and its principal rival, the I-16, were at first closely matched. The Bf-109B was faster in level flight and in a dive, while the I-16 had a superior climb rate and maneuverability. Republican ace and fighter squadron leader Andres Garcia Lacalle commented in his memoirs that the I-16 was superior to the Messerschmitt up to 3,000 meters (9,840 feet), but from that altitude upward, the Bf-109B’s performance achieved complete mastery over that of the I-16.

The Messerschmitt drew first blood in the air on July 8, when Leutnant Rolf Pingel and Unteroffizier Guido Höness were credited with two Tupolev SB-2 bombers, although the Republicans attributed only one of those two losses to a Bf-109, the other having fallen victim to a Fiat C.R.32. A series of air battles fought on July 12 resulted in the downing of two Aero A-101s by Höness, an SB-2 by Pingel and three I-16s by Pingel, Feldwebel Peter Boddem and Feldwebel Adolf Buhl. Höness was shot down and killed while attacking another SB-2 that same day–the first of thousands of Messerschmitt pilots to die in combat.

During the second Ebro campaign, between July and October 1938, Oberleutnant Werner Mölders of 3.J/88 developed a significant fighter tactic. By combining two Rotte, the basic two-man elements within a Staffel, into a loose but mutually supportive team, he created an infinitely flexible offensive and defensive unit that he called the Vierfingerschwarm (’four-finger formation’). That fundamental concept would become the basis for numerous variations. Mölders himself was the leading ace of the Condor Legion, with 14 victories, and on July 15, 1941, he became the first fighter pilot to pass the 100-kill mark. When he died in a transport plane crash on November 22, 1941, his score stood at 115.

While the Bf-109 was being blooded over Spain, its capabilities were also being demonstrated to the world in Switzerland. At the Fourth International Flying Meeting, held at Zürich in July and August 1937, Bf-109Bs won four first prizes. Back in Germany, the Bf-109V-13, using a boosted 1,650-hp version of the Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine and flown by Hermann Wurster, set a landplane speed record of 379.8 mph on November 11. Ernst Heinkel, whose He-112 was rapidly losing ground to the Messerschmitt, responded with a sleeker design, the He-100. With German fighter-inspector Ernst Udet at the controls, an He-100V-3 achieved a speed of 394.4 mph on June 6, 1938, and an He-100V-8, flown by Hans Dieterle, reached 463.92 mph on March 30, 1939.

Not to be outdone, Messerschmitt undertook a major redesign of his basic fighter, producing the Me-209V-1, with a special DB 601ARJ engine that could boost its power from 1,500 hp to 2,300 hp for about one minute, bringing the maximum speed up to 469.22 mph on April 29. At that point the Bf-109 was in full production, and the Nazi Propaganda Ministry falsely designated the record-making plane the ‘Bf-109R’ (to make it seem like a less-radical variant on an existing fighter type), while the RLM barred Heinkel from trying to outdo the Messerschmitt. As a result, that official piston-engine speed record would stand for the next 30 years.

Guided by lessons learned in Spain, Messerschmitt produced a rapid succession of improved fighters. The Bf-109C-1 (’Clara’), with a fuel-injected Jumo 210Ga engine and four machine guns, arrived in Spain in the spring of 1938, followed by the Bf-109C-2, with a fifth machine gun mounted in the engine. The Bf-109D (’Dora’), five of which joined 3./J88 in August, combined the Bf-109C-1’s four-gun armament with the Bf-109B-1’s carburetor-equipped Jumo 210Da engine. Meanwhile, Messerschmitt’s experiments with the fuel-injected Daimler-Benz DB 600 and DB 601 engines, which were hampered by cooling problems, ultimately resulted in burying two radiators in the plane’s wings, leaving only an oil cooler under the fuselage. In addition, the DB 601A-powered Bf-109V-14’s armament increased to two MG 17 machine guns in the nose and two 20mm MG FF cannons in the wings, along with a three-bladed controllable-pitch VDM airscrew. The result was put into production in early 1939 as the Me-109E-1, soon to be nicknamed ‘Emil’ by its pilots.

Pages: 1 2 3