Hitler's Forgotten Secret Weapon
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About this ebook
The last great untold story of World War II, the career of Hitler’s “Super Fighter” intended to destroy the RAF in the Battle of Britain and why it never succeeded.
The super-secret Heinkel He113 fighter was designed to be a high-speed, high-altitude fighter that could outperform, outgun and outfight any other aircraft in the world when it entered service with the Luftwaffe in 1940.
Leonard James
About the AuthorLeonard James is the son of an RAF veteran who fought in the Battle of Britain until wounded. Leonard grew up in a household dominated the RAF, and later married the daughter of an RAF squadron leader.
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Reviews for Hitler's Forgotten Secret Weapon
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Plane That Never Was : How could someone write a 105
page book about an airplane (HE-123) that never existed ?
The "Super Fighter" was a deception based on the HE-122
that was never adopted by the Luftwaffe. The British
believed what they wanted to believe.
Book preview
Hitler's Forgotten Secret Weapon - Leonard James
Hitler's Forgotten Secret Weapon
by
Leonard James
Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords
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Copyright © Bretwalda Books 2011
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ISBN 978-1-907791-16-1
Contents
Introduction
Rumours of a Super Fighter
War in the Air
Dowding’s Nightmare
The Super Fighter goes to War
Eagle Day
Truth will Out
The Men
The Aircraft
Introduction
Historians tend to look back on the past with the benefit of hindsight. Things have a habit of seeming inevitable just because that is how things happened. Knowledge we have now can seem to be commonplace and obvious: RAF Fighter Command won the Battle of Britain; the Spitfire was a superlative fighter aircraft; the Germans did not invade Britain.
But for the people who lived through the past, things were very different. They did not know what the future held and they did not know what we know now. The people of Britain in the summer of 1940 did not know that they were going to defeat Germany. Every other country that had dared to stand up to German dictator Adolf Hitler had been crushed in a matter of weeks. The Aryan Master Race
was starting to look like a reality. Hitler’s boastful gloating over his secret weapons
that had seemed bombastic in 1938 now seemed to be fully justified as new models of panzers swept across France, new types of mines sank merchant shipping by the dozen and new types of bomber pounded cities to destruction.
It was into this maelstrom of carnage, destruction, secrecy and terror that the Heinkel He113 Super Verfolgungsjaegar
(Super Air Pursuit Fighter) flew in the spring of 1940. Faster than the Spitfire, more agile than the Hurricane and more heavily armed than the Messerschmitt Bf109, the He113 was a Super Fighter
indeed. It had the ability to dominate the skies. Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, was quoted as saying that The Spitfire is now just a pile of scrap metal.
And yet today almost nobody has heard of this wonder. The Heinkel He113 Super Fighter has become Hitler’s forgotten secret weapon.
Chapter 1
Rumours of a Super Fighter
At 9am on 14 July 1936 a black car pulled up at the gates to Bentley Priory, a Georgian mansion built in the Italianate style that had been a girl’s boarding school until bought by the RAF. In the car was Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. He had just been put in charge of the newly formed RAF Fighter Command and given Bentley Priory as his headquarters. Dowding was shown around the rambling house and chose his office. None of his staff had yet arrived, but the paperwork had.
Dowding’s prime task as head of Fighter Command was to defend the air space over Britain in the event of war with a foreign power. By 1936 it was becoming clear that if war came, then Germany was going to be the enemy. If Dowding was to turn Fighter Command into a war-winning organisation then he needed to know everything that he possibly could about the prospective enemy. Unfortunately, as Dowding took his seat in Bentley Priory, that wasn’t very much.
The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War had forbidden Germany to have an air force at all. Intelligence had reported that since coming to power in 1933 the Nazis had begun secretly forming an air force, the Luftwaffe. The key figure in the formation of the Luftwaffe was Herman Goering. Goering had served with distinction in the German air force during the First World War and then become a leading member of the Nazi Party. His prestige was instrumental in persuading Adolf Hitler to divert resources from his beloved army to the newly constituted Luftwaffe. Goering generally preferred to leave the hard work to others, but he had a real talent for spotting the right men for jobs and had a sound grasp of air power that enabled him to set the overall direction and pattern for the Luftwaffe.
The formation of the Luftwaffe was, of course, carried out in absolute secrecy. It was a flagrant breach of the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler worried about how other countries would react — but the Luftwaffe, could not be kept secret for ever. In 1935, the new propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, came up with a plan. The Luftwaffe would be announced to the world, but in the guise of a purely defensive force. It would be portrayed as a force dedicated to the defence of German air space against invaders. To this end, the announcement in the summer of 1935 that the Luftwaffe existed did not mention bombers, but concentrated on the new fighter the Heinkel He51.
Thus when Dowding sat at his desk in Bentley Priory, one of the first documents he read was the assessment from British intelligence of the He51. It did not worry him unduly.
The Heinkel He51 was a conventional biplane fighter of a type to be found in all air forces around the world. The frame was constructed of metal while the skin was of stretched fabric. The wings had two aluminium spars, while the fuselage was built around four steel tubes shaped into a rounded form by aluminium and wood spacers. The engine cowling was made of aluminium sheeting and could be easily removed to allow for engine maintenance. The best feature of the aircraft was the BMW VI engine, a V12 liquid-cooled powerplant that remained the main German air engine until 1938.
The performance of the He51 was average for the early 1930s. Nor was the weaponry outstanding, being composed of twin 7.92mm machine guns firing through the nose, and later models were adapted to be able to carry six 22lb bombs in racks below the wings.
Dowding knew that his RAF Fighter Command aircraft easily had the measure of the He51. The Hawker Fury biplane, which the RAF had in large numbers when the He51 was announced, had a top speed of 223mph, a ceiling of 29,000 feet and a range of 270 miles. Just entering service was the Gloster Gauntlet with a top speed of 230mph, a ceiling of 33,500 feet and a range of 460 miles. Its armament, however, was almost identical to that of the He51 being two 0.303in machine guns mounted in the nose. Another Gloster