Author: Grumpy
Despite around-the-clock bombing by British and American heavy bombers, the Germans during World War II produced an ever-increasing volume of advanced military materiel right up until the end of the war.
Even though they had terribly limited resources and were being squeezed on all sides, they still managed to field the first true assault rifle, genre-defining attack submarines, and surface-to-surface missile systems that the rest of the world would take a generation to best. However, what they really excelled at was jet airplanes.
The Americans had the P59 Airacomet, and the Brits the Gloster Meteor. The P59 never amounted to much. The Meteor did see limited service during WWII, mostly in chasing down V1 buzz bombs. By contrast, the German Me 262 was a veritable scourge in the skies over Western Europe in the latter days of the war.
The Me 262 had a top speed of 560 mph and sported four bomber-killing 30mm automatic cannon in the nose. To put that in perspective, the vaunted P-51 Mustang topped out at 440 mph. The Me 262 badly outclassed everything in the skies at the time.
It was indeed the swept-wing Me 262 that got all the press. However, the Germans also produced a corresponding twin-engine bomber that actually earned more love from Hitler. The Arado Ar 234 Blitz was a unique design powered by a pair of Junkers Jumo 004B-1 axial flow turbojets, the same powerplants that drove the Me 262.
Blitz is the German word for Lightning. Der Führer envisioned the Ar 234 as a war-changing wonder weapon that would seize the initiative and, once again, take the fight to the Allies. Fortunately for us all, the Ar234 was too little, too late.
Arado Ar 234 History
Development of the Ar 234 began in the latter days of 1940, when the Third Reich’s rampaging legions seemed unstoppable. The airframe was developed in short order, but it was February 1943 before the unique Junkers Jumo turbojet engines first became available. The Ar 234 saw its maiden flight on 30 July 1943.
The original plan called for a max production of 500 airframes per month by 1945. The Luftwaffe envisioned bomber, night fighter, and strategic reconnaissance versions of the plane. However, the exigencies of total war curtailed those projections drastically. Overall production by war’s end was only 214 machines.
Early versions of the plane did not include conventional landing gear, per se. These variants used a discardable wheeled trolley for takeoff akin to the Me 163 rocket plane. Landing was effected via a set of retractable skids that took up very little space in the cramped fuselage. However, in addition to having no braking ability at all, the prospect of having a dead airplane resting on the runway until somebody could get out, jack it up, and drag it into a revetment was obviously not tactically viable. Test pilots who landed these machines on damp grass described the experience as setting the airplane down atop a bar of wet soap.
Later versions did indeed include conventional landing gear. They also experimented with a variety of different engine configurations, predominantly driven by a chronic lack of Junkers Jumo powerplants. Regardless, by the time the Ar234 was ready for prime time, the Nazis were desperate. They had to make do with what they had.
Details of the Ar 234 Blitz
The Ar 234 was actually a really weird airplane. With a top speed of 461 mph and a practical payload of 3,300 pounds’ worth of bombs, the Ar234 offered significantly better performance than any comparable medium bomber then in service. However, the Blitz bomber certainly had its eccentricities.
For starters, the revolutionary turbojets drank a whole lot of gas at a time when the Germans were chronically short of the stuff. Around-the-clock strategic bombing prioritized petroleum processing facilities, making the production and delivery of quality fuels increasingly difficult.
Additionally, the Ar 234 was designed for speed and high performance. The plane’s slender fuselage left no room for internal weapons once the landing gear and prodigious fuel tanks were accounted for. As a result, the Ar 234’s weapons were carried externally on racks underneath the plane.
The really strange bit, however, pertained to the crew arrangements. The Ar 234 was a single-pilot aircraft. There was no gunner, bombardier or navigator. Toward the end of the war, producing competent, trained pilots became one of the weakest links in the German logistics chain.
However, it is asking a lot to expect a single aviator to fly an advanced twin-engine jet bomber through hostile skies infested with Typhoons, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Spitfires and then accurately drop bombs on a well-defended target. As a result, German engineers developed some truly exotic tools in a failed effort to help those hapless guys out.
Forward visibility in the Arado Ar 234 Blitz was actually quite good. The entire nose of the plane was glazed for an exceptional field of view. However, the pilot still could not readily see the ground where he was dropping his bombs. Additionally, early models included a pair of rear-firing guns intended for use as defensive weapons. In an effort to allow one crewman to do all that stuff, the Germans included a curious periscope system that was meant to perform several different functions.
When directed rearward, this periscope was supposed to allow aiming of the two defensive machine guns. Doing this effectively while flying the airplane evasively was found to be quite literally impossible. The rear-firing weapons were deleted from later variants.
The periscope could also be rotated forward and used to control the aircraft during dive-bombing missions. That looks great on paper. However, when used in this capacity, the image seen by the pilot was vertically reversed. That meant that the controls responded in reverse of what the pilot saw, but only in the vertical plane. Up was down, and down was up.
As I said, that’s asking a lot of a guy managing a machine all by his lonesome with half the planet trying to blast him out of the sky. Additionally, egressing from the plane in an emergency involved unstrapping and exiting via a cramped hatch in the floor. Nobody ever was quite sure who was supposed to be controlling the stricken airplane while the pilot tried to pull this off.
Operational Use of Ar 234
There were never enough qualified pilots or engines, and the gas issue became critical in the war’s final months. However, the Arado Ar 234 was used to attack the Brussels train station as well as the Antwerp shipping docks. A few examples were encountered in the ground attack role around Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
The most high-profile missions of the war for the Ar 234 involved a maximum effort on the part of the Luftwaffe to drop the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. Though this effort was ultimately successful, Allied engineers bridged the river nearby in short order, rendering these efforts superfluous.
The Ar 234 was used as a fast reconnaissance platform. Accurate intelligence was critical to allow the German high command to allot dwindling defensive resources, and the speedy Blitz bomber excelled in this role. Regardless, most completed Arado Ar 234 Blitz bombers still never saw action for lack of fuel, engines and pilots.
Ruminations
The real limiting factor in the use of the German jets was actually metallurgy. The tendency of a metal part to elongate or stretch when subjected to heat and stress is called creep. Turbine blades in modern jet engines are good for thousands of thermal cycles and tens of thousands of flight hours. By contrast, the Junkers Jumo 004B-1 turbojet engine typically had to be replaced every 10 flight hours or so. As soon as the turbine blades stretched to the point where they contacted the engine housing, they were done.
The Ar 234 Blitz was nonetheless a truly groundbreaking design. Sleek, fast, and well ahead of its time, had the logistics and engineering been up to the task the Blitz bomber really could have had an outsized influence on the war. The Germans still would have lost, but it might have taken a bit longer. We should all, therefore, be thankful for the primitive state of 1940s-era German materials science.
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The Highest Altitude AA Guns Ever
Modularity is the holy gospel in military circles these days. Distilled to its essence, a modular weapon system uses a single basic chassis that can then be customized to perform specific missions. Think of it like Barbie dolls for gun guys. By mixing and matching accessories, you can be ready for a hard day at the office, a vigorous romp through the woods, or a festive night on the town.
Springfield Armory has gone all in on modularity. Their superlative Echelon pistol is built around a removable, serialized Central Operating Group (COG). The COG is a steel chassis that can be fitted with sundry slides, frames, and assorted ditzels to make the gun into pretty much whatever you wish it to be. And then there is their extensive line of AR rifles.
The Springfield Armory SAINT’s all orbit around common receivers. There’s one size for 5.56 and another for 7.62, but those two basic designs can be had as carbines, long rifles, and handguns. That’s the cutting edge in modern small arms design.
One might be forgiven for believing that this was all a new fad. However, it seems that one Georg Luger, an Austrian of some renown who contrived the most popular handgun cartridge in all of human history, became enamored with the concept of modularity more than a century before it so suffused the modern military mindset. The P.08 Parabellum pistol he designed was indeed a prescient thing.
Origin of the Luger
In 1893 Hugo Borchardt designed a handgun based loosely upon the toggle lock of the Maxim machine gun. He christened his creation the C-93 (Construktion 93). The C-93 fired a 7.65x25mm bottlenecked high-velocity cartridge, weighed more than two and one-half pounds, and was better than a foot long. To make things worse, the pistol grip met the frame at a right angle. That made most everything about the gun awkward. However, it was nonetheless still an undeniably groundbreaking design.
Deustche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) produced the C-93. Georg Luger was a DWM employee tasked with promoting the radical new pistol to both military and commercial users. Georg took the basic Borchardt action, fixed most of its most obvious flaws, and, in so doing, changed the world of combat pistols forever.
The basic Luger action was indeed an amazing thing. The technical term is biomimetic or biomimicry. This means a mechanical contrivance that is patterned after something found in nature. Common examples include Velcro, the Japanese Shinkansen “bullet” train that was inspired by the beak of the kingfisher bird, and certain adhesives that were based upon the feet of the gecko lizard. In the case of the Luger pistol, the action was inspired by the human knee joint.
When extended and locked, the mechanism can support a great deal of linear force. This allows the firearm to manage fairly high-pressure cartridges. Upon firing, the upper half of the gun slides backward along a track in the frame.
The hump on the back of the frame cams the toggle lock upward, breaking it in the manner of the human knee. This action then ejects the empty case. A spring in the butt drives the bolt forward to strip a round from the magazine and repeat the cycle.
It is a fairly straightforward thing to demonstrate this with an unloaded example of the gun. Press the muzzle against a firm surface, and you can watch the way the action operates. It really is an inspired design.
Curiously, the US Army actually came fairly close to adopting the Luger in .45 ACP as a service pistol. In 1901, the U.S. Army Ordnance Board bought 1,000 copies for field testing with the mounted cavalry. These Model 1900 Lugers sported American Eagle stamps over the chambers, 4.75” barrels, and U.S. Army ordnance flaming bomb proof marks. Possession of one of these original guns today would serve as a down payment on a decent house.
Variety Is the Spice of Life
While a serviceable combat pistol in its basic form, Herr Luger envisioned his P.08 Parabellum as something much greater. An early leaf spring design was changed to the more efficient coil spring drive in 1906, but the guns remained externally identical. The aggressively swept grip met the frame at a 155-degree angle. Throughout the sundry variations, the basic Luger frame remained common to all variants. Most all frames were cut to accept shoulder stocks.
In 1904, the Imperial German Navy adopted a modified version of the Luger Parabellum pistol designed for use in close-range ship-to-ship combat. The Navy Luger was designed to give U-boat captains a weapon with which they might snipe at their opposite numbers while their ships duked it out in surface engagements. That’s honestly fairly ridiculous, but it made for a cool gun.
This novel pistol sported an extended 6” barrel as well as a two-position rear sight selectable for 100 and 200-meter ranges. When fitted with a detachable shoulder stock, this gun formed a nifty little carbine at a time when the industry standard was a meter-long bolt-action rifle firing massive cartridges the size of your middle finger. I doubt they were ever used effectively for their intended purpose.
In 1908, the German Imperial Army adopted a standardized version of the P.08 Luger pistol with a 4” barrel. This was the definitive model issued throughout the German military on all fronts during both world wars. Production finally ceased in 1943 when the Luger was supplanted by the more advanced Walther P.38.
The Germans produced more than two million copies of this weapon by the end of World War I. Despite being compact, powerful and reliable, the Luger’s trigger wasn’t all that it could have been. However, it was an eminently serviceable sidearm and a prized war trophy during both world wars.
In July of 1913, the Kaiser personally authorized another major variation of the standard Luger pistol. This firearm included a 7.9” barrel along with an eight-position tangent rear sight graduated out to 870 yards. The gun included a board-type shoulder stock with an associated leather holster. There was also a complicated clockwork 32-round snail drum magazine intended to increase the gun’s onboard firepower. These long-barreled weapons were technically intended for use by German artillery units for close-in defense.
Without really intending to do so, Herr Luger had produced one of history’s first Personal Defense Weapons. As a result, these artillery Lugers were prized by both aviators and Stormtrooper assault units. At a time when most infantry weapons were massive polearm-style affairs, the artillery Luger made for a proper fast-handing carbine.
Denouement
All of the sights were too small and too complicated to be particularly effective. There was even a weird cam built into the rear sight on the artillery Luger that supposedly compensated for spin drift or Coriolis effect or some such. You can see it in action if you look really close while adjusting it. This thing is insanely overbuilt.
The eight-round, single-stack magazines sport dimpled floorplates, because you have to tug on them a bit to get them free. The action, though inspired, is all externalized so it is susceptible to battlefield grime. However, given that the state of the art at the time was a double-action revolver, the Luger family of pistols was amazing for its era.
All three of these firearms were built around a common frame. By mixing and matching upper assemblies, you could theoretically make that one chassis into a service pistol, a stocked target handgun and a close quarters carbine. The Germans did not issue the gun to be used that way, but they could have.
Georg Luger designed the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge in 1901. That inspired little round is produced in the billions each year worldwide, even today. At around the same time, Herr Luger also serendipitously contrived the world’s first truly modular combat weapon. He was indeed a man well ahead of his time.
Special thanks to www.WorldWarSupply.com for the cool replica gear used in preparation of our photos.
