Yet another what-if German aircraft, with the distinction that this one actually made some test flights as opposed to remaining a set of paper drawings. Author Robert Forsyth and collaborator Eddie Creek have written dozens of aircraft books between them, and are apparently expert at extracting documents and photographs from musty government archives; the book has all sorts of pictures of the Me 264 under construction, on the ground, and in flight that I haven’t seen elsewhere.


I suppose the subtitle – “The Luftwaffe’s Lost Transatlantic Bomber” – makes me a little uncomfortable; it carries, perhaps, the subtle implication that if the Luftwaffe hadn’t been careless they wouldn’t have lost their bomber and thus would have been able to pulverize Manhattan. I keep buying and reading these things, though, so they can’t be making me that uncomfortable.


Despite the airplane porn, the most interesting part may be the political interactions between the miscellaneous German agencies concerned with specifying, ordering, designing, producing and flying aircraft. It never ceases to amaze me that an entity as internally screwed up as the Third Reich did as well as they did. Reichsluftfahrtministerium secretary Erhard Milch hated Willy Messerschmidt, Hitler changed his mind about what sort of airplanes he wanted about every 15 minutes, and Göring seems to have prided himself on how uncooperative he could be with the rest of the Wehrmacht.


Initial chapters provide a background on earlier German attempts to build long-range bombers – the Ju89 and Do19 – but these were abandoned (Göring, despite numerous other flaws, was not without intelligence and realized German simply couldn’t afford the infrastructure for a strategic bomber program. In that regard, it’s interesting that every major belligerent in WWII eventually did build four-engine heavy bombers, but only the US and UK were able to build strategic bomber forces). The book notes that the German aircraft industry was running at maximum capacity, and while it was perfectly capable of producing a prototype Me264, regular production – even of 20 to 30 aircraft – was impossible; there was just no German manufacturer, Messerschmidt or otherwise, that had the capability.


The Luftwaffe eventually did ask for a long-range aircraft – again, not quite being able to decide if it was going to be used for maritime reconnaissance or bombing New York - and Messerschmidt obligingly provided the Me264 (which apparently had been lurking around as an unfunded design project for a while). The product was an attractive aircraft, which got favorable reviews from test pilots, but which would not have been able to fly from Brest to New York City and back despite initial promises.

(There’s something of a mystery concerning Messerschmidt’s range projections. This book, and the online articles I’ve glanced at, gives the maximum range for the Me264 as between 11000 and 15000 kilometers, depending on bomb load. A Me264 was roughly the same size as a B-29 (I can’t say these are “definitive” numbers, because of the many variants of both aircraft, but they’re probably reasonable):

Length: Me264 20.55m; B-29 30.18m

Wingspan: Me264 43.1m, B-29 43.06m

Wing area: Me264 125m**2, B-29 161.3m**2

All-up takeoff weight: Me264 50000kg, B-29 60560kg

Fuel load: Me264 19721kg, B-29 25954kg (assuming 2.75 kg/gallon)

Yet the combat range figures Messerschmidt gave the RLM were between two and three times that of a B-29 (5230km). German engines, regardless of which ones were used, can’t have been that much more efficient than American ones. I suspect Willy was a little overenthusiastic. One important difference was the Me264 was not pressurized, which would have reduced its range compared to a B-29).


The superficial resemblance between a B-29 and an Me264 possibly misled some aviation enthusiasts ; there’s also a similarity between the cockpits on an Me264, a B-29, and the Millenium Falcon (presumably due to the Star Wars modelers having a B-29 kit handy) but neither a Me264 or a B-29 could make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.


While the Me264 was under construction, the Luftwaffe and Messerschmidt began playing musical chairs with specifications and designs. The Luftwaffe, at least, kept its vacillation between two possibilities – an Amerika bomber and an long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft. Messerschmidt proposed (and did enough design work to provide drawings and specifications):


* Four of just about every piston engine in the Luftwaffe inventory.

* Six of the same (this version probably could have reached the US East Coast from western France, assuming there was a long enough runway available)

* two turboprops and two turbojets (the turboprops were supposed to be steam turbines, running on a 65:35 mixture of powdered coal and gasoline).

* four piston engines in paired nacelles (one tractor and one pusher in each) and two turbojets in the wing roots.

* four pusher piston engines and two turbojets in the wing roots.


That’s just the power plant variants; the others were:


* an extended wing version.

* two different heavy bomber versions, sacrificing range for bomb load

* two different reconnaissance versions, sacrificing bomb load for range

* a courier aircraft to provide regular service to Japan

* a troop transport designed to carry twenty paratroopers. (The designers didn’t suggest what the utility of dropping 20 paratroops several thousand miles from their start point would be).

* a hybrid with the He277, using the wings of an Me264 on a He277 airframe


The Luftwaffe was particularly concerned about the takeoff weight and runway length required by the Me264. The prototype went into the air with single-tire main gear; it was recognized that a loaded example wouldn’t be able to do this and it was proposed to use a additionally, jettisonable wheel or pair of wheels. The six-engine version was to have an additional set of landing gear (i.e., two on each wing). The takeoff run was expected to be more than 2 kilometers when loaded, and various proposals were suggested to reduce that – towing the aircraft into the air with another Me264 or using rocket assist units.


Somehow a single aircraft managed to get built from this hodgepodge; by all accounts it was a fairly good airplane – at least the test pilots liked it. No weapons – offensive or defensive – were ever installed, and of the 52 test flights the longest was 2 ½ hours. The aircraft was totaled by B-17 raid on July 18, 1944.


The book ends with the obligatory “what-if-the-Nazis-got-The-Bomb” chapter that appears in any WWII speculative book. Nothing new.


All in all, the conclusion is more or less the same as other books that discussed Luftwaffe attacks on the US, Luftwaffe over America and Target:America): using existing aircraft (admittedly, single existing aircraft) the Germans could have cobbled together a mission (requiring mid-air refueling or ditching the aircraft in the ocean) that could have dropped a few bombs on the American east coast. Oddly, none of the authors speculate at any length over what the utility of such an attack would be, other than saying “the US would have been forced to withdraw air defense assets from Europe”. That’s very likely true, but it probably wouldn’t have lengthened the war in Europe by any significant amount.


Recommended if you like cool pictures of rare and/or hypothetical Nazi aircraft, and/or details of interagency rivalries in the Third Reich.
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Sometimes it's great to 'tech-nerd' it a bit. This book is one of the better I have a read. Wonder if the Me 264 really could have made to the east coast of the USA and back? We'll never know ( )