Messerschmitt was saved by the Nazi Party that came to power in January Probably the most important man in German civil aviation was Erhard Milch. Between and , Milch had done all that he could to stop Messerschmitt getting any form of contract.
He blamed Messerschmitt for the death of one of his best friends who had died when his M20 had crashed. Milch was a supporter of Hitler, yet it was the Nazi Party that saved Messerschmitt.
Milch may have been important in civil aviation. In , Nazi Germany announced its intention of rearming. This gave Messerschmitt and his company the opportunity to show Hitler what the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke hence the Bf in plane names was capable of doing.
The result was the Bf It was a revolutionary design — the plane had a monoplane metal construction, retractable undercarriage, enclosed cockpit and devices that gave the plane high lift. By the standards of the time, Messerschmitt had produced a one-off. The development of the Bf also coincided with a major decline in the power of Milch. Udet was less than impressed when he first sat in the Bf He found the plane to be cramped and not pilot-friendly. However, when he flew it, Udet realised that Messerschmitt and his team had designed something that took fighter plane design to another level.
This is not the case. Rather jet engine development proved lengthy and difficult. Hitler's order did divert some 30 percent of production airframes to the Me A-2a Sturmvogel Stormbird bomber type. The vastly superior performance of the Me gave confidence to the fortunate pilots who flew it, but the Allied dominance of the air was so complete that the Schwalbe never reached its full potential. The airfields from which it flew were under constant attack, and in the last days of the war, the remaining Me units were forced to operate from makeshift bases constructed along Germany's famous autobahns.
Although 1, Me s were completed, it is estimated that only about saw combat. The airplane was reportedly delightful to fly, as long as the pilot used care in moving the throttles to avoid an engine compressor stall.
Harold M. Watson directed Operation Lusty, the discovery and seizure of advanced German aircraft. The Technical Intelligence staff assigned the inventory and tracking number FE to this airplane. It arrived at the Silver Hill Facility in , and restoration work began in The biggest challenge in the restoration project was to remove the corrosion that had built up over thirty-four years.
The second-biggest problem was the restoration of the fighter nose, which involved much tedious but skillful metal work. After 6, man-hours, the aircraft appeared as it did when it served with the famous JG 7 Fighter Wing 7 , complete with unit insignia and victory markings.
But Willy Messerschmitt found himself a rich sponsor…and roommate. She was smart and beautiful, but she was seven years older than Willy and already married, to financier Otto Stromeyer. Nevertheless, Willy asked Lilly for help, and she persuaded her husband to buy an The more they saw of each other, the more Lilly became fascinated by the daring, dashing young engineer. He was distinguished-looking, in a dark-eyed, sharp-featured, professorial way.
And above all, he was a vivid contrast to her boring, stuffy husband. Inevitably, the baroness and the engineer began an affair. Throughout a large part of his career, Willy Messerschmitt had one implacable and powerful enemy: Erhard Milch, a bureaucrat who became head of the RLM and ultimately a Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall. Their bad blood extended back to the late s, when Milch was managing director of the airline Luft Hansa.
Messerschmitt designed and built for Luft Hansa a single-engine, passenger airliner with a large but lightweight cantilever, single-spar wing—the M Its payload as a percentage of gross weight was remarkable, and its huge hp BMW V12 engine could be run at very low power settings in cruise, for economy. His parachute never deployed, and he was killed.
As far as Willy was concerned, Hackmack had screwed up and destroyed his airplane. Milch thereafter thwarted Messerschmitt every chance he got, canceling contracts and projects, removing RLM subsidies and openly favoring other manufacturers.
Landing-gear design, however, was a challenge that Messerschmitt never quite conquered. But a number of his airplanes suffered landing-gear collapses, and the problems created by the narrow, knock-kneed, difficult-to-align main gear on the have been amply discussed. The original Me prototypes had conventional tailwheel gear, requiring a delicate tap on the brakes during the takeoff run to get the tail off the ground. When Messerschmitt as a result added a tricycle-gear nosewheel, it often collapsed.
The is easily the most famous German airplane ever to fly, but the has been called the worst single airplane Germany ever developed.
Messerschmitt, as was his wont, did as he wished and instead developed a totally new airplane that turned out to have dangerous stability problems. The Me was laterally unpredictable, and since its propellers were unusually far ahead of the center of gravity, this could have been longitudinally destabilizing, particularly if power was suddenly added during a too-low landing approach.
Thanks to many accidents, including landing-gear collapses while taxiing, the Me was adjudged useless as a combat aircraft and withdrawn from service; production was canceled. He was shifted to production oversight responsibilities, and design duties were largely removed from his purview. His fall from grace, from prosperity, from a position of command and control was all but complete.
His factories were in ruins, and nobody seemed to care about his accomplishments. He nearly died of exposure and starvation during the winter of One guard took it upon himself to shelter Messerschmitt inside a barracks building, and perhaps because of what that soldier learned from talking with him, the Americans finally found out who they had imprisoned.
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