#1 Jet of World War II

"Gordon" wrote in message
...
We can all be grateful that it came too late
to make any difference in how the air battle over Germany worked out.

Agreed, Dan. As Hap Arnold said a few days after the war as he watched a
captured Me 262 thunder past him at an Allied airfield, "We really got
lucky..."


"Hap" Arnold was at times given to hyperbole. For example, upon seeing a
demonstration for the first time of an early-model Mosquito, he blurted,
"We've (the Allies) won the war!" Perhaps he meant that remark in terms of
qualitave measures.

That the Me-262 was not a sgnificant a/c had exactly nothing to do with
luck. Allied depredations against the sources of proper materiels for its
turbine construction (and against all other German jet engines to boot)
combined with relentless bombing attacks on its formal production facilities
and fuel sources as well as the lines of communication from factory to
airfield meant that no more than perhaps 200 such underdeveloped,
short-ranged a/c were ever available to the Luftwaffe on a given day.

The great majority of Me-262s were either bombed to bits at their factories
or strafed into ribbons on their airfields. If either side were "lucky" it
was Germany, not the Allies, because the latter elected not to seriously
explore applications of jet-propulsion until some point in 1943.