WW2 Aircraft: The Most Unique Fighters & Bombers | Secret Weapons of WW2 | Documentary

The fight for dominance in the skies was a defining feature of World War II. In truth, the technological advances during the Second World War alone probably eclipsed all the advances in technology in 400 years before World War II. With this struggle for supremacy in the air came the race to create superior aircraft technologies. A race that led to ambitious, unusual, and in some cases, failed designs. Concepts were developed under a shadow of secrecy, built and tested under code names and classified programs. The designs of aircraft change considerably from, for example, the Hawker Fury biplane to the Gloucester Meteor. They were the cutting edge of aircraft and propulsion design. These secret aircraft were designed to give a nation the technological advantage in the sky. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japan unleashed a devastating surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, dragging the U.S. into the Second World War. To reach Japan's homeland, the U.S. would have to navigate the vast distances of the Pacific Theater, all the while under threat from Japanese aircraft based on island fortresses and through waters patrolled by the powerful Japanese Navy. The U.S. Navy wanted a new aircraft to help in this fight, one that could be launched off tankers, cruisers, and other ships to mount a defense against Japanese attack. Enter the Vought V-173 Flying Pancake. It was shaped like a disc, which acted as the plane's fuselage and its source of lift. The plane's designer, Charles Zimmerman, believed this would help the plane take off and land at low speed. The V-173 was 7 meters wide by 8 meters long and was powered by two piston engines outputting 80 horsepower each that could reach a maximum speed of 222 kilometers per hour. It was capable of being armed with a variety of weapons, including two 454 kilogram bombs and four 20 millimeter cannons. The engines drove twin propellers out on the very tips of the disc, and there was a very clever aerodynamic reason for that. Because at the wingtips, under the fuselage, you have high pressure. Above the fuselage, or the wings, you have low pressure, and that's what makes an aircraft fly. But at the wingtips, you get induced drag because those two are trying to mix, and if an aircraft is landing and it's high humidity, you can see these vorticity trails coming off the wingtips. The propellers on the flying pancake actually turned in the opposite direction to the vortice, and that induced drag was considerably reduced. Capabilities that would soon be put to the test. The initial V-173 model flew for the first time on the 23rd of November 1942 out of Bridgeport Army Airfield in Connecticut. Certainly the 173 during testing did live up to the projected performance, and Charles Lindbergh actually flew the prototype, and he was very fulsome in his praise. One of the benefits of the proposed production of the flying disc was its high strength and low landing speed, low takeoff speed, great maneuverability, and also high speed. The design of the pancake was aimed at allowing it to take off and land in restricted spaces. It could take off in just 61 metres of runway. Compare this to the popular carrier-based fighter in the US Navy arsenal, the Grumman F6F Hellcat. It needed more than seven times the runway to take off at 475 metres. While the prototype was successful, and Zimmerman was already planning a larger version, the project was already being surpassed by other technologies, and the US Navy formally ended the program on the 17th of March 1947. The time for the production and the development of the aircraft had been quite long, and by this time, the jet age had arrived. And everybody was looking towards the jet as being the performance aircraft that would be used by the US Air Force and the US Navy. The emergence of jet technology revolutionized air forces and became the driving force in the race for aerial supremacy in the later half of the 20th century. And the battle to harness this new, world-changing technology began in secret labs and research facilities in Europe during the Second World War. In July of 1942, Germany performed the first test flight of what would eventually become their first jet fighter to enter military service. In March 1943, Britain tested theirs. The result of years of secret development, and with more years of work still to come, the race to emerge first into a revolutionary new age was on. Prior to the arrival of the Meteor and the Me 262, the most advanced fighters the Luftwaffe and RAF could field were the iconic Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf 109. The design of the Meteor combined the fundamentals of planes like the 109 and Spitfire design with something entirely new. Technologically, the airframe wasn't all that advanced. It was a straight wing. It had very rudimentary aerodynamics, which were later changed to modify the engine themselves. It was pretty conventional apart from that. But it was actually the jet engine that was the thing that stood out. As early as the 1930s, the limitations of propeller-driven planes was becoming apparent. These aircraft were powered by a piston engine, which brings in air to build pressure, which then turns the propeller. But as the tips of the propeller reached the speed of sound, their efficiency dropped. The jet engine could solve this limitation. It uses a fan to draw air through the front of the engine, where it is mixed with fuel and ignited. This is then released through the back of the engine, creating thrust. This valuable new technology meant that the Meteor, codenamed Rampage, was developed under a shroud of secrecy. Despite the secrecy, a comparable aircraft was also under development in Germany. This was the Messerschmitt 262. The Messerschmitt 262 had two underslung jet engines. The Meteor had the jet engines embedded in the wing. Now, some people say that it was more efficient to have them buried in the wing because that meant a lower undercarriage and less weight. That's a small technical difference. While this engine layout may have been more efficient, it did not make the Meteor Mark I the faster craft. The Me 262's two Junkers Jumo 004B turbine engines could propel the jet fighter to speeds of 869.4 kilometers per hour. Significantly faster speeds than the Meteor Mark I's two Rolls-Royce Welland engines could produce, at 660 kilometers per hour. A speed slower than that of the Spitfire Mark XIV. Despite the Me 262's clear superiority in the air, it did have some clear disadvantages to the Meteor. At that time, Germany was being decimated by bombing by the Allies, day and night. So the materials that they needed to give heat resistance to turbine blades and things like that weren't available. Although calls to put the Me 262 into mass production were made as early as May 1943, a lack of resource allocation meant this didn't begin until 1944. And so the Meteor was catching up. By mid-1944, the first Me 262's ended service, beating the first delivery of the Meteors in July 1944 by a matter of months. But British fears of the Meteor falling into enemy hands meant it didn't see widespread use in the European theater, as it was banned from flying over Germany. And so it was put to use against the German V-1 flying rocket. But following the success of the landings at Normandy the month prior, and the Allies' push towards the German borders, this was reassessed. By the delivery of the improved Meteor Mark III in December 1944, it was deemed safe to operate in Europe. Painted white to avoid Allied anti-aircraft batteries, confusing it for the Me 262, the Meteor was unleashed on what remained of the Luftwaffe. They never saw air-to-air combat with the German jet, which was something that they very much hoped to be able to do. How that would have turned out is anybody's guess, but the Messerschmitt 262 as a fighter was very good. Today, the legacy of these first jets lives on, as this secret World War II technology continues to power military and civilian aircraft around the world. As much as the race for aerial supremacy during the Second World War was a battle to equip air forces with innovative technology, at times it was also one of pragmatism and even desperation. This would lead to secret aircraft designs that were cheap to construct, yet still able to deliver devastating results. By 1944, Japan's crop of experienced pilots and advanced aircraft had been decimated by the grinding attrition in the carrier battles of the Pacific theatre. The Japanese would turn to a desperate tactic to try and make up this shortfall — kamikaze. But kamikaze planes were retrofitted from whatever planes were available, and were often outdated. So senior Japanese commanders demanded a new aircraft — one that was cheap to produce and didn't require intensive training to be effective. What was developed was the Yokosuka MXY-7 Oka. Following the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, the Japanese began forming special attack squadrons whose goal was to purposely crash into enemy targets. This attack style would infamously become known as kamikaze. The principle behind kamikaze attacks was one man, one plane, one ship. But this desperate plan would put intense strain on their already dwindling supplies of frontline aircraft. And so the Oka was born. The main type of Oka was the Model 11, which was a simple monoplane. It had a wingspan of about five meters and a fuselage about six meters in length. The instrumentation was very simple. It basically had a speedometer, an altimeter, and an attitude indicator. The Oka was designed as a parasite craft — a plane that would be delivered to their target by a mother craft. The Oka would be attached to a Mitsubishi G4M2E Betty bomber, where, once released, the engines would power its dive into its target. It was powered by three solid-fuel rockets, and it had a warhead of 1,200 kilograms. It was also very simply constructed of the cheapest materials available — mostly aluminum and plywood. As it was intended for a one-way suicide mission, there was no reason to invest more in developing this design. Tested for the first time in October 1944, the Oka would see its first success in combat just in time for the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War. By mid-1945, the Japanese had been pushed back from their conquests throughout the Pacific, and the Allies were steaming towards Okinawa, the largest of the Ryukyu Islands. If the Allies captured these islands, they would act as a vital staging ground for Operation Downfall — the codename given to the eventual invasion of the Japanese mainland. By now, the Japanese could not hope to turn back the combined might of the forces bearing down on them, so they determined to make this battlefield so costly that the Allies would think twice about invading the home islands. The remnants of the Japanese Navy, its air force, and almost 100,000 Japanese soldiers dug in and waited for the Allied invasion fleet in what would be one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Second World War. On the 1st of April 1945, the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific theater began. On that same day, the Oka was used in combat. The Oka struck an American battleship, the West Virginia, and three transport ships. When the Americans saw the Oka used on April Fool's Day, they began to refer to the Oka as the Fool's Bomb. And that eventually became the Baka Bomb, because Baka means fool or idiot or stupid in Japanese. And the Oka may have indeed been stupid, as it was not a particularly effective weapon compared to the other kamikaze planes in the special attack operation. During the Battle of Okinawa, the defenders could muster a combined air strength of 1,815 aircraft. Of which 540 were assigned to the special attack operation. Impressively, of the 34 Allied ships sunk during the battle, kamikaze attacks accounted for 26 and damaged a further 168. But of all the U.S. warships sunk or damaged by kamikaze attacks during the battle, the Oka only claimed seven. The Oka only played a very minor role in an overall special attack strategy, otherwise known as the kamikaze strategy. Because the Mitsubishi G4 M2 Betty didn't have the power or the speed or maneuverability to evade American fighter planes that would attack it before the Oka could even get into range. So in the end, it was not a very effective weapon at all. Although the Oka's impact was negligible, the Japanese did succeed in making the Battle of Okinawa a bloodbath. It is estimated that the Japanese military suffered as many as 100,000 dead, with about as many civilians killed. For the U.S., approximately 12,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and another 36,000 wounded. Of those, the U.S. Navy suffered almost 5,000 deaths, with as much as 40% of those casualties caused by kamikaze attacks. As such, the Battle of Okinawa has been referred to as the typhoon of steel by many who served there. The Oka, and other kamikaze planes like it, were designed to be simple yet effective. No more resource was put into making them than was needed to hit their target. The strains of competing in an industrial-scale war and the relentless devastation caused by aerial bombing campaigns saw this design principle rolled out by many nations, seeking secret weapons that could make an impact with their dwindling supply of resources. By the middle of 1944, the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was taking its toll. In response, the Luftwaffe shifted focus away from bomber production in favor of new fighter aircraft. One of the more unusual proposals to emerge from this new strategy was designed by Erich Bachem. The Bachem BA349 Natter, or Snake. Germany was under pressure and needed fast, cheap and simple solutions. War resources were limited and Allied bombings were making matters worse. 72% of the total bombs the Allies dropped on Germany were after the 1st of July 1944. Cities where anything was manufactured for warfare were targeted most. The Allies dropped 35,000 tons of explosives just on the German rail network. The BA349, or Natter, was an incredibly simple design, so as not to be a burden on Germany's scarce resources. It was made of plywood and timber. It hardly had a nail or a screw in it. It was glued together. It was tremendous. Borrowing from the German rocketry programs, the Natter was designed for vertical take-off. It was an aircraft with two wings. It had booster rockets on the side. What they would do is to launch this thing with its booster rockets going off right now. Then its own rocket motor would take it up to height. During the climb, the Natter was under the control of ground-based radar or radio operations until contact was made with the enemy. Whereupon the Natter would level out, the engines would cut out, and the pilot would assume control. Then, of course, it had no power anymore, so the pilot would then glide down. When the pilot reached an altitude just above the enemy bomber, they could jettison a plastic nose cone revealing a battery of rockets and launch them off at close range in one burst of fire. Now, the Natter had no landing gear, so when you got down towards the ground, you would pull a lever. The Natter would drop out of parachute and float down to the ground, and the pilot would float down to the ground separately. The SS ordered Bachem to build the Natter in September 1944. Flight tests began two months later using wind tunnels and unmanned tests. Manned tests began in early 1945, and a battery of the Natters was established near Stuttgart. But the war ended before they were ever used. It was really cheap. It was really clever. It was really ingenious. It never saw any use in World War II because it was developed too late. Once again, Hitler realized you might need this weapon, but he wasn't in time to do anything about it. Ultimately, the Natter never made it far enough to truly test its value. But the Natter was only one of many secret German aircraft programs during the war. Others were far more ambitious in scale. 11th of December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, and the US responded with their own declaration. With this new and powerful enemy located half a world away, Hitler wanted a method of bringing the fight to them. The resulting weapon designs would take many forms. Some conventional designs using unique materials, and one well ahead of its time. Since the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler had a mental picture in his mind that cropped up time after time after time. He could picture Manhattan in flames. He was driven by this vision of the Nazis bombing America if America didn't want to come on side with what Germany had in mind. But obviously, as America didn't technically enter the war until 1941, the Germans then, after America entered the war, they thought, okay, we better start doing something. But what the German aircraft lacked was range. In 1942, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering put out the call for a new kind of strategic bomber. One that would be capable of making the roughly 5,800 kilometer trip from Germany to America, bomb strategic targets, and then make the return journey. Three German aircraft manufacturers responded. Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf and Junkers submitted proposals for this initially. The Messerschmitt proposal, the America bomber, was pretty conventional. It had a crew of eight, but it had a very small bomb load. It did have a range, however, of about 15,000 kilometers. The Messerschmitt design was a massive, imposing aircraft. Its wingspan was 43.1 meters, and the length of the fuselage was 20.55 meters. But this size came with limitations. It was really quite an extraordinary aircraft. Because it was built entirely of aluminum, it had great strength on its side. It had power on its side, too. But its main disadvantage was the very heavy wing loading. The enormous wings were filled with fuel. Tons and tons of fuel. But that's all fuel that the plane has to carry. It didn't take off too easily. It wasn't easy to control in the air. It was an inflexible, heavy, cumbersome aircraft. Had it been subject to fighter attack, it would have found it very difficult to maneuver out of the way. But had development proceeded, there's every chance that it could indeed have carried a bomb to America. Adding to the Me 264's issues was the fact that production delays meant estimates for the plane's delivery were in 1946-47. The project was inevitably abandoned. The proposals Goering had received from German weapons manufacturers weren't the only ultra-long-range bomber concepts on the table. Engineering student Eugen Sanger first came up with the idea of a suborbital rocket-powered aircraft in 1931. But with the outbreak of World War II, Sanger had to shift gears, turning his concept, which he had named the Silbervogel or Silverbird, into a military weapon. Manned by a single pilot, this plane was more of a spacecraft than an aircraft. It was launched on a sled on rails. It was powered by a rocket that pushed the aircraft along a three-kilometre track to gain about 1,900 kilometres an hour. Once airborne, it would light its own rockets and then it would ascend to about 145 kilometres. And then once it was up out of the atmosphere, it would skip across the atmosphere and remain in virtual low orbit. Then, of course, as the world turned beneath it, in essence, all the major cities of the world would be covered by this thing up in space. Once the bombing run was complete, the Silbervogel would glide back down to Earth, much like a modern-day space shuttle, possibly landing in Allied Japan. While the Silbervogel was promising, it never made it past early prototypes and testing. And yet, within its designs were revolutionary ideas. There were two principal radical design features for this spacecraft. One was an ablative heat shield, the same as the heat tiles that you see used on the space shuttle. They were designed to absorb the heat of the re-entry into the atmosphere, or this constant skipping. And the other thing was it used regenerative rocket engines. By that, I mean that the fuel lines and the oxidiser lines actually wrapped around or near the rocket bell. And the idea of that was to cool the engine down. But it had a secondary effect, which was also beneficial, in that that heat transfer also pressurised the fuel and the oxidiser for use in the rocket. These are both concepts that are still in use today. A lasting legacy for a plane that never fulfilled its wartime purpose. The Germans' attempts to develop their own long-range heavy bombers began far too late in the war for them to make meaningful progress. All the while, the US had been developing their own well before the Second World War had even begun. With tensions in Europe and Asia building, and the threat of war looming, America was focused on building their military strength. At aircraft manufacturer Boeing, engineers were tasked with improving on the success of their B-17 Flying Fortress aerial bomber. What they devised would be known as the B-29, or Super Fortress. Development of the B-29 started around about in 1937, when the idea arose that with what was happening in Europe and what was happening in the Pacific with Japan, that the Americans would need a large aircraft with a longer range and a higher bomb load than the B-17, which was going to be their major bomber aircraft. Developed in secret, the existence of this new kind of plane was strictly classified. With a length of 30 meters, a wingspan of 43 meters, and a bomb load capacity of close to 9,000 kilograms, the B-29 was the largest bomber ever built. Four turbo-supercharged radial engines, outputting 2,200 horsepower each, allowed the B-29 to reach speeds of 644 kilometers per hour, an altitude of 9,710 meters, and a range of at least 8,050 kilometers. To deliver a plane with these capabilities required a raft of experimental design features. But the desperation for this new weapon following Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 saw the B-29 rushed into production before flight tests were completed. In trying to rush it into production, that caused its own problems, because there were constant modifications being undertaken as a result of testing. And brand new aircraft that came out of the factory were then sent to modification centers immediately, where they had to be modified to be brought up to the standard of an aircraft that had just started production in the factory. If you look at the rush to put the aircraft into production, the total production costs of the B-29 program at that time were $3.4 billion, which equates to $56 billion in today's money. The entire Manhattan project, which was the development of the atomic bomb, was only $1.9 billion, or $34 billion in today's money. So you can see the importance that was placed on the development of the aircraft, the amount of resources that were put to it. While initial production may have had its challenges, what Boeing were producing was unlike any bomber that had come before. Boeing came up with a radical design, I'll say, because the aircraft was pressurized. Now, how were they going to do the pressurization? Was it going to be the entire fuselage? That caused a problem because you'd have to depressurize the fuselage if you opened the doors. So the design quite cleverly came up with two pressurized areas within the fuselage, one down the tail and one in the cockpit area. And they were joined by a tunnel over the top of the bomb bay that had a little railway so that you'd put yourself along on a small contrivance, a bit similar to what you would when you're working under your car. The pressurized compartments allowed the B-29 to achieve altitudes far higher than their counterparts and improve the level of fatigue suffered by the crew as they weren't exposed to the elements during flight. As well as the pressurization for the crew, the aircraft had a radical new system for gun aiming. You had a master gunner and two side gunners that had blisters in the rear fuselage. But all of the guns could be taken over by the master gunner, and they could be operated through an analog computer for gun sighting. And they could direct the fire of all of the four turrets, two on top, two underneath. So that was quite an advance. The B-29s began entering service in 1944 in the vast Pacific theatre, where their superior altitude and range brought the Japanese homeland within striking distance. The B-29 was employed from bases in China and also Saipan and Tinian. They were used for high-altitude strategic bombing and also were very good at low-level night incendiary bombing. And the results of the effect on the Japanese people were undeniable with the constant bombing, particularly with the incendiaries at night. On the night of the 9th of March 1945, over 300 B-29 bombers took off from bases throughout the Pacific and headed for Tokyo. During the mission, designated Operation Meeting House, the bombers dropped more than 1,600 tons of bombs, of which the majority were napalm-filled cluster bombs. It is estimated that around 100,000 people died and more than a million were made homeless in the ensuing fires. It was the single deadliest bombing operation in history. A few months later, the B-29 would cement its place as one of the deadliest weapons ever created when it delivered nuclear weapons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although estimates vary wildly, it is thought that the combined death toll from the blasts and the ensuing radiation is in the hundreds of thousands. While the Allies saw this as a military success, the devastation of the aerial bombing campaign against Japan was one that was borne primarily by civilians. They called it the de-housing campaign. It's a euphemism. We're killing people here. And that's what the intent was. Ultimately, what I want to do is kill enough people so that I can destroy the will of the people to stop working and to stop supporting this government and ultimately win the war that way. The legacy of the B-29 and the success of the Allies' de-housing campaigns are controversial. Debate rages as to the morality of the tactic and its overall effectiveness in its goal of destroying the morale of civilian populations. But the B-29's place in history is more than just that of one of humanity's deadliest weapons. It is also seen as a critical technological stepping stone in modern aviation. As nations strived for ever greater range with their bombers, a problem presented itself — how to defend them from enemy fighters. In 1945, the US Air Force was developing the B-36 bomber, designed to take off from US soil and carry the new atomic bomb to the most distant target. The emergence of powerful ultra-long-range bombers like the B-36 presented a new problem — how to protect them in flight, leading to experimentation with a novel concept — the parasite fighter. During the Second World War, escort fighters would shadow bombers as they attacked targets. But their far larger cousins could carry far more fuel, meaning that their effective range was also far greater. External fuel tanks were added to many escort fighters to help bridge this gap. But by the time the B-36 was in development, even this wasn't enough. This became particularly true when we got to the advent of the nuclear bomber. So the question was asked at the US Air Force, what would happen if we gave a nuclear bomber its own defense capability by embedding a tiny jet fighter either in its bomb bay or attached to its wings? This was known as a parasite fighter. While it was flying along, if it came under attack, it could release it to defend it. And then when the aircraft had finished defending the bomber, then fly back, hook onto a trapeze and get cranked back on board. The concept of parasite fighters was not a new one. The advent of airships in the early 20th century had seen a number of militaries experiment with the idea, with the British being the first to attempt it. But the process of reattaching to the mother craft was incredibly dangerous. And after a number of catastrophic crashes, most nations had given up on the concept. Most, but not all. By 1930, America had tested the first fully functional aerial recovery system, and the US Navy ordered two airships to be specifically built to utilize this technology. But without a war to test this new system, the US's parasite fighter program stagnated. But with bombers becoming bigger, new technologies revolutionizing aircraft design, and almost 15 years of using aerial recovery systems without incident, led the US to begin development of a jet-powered parasite fighter. By late 1945, the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin went into development. The Goblin was armed with four .50 caliber machine guns and was crewed by one person. Measuring just under 4.5 meters long, and with its wings folded 1.5 meters wide, the Goblin is the world's smallest jet fighter ever built. The Goblin was a novel concept solution, but the design and development process meant that the Goblin would not have its maiden flight until well after the war had ended. On August the 23rd, 1948, at Muroc Field in the Mojave Desert, a heavily modified B-29 Superfortress prepared for the Goblin's first test flight. Piloted by McDonnell test pilot Edvin Shook, these tests revealed fundamental issues with the concept. I think the primary thing was a range issue. Because these things were so small, they couldn't carry much fuel, which meant range and flight duration were necessarily limited. In fact, the Goblin could only fly for about 30 minutes. If the enemy attack on the bomber lasted more than 30 minutes, you were in trouble because the Goblin was out of fuel. Not only did the Goblin have issues with range, it also proved incredibly difficult to reattach to its parent aircraft once deployed. The reason was, is that the bomber was so large and moving so fast that it created a tremendous amount of turbulence in its slipstream. So you have cushion of air with the mother craft, and then the cushion of air with the Goblin. And you had to overcome that to actually mate up with the trapeze. Now, the aircraft only undertook seven flights that were captive. Three of them ended in almost disaster, where the Goblin crashed against the trapeze and the mother aircraft, and then had to land because it couldn't mate up. In October 1949, the Goblin project was cancelled. The thing that scrapped the whole program was that the mid-air refueling capabilities significantly advanced in the Air Force. So all of a sudden, they were able to refuel the fighters and the bombers in mid-air. So no reason to have a parasitic aircraft, because he just kept refueling the fighters so they could keep up with the bombers. Ultimately, the Goblin couldn't be developed fast enough to meet the need it was designed for. A problem that would be faced by many nations trying to get new aircraft into the air to meet the changing needs of the war. The bold and unusual aircraft designs that emerged in World War II may have been designed to win the war. But many of these concepts have had an enduring influence on modern aviation. The necessity to respond to changing needs, to anticipate the enemy and find ways to protect and defend, pushed engineers and designers to explore new and bold ideas. While some may have failed, many innovations that were made during the war laid the foundation for modern aircraft technology. From reconnaissance, to vertical takeoff, to the ubiquitous jet engine that propelled aircraft to reach unprecedented heights and speeds. These technologies may have started under a veil of secrecy, destined for battle. But their impact is felt not only in modern military aviation, but in the way flight has connected us across the expanse of our world and to our universe.