Arado Ar 196
The Arado Ar 196 was a German shipboard reconnaissance floatplane, a low-wing monoplane on twin floats built to scout for the Kriegsmarine's warships and to patrol from coastal bases. First flown in 1937, it replaced the Heinkel He 60 and He 114 and served throughout the Second World War in nearly every European sea; its best-known exploit was forcing the surrender of the submarine HMS Seal in 1940. Arado built it in Germany, with further production in France and the Netherlands, and 541 were completed including prototypes before production ended in August 1944. Three survive in museums.
Why It Mattered
The Ar 196 was the Kriegsmarine's standard shipboard reconnaissance floatplane: it rode by catapult on Germany's major warships and flew coastal patrols from shore bases around occupied Europe. The National Air and Space Museum calls it the last combat floatplane built in Europe, and the German navy's primary maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the counterpart of the American Vought OS2U Kingfisher. For six years it did the fleet's unglamorous seeing — scouting for surface raiders, watching coasts and hunting submarines — in almost every sea where German forces operated. It won its place by outclassing a conservative biplane rival, and it kept the job for the whole war: no German seaplane replaced it.
Design Notes
The type answered a Reich Air Ministry (RLM) specification released in the fall of 1936, which called for a two-seat aircraft powered by a single engine of 800–900 horsepower, on either a single float or twin floats. Arado proposed an advanced monoplane, and the RLM ordered four prototypes; hedging against the new idea, it also ordered two conservative Focke-Wulf Fw 62 biplanes. The airframe mixed old and new: a welded steel-tube fuselage covered in fabric and metal panels, and an all-metal two-spar wing whose float struts could be removed so the wings folded back alongside the fuselage. The prototypes tried both float arrangements: the first two flew on twin floats, the next pair on a single central float with outriggers, and trials found little to choose between them, so both were readied for production before the twin-float layout was picked. Power came from a BMW 132 nine-cylinder radial, and production aircraft were well armed for a spotter: a 20 mm cannon in each wing, a fixed machine gun in the nose, flexible guns in the rear cockpit and a 50 kg bomb under each wing.
Operational History
The first pre-production Ar 196A-0 reached the Kriegsmarine in November 1938, and deliveries of the production A-1 to the fleet began the following June. The navy put the type aboard many of its finest warships, among them Admiral Graf Spee, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Admiral Scheer and Prinz Eugen. The type first went to war aboard Admiral Graf Spee, whose two catapult-launched Ar 196s scouted the South Atlantic and found most of the raider's eleven British victims. Its most famous success came on 5 May 1940, when two Ar 196A-2s from Aalborg, Denmark, attacked the mine-damaged British submarine HMS Seal in the Kattegat, prevented her diving, and took her captain's surrender. From bases along the French coast, Ar 196 units also intercepted RAF Whitley bombers that were attacking U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. In all, the type served over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean, Baltic, Aegean, Black and North Seas; Romania and Bulgaria flew it in limited numbers, and Finland used its aircraft for reconnaissance and supply runs behind enemy lines. Production stayed slow: a French factory at St Nazaire built just ten aircraft before the work moved to Fokker in Amsterdam, which had become the main builder by the end of 1943. Counting prototypes, 541 Ar 196s were built, 526 of them production aircraft, before the RLM ended production in August 1944, by which time the slow floatplane had grown increasingly vulnerable to Allied fighters.
Afterlife
Only three Ar 196s survive from the production run. One, an A-3, is displayed at the aviation museum in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; it is one of twelve Ar 196s the Bulgarian Navy operated from Varna during the war. The other two were taken from the surrendered cruiser Prinz Eugen at Copenhagen: one belongs to the U.S. Naval Aviation Museum at Pensacola, and the other to the National Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian's A-5 had flown only fourteen hours in German service, with four more added by U.S. Navy test pilots; transferred to the museum in 1961, it remains in storage at the Paul E. Garber Facility in Maryland, still wearing the markings of a different aircraft. The Pensacola aircraft was shipped to Nordholz, Germany, in December 2012 for restoration on long-term loan from the Naval Aviation Museum, and no Ar 196 is known to be airworthy.