Heinkel He 177 Greif
The He 177 Greif was the closest the Luftwaffe came to a long-range heavy bomber in the Second World War. Designed to the 1936 Bomber A specification and first flown on 19 November 1939, it used two coupled Daimler-Benz engines, each pair driving a single propeller, because no single German engine was powerful enough. The coupled engines overheated and caught fire throughout the type's career, an official dive-bombing requirement added weight the design could not spare, and the bomber reached service only in 1943. It flew anti-shipping strikes with Hs 293 glider bombs, joined the Steinbock raids on Britain and served on the eastern front before fuel shortages grounded it in the summer of 1944. Published production totals differ, and no example survives.
Why It Mattered
The He 177 Greif was the nearest the Luftwaffe came to possessing a long-range heavy bomber during the Second World War. It was designed to the Bomber A specification issued in June 1936, which asked for an operational radius of 1,000 miles carrying a 4,400 lb payload. Heinkel received the development contract in the spring of 1938, for its P.1041 project. Two decisions shaped the whole programme: coupled engines, adopted because no single German engine was powerful enough, and an official requirement that the big bomber also be able to dive-bomb. The aircraft arrived too late to make any impact on the war, reaching service only in the summer of 1943, and its engine fires were never wholly cured.
Design Notes
Each of the He 177's two nacelles held one Daimler-Benz DB 606: two DB 601 inverted-V engines placed side by side, driving a single propeller through a complex gearing mechanism. The design needed two 2,000 hp engines, but no suitable power unit in that class was available, so two DB 601s were coupled together to form the 2,600 hp DB 606. The coupled engine was never particularly reliable, and engine fires, fed by oil leaking onto the hottest parts of the engine, remained the type's main weakness throughout its career. An evaporative cooling system that used the wing proved incapable of cooling the engines and had to be abandoned; the standard radiator system fitted instead increased drag. Strengthening the airframe for dive bombing produced very high wing loading, making the aircraft very hard to handle — in a role it never proved able to perform. The landing gear was also unusual, with twin main legs on each side retracting sideways into the wing. The later DB 610, made by pairing two DB 605s, together with improved cooling and a larger cowling, slowly reduced the number of fires, but they were never eliminated.
Operational History
The first prototype flew on 19 November 1939 at Rostock-Marienehe; the flight was cut short after twelve minutes as the engines overheated. Testing cost aircraft: one prototype was destroyed in a dive test, another crashed into the Baltic, and a third was lost after both engines caught fire. Thirty-five pre-production A-0s were built, at least twenty-five of them destroyed in accidents; the rest were used for development and training. Arado produced 130 A-1s, but that version was still not combat ready; the A-3 was the first version to see combat. Its combat debut came in the winter of 1942, when A-3s were pressed into the desperate air-lift of supplies to Stalingrad; the He 177 made a poor transport, with limited space for supplies, and engine fires caused several losses. The A-5, the most important version, went to KG 40 in the summer of 1943 for anti-shipping work with the Hs 293 glider bomb, first used operationally on 21 November 1943. Heavy losses on KG 40's first two big missions forced it to abandon daylight attacks. Two He 177 units took part in Operation Steinbock, the last German bombing campaign over Britain, in January–April 1944, finishing in a shallow full-power dive; the operation was generally unsuccessful. On the eastern front the whole of KG 1 converted to the type and attacked in daylight at about 20,000 feet, where losses were very light. After D-Day, II./KG 40 lost half of its 26 aircraft in ten days against the invasion fleet. From the summer of 1944 the He 177 was grounded, as Allied bombing began to cripple German fuel production. Published totals differ — around 1,000 aircraft in one History of War account, almost 1,200 in another — and most built never saw combat, being captured intact and unused at the war's end.
Afterlife
No He 177 survives today: every aircraft left at the war's end had been scrapped by the end of the 1950s. The four-engined He 277 that Heinkel had pressed for fared little better: just four were finished before heavy-bomber production was cancelled outright in July 1944. Its high-altitude offshoot, the He 274, was completed in France after the war and flown as the AAS 01A in December 1945, but it too was scrapped, at Marseilles in 1953. What survives is the reputation: crews knew the aircraft as the 'flaming coffin', in German the Luftwaffenfeuerzeug, the 'air force lighter'. History of War judges that nickname somewhat unfair: the fires were real, but they diminished as the design matured, and the aircraft did useful anti-shipping service in its short combat career.