Heinkel He 219 Uhu
A night fighter built by Heinkel Flugzeugwerke, the He 219 Uhu was one of only two aircraft of the Second World War designed from the outset for night fighting. First flown in November 1942, it combined intercept radar with heavy cannon armament, but its programme was cancelled in May 1944 and production continued only in small numbers: NASM counts 294 constructed and 268 put into service. The sole complete survivor, an A-2 captured in Denmark in 1945, is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center.
Why It Mattered
The He 219 was one of only two aircraft of the Second World War designed from the start for night fighting, a status it shared with the American Northrop P-61 Black Widow. Ernst Heinkel conceived it in the summer of 1940 as Project P.1060, a private-venture multirole fighter, and the German Aviation Ministry rejected the design as too radical. When RAF night bombing grew beyond what the existing Ju 88 and Bf 110 night fighters could counter, the ministry reversed itself: at the urging of Maj. Gen. Josef Kammhuber, commander of the night fighter force, Heinkel was asked to redesign the P.1060 as a radar-equipped night fighter. The Smithsonian judges that it may have been the best night fighter of the war, and it was the only piston-engined Luftwaffe night fighter able to meet the de Havilland Mosquito on equal terms.
Design Notes
The V1 prototype flew on 15 November 1942, only eleven months after the design request. It was built around its intercept radar: the FuG 212 Lichtenstein C-1 reached only 4–6 km across a 70-degree cone ahead, so the aircraft worked best within an integrated air-defence system of ground radars, radio networks and observers. British chaff blinded that first-generation set, so the longer-wavelength FuG 220 Lichtenstein SN-2 replaced it, immune to the jamming and carried on an antenna array nicknamed "antlers". Later versions added Schräge Musik, two MK 108 cannon behind the cockpit firing obliquely upward, which let the fighter attack a bomber from its vulnerable underside while staying clear of its defensive guns. The design also brought the first steerable nosewheel on an operational German aircraft and the world's first ejection seats on an operational aircraft. Armament grew across the versions, and the A-7 carried eight cannon in all, including two in a Schräge Musik installation.
Operational History
The He 219 won a competition against the Ju 88 S in early 1943 and the Luftwaffe ordered 300, but RAF raids on Heinkel's Rostock and Vienna-Schwechat factories in March and April 1943 destroyed nearly all the drawings and delayed production. A small batch of pre-production A-0s was delivered to the 1st Squadron, 1st Night Fighter Group at Venlo in the Netherlands in April 1943. On the type's first operational mission, on the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib and his radio operator, flying one of those pre-production aircraft, downed five British bombers, four Halifaxes and one Lancaster. Output stayed small: eleven aircraft were built in 1943 and 195 in 1944 at Vienna-Schwechat and Rostock-Marienehe, and about 2,000 prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp worked on the Schwechat assembly lines. In May 1944 Erhard Milch persuaded the ministry to cancel the whole programme in favour of the Ju 388 and the Ta 154, yet Heinkel kept producing small numbers at Vienna-Schwechat, and 54 were built in 1945. NASM's accounting gives 294 aircraft constructed in all, of which 268 eventually entered service. By 10 January 1945 the 1st Squadron of Night Fighter Group 1 had 64 He 219s on strength but only 45 serviceable, and six further aircraft were built in the field from spare parts and used operationally without being officially registered. Two He 219s captured by the Russians were flown by Czechoslovakia in 1946 under the designation LB-79.
Afterlife
On 16 June 1945 a U.S. Army Air Force intelligence team, working under Operation LUSTY, took control of three 1st Night Fighter Group He 219s at Grove in South Jutland, Denmark, and the aircraft were shipped to the United States aboard HMS Reaper. One of them, the A-2 with Werknummer 290202, was reregistered FE-614, later T2-614, and flown to Freeman Field, Indiana, for testing; in 1946 it was moved to storage at Orchard Place Airport, Park Ridge, Illinois, and on 3 January 1949 it was transferred to the Smithsonian's National Air Museum. In early 1955 the aircraft was crated and sent to the Smithsonian's Silver Hill storage facility in Maryland; its fuselage and engines were later exhibited at the Udvar-Hazy Center while the wing went through a long restoration at the Garber facility. In July 2014 the wing was prepared for its move to the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, to be assembled with the fuselage, and the museum's A-2 is currently on display there. Until 2012 the Smithsonian's aircraft was the only known survivor; that year Danish divers raised a second, badly corroded He 219 from the sea off the Jutland peninsula, and its owners loaned its radar array to the museum, whose team reverse-engineered a replacement antenna from it.