I read that near the end of the war Ar 234s flew reconaissance missions over England. I was wondering if anyone knows more details of these missions and if any were shot down? Although the first jet vs jet encounter supposedly occurred in Korea I would have thought Meteor’s might have been sent to try to intercept these aircraft.
Here’s the few info I could find:
- The Luftwaffe conducted reconnaissance operations with the new Ar-234Bs through the fall, including some reconnaissance missions over England, beginning in October, to determine if the Allies were preparing a follow-up amphibious landing in the Netherlands. Despite the activity, it wasn’t until 21 November 1944 that Allied pilots reported spotting an Ar-234B, when P-51s escorting bombers over Holland observed one of the jets overflying their formation. Detected, the German pilot immediately applied power and disappeared.*
http://www.vectorsite.net/avar234.html
Thing is, intercepting an aircraft actually requires both good advanced knowledge of where it is and where it is going, and a significant performance advantage over it. Where the two aircraft have much the same speed then the one being pursued can simply turn away and run for it - in which case the one with more fuel will almost certainly win. Given that the Ar-234 was essentially a four engined bomber, it would have significantly longer range than a Meteor so should be able to get away quite easily in that scenario.
Incidentally, the early Meteor wasn’t actually a very good high speed aircraft (when they had time to fix the aerodynamics postwar they gained approximately 100 mph for no increase in engine power) but would have been an excellent dogfighter. The wartime evaluation reports describe it as handling “like a Spitfire”, and the battery of 4 x 20mm Oerlikon cannons in the nose was probably the best fighter armament of the war, anywhere.
Didn’t the Me262 have 4 X 30 mm cannon in the nose?
the quote below was taken from wikipedia
[i]After the end of the war, the Me 262 and other advanced German technologies were quickly swept up by the Americans (as part of the USAAF’s Operation Lusty), British, and Soviets. Many Me 262s were found in readily-repairable condition and were confiscated.
The Me 262 was found during testing to have advantages over the early models of the Gloster Meteor. It was faster, had better cockpit visibility to the sides and rear (mostly due to the canopy frame and the discoloration caused by the plastics used in the Meteor’s construction), and was a superior gun platform, as the early Meteors had a tendency to snake at high speed and exhibited “weak” aileron response.[28] The Me 262 did have a shorter combat range than the Meteor.[/i]
Umm… describing them as “cannon” is a little misleading - they had a very low muzzle velocity. The closest modern analogues are probably grenade machine guns like this one. Excellent for destroying bombers - which was after all the designed role of the aircraft - but of very little use in a dogfight. The Oerlikons, by comparison, had a very high muzzle velocity combined with sufficient power to down a fighter-sized aircraft with a very few hits.
I have the information somewhere if i get the chance I will give a better reply, but there were only two Arado 234B involved. These were the first two with retractable wheels from the Ar-234A with skids. This pair of aircraft were also converted from bombers to photo reconnaissance and operated from an airfield in northern France. The unit was called Kommando Gotz for the unit’s leader. It was very much a hasty response to Normandy landings.
‘Grenade launcher’ usually has a low velocity of ~200m/s. As I recall the Mk 108 had velocity of 540m/s not that much slower than the usual cannon velocitys of 750m/s…no were near a grenade launcher. I recall the round is refered to in German text as a grenade, which may be causing some confusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mk_19_grenade_launcher