Nazi Germany was thankfully on the losing end of the ledger during World War II, and as such, the Luftwaffe’s bombers didn’t reach the heights of fame that Allied bombers, such as the American B-17 Flying Fortress, B-29 Superfortress, and B-24 Liberator or Great Britain’s Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax, did.

That said, it’s time to “give the devil his due,” as the saying goes. The Third Reich’s arms industry produced some very impressive war machines, and this included bombers. The two most famous of the bunch were the Heinkel He 111 and the Junkers 88. This raises an interesting question: Which of these two warbirds can truly lay claim to the title of the WWII-era Luftwaffe’s best bomber?

The Case for the Heinkel He 111

The He 111 made its maiden flight on February 24, 1935, and entered into the official operational service of “die Vaterland” later that year.

The Heinkel wielded a payload of 4,400 lbs. of bombs in its internal bomb bay; self-defensive armament consisted of seven 7.92 mm MG-15 or MG81 machine guns, (two nose-mounted, one dorsal, two on the sides of the fuselage, two ventral). The plane had a top airspeed of 440 km/h.

A total of 6,508 He 111 airframes were produced, five of which still survive today: at the Royal Air Force Museum in the Hendon section of London; the Royal Norwegian Air Force Museum at Gardermoen; Museo del Aire in Madrid, Spain; the Kent Battle of Britain Museum; and a He 111-H2 salvaged from the Norwegian lake of Jonsvatnet and sent to Germany for restoration.

The Heinkel was first “blooded” in combat during the Spanish Civil War, more specifically during the Battle of Guadalajara on March 9, 1937. Therein, four He 111Bs attached to the German Condor Legion—ostensibly a German volunteer unit supporting Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces—bombed Republican airfields. Fast-forward to the commencement of WWII in September 1939, and the He 111 formed the backbone of the Luftwaffe’s component of the blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) against Poland; the bomber repeated the feat during the Battle of France the following year. The bomber continued to add to its combat history in 1940 by conducting raids against British shipping in the North Sea, supporting the invasions of Denmark and Norway. Then came the Battle of Britain, at which point the plane’s weaknesses—particularly, its vulnerability to head-on attack—were glaringly exposed by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane fighters.

After 1943, the Luftwaffe’s loss of air superiority and the 111’s defensive inadequacies caused the bomber to be consigned to transport duties for the remainder of the war.

The Case for the Junkers Ju 88

The twin-engine Ju 88 made its maiden flight on December 21, 1936, and officially became operational in 1939.

To reiterate what I said in a previous article on WWII bombers, there’s the famous saying (apocryphally attributed to Joseph Stalin) that “Quantity has a quality all its own.” (To use a couple of WWII tank analogies, the same philosophy could be applied toward the American M4 Sherman and the Soviet T-34/85): “The twin-engine Ju 88 ended up as the second-most produced bomber of all time, with 15,183 airframes built; these numbers were only exceeded by America’s Consolidated B-24 Liberator four-engine heavy bomber, with 18,482 specimens made.” 

Despite those impressive production numbers, only two Ju 88s survive intact today: Werknummer (Work Number) 360043 (reassigned British Serial No. PJ876) is at the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands in Cosford; the other, Werknummer 430650—nicknamed “Baksheesh”—is housed at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

The Ju 88 packed a payload of up to 1,400 kgs (3,100 lbs) of ordnance internally in two bomb bays rated at 900 kgs (2,000 lbs) and 500 kgs (1,100 lbs), or up to 3,000 kgs (6,600 lbs) externally; for self-defense, she carried a total of five 7.92mm MG 81 machine guns (one mounted in the front windscreen, one in the lower fuselage nose, two in the rear of the cockpit canopy, and one in the rear ventral Bola position). The bomber carried a crew of four (pilot, bombardier/front gunner, radio operator/rear gunner, navigator/ventral gunner) and boasted a max airspeed of 470 km/h (290 mph, 250 kn).

The Ju 88 had its baptism of fire in the 1939 invasion of Poland, though its figurative and literal impact on that campaign was relatively minor. The bomber made a much bigger contribution during the Battle of France (May-June 1940) and, as with the He 111, garnered its greatest degree of notoriety during the Battle of Britain. However, also in common with its Heinkel counterpart, the Junkers bomber crews paid a terrible price in the skies over Britain; between July and October 1940, 303 of these planes were sent crashing to a fiery grave, thus constituting a 15.3 percent chunk of the 1,977 total Luftwaffe aircraft losses for Herman Goering’s ultimately doomed campaign.

And the Winner Is…?

The Ju 88. To quote the famous dictum by early twentieth-century theorist General Giulio Douhet, “Flexibility is the key to airpower,” and going hand-in-hand with flexibility is the concept of versatility, and the Junkers was a far more versatile platform than the Heinkel. Whilst the latter was purely a medium bomber (and, as already mentioned, pressed into makeshift duties as a transport aircraft), the former was a true multirole warbird; in addition to serving as a level bomber, the ‘88 also served as a dive bomber, torpedo bomber, night fighter, heavy fighter/Zerstörer (“Destroyer”), and reconnaissance plane.

About the Author: Christian D. Orr

Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ). He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch, The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.

Image: Dmitry Eagle Orlov / Shutterstock.com