To the far left, on the floor, is the aft compressor section of an Me-262 engine, then the top cowling of the Me-109G at right angles to the fuselage, and it appears, another Me-262 aft compressor, behind it. These may be the other halves of the two front sections between the Me-109G and Me-262.

The white "28" on the He-111 rudder may be seen directly above left, front jet engine. The white letters were common markings in late 1944 and 1945.

From this view, the Me-262 is showing some structural damage on right forward fuselage side that looks more like crash damage than combat. Also, the ends of the nose wheel strut is separated at a strange place -- that is the nose strut with tire still attached lying just forward, left of nose.

The underside of the fuselage nose is pretty well chewed up, so we can assume that the pilot of this Me-262, with gear down, didn't have the landing he would have preferred. The Me-262 often had landing gear problems and generally it was the nose strut that failed.

Of interest is that inside the jet engine nose...the pointed part to smooth airflow...is a little cap and it can be removed and a phenolic "D"-ring pulled. This would start a small, air-cooled, twin cylinder, horizontally-opposed engine. The engine's output shaft was coupled to the turbine and would spin the turbine up to ignition rpm.

There is a better view of the Fw-190D showing distinctive round air-intake on right side, and the broken wooden prop blades (at least that is what it looks like to me -- the 190D was supposed to have metal blades; yet I have four photos of 190Ds that are bellied in and all have broken wooden prop blades--?).

Though the windscreen and side front canopy appears to be damaged, and in one case by combat, it could be reflections and collected grime -- but the marking on the windscreen does look like a bullet strike with ancillary damage in the bullet-proof glass.

The spiral pattern on the 190 spinner is obvious here.

The curious GI seems to be just wandering in the boredom of "hurry up and wait."

Since we will be seeing more of some Fw-190D predecessors, I will review a little development history.

Kurt Tank designed the 190 series and the last, an almost totaling retooled aircraft carried the "Ta" of his name.

In the US, we used the Fw designation but most were made by BMW and carried the Bf designator -- for US convention, I will stick with the Fw. (Arado and Fieseler also made them.)

Reading about the flight tests of, and modifications to, the first Fw-190, it all sounds very familiar to a designer of R/C sport powered models.

The 190 was the "Wuerger" or "Butcherbird" and the first "real" production model was the A-2-model which carried a lot of "band-aid" fixes from the 190A-1.

The 190 was initially designed for a liquid-cooled, 12-cylinder, in-line engine with 1,050 hp, but it ended up with (for good reason) the 14-cylinder, air-cooled, 1,600 hp BMW radial with two-speed turbo-charger.

For armament, the wing roots carried 20-mm cannons. The wing root bulge at the loading breech was on all 190s and became a characteristic of the aircraft.

The wide-stance of the landing gear was much appreciated by the 190 pilots who had to be so careful with the narrow undercarriage of the Me-109 -- the same comparison was true for the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots (the Spitfire had a narrow landing gear track).

Aircraft with the landing gear mounted at the wing root used a lighter overall landing gear structure than those mounting the gear well out on the wing spar. The spars of the Hurricane and Fw-190 had to be reinforced to take the landing loads while this was not experienced by the Spitfire and Me-109s.  With the landing gear pivoting at the wing root, this could take advantage of the structure there and this was near the well-braced engine mounts.

There is little point in comparing kill ratios as published by the Germans and British -- to read those of the Germans, one would have to conclude that they won the war; where as, in the Battle of Britain, we know they didn't.  Still, the 190 series were very deadly aircraft.

Over 400 A-2s were built before the 500+ A-3s.  The A-3s had only minor structural and geometry changes but had a more powerful engine; gained primarily by higher-compression and provisions for take-off and war-emergency boost. The A-3s were modified so that in the field, the model could be converted from a fighter to a ground-support role.  These A-3s carried a suffix of U1, U3, and U4 -- for instance, the Fw-190A-2/U4 carried two reconnaissance cameras.

In late 1942, the A-4 was introduced which differed from the previous model in that it had a methanol-water power boost system and a better radio. This model had the same "U" suffixes for basically the same ground-support mods. This was the first 190s sent to the Eastern Front. There was one other mod to this model and that was the R6 which incorporated air-to-air rockets to try to break up the tight formations of allied bombers.

The following A-5 had lengthened motor mounts (to move the CG forward with all the stuff that they were adding to the aircraft) and as the engines became more powerful, the vibration dampening of the shorter mounts had exceeded their limits and they were lengthened.

There were a bunch of "U" mods -- night fighting, drop tanks, more variants in armament, torpedo, and dive bomber -- all sounding very familiar to those knowing the "do-everything-design" mind-set of the Luftwaffe Technical Office.  In retrospect, this was a major fault during the entire war.

The A-6 was a short production run using some of the earlier armament packages of the A-5.

The A-7 was next with an optimized armament package -- 13-mm guns in the cowling with bulges for the breech loading and a new reflector gun sight.

The A-8 was the last of the A series. This one had a larger methanol/water tank just behind pilot and they had to move the radio to keep the proper CG with the addition of the more methanol/water on board.

In almost all of the A variants there were at least nine sub-variants carrying the "U" or "R" designators; these remained somewhat constant, in that the "R6" always carried pairs of rocket launchers.

Even with all of these modifications, the Fw-190A was always easily recognizable as such.

The Fw-190B Series

The 190s had always had a drawback in that it lost performance at altitudes above 20,000' -- it was a 15,000'-to-20,000' fighter.  Bombers were way up there.

The methanol/water boost helped some and they tried nitrous-oxide injection and that helped up to 25,000' but this took a lot of space and added weight in the fuselage -- and it wasn't doing the engines a lot of good, either. They tried a different turbo-charger, increased wing-area, and added pressurized cockpits.

The aircraft designer Tank and the Luftwaffe Technical Office decided they had gone about as far as they could with this engine.

Tank and engineers received a new liquid-cooled, inverted V-12 and modified an old A-model for this lighter engine. There was a definite improvement. Another A-model then got a V-16 with both methanol/water and nitrous oxide injection(!). This model zipped right up to 40,000' and after a little testing, they extended the flight times to two-hours at this altitude -- now they were getting somewhere! 

But then some of their enemy aircraft started flying at 45,000'.

To meet this challenge, a whole new airframe would be needed so the rest of the development tests that were to produce a B-model were then done to test variations on the next Fw-190 -- not a B, but the D-model.

To get to this D-model, A's and B's were hacked up and a few were so different, they even produced a few Cs, but in the end a superior aircraft emerged.

The Fw-190D-0 used a Junkers Jumo 12-cylinder in-line, liquid-cooled engine and it was installed in basically an A-8 airframe but with the nose extended and a sloppily extended aft section to get the CG back where it belonged.

It carried two 7.9 mm guns over the cowling and two root-mounted 20-mm cannons, but it did not have any increase in flying surface area(!). It's performance was only "acceptable."

While these were being manufactured, Tank continued with the modifications to get a prototype with increased surface areas. He finally got it airborne and this was the Fw-190D-9, the finest performing Luftwaffe fighter.

It had 13-mm nose guns, a fuselage mount for drop tank or bomb, and a large amount of methanol/water. It used the Jumo engine to produce 2,250 hp.

Even then Tank was seeing his Fw-190 design specs compromised, so he continued designing the Ta-152 -- the ultimate Fw-190.

Until then, he would make what improvements he could to the D-9 -- such as a more powerful Jumo with a 3-speed turbocharger with induction cooling, hydraulic flaps and undercarriage, and the dreaded 20-mm cannon firing through the spinner (later variants had a 30-mm spinner cannon).

Construction began in June with first deliveries in August, 1945.  These aircraft went to the skilled  III/JG54 "Green Hearts" in September.

They were stationed at Achmer to provide top cover of the base and provide escort to the Me-262s flying from there. This was necessary to protect the Me-262s' departures and arrivals. The same was true of the Me-262 base at Hesepe. (One of which could be the source of the Stockum Collection; however, the Fw-190D in our photo has the common white numeral on fuselage side which was the marking of late 1944 and 1945 -- the numbers on the fuselage of the Fw-190Ds at Achmer were black.) There were other groups equipped with 190Ds, of course.

The aircraft were available; the fuel wasn't. The last "hurrah" for the Luftwaffe was the January, 1945, attack on allied air bases in Holland, Belgium, and northern France, and for this mass fighter attack, special allotments of fuel had to be arranged.

Indeed, in April, 1945, a squadron under the command of famous Gerhard Barkhorn received 150 brand new Fw-190D-9s from a nearby Focke Wulf factory, but because of diminishing fuel supplies, they could only permit four aircraft to maintain a standing patrol. (!)

The "Butcherbird," now capable of flying faster and higher, was reduced to "Home Defense" -- and often doing so at lower altitudes than what necessitated the design improvements.  So even then, it was a compromised design.

Ken Cashion