"... he was one of the worst mechanics in the luftwaffe!"

An interesting comment to the Youtube presentation "Which Country had the Most Effective Fighter Planes in World War 2".

Actually the payoff at the end of the video is his nomination for best fighter plane in wwii, not the best country's planes. I was always interested in the subject but could never make up my own mind about this. Too many opinions from the aces themselves, contradicting.

While there were/are great pilots that flew during ww2,I think the only one that can really say which aircraft was Eric Winkle Brown, that flew 458 different aircraft types and still holds the record of more aircraft types than anyone else.

There was a tv documentry a few years ago in which he spoke of his exploits that was very interesting. He was sent by the british goverment to interogate Goering after the war  but from what I can remember he thought the best aircraft he flew  was the me262 and if germany had more in service earlier then it may well have changed the war.

I had the privalge of meeting him once and like most ww2 pilots he was a very unasumming man that was just doing his job.

So if he thought the me 262 was the best, then thats good enough for me.

I would agree with the Me 262 being the best fighter aircraft to see combat in WW II.  Post-war testing also proved it was superior to the Gloster Meteor and the Lockheed P-80.

The Me 262 was undeniably the best fighter to see operation in WW2, its post-war influence on other aeroplanes such as the MiG-15, F-86 Sabre is evident.

Having said that, it's often the case that something which is available and works well is better than something which is technically impressive but not reliable and not around in large enough numbers to make a difference. The prudence of this consideration is most certainly not the case with the Me 262, as it is with a lot of other WW2 German weapons which were clearly very advanced, but lacking in numbers and lacking in serviceability owing to compromises or stupid decisions in production.

A classic example of the wiser choice in WW2, is the M4 Sherman tank compared to contemporary German tanks. The M4 was quick and inexpensive to build, easy to transport, being specifically designed to be able to fit through most European railway tunnels when mounted on a flatbed railway truck, very reliable, comparatively economical to run, and easy and quick to repair if damaged. Following some modifications based on combat performance of early variants, it was pretty tough too. All of this meant it could get to any battle where it was needed, in sufficient numbers to make a real difference. The Allies could have made something much bigger, and in fact they did in the shape of the M26 Pershing, but it was the abundant and mobile M4 Sherman which carried the Allies armored fight for the most part in WW2.

On paper, stuff such as the German Panther and Tiger tanks look hugely superior in every way to the M4 Sherman, not that the Germans thought so, they were impressed with the M4's mobility which their own tanks couldn't hope to match because theirs were stupidly large and heavy. So the truth is those big brutish German tanks just were not as good a design in practical terms. They were not cheap or quick to produce, used loads of fuel, were not very reliable, not easy to fix when they broke down, which they frequently did because their weight put an enormous strain on their drive train, and this isn't even considering the frequent sabotage which the forced labourers in Germany were inclined to indulge in. German tanks such as the Tigers were not easy to move around either, actually requiring different tracks to be fitted for transportation, so even when they were working, half the time they were in the wrong place, or waiting to have their tracks changed so they could be loaded onto trains, making them vulnerable to Allied bombing and strafing raids. Thus we can see making tanks like this was a terrible production strategy by the Germans, particularly if we look at the vastly more successful, and vastly simpler German StuG III, which was by far the most effective German AFV in WW2, all whilst being about a third of the price of a Tiger 1, as well as being a lot harder to hit too, thanks to its diminutive profile.

The same is true of the Me 262; if they'd got it into service in large numbers two years earlier, it would have potentially made a huge difference to the war, and have been a real threat to Allied strategic bombing, but by the time it actually was attacking bomber formations in 1944, the Allies were already on the European mainland following the D-Day landings.

So we can see the wisdom of the Allies not falling into this kind of money-pit, resource-heavy slow production trap, nor indulging in continuing to produce things which might also prove unreliable. A good example of this is the P-51D Mustang, which replaced the P-47 Thunderbolt in large numbers; but not because the P-51 was deemed superior to the Thunderbolt - it wasn't - rather for the far more practical reason that the Thunderbolt was a lot more expensive and time consuming to make than the Mustang, being over twice the price of a P-51 at a point in the war where the cheaper Mustang was more than adequate for the job against the vast majority of Axis combat aeroplanes.

The Allies did of course all have a go at producing their own jets, because they knew that it was the way things would go in the future, but they wisely stuck to making and deploying tried and tested more conventional stuff in such large numbers that the German jets, whilst briefly impressive, were never able to prove any sort of real threat to the big picture, then in victory they were able to simply benefit from all the research the Axis had done into those fancy things.

So yeah, the Me 262 was probably the best technical design of the war to see combat (albeit with somewhat compromised engines), but it certainly wasn't the smartest design choice. Then again, if the German high command of the 1930s had been really smart, they wouldn't have started a war in the first place, because they clearly had the smarts to compete economically with their technological prowess, as evidenced by those US and Russian space rockets of the 50s and 80s, which were about as American and Russian as bratwurst. 🚀

Edited July 5, 20214 yr by Chock

A lot of engineers are brilliant academically, but clueless to the context in which their design will be used. From time to time you get a team that either “gets it” a or gets enough feedback and they make legends. Often that actually means simpler systems engineering, but better “human factors” engineering. 
 

The funny thing is, when this happens, the name of their inventions live on forever, but the engineers who designed them fall to obscurity.