American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffeâ??s Secrets

20. Roast Duck at Aalborg

[ 279 ] ROAST DUCK AT AALBORG By the seventeenth of June, Fred McIntosh was back at Villacoublay to pick up a Ju 388, the same airplane which he and Watson had flown in May from Merseburg to Kassel. He flew the 388 to CherbourgQuerqueville . His arrival at Querqueville was timed to coincide with the arrival of Germany’s strangest-looking aircraft—two Dornier Do 335s from Nürnberg-Roth. The Do 335, called Pfeil (arrow), was a heavy push-pull fighter with one engine in the front and another in the rear. It was still in the development stage when the war ended and never saw combat. Wrote Watson, “It looked less like an arrow than anything I’ve ever seen. Apparently some Germans thought so too because they called it Ameisenbär, anteater.”1 According to Watson the Do 335 was equipped with two twelve-cylinder Daimler-Benz liquidcooled engines, rated at 1,750 horsepower each, and cruised at 425mph at 23,500 feet altitude. German test data, however, claimed a speed in excess of 470 miles per hour for the fastest piston-driven aircraft in the world. The Arrow was equipped with an ejection seat. Prior to ejecting, the pilot had to push three buttons in the cockpit. “One would jettison the rear propeller using an explosive device, the second button blew off the upper vertical tail surfaces, and the third armed 20 the seat.” The Do 335 “typifies German creativity,”Watson wrote,“and tests showed that it was tops in speed for a piston type aircraft.”2 An ATI team had located one 335 at Neubiberg airfield.Watson took a look at it in early May when he was in the area, but it was too heavily damaged by bomb fragments. Four others, however, were located at the factory in Oberpfaffenhofen, a few miles west of Munich. It was two of those factory aircraft Fred McIntosh was expecting at Querqueville airport. The third and fourth airplanes Watson gave to the British. The French had acquired several Do 335s in their zone of occupation, but for some reason wouldn’t release even one to their American ally. Earlier in June, Flugkapitän Hans Padell, one of Germany’s best test pilots who had previously worked at the Erprobungsstelle in BerlinRechlin , the German equivalent of Wright Field, led a flight of two 335s from Oberpfaffenhofen to Nürnberg-Roth. Watson had obtained their services in the same manner he acquired the services of Karl Baur and Willie Hoffmann. On the seventeenth of June, Hans Padell and the other Dornier 335 test pilot were supposed to be on their way from Nürnberg-Roth to Cherbourg with a P-51 escort. “I had made arrangements with the P-51 outfit across the field to escort the two 335s from Nürnberg-Roth to Cherbourg,”McIntosh said. “After they landed, I looked up and saw the 51s coming over the field. They dipped their wings, we waved at them, and they went home. The 335s and the 51s never got together. Hans Padell later explained to me that they shut down one engine and cruised on the power of the remaining engine to give the 51s a chance to catch up, but they never did. I hooked up with that airplane again when we got them ashore in Newark, after they were degunked and cleaned up. One of our maintenance men working on one of the aircraft set off part of the ejection mechanism. The lower fin of the airplane blew off as well as the propeller . Those explosive charges on the airplane were never properly explained to us. Then Jack Woolams and I worked on the other one to make it flyable. I personally greased the wheels and did all the cockpit Roast Duck at Aalborg [ 280 ] checks. No decision had been made as to who was going to fly the airplane . When the day came I proposed to Jack that we match coins to see who would take the thing up. I wasn’t too wild about flying this machine. I won the flip. I said to Jack, I won. You fly. Something told me to stay out of that airplane. Watson called and told us to get a bird out to Freeman Field in Indiana. ‘Stop in Pittsburgh to refuel if you have to,’ Watson added. Woolams taxied out to the end of the...