Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 247 - The Wooden Nazi Jet Made for Kids

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Joe is joined by Nate to talk about the time the Nazis built a death trap out of wood and thought it would be perfect for the Hitler Youth. Correction: The Gloster Meteor was a jet that also saw limited action in WWll Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/models/aircraft/Heinkel-Salamander.html http://www.aviation-history.com/heinkel/he162.html https://shop.historynet.com/blogs/new-the-latest-from-historynet-com/the-10-worst-fighters-of-world-war-ii https://www.hotcars.com/the-me-262-the-fighter-that-could-have-changed-world-war-2/ Christopher, John (2013). The Race for Hitler's X-Planes.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old crow

today and now back to the show hello and welcome back to lines up by donkeys podcast i don't know why i said welcome back this isn't a series uh i'm'm Joe and with me is Nate. Hello. Hey, Nate. It's a lovely day in London. I thought the sun was going to be out, but actually it's gone behind the clouds again, which is to be expected. It's January here, but also it could be April or July or August. It would still be cloudy and kind of cold here. So lovely day to learn about history and its various disasters. Speaking to you. Yeah, I think my weather is slightly better, though we have entered the smog bowl season in Yerevan, unfortunately. So it's not like super cold, but the smog just kind of settles into the valley that the city's based in. So even if you don't smoke,

it kind of feels like you smoked a half pack of cigarettes if you go for a jog. It kind of sucks. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I recall this in Kabul, same way. Like, oh, all the exhaust, all the wood fires, it's winter, cold weather, whatever. the pressure system basically creates like this uh like a pancake of smog over the city so if that's anything comparable i i know i know what you're going through and yeah that sounds like shit i think i said before on the show like is it smog is it fog the answer is yes pretty much well i mean that's that's why so many armenians moved to los angeles because they figured it was their you know it was physical geography that best resembled the kind of place they knew best it's like if you take a fish out of water, it still has gills. Like you have to drop Armenians in LA so they can, they only can

breathe the certain like baseline level of pollution. Well, you know, it's a country that it's an area that produces lots of wine grapes. You could make brandy. The smog will kill you. It's like, this is basically armenia perfect uh speaking of things that will kill you uh a while back nate we did an episode it was 169 uh for those not uh keeping track home when we talked about the comet uh nazi rocket fighter or it was better known as the nazi rocket death trap that would melt its pilots into a kind of chunky soup due to being powered by toxic chemicals and held together with most, mostly spit and hope. Do any of these exist in real life?

Oh yeah. I was at the national air and space museum and I saw some weird Nazi planes, like mini planes. And I wondered to myself, like, are these the ones on those episodes Joe was talking about I'm a moron I don't remember any of like the nomenclature like the you know alphanumeric

designators for the plane model and whatnot but I saw some things that basically looked like bat wings except they had Nazi shit all over them and all I could think of was like I bet you Joe's done an episode about how this plane will absolutely like put you in a blender if you fly it yeah there's some like the

the wonder of often that they were cranking out most of them only existed on paper ah but but they did get a lot more than you'd think of like jet and rocket design planes literally in the air and they killed so many of their own pilots. Like the comet is probably one of my favorite episodes of all time because like everybody involved in flying this thing, like all the test pilots, the engineers, like it was like, this thing's a fucking death trap.

It go nuts. And like their best test pilot crashed and all of the fluid leaked into the cockpit. And he was literally turned into soup. I mean, fuck you, but also all. And,

uh, this one also existed, um, because everybody loves a good story about a Nazi death trap, flinging some dickhead into the ground and killing them in the worst way possible. Uh, and the Nazis did this a lot.

They're actually very good. Say what you will about the Nazis. They were really good at killing themselves. Um, and they did this a second time. And this time it was purpose built, very good. Say what you will about the Nazis. They were really good at killing themselves. And they did this a second time. And this time, it was purpose-built to be flown by the Hitler youth, which, yeah, teens, preteens, you name it. Yeah. I mean, if you ever want to see some disturbingly homoerotic artwork featuring minors uh definitely go no don't don't go to that discord don't go to that website go to the historical archives featuring posters to recruit for the hitler youth they will typically feature a very very we'll call it stylized artwork of of

you know shirtless boys swinging pickaxes and something to the effect of like all 10 year olds must join the hitler youth or something to that effect uh it's very sus yeah yeah yeah the nazis the ernst room aside like there was definitely that undercurrent there of sort of like all femininity is uh is somehow weakening and therefore we have to be masculine and pure and that means uh being basically like naked mud wrestling each other uh all the murderous ideology aside i mean i don't want i don't want to chalk it up to kind of like a pop psychology explanation, but that definitely was a present thing, you know, with just them in general.

And there was... Look at Mishima. It's like the same thing. Yeah, and there was this... There actually was like this kind of factionalism between like the sort of the gay pagans and the straight pagans amongst the Nazis. Like they were all into this sort of like

Nordic rune ancient religion shit, but some of of them were like and we achieve this by fucking boys and others are like no we we don't want to do that so if you ever google night of the long knives if you want to learn more about the sort of internecine gay versus straight fights in the nazis um but yeah the hitler youth man pretty gross organization across the board like and specifically was like the way i don't know how to describe it like there were some people whose kids didn't whose boys didn't go into the hitler youth but like towards the end it was mandatory and towards the end like it was just you were you were basically reserve army labor at whatever age you were that's one of the things that kind of baffles

me that there are so many hitler youth uh like recruitment posters like because i think it was from like 1940 on maybe even earlier that uh membership was mandatory same with uh i think it was uh i forget the there's a woman's version for girls as well i forget what it's called but like at the it's like having recruitment posters up for the army if you have conscription. It doesn't matter if I want to join or not. I'm going to be there. Come on. I mean, that's why the Pope was in the Hitler Youth.

Yeah. I think the League of German Girls, I looked it up. I'm not going to pretend that I had that in the back of my mind. But yeah, Bund, Deutsch, orel um was the equivalent for girls and so yeah like basically there was there was the child indoctrination thing but also like um if you've ever heard of stories of people i know that this turned out to not be true um but the the german author gunter gross uh that was sort of his like mythology was that he was one of the um kids conscripted into active service in the wehrmacht from the hitler youth so before gunter gross died i think it was revealed that actually he volunteered to join the wehrmacht and I think he was actually in the SS.

And that doesn't obviate the work that he did after the war. He was an East Prussian. He joined, I mean, he didn't join, as I understand, until he was like probably about 16 or 17 at the very end of the war, like the last months of the war. But there was this kind of concept in German, I don't know, like sort of when they talk about like gender, like, you know,

we talk about the silent generation and the baby boomers. And there was a term that they had. I can't remember what it's called and I'm not going to guess because I'm going to sound stupid, but it's sort of like a term for the generation of kids who were at the very, very, like,

I want to say it was like flock helper, like people who were helping load the flat guns. They were like kids at the end very like i i want to say it was like flockhelfer uh like people who were helping load the flat guns they were like kids at the end of the war teenagers at the end of the war and they absolutely were veterans and drafted like forcibly conscripted but it's you know it's obviously a little bit different than being um fucking you know like 25 when you fight in the vermont you know what i mean yeah and i mean not not to mention the Hitler youth fighting formations were all folded into the SS. So like, it's not like these kids, I mean, some of them I'm sure did. It's not like, I mean, they're children, but like, you're kind of guilty by association by being in the SS at that point.

Yeah, absolutely. But also one thing I'd say too, before we move on is just that like, you know, we look at rightfully with disgust at the idea of the Germans, you know, creating a whole formation full of 16-year-olds. But you can join the British Army as a 16-year-old and you are in a regular formation. That is absolutely wild to me. Yes. And I mean, there's a lot of groups here in the UK with stuff like sort of decrutement, anti-military recruitment things. They have pointed out that a lot of research has shown that by every appreciable life metric, kids who enlist

at 16 wind up worse off in life than their peers who don't. Even if they come from the most deprived postcodes in the United Kingdom, it doesn't matter. Enlisting at 16 is undeniably worse for you, but it's absolutely still a thing. Okay. You should do something healthier like crystal meth. They don't have that here, Joee they just have three liter bottles of white lightning of cider that's true i did see those yeah there's some guy in line in front of me at a tesco with like these massive like i didn't know what they were because it doesn't look like it's cider it looks like fucking like cheap soda but yeah it's like it's like four

percent or six percent alcoholic cider and they sell it for like two pounds, 50 pence for a three liter. And it's called something ridiculous too. Yeah, it used to be called White Lightning, but they have like Frosty Jacks is another one. Frosty Jacks sounds like if you beat off in fucking winter formation, but like... A Frosty Jack is when you jerk off in the Dairy Queen freezer. Everybody knows that.

Yeah, man. Yeah, but 100%, you can enlist at 16 in the British military and it's gross. So anyway, with that in mind, let's talk about child planes. So Nate, before we go on, I want you to look up this very lazy death trap, the HE-162 of Volksjäger, which is sometimes known as the salamander because i want you to know what this thing looks like so you said he1602 volks i know how to spell this but volks

162 volksjäger gotcha okay 162 volksjäger yep it's a suggestion uh so to me it looks like a jet that you would draw when you're like 10 years old because you suck at drawing and have never actually seen a jet before. Yes.

If you as a small child, imagine that the way to make a plane fast and good and cool was to put a huge engine in the center of it. Yeah. Like the world's biggest, like it looks like a novelty oversized Remora. It looks like when the big plane flies the space shuttle into low Earth orbit, but it's on a jet, like on a plane the size of what looks like a P-51. And you can imagine all of the problems that comes with that jet placement, and we will talk about that, I promise.

Okay. Yeah. I just see a caption or a headline in the image I looked up on Google, and it says, Volksjäger, the story of the Heinkel He 162, the Nazi wooden jet fighter. And I'm already, I'm on board, big wooden jet fighter with a huge engine in the center of it. What if the spruce goose killed you even faster? Now, like, Franz, what if we slapped the stupid jet engine on top of this plane we had lying around? No, don't bother to make it aerodynamic it's fine fuck those kids you know this is really funny man as an aside and i promise i'll stop doing this this now makes what seemed like one of the more absurd plot points in uh thomas pinchin's gravity's rainbow actually make more sense in which they

can't figure out the perfect mechanism to control the like the the schwarzer rate like the black device the best existing version of the the v2 buzz bomb and so finally like the horrible nazi guy like basically forces his like 16 year old male sex slave to pilot the fucking bomb himself and so like that's what they discover at the end is that the schwarzer rate it's not that they've built the best version of the control system it's just that they basically made like a teen boy be a kamikaze pilot of it well they did do that um there was a german like purpose-made kamikaze thing kind of like the japanese oka but the the rumor is it was never used um but then there is some evidence to suggest they did use it once i mean gravity's rainbow is an insane book gravity's rainbow posits the existence

that german naval fleets didn't have toilets on their ships but rather it just had one ship that was nothing but toilets so like i i understand that a lot of is fictionalized to an extreme degree but like gonna give Lockheed Martin ideas. But you know what I mean, though, is that that seemed kind of out of left field. But then when you described this to me, I'm like, oh, no. I mean, Thomas Pynchon was an aviation engineer. He knew a lot about this stuff. His job was deconstructing things from German documents from the war. So maybe he wasn't too far off. They wanted child kamikazes. war so maybe maybe he wasn't too far off they they wanted child kamikazes yeah i mean that that is one of the few projects that even the nazis were working on they're like guys what

the fuck are we doing yeah it takes a lot to get that reaction from them doesn't it and also like very very different um like there wasn't this suicidal sacrifice culture driven into german soldiers so much so So the people that could still fly jets are like, why don't you just give me a regular jet? Yeah. I'm not going to say that there wasn't a cult of heroic death in German. Oh, for sure there was. Absolutely was. But I think there is a cultural difference as I understand it as regards sort of difference as I understand it as regards sort of a suicide attack. And I mean, without trying to be broad strokes or like Orientalist about it, I think that this was something that was more common

as I understand it in history with the Japanese military. They did absolutely recruit young kids to fly and basically just like they trained them to fly aircraft, but to take off and crash, but not to land. And they would have been... To be fair, by then, young boys are pretty much all they had left. have kamikaze like deliberate suicide attack you know uh airplane pilots but they absolutely you know were manning defensive positions you know on the on the border with with poland with 14 15 year old kids who were getting smoked by soviet artillery so like they knew those kids were going to die so in the end of the at the end of the day it's the same thing yeah the famed German military motto Fuck them kids Now The roots of the Voltaeger

As I'm sure you'd guess has its roots in the Nazis Getting their teeth kicked in as World War II Circled back around to what academics call The finding out part of history In 1943 and into 1944 the tides had turned against the Nazi empire in a way that they would never recover Due to constant intense and systemic Losses on a three front war It a way that they would never recover due to constant intense and systemic losses on a three front war is

made sure they would never be able to replace the losses of bin machinery. This is coupled with the allied bombing campaign that while a horrific war crime did render Germany a little more than a series of small rocks, corpses, and fire. Yes. Um, the German war machine would never be able to turn out anything of quality

like they could before. And rather than seeing the writing on the wall, they had to figure out how to prolong this war as long as possible by slapping shit together in hopes that it would counter the total air superiority of the Allies. I mean, they also did this on the ground as well. But instead of churning out shitty tanks, they churned out badly made over overly complicated tanks that people still like to jerk off to uh that were giant pieces of shit uh but you know it kind of makes sense when you realize like oh they're putting jets together with wood now like the japanese had to do that as well um minus the jet part for them but like yeah like in the in the air it seems like their priorities were in order but on the ground um But the goddamn sun was blotted out by Allied bombers and the we're talking into 1943, air bases in Britain, like Britain was still being attacked, but they could transport stuff over, move it over and attack Germany.

had forced the Germans out of North Africa. Depending on when we're talking in 1943, you can look at the progress made in Italy, but Sicily, I believe by that point, belonged to them. So while they hadn't gotten into France yet, the Allies were able to move shit and both also make stuff in America, and we're talking about the Americans, and then base it in places where it would be safer from attack.

And then you start to look at what they could do with one mission. I used to live in a small town in Germany when I was a little kid. And the nearest city was a town called Pforzheim. And it was completely leveled on one night in February 1945. Now, Pforzheim is a big enough city that I would say it's probably in the 50,000 to 100,000 range. I can't really remember, but it was a decently sized city. And yeah, so imagine a city, you know, it wasn't that big in 1945, but it was still a significant city.

There was munitions and military stuff there. Complete one sortie, basically, if you want to call it that. One mission of like a night raid. And they leveled every structure in the town. Yeah. Yeah. Like this, each one of the bombers could carry literally tons of explosives it's fucking insane you know uh and like the the fighter wing

of the luff waffa was still you know causing quite a bit of losses being a bomber crewman over europe was fucking damn near suicidal depending on what year it was. So they came up with Operation Argument, which I have to say is a very weird name for a military operation. It sounds like it should be followed by something like Operation Mom is Going to Start Dating Again or Operation Dad is Just Tired.

Nothing to do with my home life at all. I like the idea of Operation Argument there. Like operation, we're going to defeat you in the marketplace of ideas. And that's just a code word for fully fucking obliterating everything built by a human in your country. Yeah. It's the bomber equivalent of arguing with college students for the Daily Caller. with college students for the Daily Caller. Now, from the 20th to the 25th of February 1944,

Operation Argument, which is also sometimes known as the Big Week because the last name wasn't lame enough, was an Allied bombing campaign that directly targeted the Luftwaffe's fighter wing in preparation for an Allied invasion of continental Europe and to secure complete and total air superiority. The operation was very effective, and the Luftwaffe, which was already in bad shape, would never come close to recovering ever again. In response to constant, unrelenting bombing, the Luftwaffe began to evolve as well, though it went about as well as you can imagine. Their main goal was pretty simple. How can we attack allied bombers and stop our cities from being transformed to a series of rather bright flashing lights and screaming, screaming noises of dead Nazis.

For starters, there was the allied fighter sweeps that the fighter escorts would, uh, they would have, they'd have to get around those in order to get to the actual bombers, uh, while the bombers are tap dancing their way across Germany. Oftentimes this is done by some fighter pilots who would swoop in and try to

get the escorting fighters to peel off and chase them, which would then open the rest of the bombers up for the rest of the Luftwaffe fighters. However, the Germans still had to contend with gun crews aboard the bombers themselves, which frequently shot down attackers or at the very least kept them at bay long enough for the fighter escorts to come back around and bail them out. They decided the best way to get around this is a slap on some heavier, longer-range guns so they'd be able to inflict damage on a bomber

before the bomber's gun crews could shoot at them. So they went full ACME. First, there was the Sturmbach, which was the most normal thing they would attempt, and that isn't saying much so you take your standard faka wolf 109 sorry one one nine zero with a cannon strapped uh onto it that was so large that the airframe could hardly even carry the goddamn thing in order to make this possible the loofah had to strip away pretty much everything else

other than like the engine engine because it was so heavy that it could stall the plane out if they didn't strip it bare. Kind of like the Doolittle raids so they could carry more bombs, but this was stripping all of the armor off of this thing so they could build a gun around it

like a very shitty A-10. Gotcha, okay. It's so heavy that it makes the plane itself virtually uncontrollable. Someone likened it to driving a car on only rims. So it's so slow and unmaneuverable, it actually had to be escorted by other fighters because there are such sitting ducks

to escort Allied fighter aircraft. His tactic was, of course, called the Sturmgruppe because the Nazis are terribly unimaginative. I do have to admit, though, when this tactic worked, it worked. This is the most working any of these things are going to do. Hundreds of bombers were shot down this way. However, the Sturmbox were eaten alive in much greater numbers. It didn't take long for fighter escorts to know exactly what the fuck this thing was because you can tell from a mile away, like shit that thing's got a cannon attached to it

uh and once the uh they they sighted it everybody gunned for it and they were doomed they couldn't outrun anybody they could they had like no interceptor weapons to defend themselves you're not going to shoot down a fighter aircraft with a giant cannon. And there's no armor on it. So literally one burst from any caliber weapons bringing it down. That sounds, I mean, once again, it sounds cool on paper. And because like on paper, it's being drawn by a grade school boy. And then when you actually put it into practice, you're like, this is, it's like, I don't think anyone anyone actually wants to build metal gear the nuclear armed walking battle tank for a variety of reasons i disagree

but go on well it just seems like this is you know what i mean like like this sounds like it would sound badass on paper but then it seems like everything that you're you've highlighted so far is just a massive massive uh structural problem to the whole device that like makes it very very difficult to operate in a way that doesn't just like well you get to fly one mission and then you never land because you get shot down yep hey you're really you're really uh uh hurting my lobbying for the u.s government to finally build gundam so thanks fuck yeah i mean it would be cool as hell but like you know i i think i think we're probably gonna see stupid robot legs to let you carry a heavier rucksack sooner than any of that like i don't think they're gonna build

mechs yet like that that may be in the future but the closest we'll get to it is they'll definitely be like oh now we can we can make every soldier carry an entire water buffalo in their ruck because they've all got fucking robot assist legs which are going to like totally break down in the field and then you won't be able to fucking keep walking just get fucking crushed exactly the hydraulics fail because like they're made by dyncorp or something like that and then you just immediately get get smooshed like you were hit with jupiter gravity as a joke the only thing i keep thinking of of like the concept of walkers or mechs or anything is how like because that was a tank crewman and some of the worst things that you'd ever like oh track broke right but now you're

piloting a fucking evangelion and like oh the the ava rolled its ankle we have to fucking switch out its foot or something it's like this is fucking miserable yeah this is no fun at all fighting this war in the future against the angels but my ava is made by general dynamics and so like i've got to wait till the guy who makes five hundred thousand dollars a year to be like a tig welder you know fucking back at the fob to like fix my fucked up foot so in the meantime like they're just angels it's just playing scary music angels are completely wiping shit out. And that dude's like, no, sorry, I'm on crew rest. It's like, you're not even flying. You're just a mechanic. He's like, no, I'm on crew rest.

And the fluid that fills the cockpit so you can breathe will absolutely give you cancer. Yes, absolutely. That's non-negotiable. That's in the contract. I have to throw this in there as a get cancer thing. I know that we don't want to get too off track here, but there's a story. It's really fucked up, but it's also extremely true. In the early days of the Global War on Terror, when the US had a base called Karchi Khanabad in Uzbekistan,

also known as K2, we eventually got kicked out of Uzbekistan because even the Bush administration was just like, y'all are a little bit too big on human rights abuses. Christ, I didn't know we did that. Yeah, and the Uzbeks kicked us out. But it's also good they kicked us out because the base where the K2 was on

the site and I am not making this up it was built as a tent city on the site of a Soviet military and then later Uzbek military NBC decon site so the entire base was built on basically a field that was used for nuclear

biological chemical decontamination and so basically in the rainy season spring etc it would be a mud just total mud getting churned everywhere which was fully in fact like you know uh contaminated and then in the dry season it would just be dust blowing everywhere and like the degree to which people who have been who were stationed at k2 in that brief window of like i want to say oh one to like maybe oh five the degree to which those people have cancer is it's unreal and it's like yeah they knew in advance they're like we're literally putting people in like the like hey the depleted uranium fucking scrapyard basically and they're like yeah definitely do some mud wrestling while you're here to blow off steam and then amazed they get cancer yeah going for your morning pt run your teeth fall out you start

shitting blood like it's like my 2001 sony mavica digital camera keeps having these weird white flash spots all over it i don't know what i was like ah you know dust got in the goddamn lens it reminds me there's a there's a family guy bit from years and years ago where uh mayor west rolled around in medical like uh radioactive waste and just got leukemia like he was trying to get superpowers fuck's sake yeah man it's it's really really grim so yes if to recap uh if the germans built a plane that cool, but gets shot down a lot. And also, if America built Evas, you would get cancer from the fluid. And absolutely, you would have to deal with KBR and flu or contractors not wanting to fix Eva,

while the angels just whipped ass around and destroyed everything in the city you were supposed to be protecting. I can't believe Nerve has all these subcontractors. has all these subcontractors now uh now there's the thing after the sternbach is probably my favorite done weapon that actually got rolled out and it's the verfer granat 21 um this was a repurpose and redesign infantry rocket barrage system that they then bolted onto fighters which is the most mad Max shit I have seen. And like, I don't mean to like, you don't have to hand it to the Nazis, but the guy who came up

with this idea fucking rules because it's not like it was Hitler. So we're saying, so basically like primitive MLRS, but bolted onto a plane. Yes, it does.

No, you cannot aim it. That does rule to be honest with you. I mean, because you think about like, all right, in your heart, you know that the AC-130 that has the fucking 105 cannon in it is badass the idea that a plane is flying around using a howitzer and firing it in direct fire mode

and literally like shifting the plane laterally in flight while it's fucking firing because of the recoil that is that's badass that's fucking sick like you put a howitzer in a plane and you shoot it fucking direct fire that is extremely cool so yes it's like eight other weapons too yeah yeah like a mini gun and all sorts of other stuff i don't even remember the munitions on the ac-130 um and so similarly uh a very primitive mlrs on a plane i don't know if it would be effective. Like you said, you can't... It's basically the same level of accuracy as shooting bottle rockets off your fucking Mongoose bike

when you're 12 years old. But much like that, it is badass. It is the Nazi version of a green shell from Mario Kart. You just have to point it and hope for the best. Now, the idea was that they would be able to launch rockets from outside the cone of fire coming from the bombers and get the hell out of there each plane could only carry two of the oversized rockets and hypothetically they would fire them

off really really fast and then haul ass small problem though these things were not meant to be launched from a moving aircraft for starters as we point out these things were not meant to be launched from a moving aircraft. For starters, as we point out, these things were not meant for planes, so the launchers were huge. Bolt two of these onto the underside of a plane and suddenly, your plane doesn't fly so well. They managed to solve 50% of this problem by having the pilot jettison the rocket

tubes after firing. So at least on their way away from shooting at the bombers, they could actually control their plane, but they still had to get on target and it made it pain in the ass. And the huge rocket pods were a dead giveaway to escort aircraft. So it was like a giant sign that like, for the love of God,

shoot me down first. That's extremely fun. Like this is something like, I always thought that it was stupid in those like, you know, vertical scrolling arcade games like 1942 or whatever, where there would be fantasy versions of World War II aircraft. And you would have these kinds of things like the plane with the big, dumb, huge weapon, but it's also incredibly vulnerable. I didn't realize that was based on a true story.

Oh, yeah. As for the rockets themselves, they had such low velocity that they were super slow. And when they got launched from the plane, they would almost immediately drop and plummet back down to Earth. Even after trying to install some mid-air stabilizer fins, it didn't do much to counter this because the rocket itself was meant to be fired from a stationary ground launcher. Also, there was no way to aim them. Like I said, the pilot just had to eye fuck his plane in the general direction of a moving bomber and let these rockets rip and hope for the best. The rockets would explode on a time delay fuse that was preset by ammo technicians.

It could not be adjusted while flying. So on top of flinging the rockets akimbo into the distance, he had to time it again with two moving targets wait you couldn't adjust the time you you could you time it in the sense of you're firing it and you know how much time it's got but like you don't get to set the time delay so like no just the guy on the ground does it so you're like god i hope i'm in 30 seconds range or whatever as like fucking you know you know aces high or just shredding the fuck out of you with machine guns or like just hitting the that allied bomber with like a tactical bonk because the missile

of the rocket isn't armed it just bounces off you know honestly i feel as though a nazi version of mario kart would actually make sense within the nazi ideology because like it classifies all different groups of people as animals and that you're basically good or bad depending on what kind of animal you are. So I would be terrified at what the Nazis would come up with to be the equivalent of the blue shell. But I absolutely think the Nazis would see Mario Kart and be like, yep, this is correct. There are good and bad races and some of them are superior to others. Mario Kart is, in its own right, part of the Nazi Weltanschauung. And I feel as though we should probably purge all of this from our culture at large, because I don't think it's good for people to think that some people are just

big mushroom humans that are weak and incapable you know incapable of standing up to huge turtles with spikes coming out of their backs i'm more of a yoshi guy and i don't know what that says about me uh i i'm worried i'm falling uh somewhere below uh because he's a dinosaur that people ride for fun yeah exactly that's not a good sign no it's really not i mean he like literally like like epistemologically is an intermatch so like that's not looking good for you joe story of my life uh they attempted to fix the velocity problem by mounting the rockets an angle so they'd fire straight up as they possibly could which would then of course fire exhaust directly into the face of the pilot blinding them for a few seconds

insane so like they basically are like you have to go and do like a hedgehog quill attack you have to fly under shit fire it straight up this is amazing fucking space invaders in an actual combat zone legitimately man this is the kind of thing like there was a story recently uh about a japanese hacker who created like a ransomware thing where you had to basically get this impossible score in what was described as a bullet hell game. And I didn't know what a bullet hell game was. So I went and looked at this game that he basically forced you to play on your computer and before you could get your computer back. And it's impossible. It's just endless bullets flying everywhere in just bizarre geometric patterns. And's like that's I see why they did this in this game they learned about this German

plane and we're like oh yeah you have to shoot you have to fly under shit and shoot perfectly upwards and get hit by your own back blast while flying also it massively alters your trajectory and like the aerodynamics of your aircraft I imagine when they fired it like it like

throws the plane off too. And balance is very important when you're flying a plane. You kind of don't want to be unbalanced. Seeing is, yeah. You can't see through the exhaust while flying towards airborne bullet hell.

Now, I could find claims that at least 10 bombers were taken out directly with rockets, with pilots realizing their limitations, and instead switching to use them to burst midair and disperse tightly packed together fighter escorts and bombers, at which point they would conduct normal gun runs on the bombers with other fighters. However, this still led them into contending with escorts and bomber gun crews, which meant the entire plan was completely pointless and with that they rolled out the nazis they rolled out the emergency fighter

program which is never a good sign with a name like that this happened around the time that the nazis were rolling out the famed fighter jet of the war the me262 which was kind of a cluster fuck of different mechanical problems as as you can imagine, of rolling out a fighter jet in the 1940s and making it mostly slave labor in caves. But it was very easy to be the best at something when you

only jet with combat experience during the war. The US did put out the P-80 shooting star in time to get it to Italy, but I never actually saw combat until the Korean War. So when you're in a class of your own, it's very easy to win. Now, one of the major drawbacks of the Me 262,

of which there were many, is that it was really hard to build. So much so that it was entirely impractical for Germany to try to roll it out in large numbers while the entire country fell apart around them. For example, the 262 required highly advanced materials that were already in short supply, and thousands of skilled man-hours to build correctly, which they didn't have any of those left either.

The engine had a very short service life due to the fact that engineering was short on quality parts and corners were cut, requiring frequent overhauls to the jet engines, meaning the planes couldn't even be used that often and made them a resource beast in the military that just didn't have resources anymore.

However, despite all of this, Lieutenant General Adolf Galland wanted the 262 to be the country's top priority in regards to air power, thinking that they would be able to crank them out fast enough to turn the tides of the war, which spoiler alert, that didn't work out. Yeah. I was thinking about this and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but like when you made the comment about, they were able to take out 10 bombers this way with a shoot upwards, hedgehog gun.

And it's like, great. Okay. You knocked out 10 bombers. Like they were building tens of thousands of these fucking things. Like you're not really inflicting a death blow on allied capacity. Like losing 10 bombers would be a death blow to German capacity at this point in the war, but not really to the allies.

Yeah, destroying 10 allied bombers, I think would cost six hours at a Detroit factory. Yeah, you're only 15 minutes into the movie Memphis Belle at that point. Now, however, Hitler agreed about the 262 because he was a fucking idiot and he was a sucker for wonder weapons. However, Albert Speer, the

war armaments minister, pointed out that we need something else while we wait for the 262s to start miraculously rolling off the slave assembly lines. And that's where the emergency fighter program comes in. The German Ministry of Aviation sent out a request proposal for the

stopgap fighter jets on September 8th, 1944 to every company in Germany that could still feasibly make an aircraft. This included Messerschmitt, Junkers, Blumenfoss, and Heinkel. Not surprisingly, Messerschmitt wanted nothing to do with it because they had enough problems with the 262. Junkers bowed out as well, and Blumen Voss submitted a design for the P211, which was so complicated and hard to build, it was rejected immediately, though noted for being significantly better than the Heinkel design. So, of course, Heinkel wins by default, which is always a good sign of building a jet with no budget or materials. I can't imagine like, oh, so we picked

the best design, right? No. No, we didn't. We just got one of the submissions, yes. That's it. That was the only submission that we could feasibly build because it was a piece of shit. Heinkel had already designed what

they'd been working on for a few months, though it only existed on paper. And Heinkel seemed to hate Messerschmitt and their 262 because in a paper presented in July of 1944, it directly roasted it for its various flaws, namely how hard it was to fly and its terrible fuel consumption rate. So he solved this by creating a jet that was, theoretically at least, so stupid easy to fly, it would require virtually no instrumentations or equipment. And that would weigh more and therefore drag down fuel economy. Some would say, so easy a child could fly it. Uh-oh. I never like it when it's made that easy. I think that may be a bad thing. No, the problem is Heinkel was not correct about this. It's still a jet. It's going to be hard to

fly. And because the 262 is sucking up all the valuable jet pieces, the entire thing would be made out of plywood supported by the most minimal amount of metal possible to save resources, minus the cartoonishly large jet engine that'd be slapped on the top of the thing. Wait. So that's basically... That's the origin, then, is the design was proposed and accepted accepted and then they changed it and threw the fucking jet on top? No, the jet was always on top.

Yeah. And another fun thing about design, like we looked at a picture of it, you'll notice the jet intake is directly behind the cockpit. That means you cannot bail out or you'll die. You'll be sucked into the engine and churned into pudding. Wow, i did not think of that they did eventually fit an explosive ejection chair for the pilot uh so it would shoot them clear of the the jet intake but it was considered so dangerous that nobody tested it and nobody should ever use it so it's safer to be sucked into a jet engine wow they did they did find

they did find one way uh hypothetically of course that a pilot could bail out and that is assuming your jet isn't uh heavily damaged to the point you lose control of the engine you have to completely power down the jet engine and then jump out uh which i'm sure you'll be doing as you're plummeting towards the earth after getting shot by an allied fighter. Yeah. You know, something to people who may not know this, civilian listeners or people who weren't airborne, for example, it's not the same as flying a jet, for example, different altitude. But just to give you an example of call it the ratio, when you're jumping out of an aircraft, a static line jump for doing your basic military parachute operations, you're jumping in training,

you're jumping at like, I want to say 1500 feet or 1250 feet. And then typically in combat operations, it would be like 1000 feet. But at 1250 feet, you have about 60 seconds from the typical opening shock, your parachute opening up to when you touch the ground. But if your parachute fails to open it, you have six seconds. And if you don't react within four seconds, you probably will not get your reserve parachute open in time for it to catch enough air to slow you down before you hit the ground. The reason why they train you nonstopstop in airborne school of like 1 000 2 000 3 000 4 000 or fucking pull your pull your reserve is the fact that uh you you just you if you don't make

that decision automatically you're gonna fucking hit the ground and die and so i just think about that with a jet like this is a lot of the stuff's experimental. You know, you're in fucking combat. So, like, there's not a lot of sort of gutter guards kind of directing you towards where you're supposed to be going. It's kind of free-for-all. And you would have to make the decision to power down your engine to safely eject before you hit the ground.

Like, I don't really think that's going to happen. Yeah, you're in a wooden box going 500 miles an hour rocketing towards the earth good time to make some quick decisions and you basically have uh you know just just just for every for every thousand feet or so above uh ground level you're at just think you have about six seconds for every thousand feet so yeah that's gonna be covered very quickly yeah i bet it will especially when you're fucking dogfighting. Like, you know what I mean?

Obviously, some of that is high altitude, but some of it's not. And yeah, exactly. Now, the jet was officially dubbed the HE-162 because they actually named it that. They knew the Allies would eventually find out about it. It's kind of like when they named SEAL Team 6. It's because they wanted the Soviets to believe there was like five more of them at the time or whatever uh they wanted

them to think that there were so many jets in uh production that they're up to 162 um it didn't work the allies saw through it quite immediately because they're like they can't possibly build that many jets that's stupid but they tried um and it went from a you know a a design on a fucking bar room napkin to a prototype in 74 days which is the build quality i like in my jets yeah 74 days i'm sure they ironed out all the kinks like will the wings fall off if i turn uh now, it weighed just over 6,000 pounds. Fully one-third of it was plywood because it was the only resource the government said they could use as much of as they wanted.

And the first test flight was made December 6th by Gothard Peter, and he reached 500 miles an hour, which is only 50 miles an hour slower than the 262 everything went great until he flew it a second time ah i see there was tearing ass uh right in front of lufwafa officials and made a high speed turn something that you know all judges should be able to do however this jet is made out of wood and the left wing just tore the fuck off it cart wheeled into the ground exploded and killed him I see yeah that sounds really

bad you kind of don't want your plane that's going 550 miles an hour 500 miles an hour to just simply rip apart when you turn it I feel as though that would be kind of in front of everyone in front of everyone all

of the Luftwaffe like top brass were there to see him die. Oh, so it's basically any given air show at any given day. Yes. Yeah, that is correct. Now, what do you think the cause of this crash was? Besides the fact it's made out of wood. I am going to guess that the plane was like, structural integrity was damaged to so great a degree from that first flight

that it wouldn't have been safe to fly in any other way. Basically, the construction itself, what it's made of, is such that it degrades the materials by flying it at all. That is mostly correct. So it turned out nobody at Heinkel had thought to test if the load-bearing wood glue that held the wings on would work at 500 miles an hour.

Oh my load-bearing wood glue. Yeah. The wings were glued on. You know, it's like we make jokes about stupid military occupational safe like safety health hazard things but god i mean go figure fucking you know uh famous for for for slave labor and extermination camps the nazis aren't really good on osha shit but like every time you encounter something like new is like a surprise to you, something you haven't read before. You're just like, damn, you guys really just didn't give a shit.

I imagine Nazi OSHA would be like the worst kind. Oh, that wood glue is too strong. You need to make a week. It's like, oh, the fumes in this factory are killing enough slave laborers. Yeah. Now, whoops. Who would have thought that wood glue and fucking jets don't mix? Now, whoops, who would have thought that wood glue and fucking jets don't mix?

It was also discovered that the glue they were using was so acidic due to the lack of resources that it was pretty much the only glue that they could use, that when they applied it, not only would it fail at high speeds, it ate the wood. It, like, burned away the wood. However, they had no other options. they just didn't bother fixing it it didn't stop anyone after the second flight killed the only man to fly it the nazis said fuck it and began production though with the engine throttled down to only go 310 miles an hour so he could keep using the wood glue which again was eating the wood. But as they began to build it, people realized that there's a lot of other problems as well. For one, you shouldn't build jets out of wood and slap a giant engine on top of it. Neither pitch nor yaw could be controlled at high speeds.

This is because when it even hit 300 miles an hour, the wood would warp and twist under pressure, which is bad. Yeah. Despite the fact that fuel economy was a major part of the design, it could still only fly for about 30 minutes because its engine had terrible acceleration, required a long runway,

and that's not something that Germany had a lot more of now due to all the bombs. You know, it's funny because it's like the Spruce Goose is insane, but the whole concept with the Spruce Goose is that you have this gigantic wooden prop plane that can carry a lot of cargo. It's not going to be flying insane fast speeds. It's not going to be banking to taking acrobatic turns.

It's just like, can it fly safely? Okay, now load it up with as much shit as you possibly can. It was like the AN-224 of its day. an-224 of its day um and so it's like you understand the concept given the time it was dreamed up but like it wasn't meant to be a stand-in for something that can only operate safely if it's made out of metal that's you know bolted welded etc together so like i used to joke sometimes when i'd see people riding those like e-scooters that you can rent on apps, when I see them riding around London... Oh, yeah. I fucking hate those things.

Oh, yeah. They're so stupid. I was always like, in a way, I can't hate people too much for riding them because riding those in traffic in London feels like, hey, I built a plane out of balsa wood and I'm going to fly across the Atlantic Ocean with it. But see, I use that as a metaphor because it sounded absurd. I didn't realize that Nazis had actually done that. Kind of, yeah. You know, one of the things that's always kind of

made me wonder about those scooters is like, who does maintenance on them? Like, we have those here as well. And one of my friends was riding them. The fucking handlebars just came off and he just plummeted into the street. Like, had to go to the hospital. He's fine.

But like, yeah. They go fast as hell. Yeah, like, I see like night crews. Yeah, they do. I see like night crews coming out and picking up the rechargeable bikes, like the e-assist bikes around in London. But I think about that too. It's like, okay, if I'm riding an e-assist bike and it fails, like, it's annoying because

they're really heavy if they're not powered but if i'm riding a e-scooter and it fails it's like you just i don't know like it's basically oh whoops the wings fell off of my plane guess i'm gonna fucking i'm gonna get on my icarus shit you know like you're gonna hit the road really hard i just getting road pilled and by that i mean flying into the road because my burn scooter fell apart yeah flying into the road and by that I mean flying into the road because my burn scooter fell apart yeah flying into the road and being condensed and compacted into the shape of a pill yeah because like my friend texted me he's like bro when the scooter's handles came off I was like what the fuck are you talking about he sent me a picture I guess he was going because the

first of all I'm sure most people listening have never been to this country, but this country is not conducive to using anything on the sidewalks because you have to do parkour sometimes because it's a city that's a thousand years old on top of like bad Soviet public engineering. So the sidewalks are all different levels. Like staircases have no guardrails whatsoever, and they will just be in the middle of the sidewalk. And if you're not paying attention, you'll just fall into someone's apartment. The idea that you're going to get on a scooter and go rip an ass out of one of these things is fucking insane to me. Yeah. Jesus.

That truly is asking to die the dumbest way possible. Yeah. I mean, I know we're talking about another dumb way to die in the Luftwaffe in the 1940s. But yeah, when I see those things, I'm just... I don't know. I one time almost got wiped out on a bike trail, like a paved bike path here in London by what appeared to be a kid, probably like 16, 17-year-old girl in a cat suit on one of those scooters. She was checking her phone and just wasn't paying attention, had drifted into the oncoming lane. And I was like, yo, yo, yo, what the fuck? And she dodged a little and I had to really swerve to avoid getting hit by her shoulder. And I was just like, none of these words are in the Torah. This shouldn't be allowed.

You just got taken out by a cat girl on a scooter. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know what's more embarrassing, being a cyclist, having to yell at people. Because let's be honest, there's nothing cool about being a cyclist who's yelling. You just seem like a huge, weird baby because cycling is inherently comic. And cycling is how I get around. I'm allowed to say that. Or getting killed by a teen girl in a catsuit on an electric scooter because you didn't want to be the angry cyclist. So you just got fucking plowed, like just completely obliterated. I mean, I...

It's unfortunate because I wish you would have saved this story until the questions from the Legion that I have for this episode. Actually, you probably have a better story because you were in the army as well. You almost certainly do. But I was thinking about this. That's the mentality of the Luftwaffe pilot. Like if you complain, you basically have a better story because you were in the army as well you almost certainly but i was thinking about this that's the mentality of the luffa pilot like if you if you complain you basically are a traitor and you get you you're not allowed to complain but like if you get in the plane it's gonna kill you so basically you you aren't allowed to yell at the girl in the

catsuit you just have to get fucking obliterated i i'm i'm not sure who the girl the catsuit here is it hitler yeah basically basically, basically the entire German industrial economy is now the girl in the cat suit checking a smartphone, riding the e-scooter on the cable street cycle path just north of the river in London. Oh, God. Whenever we have an episode together, we come up with the most cursed fucking lore on Earth.

This happened to me, I swear lore on earth this happened to me i swear to god this happened to me like i just last time it was christopher of benoit no it's this hey now we got cat girl hitler christopher of benoit okay absolutely he was a page he was a squire he had to do all the weird prayer shit he got knighted uh and yes now we have basically have cat suit hit. God damn it. Now, to be fair, all of these problems that we're talking about with the salamander, the Voltaeger, is a kind of hard work quality and craftsmanship you would expect to get when you're putting together a jet fighter out of wood and glue at an underground slave

factory. The plane was designed with twin 30 millimeter cannons in mind to be modded to the nose. However, when they install them and took them out to the range and fired them, it shattered the front of the plane because again, it is wood.

So they are downgraded to 20 millimeters. And it was also discovered during testing that if a pilot inverted the jet for any reason, the engine would die and then you would plummet to the ground and crash. Okay. So no barrel rolls.

No barrel rolls, no inversions, which means no acrobatic swoopy dogfighter turns that you would presume you'd want to be able to take advantage of the plane's capabilities to do. And I'm presuming the nose exploded from 30, probably just from the overpressure. Just like... I think from just recoil or something. Yeah, that's what I was going to guess. Like literally just firing that many explosively detonated rounds just caused the wood to explode.

It's like, it's basically, this is the equivalent of, you put the soup in the container in the microwave for four minutes instead of three and it fucking exploded. But it's the front of a warplane. To be fair, that soup explosion is what most of these pilots would end up looking like at the end of their service now i i would hate to be the pilot that uh that figured out the whole upside down thing he's like oh i'm gonna do a sick barrel roll oh god oh fuck i feel like yeah you you aren't really the pilot who figures it out so much as like you're the example that is used in the in the Nazi

OSHA like movie reel oh no my balsa wood has exploded no my plane is fallen I will die why did I dare this cat girl no

no dieses cat girl get out god damn it now i do speak german just not very well anymore i used to look at as a kid like it was my first language but like i don't fucking speak and so if that was wrong i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm trying i think germany is our number one non english-speaking uh listener base so they will let me know, I'm sure. I pronounce enough things in German bad enough to know that they will tell us. Now, with a pilot that figured out that turning upside down would kill him also found something else that you really don't want to find out about a jet.

It doesn't glide. Even though it was modeled after literal gliders, much like the comet, it would not glide. It fell out of the sky like a rock. But why? It was made of wood. I think the engine threw off its center of gravity. And also, they couldn't control the pitch or the yaw. Oh, God, yeah.

So, wait, if you couldn't control the pitch, I don't really understand planes that well. But like, so I understand. I don't either. Is that is that is to suggest like, that basically, you only could control, I don't know, like, one axis of movement, like you were no longer a jet as much as you were an unguided missile. Right. Okay. I see. So what you're saying, it's not that you couldn't control it at all, but it's just like at a certain speed, you had to really slow down before you could turn in any way. Yeah. And remember, it's already leveled off at 300 miles an hour, because if it goes any faster, it'll just hit a crate. This plane rules so hard, man. Seriously. This is genuinely like you made a plane out of box tops and it's now time to fight a war with it. Now, this is around the same time that Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering walked his fat ass into the

middle of all this and decided, wow, this plane would be perfect for children, specifically the Hitler youth. And nobody is sure why he thought that. And that is not who Heinkel designed this for. He designed it for unskilled pilots because when you know it Germany was running out of those so the there's like okay it's kids and this is because Heinkel talked about how simple it was to fly people had no idea about jets in general like Goring whose flying experiences in world war one suggested even glider or student pilot should be able to fly this jet

effectively and would require little to no training, despite the fact it has already killed so many test pilots. Yeah. It's like, if your pilot experience was in World War I, then you definitely would go into it with this sort of ethos. Because back in those days, it was just sort of like, well, I think this thing achieves lift maybe you can just like throw a novelty oversized anvil at the enemy trench from this um like make sure that you don't uh you don't hold the anvil out too long because shifting the center of mass will cause the plane to just plummet to the earth because it's made out of matchsticks and canvas so like yeah i could imagine that a guy who'd only ever done red baron shit would probably not understand but you'd like i mean i imagine that a guy who'd only ever done red baron shit would

probably not understand but you'd like i mean i guess this thing right you'd like to think someone would brief him up on it but then you realize like the whole taxonomy of like the nazi system was that like the guy was in charge because of whatever ideology and you know his position within the party and so it was just no, you don't get to tell Herman Goering that it's not a good idea to have children fly a plane. When we said it was simple, we didn't mean that simple. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why Albert Speer was trying to get around building so many 262s is because he knew it was stupid and he had to exploit away around it without telling Hitler he was wrong. Same with Herman Goring.

Like literally everybody who touched this jet knew, knew immediately how bad of an idea it was to put children behind the sticks of this thing. Yeah. But it was harder than hell to fly. Hitler will start yelling in his bunker. Like, you know, one of the things that's always kind of been curious to me, I love that movie.

It's very good. But what was the casting call like? Like, hey, I can't forget the actor's name, but I can't remember the actor's name. It was like, you kind of look like Hitler. Would you like to try out? Bruno Gans. I think he was Austrian, too. But the thing about it is, I remember reading about this, that it was kind of, that was

kind of a taboo in German cinema at the time. Like not in everywhere in the world, obviously, but like for German films, you know, written, produced, shot in Germany, they didn't cast people to play Hitler. Having someone be Hitler was kind of like a taboo for actors in general. And so they would just use like historical footage of Hitler to represent whatever was going on in the plot um and so they just use a cut in of like uh an anime character for hitler yeah and so uh and so if i remember correctly also like with bruno guns like the real struggle was that like hitler's speaking delivery voice was very different from the way

that he talked normally because he had like a really strong, like working class Austrian accent and Austrian accents are nuts. And so he, uh, but they found like, are they some footage from like a, like a secret recording of Hitler's Finland. Yeah. And then that was like,

Oh, this is what Hitler's actual speaking voice was like. So yeah, I mean, Bruno guns, I'd seen Bruno guns and other films before. Like it's just, it was like a huge role for him.

And I think that movie is genuinely really good. But it's just, it was kind of like a watershed moment, I think, to be like, we have our A-list actor and he's playing Hitler. And it's like, I just don't think that, I mean, obviously, I left Germany as a kid, but that's what it was like. In terms of, there was definitely a fine of like taboos and shit that like you didn't cross with that stuff or polite company didn't cross them whereas like your neighbors would be flying the confederate flag the u.s confederate flag but they're like guess what

this actually means oh yeah of course that means states rights nate everybody does that god yeah they're probably all reichsburgers or something now uh this the the the 162 is harder than hell to fly a fact not made easier by the lack of instrumentation that is normally around to make things easier for a pilot however the hitler youth would need training gliders to prepare themselves for flying the 162 and after that thought, it would be three weeks of training at most before you jump in this rocket.

Ah. Yeah. In case you want to know how well this is going, it turns out, it was the same training gliders that were being used

to train comet pilots, which, from our previous episode, we know does not end well. Also, I should point out, three weeks ended up being a charitable

amount of time because it would actually be way less. Whatever amount of time you're thinking, I promise it is less than that. That's really unfortunate. Hitler Youth pilots learned to use gliders. The Luftwaffe began to cobble together from regular units. In February, the first operational unit of 162s was organized, made up of regular fighter pilots, but those who had never handled a jet before.

And remember, these are already pilots who had their training hacked to pieces due to all the other pilots dying. So at best, they walked into this with like 25% of the training that they would have received three years earlier. 100 pilots were chosen, split into groups of 50 apiece, and given a grand total, wait for it, 20 minutes of on the ground training before being blessed off for operations oh my god i was gonna make a joke about like oh three weeks they've got the airborne school model just rocking and rolling but like 20 minutes all right i mean and it was literally just to teach them how to take off there was no trainer aircraft nothing it was like flip these switches aim how to take off. There was no trainer aircraft, nothing. It was like, flip these switches, aim it that way.

Don't hit the trees. Oh, God. I mean... They still didn't have enough pilots, though. So they had to fill this gap. You want to guess where they found these people at? Injured soldiers, the disabled, the elderly, kids who were too

young to even be in high school, I don't know, people from punishment battalions? You tell me. All of the above. Anybody who happened to be nearby. One guy had been an anti-aircraft gun operator before being said, congratulations,

you're a pilot. Here's how you start this thing. Aim it that way he crashed directly into the trees when he tried to take off because this might shock you he did not know how to fly a plane this happened constantly firsthand accounts of pilots note that when pilots were given a 162 they immediately crashed it one way or another either because of the obvious lack of training or because the one death trap they've been flying came apart at the seams and they plummeted to Earth like a fucking meteor. Of these 65 factory test pilots who got to fly,

five survived. None of them were lost in combat. What's killing me about this is that surely the Germans of all people would be able to identify that even given the limited constraints they were operating under, this is inefficient. You spend a lot of time building these fucking things. You certainly spend more time building them, even if they're rushed,

than a guy spends immediately crashing it the first time it rolls down a runway. Yeah. I mean, this is a fatality level that I think is much worse than the comet. Yeah, I mean, this is a fatality level that I think is much worse than the comet. But none of these, these are just test factory pilots. None of these were lost in combat because we haven't gotten to that point yet. All of them crashed just figuring out how to get the fucking thing to work. They're crashing so many jets. Heinkel couldn't build them fast enough to get them to units that were actually trying to use them. The German government ordered them to build 1,000 of these per month.

Yeah, because the German government is dumb. A number so unrealistic, they never even built half of that number during the rest of the war, building about 320 of these. Though only 200 at most were considered airworthy and passed their very rudimentary quality

checks. I don't know how bad the build quality has to be for the Nazi QA guys in 1945 to be like, ooh, we can't use this one. Okay, it's too bad. We need to get some more glue. Yeah, that's shocking. I mean, it's genuinely shocking.

Like we make jokes, we riff, you know, it's fun. We love this podcast. But that is genuinely a shock to hear. Yeah, they just didn't give a fuck i mean that isn't to say that the 162 didn't claim some victories well victory it claimed a single victory on april 19th uh a captured raf fighter pilot uh claimed that during interrogation that he had been shot down by a jet aircraft and the 162 unit commander claimed credit in the name of a Hitler youth cadet who did not get to bask in his glory

because immediately after shooting down this fighter plane his jet engine stalled out and he crashed to earth and died so that was it there was allegedly one other confirmed shoot down by a 162 when a pilot claimed to have shot

down a de Havilland Mosquito, which was confirmed by two other pilots. However, an anti-aircraft battery on the ground had actually shot it down and claimed that they had recorded it on video. I see. So that one gets the old Barry Bonds asterisk next to it. Yeah, that sucks, man. That really sucks.

I mean, part of me thinks to myself, imagine if you were the one guy who was confirmed shot down by this piece of shit. Like, imagine how much of just everyone being like,

dude, for real. They literally like let a kid build a model plane and it shot you down. Yeah. Like, how did you graduate

from fighter school or whatever and get slapped out of the sky by a kid with 20 minutes of training flying like a fucking rocket toboggan? I mean, to be fair, like, let's not be too hard on the poor guy. Because, I mean, nowadays, pilots are constantly being killed because the company they fly for didn't buy the extra DLC from Boeing. So like... The safety DLC, of course. So I mean, like, dumber things have happened in

aviation oh dumber things will continue to happen in aviation it's like when the the u.s built a plane then sold it to germany and it just kept crashing repeatedly like oh yeah i think the wings are too short whoops which one was that uh fuck i can't remember what it's called now it's not the shooting star 162's flew missions all the way until the end of the war still taking off from their base until may 5th 1945 when the runway was finally captured by the british and then the war ended on the 8th in all around one month of real combat time the 162 is a miserable failure on every level it claimed one plane for sure at the cost of at minimum 70 dead pilots. If we count both the test group and the operational units, all of them died from some acme-ass plane crash that may have been avoided if someone spent just a little bit more money on glue.

After the war, the British and American and French air forces captured the remaining 162s and flew some of them, which certainly went better than when they tried to fly a comet. and flew some of them, which certainly went better than when they tried to fly a comet. British test pilot Captain Eric Brown, a guy with the nickname Winkle for some reason. His name is Eric Winkle Brown. That's got to be sexual. I'm sorry. It's British. I know sometimes we're unfair and ganging up on the British, even if I don't believe you can be unfair against them.

But that's got to be sexual. Yeah, especially in the military. He judged the jet, an innovative concept that was quite tricky to operate, which is the normal British toning down of seriousness. Yeah, that's like British understatement for like, you are going

to die. Yeah. I mean, he called it a quote, unforgiving airplane, which is another one of those Britishisms. Like, ah, ah yes it's quite tricky especially that time an acidic glue melted through the cheap plywood and burnt into my eyes it was jolly good fun exactly it's like oh it's fine not bad you know no fuss we'll muddle through and it's like just arms and legs being fucking forcibly removed it's awful everything is on fire exactly in case you want to go and look at one of these death traps in person, you can, depending on where you live.

There are several in the UK, France, and the US. The US has two at the Smithsonian, another in Chino, California, I assume for robbing banks. And there's one in Canada at the Aviation Museum. So if you want a plane to absolutely not steal because it will kill you, that's the plane for you. So I'm curious if people think that this is dumber than the than the comet was at this point but that is the the nazi jet fighter for kids well you know what

i mean in a way i wondered if the bat wings at the air and space museum were the ones you were going to talk about so in a way i'm like no this is dumber and worse, but then the balsa wood, the wood eating glue, the glued on wings, let total lack of control past a certain speed. Uh, I mean, so much of this stuff is just,

it's a delight. I mean, I wouldn't want to have to fly it. It sucks. It's kind of sad, but it's also very funny. You only use it once. I mean,

maybe you might have get to take off like half of everybody else. I mean, fire and forget is a very versatile term. So, Nate, we do this thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If anybody would like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can donate to the show, ask us on Discord, Patreon,

and we'll answer it. This person asks, what's the dumbest way you've ever hurt yourself? I. i once got a second degree burn from making mashed potatoes wow well done okay yeah well joe do you know off the top of your head because i mean i definitely have some good ones uh i once broke my foot uh because i got really i was quite young i was like pre-teen maybe uh because there's some kid in the neighborhood that was pissing me off and he was rode by in his bike uh his bicycle and I ran up and kicked the tire which is a supremely bad idea like it bent my foot in the wrong direction just

annihilated it fuck shit did he at least fall off his bike no he just rode away laughing oh Jesus that sucks so bad because you like got humiliated and then didn't hurt him either yeah that's definitely a crowning achievement of young joseph's life what's the stupidest way i ever got hurt um you know it's funny because like you could if you can find it i mean in terms of it being a close call the absolute stupidest thing that i to this day I cannot believe I did no one even dared me to do it I just said I'm gonna do this I think it's funny I was in I was in uh Oakland Michigan for a swim meet when I was in a club swimmer when I was in high school condolences yeah Oakland County or Oakland Oakland the town I think is what it's called but it's definitely Oakland County it's

like right north of Wayne County yeah it's actually like fine it. It was fine. It just seemed kind of suburban-ish. It was like there was some small regional university that had an Olympic distance, big pool, natatorium. And so they were having some conference for swim clubs in the Midwest there. So we got put up in a shitty Ramada Inn or something in Oakland. And they had a pool and a kiddie pool. And us being moron teenagers was like nothing to do. There was nothing around there. It was like in a strip mall. So we came back from the meet. I think they had gotten us food and we just hang out in the rooms.

But you got to remember, this was pre-smartphones, pre-portable DVD players. So we basically had the TVs in the room and our CD players, like our Discman CD players and stuff. But this is 2001, pre-9-11, of course, Halcyon days. And I went down to the pool with my friends, the kids that I was in the same room with. So we were sleeping in the same room and I would have probably been 16 and they would have been 15 16 also and i was like i'm gonna lane dive into the kiddie pool now if you know what it's from swimming lane dive it's like you we jump in ways where you think we're gonna hurt ourselves but like you don't have to have water that fucking deep to do a lane dive like if you know what you're doing like the way you move your

body and stuff you hit the water you arc outwards and like you know so i can i wouldn't want to fuck around with it now because i'm bigger and fatter and slower and easily injured but like at 16 yeah you jump into fucking two feet of water three feet of water whatever like you can do fine anyway i don't know how deep this kiddie pool was but it wasn't very deep and i did and i successfully lane dived into it but i scraped the fuck out of my face and i think about it this day because she's like my my face scraped the bottom of the pool and it's like i had like road rash from my face all the way down my nose no i was fine it was just a scrape like people were like what happened i was like oh i bumped a door or some shit but if that had gone sideways like two inches i would fucking be dead oh yeah absolutely would just be like up nate died in the fucking pool in august 2001 or july 2001 died in a kiddie pool died in a kiddie pool in oakland michigan because no one even Oh, yeah. To this day, that wasn't a severe injury at all. It genuinely wasn't. But I could have fucked my teeth up. I could have broken my nose.

I could have gotten brain damage. I could have died. There's so many ways I could have died or hurt myself severely. Yeah, absolutely. I cannot fucking to this day believe I did that shit, dude. And so, a little bit of a scrape, but could have been so much worse. Absolutely. The concept of maybe someday being a parent that eventually you have a teenage child.

Like, I'm not worried about them fucking and getting fucking pregnant or getting somebody pregnant. Like whatever life happens, you try to teach them the best you can. But that shit, the teenage urge to kill yourself stupidly while not trying to commit suicide scares the fuck out of me. Because, God, dude, I wasn't even that bad and I had it that bad. Oh, yeah. I think everybody listening probably has a story of them doing something absolutely stupid. Nate, thank you so much for joining us here today. This is the area where you can plug your various other shows in case anybody is not aware of them.

Yeah. So I do a show with a friend of the show, Francis Horton, called What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is us talking about military and veterans, news, culture, etc. from a left wing perspective or from at least a not right wing chud perspective. And I also am the producer and co-host of a show called trash future, which is about a tech pessimist take on the, on the tech industry and the various kinds of nonsense culture around tech in general.

I'm also the producer of this show and now sometimes co-host and I produce a wonderful show about movies called Kill James Bond that reviewed all the Bond films from an anti-Bond perspective but now also reviews lots of Euro spy and action movies from three wonderful people. Take that again. Three wonderful people. Alice

Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin. So any of those shows my fingerprints are all over in one way or the other and I hope you enjoy them did they finally make it through all the Bond films? oh yeah a while ago man then they made it through all the Bourne films and the Bourne episodes were really funny

because like I'd forgotten how bad the Bourne movies were like good and bad at the same time oh they're nuts yeah yeah and how much like the Bourne identity is like genuinely Franco Potente's role in that film is just to be your fantasy Euro girlfriend. Oh, God, they're so good. Listen to the show. Right now, all their bonus content is free because we're going through this horrible cost of living crisis. And so until April, all of their normal Patreon content is just being published. They're calling it the Winter of Content. It'll all be available for free. So if you want to check them out and get to real deep dive on these movies, you can go check them out.

I believe it's just the website, killjamesbond.com. But Google Kill James Bond podcast. And yeah, until April 1st, their whole Patreon library is free. Awesome. Everybody, thank you for listening to the show. If you like what we do here, consider donating. Even a dollar gets you episodes like this for free it gets you access to the discord it gets you other bonus content uh or if you don't have money you don't want to give me money

that's perfectly fine it's your money do with what you want but leave a review it's free it helps us out a lot um thank you again and until next time don't build jets uh out of wood