German Jet Genesis (1982) By David Masters
 
 Jets and rockets, ramjets and pulse jets, wings swept forward and back and forward again, crescents, deltas and canards. Vertical take-off and variable geometry, bouncing bombers and flying saucers. Airborne fact and science fiction, war-winners and no hopers.
 
All these and more are here in German Jet Genesis, David Masters' account of a remarkable episode in aviation history. Driven first by the hunger for a Thousand-Year Reich and then by a burning determination to defend the ravaged Fatherland, Germany's extraordinarily creative wartime aircraft industry produced a glittering confusion of advanced designs, prototypes and fighting machines that advanced the aviation state of the art at a pace never equaled before or since.
 
It all began with a pyrotechnic-powered glider, built and flown as a publicity stunt in 1929. The Opel Rak- l didn't last long, crashing to destruction after being set ablaze by its own rockets, but it attracted enough funds to permit research into the liquid-fuelled motors whose descendants would one day power the V-2 rocket and Me 163 Komet fighter. The rocket effort was paralleled by work on air- breathing turbojet engines which culminated in 1938 in the world's first flight by a jet-powered aircraft, the Heinkel He 178.
 
Then came the war, and an increasingly desperate investment of time, resources and ingenuity in projects designed to counter an Allied assault upon German and Occupied Europe that grew in ferocity with every passing month. The products of this period varied from the thoroughly practical and effective, via the promising but underdeveloped, to projects that would have overwhelmed the technology of the 1980s, let alone that of a battered Germany in 1945.
 
Typical of the first category are the Me 262 and Ar 234. If Hitler had not demanded that Messerschmitt's Schwalbe be used as a fighter-bomber, this fine interceptor might have wrought decisive destruction among the Allied bombers and their fighter escorts. Arriving just too late to make a significant contribution to the German defense of the Continent, the Arado bomber was more than a match for the Allied fighters in level flight and displayed plenty of development potential Outstanding among the promising projects that never made it beyond drawing-board or prototype stage was the Messerschmitt P.ll 01, a variable- geometry swept-wing research aircraft whose design contributed greatly to the development of the two great Korean War adversaries, the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15, and which was finally reborn in highly refined form as the Bell X-5 technology demonstrator. 
 
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
142 Pages
In Fair to Good Condition