The original 'Amerika bomber' was the Me 264, although the RLM's calculations (in contrast to those of Messerschmitt) found that it didn't actually have the range to carry out that mission. The Ju 488 was designed for anti-shipping missions like the Fw 300A/Ta 400, rather than carrying a bomb load all the way to the US. I believe that the He 177's range was even less. Particularly the He 274, which was designed as a high-altitude bomber and only had a range of 2200 to 2500 miles. Its range was relatively poor - just enough to get it to western Britain, or Scotland, and back - so there's no way that was an 'Amerika bomber' either.Īlthough, none of the aircraft you show images of was ever intended to bomb America. The He 274 was definitely in a class of its own, being specifically designed to avoid fighters by flying at high altitude. Neither of them had anything to do with America. So the Fw 300A/Ta 400 never really competed against the likes of the Ju 390, but did compete against the He 277. The earliest Fw 300A/Ta 400 designs don't appear until late 1942 - some six months after that. Once Messerschmitt was chosen as the winner of the 'Amerika' requirement, and subsequently disgraced when it emerged that its calculations on range were wrong, a new requirement for a multi-purpose long-range aircraft was issued with the Ju 390 emerging as the winner (against a revised, smaller 'Fw 238' and an unknown six-engined Heinkel design). There seem to have been some far-fetched 'maybe if we had two-stage mid-air refuelling' or 'maybe if we conquered the Azores and turned them into a gigantic air base' or 'maybe if we refuelled a BV 222 from a submarine' ideas but these never received any serious consideration. These were the three 'Amerika flugzeug' designs. It seems likely that the Focke-Wulf design commonly referred to as the 'Fw 238' (Focke-Wulf never called it that, nor did the RLM) was a competitor for the same requirement as the Me 264, and a Junkers design that no longer seems to exist too (although it was probably somewhere along the lines of the EF100 or something otherwise related to the Ju 290 family). One could argue that with 'Amerika flugzeug', 'USA bomber' and 'New York flugzeug' all used in contemporary sources, someone somewhere must've referred to the Me 264 as an 'Amerika bomber'. Goring referred to it as an 'Amerika flugzeug' and I've got interrogated prisoners of war saying it was known as the 'USA bomber' or 'New York flugzeug' but the words 'Amerika' and 'Bomber' do not seem to appear together in any contemporary source. And I can't find a single reference to it has an 'Amerika Bomber'. The only aircraft you could ever really say was designed with bombing America in mind was what became the Me 264. It was for attacking Britain and shipping in the Atlantic - which is why there are so many drawings of it armed with Hs 293s etc. What I can tell you is that the Fw 300A/Ta 400 was never intended to be an Amerika Bomber. You can see how the whole 'Amerika Bomber' myth grew up. In the 1970s 'Amerika Bomber' is usually used to refer to the Me 264, in the 1980s it tends to be used in connection with the Sanger rocket bomber, in the 1990s it refers to the Horten XVIII and in the 2000s and on it refers to the Me 264 again. The earliest mention I can find of 'Amerika Bomber' is in an American magazine printed in 1952, and it uses 'Amerika bomber' to refer to the Junkers EF132. And I can't find a single reference to it as an 'Amerika Bomber'.
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