Heinkel history

The Confederate Air Force's Heinkel isn't actually a Heinkel but a CASA 2111 E, which is a license-built version of the He 111 E-an executive transport version of the famous bomber. In that configuration, the airplane is representative of the original He 111, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was an "airliner" (wink, wink) developed for Deutche Lufthansa. Through an "accident of engineering," the four-passenger smoking compartment just aft of the cockpit proved to be exactly the right size to hold 4,400 pounds of bombs. Curiously, the Germans racked them vertically, nose up, rather than horizontally as Allied bombers did.

The airliner version first flew with two 600hp BMW V-12s, but the airplane went through a long line of Daimler-Benz and Junker Jumo engines that would eventually put out over 1,400hp each. After the War, when the Spanish began to run short of German engines, they re-engined their entire fleet with British Rolls-Royce Merlin 500s with single-stage, rather than twostage, superchargers as on most Merlins.

Spain operated license-built Heinkels almost from the beginning, with a reported 236 being produced at Construcciones Aeronauticas S.A. along with a large number of license-built Me 109s. The German Condor Squadron flew Heinkels during the Spanish-Franco War in 1939, and the dazzling success of the 260mph bomber against the plodding biplanes and Polikarpov I-16s gave them a false sense of security. They would never equip their bombers with more than a few 7.92mm (approximately .30-caliber) machine guns for defense. These planes were so much faster than Loyalist fighters that more and larger guns hadn't been necessary. Against Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mustangs, however, the Heinkel was nearly defenseless.

Copyright Air Age Publishing Jun 1998
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