On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian's account. Then he came home and wrecked the aeroplane on landing when the flaps failed. He and his radar operator walked away with minor injuries.

That first sortie is the whole He 219 in miniature: startlingly effective, and then undone by itself. The Uhu — Eagle Owl — was arguably the best purpose-built night fighter of the war, and Germany built somewhere around 270 to 300 of them. It never mattered.

The first operational aircraft with ejection seats

This is the He 219's most repeated claim, and it is true with a caveat worth stating. It was the first operational military aircraft fitted with ejection seats. The first emergency ejection by anyone had already happened in January 1942, when Helmut Schenk left a Heinkel He 280 — but the He 280 was a prototype, not a squadron aircraft.

The He 219's seats were compressed-air powered rather than cartridge-fired, and they were not reliable. Roughly half of the crews who left an He 219 in an emergency did so the old way, over the side, because the seats would not fire. The first combat ejection from the type came in April 1944.

Underpowered, and everybody knew it

The He 219 was fast enough to catch a Mosquito, which no other German night fighter could reliably claim, and its nose-wheel undercarriage and roomy cockpit made it far more civilised to operate than a converted bomber. But it was heavy, and two DB 603s were not quite enough engine.

Brown flew more captured types than almost anyone alive, and that is a damning verdict from a man inclined to enjoy German engineering. It also disposes of a story that circulates about the type: there is no heroic single-engine He 219 recovery, because a single-engine He 219 was in serious trouble.

Another popular claim deserves the same treatment. The tale that the first six He 219 sorties downed twenty RAF aircraft including six Mosquitos has no support in loss records. The type's first Mosquito kill came in May 1944, and by the end of the war Mosquitos had shot down more He 219s than the other way round.

Killed by a field marshal

The reason there were never more than a few dozen serviceable He 219s is not aerodynamic. It is that Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who controlled German aircraft procurement, did not want it. He disliked Ernst Heinkel personally, and he preferred numbers over quality — the Ju 88G could be built faster.

Milch pushed for cancellation in December 1943 and got a formal production termination on 25 May 1944, with resources redirected to the Ju 388 and Ta 154. Heinkel kept building them anyway, at low rate, and some were assembled in the field out of spares and never formally registered. On 10 January 1945 the main operating unit, I./NJG 1, had 64 on strength and 45 serviceable. That was essentially the whole force.

The Smithsonian’s account of restoring the world’s only complete He 219 — a twenty-year job.

What survives

One complete He 219 exists. Werknummer 290202 was built in July 1944, flew about three and a half hours, never flew a combat mission, was shipped to the United States after the war as FE-614, and spent decades in storage before a long restoration put it on display at Chantilly. It is a composite — fins and engines came from the other two airframes shipped to America.

The only other substantial remains were pulled out of the sea off Hirtshals, Denmark in 2012, displayed at Aalborg, then sold in 2015. Their radar masts were loaned to the Smithsonian so the museum could replicate the aerials it could find no drawings for.

Period footage of the He 219 alongside the Ta 154, the aircraft Milch preferred to fund.

The Uhu is the aircraft people reach for when they want to argue that Germany lost the air war through bad management rather than bad engineering. That argument is too tidy — the He 219 was genuinely underpowered and genuinely difficult to build. But it is also hard to look at 45 serviceable aircraft in January 1945 and conclude the decision-making was sound.

Sources: National Air and Space Museum object record A19600322000 and museum features; Eric Brown, Wings of the Luftwaffe; Stephan Wilkinson, Aviation History, July 2016; Green & Swanborough, Air Enthusiast 40 (1989); Bundesarchiv production records; Wikipedia cross-checks.