Late on the afternoon of 9 May 1943, two Spitfires of No. 165 Squadron caught an unidentified twin-engined aircraft orbiting low off the Aberdeenshire coast. As the lead pilot closed in, the stranger lowered its undercarriage, fired red flares and waggled its wings. It was a German night fighter, and its crew wanted to surrender.

The aircraft was a Junkers Ju 88 R-1, and it landed at Dyce with its radar intact, handing the Royal Air Force a working example of Germany’s latest airborne interception set. That it was a night fighter at all says everything about the type. The Ju 88 had been designed as a fast bomber. By 1943 it was doing almost every job the Luftwaffe had.

More than 15,000 were built between the late 1930s and 1945, in dozens of variants. It bombed, dive-bombed, torpedoed ships, photographed Allied territory from long range, hunted bombers at night and, at the very end, flew into targets as an unmanned flying bomb. No other German twin-engined aircraft came close in numbers or in range of roles.

The Schnellbomber idea

The Ju 88 began with a 1935 requirement from the German air ministry for a Schnellbomber: a fast bomber with a crew of three, little defensive armament and a bomb load of 800 to 1,000 kg (1,800 to 2,200 lb). The idea was simple. If the bomber was fast enough, fighters would never catch it, so it would not need heavy guns.

Junkers chief designer Ernst Zindel led the work, helped by Wilhelm Heinrich Evers and the American engineer Alfred Gassner, who had both worked at Fokker’s US subsidiary. The first prototype, registered D-AQEN, flew on 21 December 1936. In March 1939 the fifth prototype set a 1,000 km (620 mile) closed-circuit record at 517 km/h (321 mph) carrying a 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) payload.

The RAF Museum’s “Under the Radar” look at its Junkers Ju 88 R-1, the night fighter that defected to Scotland in 1943.

Then the air ministry asked for more. The Ju 88 was to be a heavy dive bomber as well, which meant stronger wings, dive brakes, a longer fuselage and a fourth crew member. Extra guns, armour and equipment followed. Each change was reasonable on its own; together they ate into the speed that had been the whole point of the design.

Into the war

The first Ju 88s went to a test unit, Erprobungskommando 88, and on 26 September 1939 they flew their first operation, an attack on British warships in the Firth of Forth. A handful flew in Poland. In April 1940, Ju 88s of KG 30 helped damage the battleship HMS Rodney and sink the destroyer HMS Gurkha off Norway.

In the Battle of Britain the Ju 88A flew daylight raids on radar stations, airfields and ports alongside the Dornier Do 17 E Heinkel He 111. It was not fast enough to escape Hurricanes E Spitfire. The RAF Museum’s own summary is blunt: reasonably manoeuvrable and able to absorb punishment, but its lack of armour and defensive guns made it relatively easy prey for British fighters.

Crews also had to learn a demanding aircraft quickly. Many losses in the summer of 1940 came from accidents and inexperience rather than enemy action. Field fixes added a twin MG 81Z gun in the rear and more cockpit armour. The Schnellbomber was turning into an ordinary bomber, and a good one.

A restored 1939 German training film on the Ju 88 bomber, from the archive library Footage Farm.

Maid of all work

Its real strength was adaptability. The Ju 88 attacked shipping in the Mediterranean and against the Arctic convoys to Murmansk, supported the army on the Eastern Front and flew long-range photographic reconnaissance as the Ju 88D. Finland, Italy and Romania all flew it, and the Finnish Air Force used it as a bomber.

The Ju 88C turned the airframe into a heavy fighter and intruder with a solid nose full of guns, and from there it became one of the Luftwaffe’s main night fighters. The radar-equipped C-6 and R-1 carried FuG 202 Lichtenstein sets with their antenna arrays sprouting from the nose. The purpose-built Ju 88G of 1944 used a new fuselage, the larger tail of the Ju 188, the SN-2 radar and, on many aircraft, upward-firing Schräge Musik cannon for attacking bombers from below.

That night-fighting role gave the Ju 88 its most important intelligence moments. When a Ju 88G-1 landed at RAF Woodbridge by mistake in July 1944, the RAF got its first look at the SN-2 radar and the Flensburg radar detector, a windfall for the British scientists working to protect Bomber Command.

The aircraft that defected

The Dyce Ju 88 had arrived more than a year earlier. According to the RAF Museum’s history of the aircraft, its pilot, Oberleutnant Heinrich Schmitt, and radio operator Oberfeldwebel Paul Rosenberger sent a false engine-fire report, dropped life rafts to fake a ditching, and turned for Scotland. Their flight engineer, Erich Kantwill, was not in on the plan.

The radar it carried, a FuG 202 Lichtenstein BC, was the first of its type to fall into British hands. The aircraft was hidden in a hangar, given the RAF serial PJ876 and flown in trials. Today it is the only surviving Ju 88 night fighter, on display at the RAF Museum Midlands at Cosford.

The only other complete Ju 88 also arrived by defection. On 22 July 1943 a Romanian pilot flew a reconnaissance Ju 88D from Mariupol to Cyprus, where RAF Hurricanes escorted him in. Named Baksheesh, it was handed to the US Army Air Forces, flown across the South Atlantic to the United States, tested at Wright Field and is now displayed in Romanian markings at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton.

The last job

Late in the war, tired Ju 88 airframes were given one final role. In the Mistel combination, an unmanned Ju 88 packed with explosives carried a fighter on its back; the fighter pilot flew the pair, aimed it and released the bomber at the target. It was an inglorious end for an aircraft first sold as a bomber too fast to catch.

Period footage of Kampfgeschwader 30, one of the first Luftwaffe units to take the Ju 88 into action, in 1940.

The Ju 88 never was too fast to catch. But its basic airframe proved so adaptable that it served from the first month of the war to the last, in almost every role a combat aircraft could fill. For a design meant to do one thing, that is a remarkable career.

Sources: Wikipedia (Junkers Ju 88), RAF Museum (Ju 88 R-1 individual history and 2017 press release), National Museum of the US Air Force (Ju 88D-1/Trop fact sheet), The War Zone, Bundesarchiv