At 18:48 German time on 7 September 1940, a Luftwaffe camera caught one of the defining images of the Second World War: a lone Heinkel He 111 drifting over Wapping, its shadow-black wings laid across the bend of the Thames and the docks of East London. It was the first evening of the Blitz. That photograph is the bomber most people still picture when they hear the word “Luftwaffe”.

The He 111 was never the fastest German bomber, or the toughest, or the most modern. But for the first years of the war it was the most numerous, and it fought from Spain to Stalingrad, carried torpedoes and flying bombs, and kept flying with Rolls-Royce engines long after the Reich that built it was gone.

A bomber disguised as an airliner

The Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from operating an air force, so early bomber work in the 1930s was dressed up as civil aviation. Ernst Heinkel handed the design to the brothers Siegfried and Walter Günter, who built it as a twin-engined, scaled-up version of their record-breaking He 70 Blitz. It was often called the Doppel-Blitz, the double lightning.

The first He 111 flew on 24 February 1935. Prototypes wore civil registrations and the airline version was promoted as the fastest passenger aircraft in the world. That is why the bomber had something unusual for a warplane: a row of cabin windows along the fuselage. From the start, though, the design was meant to give the new Luftwaffe a bomber.

Its rival, the Junkers Ju 86, flew at displays all over the world, but the Heinkel won the production race. On the eve of war the Luftwaffe counted 705 combat-ready He 111s, far more than the 533 Dornier Do 17s, making it the backbone of the German bomber arm alongside the Dornier.

Spain: the Legion Condor test

In early 1937 Germany sent its newest bombers to fight for Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. Four He 111Bs arrived in February 1937 with a bomber unit of the Legion Condor, Kampfgruppe 88, and flew their first combat mission on 9 March 1937 against Republican airfields during the Battle of Guadalajara.

The Heinkel proved faster and able to carry more than the other German types sent to Spain, and losses were light at first. In all, 94 Heinkels went to the Legion Condor. Spain taught the Luftwaffe a dangerous lesson, however: because the He 111E could outrun enemy fighters there, the planners saw no need for heavier defensive guns. England would punish that mistake.

When the Spanish war ended in April 1939, the 58 surviving Heinkels stayed behind and became the core of the new Spanish state’s bomber force. That decision would echo for three more decades.

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz

The He 111 led the Luftwaffe into Poland in September 1939, bombed shipping in the North Sea, supported the invasion of Norway and, on 14 May 1940, devastated large parts of Rotterdam. Then came Britain. Of the 34 bomber Gruppen committed against Britain in 1940, fifteen flew the He 111.

The glass “greenhouse” nose gave a superb view but packed most of the crew into the place a head-on attack would hit first. Defensive armament of hand-held machine guns was too light against eight-gun Spitfire E Hurricanes. The RAF Museum’s collection notes put it bluntly: the bomber proved vulnerable because of inadequate defensive armament, low speed and poor manoeuvrability. Some 242 He 111s were destroyed between July and October 1940, though the type could absorb a lot of punishment and lost fewer machines than the Ju 88.

One of them was He 111H-2 A1+DA of Kampfgeschwader 53, shot down over East London at 14:50 on 15 September 1940, after its crew had released twelve bombs near the Beckton gas works. The Kent Battle of Britain Museum believes it was probably brought down by Sergeant Bohumír Fürst of No. 310 (Czechoslovak) Squadron.

The RAF Museum’s film on its He 111 H-20, the bomber captured in 1945 and flown to Britain by three American airmen.

From September 1940 the He 111 became the main weapon of the night Blitz. Heinkels equipped with radio-beam blind-bombing systems such as X-Gerät, notably those of the pathfinder unit Kampfgruppe 100, marked targets with incendiaries for the bombers that followed. Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Plymouth and Southampton all felt it.

Torpedoes, Stalingrad and flying bombs

As faster types such as the Junkers Ju 88 took over front-line bombing, the old Heinkel found new jobs. From Norway, KG 26 flew it as a torpedo bomber against the Arctic convoys. On the Eastern Front it busted trains, flew supplies into the Demyansk pocket, and joined the doomed airlift to Stalingrad, where some 165 He 111s were lost.

It even landed one last big strategic blow. On the night of 21-22 June 1944, He 111s of KG 4, KG 53 and KG 55 caught American B-17s that had just landed at Poltava in Ukraine during the Operation Frantic shuttle missions, destroying 44 of them on the ground. Late in the war, modified He 111s air-launched V-1 flying bombs towards Britain from over the North Sea.

Germany’s failure to field a successor kept the Heinkel in service far longer than planned. Production for the Luftwaffe ended in September 1944. One of the strangest offshoots, the five-engined He 111Z Zwilling, joined two He 111 airframes to tow giant gliders.

The Spanish Heinkels with Merlin engines

The most unexpected chapter was written in Seville. In 1940 CASA signed a contract with Heinkel to licence-build the He 111H-16. Progress was slow, and the first Spanish-built aircraft did not fly until 23 May 1945. The early CASA 2.111s used Jumo 211 engines found in a store in France, but spares soon ran out.

The answer was British. In 1956 Spain ordered 173 Rolls-Royce Merlin 500 engines, installed in “power egg” nacelles of the kind used on the Avro Lancaster. The Merlin-powered bombers became the CASA 2.111B, the reconnaissance version the 2.111D. A Luftwaffe bomber design now flew on the engine that had powered the Spitfire. Spanish 2.111s bombed positions during the Ifni War of 1957-58 and served into the early 1970s.

Military Aviation History compares German-built and Spanish-built He 111s, including the Merlin-powered CASA 2.111.

Their last great performance came on the big screen. The producers of the film Battle of Britain needed a Luftwaffe bomber force, and the Spanish Air Force’s CASA 2.111s played the He 111 on screen. Their Merlin engines sounded nothing like the original Jumos, but for a generation of cinema-goers, those Spanish aircraft were the German bombers of 1940.

Today only a handful of He 111s and CASA 2.111s survive in museums, among them the H-20 at the RAF Museum in London, captured in 1945 and flown to Britain by American airmen. The last airworthy example was lost in an accident in 2003.

Kinolibrary archive footage of Spanish Air Force CASA 2.111s flying in formation, filed under Battle of Britain.

The He 111 was obsolete by 1942 and still flying in 1944, a Luftwaffe bomber built in Spain with British engines into the 1950s, and a film star in 1969. Few aircraft have had three careers. The Heinkel had all of them, and that photograph over Wapping.

Sources: Royal Air Force Museum, Kent Battle of Britain Museum, National Museum of the United States Air Force (CASA 2.111H fact sheet), Military Aviation History, Kinolibrary

Header photo: German Air Force photographer / Wikimedia Commons, public domain