The Ar 234 Blitz: the first bomber of the jet age

How the Ar 234 Blitz was built

Arado Ar 234 B-2 specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe the Arado Ar 234 B-2 as delivered to Kampfgeschwader 76 from the autumn of 1944 — the only version of the Blitz built in quantity, with two Junkers Jumo 004B-1 turbojets, a conventional retractable tricycle undercarriage and its bombs hung outside the aeroplane. Deltas for the undercarriage-less Ar 234 A prototypes, for the camera-equipped B-1 and for the four-engined C-3 are given in grey. Two warnings apply to the whole page. Arado never completed a full acceptance programme for any mark, so several headline numbers come from factory calculation and from short Allied and Soviet test flying in 1945 and 1946 rather than from squadron experience; and the published authorities disagree with each other more than usual, notably on empty weight (4,650 kg in German sources, 4,900 kg on the Smithsonian’s own airframe data plate research, 5,200 kg in William Green) and on service ceiling (10,000 m in Green, 12,000 m in the German literature). Where they disagree, both figures are given.

Armament & payload

The Ar 234 hung its bombs in the slipstream and gave one man the job of flying, navigating and aiming

Everything about the Blitz’s armament follows from one design decision taken in 1941: the fuselage was to be filled with fuel, because the specification asked for 2,000 km of range from engines nobody had yet built. That left no bomb bay, so the bombs went outside — one station under the fuselage and one under each engine nacelle — and external carriage cost about 80 km/h, which is to say it cost the aircraft precisely the margin that made it uninterceptable. The Ar 234 B-1 reconnaissance aircraft and the B-2 bomber carried no gun at all: the two fixed rearward-firing MG 151/20 fitted to the prototypes were aimed through a roof periscope, were judged useless by the pilots who tried them, and were deleted. A Blitz pilot’s entire defensive armament was his throttle, and on a bombing run with a tonne of ordnance under him it was not enough. Gun fits below the B-2 standard belong to prototypes, to two night-fighter conversions and to a C-series that was still being flight-tested when the war ended; treat them as intention rather than as service practice.

Sourcing caveat: bomb and equipment fits come from Arado handbooks and Luftwaffe loading tables captured in 1945, from the Allied technical reports written on the airframes shipped out aboard HMS Reaper, and from the Bundesarchiv production and allocation returns. Night-fighter and C-series armament rests on very small numbers of converted or part-finished aircraft, and the D, P and R armament is drawing-office proposal only.

Variants

Thirty designations, one production standard, and 214 aeroplanes that arrived too late to matter

The Ar 234 began as a paper answer to a tender nobody else bothered to enter. In the closing months of 1940 the Reichsluftfahrtministerium asked for a jet-powered high-speed reconnaissance aircraft with a range of a little over 2,000 km; Arado alone responded, with Professor Walter Blume’s E.370, and six prototypes were ordered on 17 April 1942. The V1, Werknummer 130001, coded TG+KB, was finished at Brandenburg on 15 June 1943 and had to be carried to Rheine inside an Ar 232 transport because the Brandenburg runway was too short to fly it off. On the evening of 30 July 1943 it made a fourteen-minute first flight in the hands of Flugkapitän Selle — not June 1943, as is sometimes stated. Selle was killed on 2 October when the V2 caught fire in its port engine and dived in from 1,200 m. Later that year Hitler was shown the V3 at Insterburg, was enthusiastic, and authorised two hundred aircraft by the end of 1944.

The extraordinary part of the early aeroplane was underneath it. To hold the weight down and keep the fuselage full of fuel, Arado gave the Ar 234 A no undercarriage whatsoever. It took off from a jettisonable three-wheeled trolley and landed on three retractable skids, one under the fuselage and one under each nacelle, the main skid originally designed as a channel section running on nine wooden rollers. It worked, in the narrow sense that the aeroplane flew. It failed in every operational sense. Erich Sommer, who flew the skid machines, said that landing one on wet grass was "like greased lightning" and "like soap", because there was no braking of any kind. Worse, an Ar 234 A could not move once it had stopped: it sat where it had slid, in the middle of the landing ground, waiting for a crane and a dolly while the next aircraft circled. A squadron operating this way would have scattered its aeroplanes across the aerodrome and blocked its own runway, and any airfield without the cranes, trolleys and prepared surface to service it was simply unusable. Eight prototypes were built to this standard and the A-series never entered production. The cure was the V9 of 12 March 1944: a conventional retractable tricycle undercarriage, mains folding forward, nosewheel aft, bought at the cost of the 830 litre mid-fuselage tank, which was deleted to make room and made up by enlarging the forward and aft tanks. Every operational Blitz was a B.

Production was concentrated at Alt-Lönnewitz in Saxony, code name Altan, and ran from July 1944 to March 1945. Two hundred and fourteen aircraft were completed — 150 of them in the four months from October 1944 to January 1945 — of which 202 were issued to the Luftwaffe from August 1944. A hundred and one had to go back to the modification industry between November 1944 and March 1945 because they were not fit to fly as delivered; 42 of those went to Umrüstkommando A for conversion to reconnaissance configuration and 57 came back as bombers. Kampfgeschwader 76 received 132 Ar 234 between August 1944 and March 1945, more than half of all the Blitzes ever built, and never had more than a fraction of them serviceable at once. The English-language literature usually gives 210 rather than 214; the German figure comes from the Alt-Lönnewitz completion returns and is the better-sourced of the two.

What could 214 aeroplanes do? As reconnaissance machines, a great deal more than their numbers suggest. From July 1944 the prototypes and then the B-1s photographed southern England, the Normandy lodgement, the Scheldt, the Ardennes front and northern Italy at will, and the Allies had no answer: piston fighters could not reach the height and speed together, and by the time a Meteor squadron might have tried, the Ar 234 had already photographed what it came for. On 10 April 1945 an Ar 234 made the last Luftwaffe overflight of the United Kingdom of the entire war, and it came home. As a bomber the type achieved almost nothing. Nine aircraft with a tonne apiece cannot close a rail junction, and the Ar 234 never flew a raid larger than a squadron. Its most concentrated bomber effort, Remagen, failed: the Ludendorff bridge fell on 17 March 1945 from accumulated damage after the German demolition charge had failed, not from a jet bomb. The Blitz proved that a jet could outrun everything in the sky and photograph a continent; it also proved that a strategic air force cannot be conjured from a few dozen airframes, a fuel shortage and an engine that lasts twenty-five hours.

Arado E.370 (1941, project)

Blume’s tender submission: shoulder-wing all-metal monoplane, two Jumo 004 under the wings, trolley take-off and skid landing, three fuselage tanks of 1,430, 830 and 1,540 litres.

Ar 234 A, V1 to V8 (1943–44, 8)

The trolley-and-skid aircraft. V1 first flew 30 July 1943; V2 crashed fatally on 2 October 1943; V6 and V8 were re-engined with four BMW 003s and became the first four-engined jet aircraft in the world to fly. The A-series was never produced.

Ar 234 V7 (1944, 1)

A skid-equipped prototype that went to war: it flew the first jet reconnaissance sortie in history and, with the V5, operated over southern England from Juvincourt near Reims in July 1944.

Ar 234 B-0 (1944, 20)

Pre-production aircraft to the new tricycle-undercarriage standard set by the V9, delivered by the end of June 1944 while the production lines were still being laid out.

Ar 234 B-1 (1944–45, converted airframes)

Reconnaissance version: two Rb 50/30 or Rb 75/30 cameras aft, fitted as Rüstsatz b to B-2 airframes rather than built as a separate batch. This was the version that did the type’s useful work.

Ar 234 B-2 (1944–45, the bulk of the 214)

The bomber, and the only Blitz built in quantity: Lotfe 7K in the floor, BZA 1B and roof periscope for glide attacks, Patin PDS autopilot, 1,500 kg on three external racks, no defensive gun.

Ar 234 B-2/N Nachtigall (December 1944–1945, 2 converted from 3 allocated)

Night fighter: FuG 218 Neptun radar fitted at the Lufthansa works at Werneuchen, two MG 151/20 in a Magirusbombe ventral pod, radar operator behind the pilot. Flown by Kommando Bonow from March 1945; no kills.

Ar 234 C-1, C-2 and C-3 (1944–45, 14 airframes, fewer than half with engines)

Four BMW 003A-1 in twinned nacelles, freeing Jumo 004s for the Me 262 and adding about a fifth to the top speed; reshaped cockpit with eight glazed panels instead of thirteen and a faired periscope. C-1 reconnaissance, C-2 bomber, C-3 multi-role with two MG 151/20 under the nose. The first two, Werknummern 250002 and 250004, flew from Alt-Lönnewitz on 27 March 1945 and reached 15,000 m and roughly 900 km/h in test; Green gives a more sober 853 km/h at 6,000 m. Three airworthy examples with III./EKG 1 were blown up at Kaltenkirchen before the British arrived.

Ar 234 C-4 to C-8 (1944–45, projects and conversions)

Armed reconnaissance with four cannon (C-4), side-by-side two-seaters (C-5, C-6), a night fighter with the centimetric FuG 245 Bremen O (C-7) and a single-seat bomber on two uprated Jumo 004D (C-8). The V31 and V32 were converted towards C-5 and C-6 standard; none was completed for service.

Ar 234 D-1 and D-2 (1944–45, 10 started, none completed)

Two-seat reconnaissance and bomber versions on a B fuselage with a cleaner canopy and two Heinkel HeS 011 turbojets. The HeS 011 never reached quantity production and neither did the D.

Ar 234 P-1 to P-5 (1944–45, projects)

A family of two- and three-seat radar night fighters with four BMW 003A-1, HeS 011 or Jumo 004D, 13 mm cockpit armour and up to five cannon. None was built.

Ar 234 R and the composites (1944–45, projects)

The R was a rocket-powered high-altitude reconnaissance version, towed to 8,000 m by an He 177 and climbing to 17,000 m on its own motor. Mistel 6 paired an Ar 234 C with an unmanned Arado E.377 flying bomb, and the V21 was to have carried the Arado E.381 prone-pilot parasite fighter. Only wooden E.381 airframes and a mock-up were ever made; a model of the V21 and E.381 combination is displayed at the Technikmuseum Speyer.

Survivors: exactly one original Ar 234 exists anywhere in the world, and there is no reproduction, no replica and no flying example. It is Ar 234 B-2 Werknummer 140312, one of nine Blitzes handed over to British forces at Sola airfield near Stavanger in Norway in May 1945; it had flown with 9./KG 76 in the final weeks after earlier service with the 8th Staffel, and carried the code F1+GS. Eric "Winkle" Brown, commanding the RAE’s Enemy Aircraft Flight, traded this aircraft and three others to the USAAF’s Operation Lusty teams in exchange for access to interview Hermann Göring. It was flown from Sola to Cherbourg on 24 June 1945, sailed for Newark aboard HMS Reaper on 20 July with thirty-odd other captured German aircraft, was reassembled and flown to Freeman Field, Indiana as FE-1010, and went on to Wright Field, where flight testing finished on 16 October 1946. It was stored at Orchard Place, Park Ridge, Illinois, transferred to the Smithsonian Institution on 1 May 1949, and moved to the Paul Garber facility at Suitland in the early 1950s. Restoration ran from 1984 to February 1989; because every trace of paint had been stripped before the Smithsonian received it, it was finished in the markings of 8./KG 76, the first unit to take the Blitz to war. Willi Kriessmann, the last Luftwaffe pilot to fly 140312, was reunited with it in 1990 and gave his logbooks to the museum. It was displayed on the Mall from 1993 in an exhibition pointedly titled "Wonder Weapon? The Arado Ar 234", and in 2005 became one of the first aircraft moved into the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Chantilly, Virginia, where it stands today beside the sole surviving Dornier Do 335 — the two of them shipmates once already, on the deck of HMS Reaper in July 1945.

The Ar 234 Blitz, from trolley to the Smithsonian

The Ar 234 Blitz in eight stories

The Ar 234 Blitz in photographs

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The first jet bomber

The story of the world’s first jet bomber — its reconnaissance triumphs, its bombing failures, and the variants that never came.

The Arado Ar 234 — the first jet bomber, and its variants (Military History Visualized).

Where the Ar 234 Blitz flew — and survives

First in the sky, and far too few

The Ar 234 was a reconnaissance triumph and a bombing footnote. It gathered intelligence no Allied fighter could stop — but as a bomber it was too few, too late and too inaccurate to change anything.

Its lasting achievement was reconnaissance the Allies could not intercept; as a bomber, shortages and inaccuracy kept it from mattering. Compare the combat record of every military aircraft.

Ar 234 Blitz: your questions, answered

Related aircraft

Where this chapter comes from

• Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumHolds the world’s only surviving Ar 234, with detailed history of the aircraft.
• National Museum of the U.S. Air ForceReference material on the Ar 234 and German jet development.
• Imperial War MuseumOn the Allied air war and the German jet and rocket programmes.
• Royal Air ForceContext on the reconnaissance and bombing campaigns over the Western Front.
• MiGFlug — AfterburnerMiGFlug’s aviation magazine, on the German wonder-weapons and the dawn of the jet age.

Some Ar 234 figures — including the exact first-flight date and production totals — vary between sources; the most widely cited values are used here.