September 1945: Why the Luftwaffe failed to secure air superiority in WWII

At the start of the Battle of Britain in July 1940, Germany’s Luftwaffe had 1,100 Messerschmitt 109 fighter aircraft at its disposal and 2,550 at its height compared to 749 fighter aircraft available to the RAF. 

By the end of the battle in October, the Luftwaffe had lost 650 109s despite being acknowledged as superior to the RAFs Hurricanes and equal to the Spitfire. 

Despite this, the 109 and Focke-Wulf 190, the other mainstay of the Luftwaffe’s single-seater fighter fleet, failed to gain air superiority from Britain and its allies. The introduction of the jet-powered Messerschmitt Me 262 in 1944 did little to boost the German war effort and in September 1945 The Engineer reflected on what went wrong for the Luftwaffe, looking first at its single-seat fighter planes.

“It is a significant fact that apart from the jet-propelled type, the Germans used only two basic designs of single-seat fighter, whereas the Allies employed at least a dozen,” said The Engineer. “Standardisation of these two types (Me.109 and Fw.190) was an excellent thing from the view point of production and maintenance, but meant that to offset the progressive modernisation of the Spitfire and the introduction by the Allies of new fighter types, ceaseless improvement was imperative.”