Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 169 - The Nazi Rocket Plane That Melted its Pilots

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/messerschmitt-me-163b-1a-komet/nasm_A19530072000 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-scary-legend-nazi-germanys-me-163-rocket-fighters-18494 https://books.google.com/books?id=xiADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA124&dq=popular+science+%22A+two-room+wing%22&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q&f=true "Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet". Wings of the Luftwaffe Volmar, Joe (1999). I Learned to Fly for Hitler https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/10/the-german-rocket-fighter-that-dissolved-its-pilots-alive/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Hello and welcome to yet another Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe and with me today is Liam. Hello, Liam. Hi. Can you tell I'm getting better at intros by sounding like a fucked up robot yeah you uh you sounded like uh uh budget what's his name the guy good night good luck guy the newscaster cronkite is that cronkite i don't i have no idea i always confuse him and edward teller fought him of the atom bomb. I don't know why I do that,

but I'm just like, yeah, same dude, right? Yeah. Same. Uh, what,

what is news, but, uh, a nuclear bomb for your TV, um, kill your TV kids. There's a reason they call it programming. If,

Oh God, that sounds, that sounds like something to have that shirt, dude. It sounds like something there should be like an edgy facebook meme from like occupy wall street days you know i mean uh the uh yeah my mom's just an old hit like not hippie because hippies never got off their ass and did anything but like my mom was very into the like consumer society is running your brain liam and then i was just like

can't hear you over gta4 mom my mom is an old hippie but only to smoke weed your political nuances are less like my mom won't smoke weed but she doesn't give a shit if my dad and i not that i condone the use of marijuana i do it, you have a TBI, so probably better for you. And of course, I live in the state where like all forms of weed are illegal. Most people would assume that like, yeah, like most people would assume that Hawaii is pretty real. Like it'd be legal. Nothing. There's not shit here, man.

Nothing. That is so good. Don't quote me on the medicinal part part but like it's pretty it's pretty fucking restricted um it which is funny because i was like oh yeah that's why everybody's relaxed like yeah until you talk about drugs uh like they were gonna why the mississippi of the pacific yeah they were going to mississippi of the will oh god um hi joe you were gonna vote on it and the governor uh governor igay who is terrible governor um heck of a name said that he would uh veto it uh it's like cool he's a democrat like everybody here's a democrat but like they're democrats which would probably be more at home in like

one of the carolinas than when people think the Aloha state is so much more progressive and it's absolutely not. But speaking of Democrats, we have a new segment on this show, which I have yet to name. I reached out for names and they were all bad.

Good job, guys. But I've also been really like, oh, it's the presidential corner, but eventually we're going to run out of clips to do with presidents and just have to come up with other shit. So this is the clip corner of the show.

What if a podcast before podcast? Now, Liam, do you ever stress eat? Joe, have you ever seen a picture of me? Yeah, motherfucker, I stress eat. I stress eat too. And you know who else stress eats?

Lyndon Baines Johnson. America's greatest president, which I'm going to say every time we do this. I heard someone describe him as he was the first president who realized how cool it was to be president. Yes. So this is Lyndon B. Johnson on the phone with, I believe, his secretary desperately trying to get snacks in the middle of the night. I've just eaten my head off. I can't button my britches. I'm craving all the time.

The stuff I get is more holy. And I used to hear Tom Miller, Mayor Austin, say whenever he had troubles, he had to eat it all. And I guess everybody does. So what I ask all of them to do is get up and make the absolutely lowest calorie dessert they could. Now, I'm not sure that tapioca is. I gain on it. And I love it. But anyway, I ought to have some change.

The thing that I can eat next that seems to be bulky is jello. Get some kind of jello that doesn't have too many calories and give me some diet to put in it. I think they have time. Get some icebox.

Get it. I need some kind of dessert. If not, bring me the tapioca. I just had Got some water put in it? A fritter or something. Alright, come in. And before I get to work here, I can't take my nap. Tell them to bring me the booty. All right. The dessert. The dessert. Are you planning to go over to Lucy's party? Should I go? Yes, sir. And it's all now.

Well, how long is it going to last? I don't think more than until 4 o'clock. All right. Well, I guess I won't go over there now. Okay, I'll go over and I'll get myself. All right. I fucking love the guy I know Vietnam bad but like I am always fascinated by Johnson

I know he recorded everything he didn't to be president you basically have to be an unrelented sociopath yeah without a doubt yeah but just like calling your secretary and being like so you got food so you got sex uh i was i could i can say this on air even though my parents probably listen to this. That's fine. Whatever. So my dad, back many years ago, was a good yippee and smoked some weed in his day. You know how it be. And he hadn't smoked weed in many, many years because my mom's not super comfortable with it because she gets you know the associations like when she smokes weed she like wants to drink and my parents stopped drinking uh any number of years ago but a friend of mine gave me an edible and i gave it to my dad because

it was like a control it was control he wasn't driving anyway doesn't drive anymore i was like i'm not worried about him he's gonna be fine so i was like here do i literally asked him do you want to get high he was like yeah so i gave my dad the edible and i told him specifically do not eat the other half of this or you're gonna go to space right and in protest to being told what to do, my dad, as he was leaving, takes the other half of the cookie, slams it in his face like he's in preschool, just like straight to the dome after saying like this edible ain't shit. And my mom calls me from the road. She's driving my dad back. And she's like, A, you got him high. B, he won't stop asking. Like, apparently, like, every, like, 45 seconds to a minute was asking for snacks.

For, like, the two-hour drive back to my parents' house. You got to give him a cup of cold bouillon, apparently. Yeah. Like, he went through all the cookies and was just like, can we stop at Sheetz? There was, when I was living in Washington, where weed is legal i had i had tons of my friends go visit me there uh which is funny because like i i had friends and family go to washington visit me which is like 100% weed tourism right like i'm not hating on them for that uh but like living in a place that's actually nice like hawaii like it was like, no, I'm good. There's no weed there.

Like, all right, fair. Joe, you won't stop complaining about tourists. I heard you on Brigham Young money. Well, I was just like, I already booked that trip. You know, when we have 400 cases on my one island. Well, someone came to visit me in Washington and they got like a gummy bear from the weed shop. And I'm very proud of it. Well, he's a big guy.

He competes in strongman and stuff. The dude's like 300 plus pounds. He's a big, big boy. Sure. And he is like, oh, yeah, I ate the whole thing. I was like, bro, you were not supposed to do that. You're supposed to only eat the leg of the gummy bear. Holy shit.

He immediately just passed the fuck out like he was he was awake his eyes were open and he was he was peering into another dimension but also like no longer of this earth yes he ascended uh and he did not move for hours like my dog crawled up on him and was like licking him in the face to ensure he was still alive uh dog good dog now uh liam the last couple weeks of programming here in the lines lived by donkeys have it's been heavy right um i mean i love learning about the genocidal napoleon cosplayers as much as anybody joe but you know we've had a lot of two-parters uh those two-parters have all the duologies uh they've all involved some heavy ass shit genocide you know it's casual alleged misdemeanor level cannibalism yeah uh whatever you know sometimes you get hungry linden johnson is there to attest to it it's like uh getting caught with drugs you can get caught

with like a misdemeanor amount of drugs and a felony amount of drugs. He was caught with only a misdemeanor amount of human flesh. It's fine. My boy didn't do nothing wrong. He was found innocent of that charge. The murder, yes. He did all of those, but he did not need anybody.

I thought it would be okay to do a chiller episode, right? If those were fitted pants, these are loose fit pants. I'm not good at analogies. So Lyndon Johnson down 15 pounds, not up 15 pounds. Yes, these are solidly Lyndon B. Johnson down 15 pounds. And the reason for that is we're going to talk about Nazis dying and plane crashes.

USA, USA. So you didn't say Nazis dying in rocket crashes that I wouldn't. Well, that I guess the USA chant would be even more appropriate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a USSR chant and everyone else. Not justify, but I uh teaching my girlfriend and her

friends about operation paperclip yeah and then being like why on earth would they do that and i was like well and i'm like putting on my best alan dulles hat i was like well it's either us or the russians and like better us or them like really uncomfortable with the actions of my own government, but like, you know, I get it. Not, not the greatest ethical choice, but like, you get it.

If, if I was to slide my glasses up my nose, I would say, if it makes you feel any better, the Soviets actually took even more of them than we did. That actually does make me feel better. It turns out like a little bit. Once the Nazis are gone,

it is truly a competition of who's a bigger piece of shit because like when the nazis are there everybody knows the nazis are biggest pieces of shit uh and then once you eliminate them it's just like spider-man pointing at spider-man right um and the answer is it's monaco monaco is actually the biggest piece of shit um now liam if if I was the one listener, which is 50% of the Monaco population is like, well, I'm turning this podcast off. I feel offended.

Monaco is great because I always want to watch the fastest cars in the world idle around tiny, shitty cobbled streets at five miles an hour. Everyone is a prince of some kind. It's a cool. it's a cool it's a cool i'm not even whatever it's a city and a country i guess it's a cool country to visit i've i've been to monaco but like you're very aware of like maybe we should really get on eating the rich monaco is also a buffet um now liam if i was going to make you a list of you're gonna make a rocket powered aircraft this which is you know not technically a jet i suppose um i'm not an aircraft enthusiast or aeronautical engineer um no there are like rocket-powered craft like the u.s like x15 which held the like fastest atmospheric vehicle it was a space plane basically

okay it was rocket-powered like super experimental this one so we're talking specifically rocket powered aircraft if you were gonna make one uh whose job eventually would be to target enemy bomber planes um if you could pick three things like it has to be fast right like it well yeah it's a rocket yeah can you land it should you be able to land this thing i sure would like to can you occupy it without being melted into something that looks like jelly i sure would like to i understand if you know best two out of three but what if i could only offer you one of those things i'll take it nazis right that alternate krieger from uh that shitty archer season where he's uh just spends all his time wasting nazi money i mean krieger in every season is kind of like a crazed nazi scientist i mean

they even named him krieger i think that's what they're going for yeah and they imply that he's a genetic clone of adolf hitler at some point so yeah happens to the best of us right when some lose so congratulations i'd like to welcome you into being a german test pilot uh around you know late 1930s throughout the middle of world war ii um now like i already said i do have to point out that we are talking about a rocket fighter not a jet uh because the germans did have a 262 yeah yeah it was a very functional well-meaning and useful jet uh the the messerschmitt me 262 um and the the jet worked uh the jet engine worked it had reliability issues because they're slapping rocket or sorry jet engines together in the

middle of a war when they barely have food anymore but like once uh you, things were retrofitted and fixed and not under the stresses of wartime operations, the 262 was used by nations for like another decade because it worked pretty well. You know, it was better than a shitty propeller plane, but not as good as the like the first generation of American or Soviet jet aircraft. Like I think the Czechs used it in the mid-50s. I think I read that. Now, the Germans also had a history of fucking up rockets. Kind of like a more racist

Wile E. Coyote, right? Actually, I can't say that for sure. I have not logged into Wile E. Coyote's Gab account. I do not know what he is up to. Roadrunner, illegal immigrant, right to self-defense, question mark. You know, I'm going to go on a limb here and I'm going to assume Wile E. Coyote is a sovereign citizen.

I don't know why. He just. Yeah, he's a sobsit. Yeah, he's one of those freaks. why uh he just yeah he's a sobsit yeah he's one of those freaks um now if you remember you know the treaty of versailles at the end of world war one put a lot of limitations on the kind of things that the german state could build the research especially weapons right well the good news is that everyone followed it yeah there's no violations and it certainly didn't lead to any i don't know blowback maybe uh now one of those limitations was on single seat airplanes

because like the concept of like a fighter and a bomber wasn't fully solidified but they knew you know a propeller powered single seat airplane that that's for war stuff you can't have that right some guy in a cessna just being intercepted i mean honestly if you could go back in time and just give someone in World War 1 like a shitty Cessna Piper it would be the best aircraft on the battlefield bar none it's the Red Baron and a fucking Cessna

oh god a plot was Harrison Ford has to fly it for people who are unaware harrison ford keeps getting in plane crashes and helicopter crashes right he gave him a helicopter well he gave him a helicopter i suppose that's you know i want a helicopter i don't fashion stuff just for i don't want i think i would just trick my many enemies into riding in it this this shirt that says my helicopter is not for fascist stuff as it is bringing up a lot of questions my

shirt said answer um now yeah this did not mean that germans were like oh shit i guess we can't fly anymore um that meant they had to start thinking outside the box largely like uh you know a cartoon character that longed for death in the coolest way possible enter a guy named alexander alexander lippich uh he was a world war one pilot and he ended up being an employee of the

zeppelin company uh so he knows a thing or two about crashing um and you know he could not you know manufacture planes like the single seat plane so he's like you know we can manufacture it isn't banned gliders unpowered flight right in doing so he helped design and figure out a lot of stuff that makes a lot of modern day aviation possible like the delta wing and like tailless aircraft um i don't really understand how those are revolutionary

because i'm not an engineer but someone out there's going oh damn which cool like i don't get it but uh but what i do is less drag joe thank you uh and that's kind of like what would go into being the comment i also am not as i i just i just play one in a podcast. But you're in an engineering podcast which makes you the most qualified engineer on this podcast. My degree is in mathematics. Engineering is just math. I have a history degree,

so a math degree might as well be brain surgery to me. I'm kind of depressed by that. Alexander Lipich is a guy... Have you ever met a guy that was uh it just didn't feel like he had a natural uh fear sense like he just died or he was born without like no no i'm totally fine ripping down this hill on roller skates through traffic because i want to go fast type person johnson my buddy josh Munson. My buddy Josh. Yeah. Everyone kind of knows a guy that it feels like somewhere like a chemical receptor in their brain was broken.

And that was Lippich because he decided to test his new glider designs by throwing them off the highest mountain in Germany that he could just to see if it would work. What better way? I guess.

I mean, it never killed him. I mean, he was hurt quite a few times, but it never killed him. And then in 1928, only about a decade removed from the first flight of the airplane in general,

he strapped a gunpowder rocket to the back of one of his planes, which he called the duck and achieve the first manned rocket powered flight in history 1928 okay all right that admittedly kind of sick and then he tried to he tried to do it again um and uh like to go faster because he thought it could go faster with one of his other gliders and the rocket exploded in his face and and did not kill him somehow and then he was just like ah that experiment's no good luckily for me i have no sense of my own mortality back to the drawing board and then there was for some reason a mysterious tunnel painted on a rock wall i think the most valuable lesson he learned is like i should have other people fly these from now on uh now something that should be very clear and will become more clear later on is

lippich did not design this rocket nor was he any kind of rocket scientist whatsoever the the concepts involved in making a a rocket work were kind of foreign to him he was an aerodynamics guy like he came up with airframes that would look cool the rocket strapped onto them uh the rocket he had used in this is borrowed from the opal car manufacturer the same opal car manufacturer that employed adolf hitler's nephew willie actually oh yeah isn't that a fun coincidence uh and like opal had been using it for your germany man uh opal had been using it for like publicity stunts which includes strapping a rocket onto motorcycles and trains yeah no hey man you are gonna get to work whether you want to or not the with the new uh socialist oh god workers dash uh i had a nazi worker joke ready to go and then i blew

it just ignore me everybody sorry it blew up in your face like an opal gunpowder rocket oh spicy uh like imagine you get on your rocket powered train somewhere in a pre-war Germany. Like how fast does this go? It will get you right to the scene of your funeral. Fast enough. Yeah. Now, later on in the 1930s,

aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel undertook a series of experiments to develop a liquid fueled rocket of his own. Heinkel's first success came in March, 1937, when a modified HE-112 propeller-powered fighter plane took power under rocket power alone for 30 seconds.

Now, this was like it took off under propeller power, they cut the propellers, and then turned the rocket on. Got it. Then he constructed the HE-176, which on June 20th, 1939 became the first aircraft to take off, fly, and land solely under rocket power. Now, Heinkel, like most people probably involved in creating this thing,

thought this would absolutely revolutionize flight. Now, there's a lot of things that go against Heinkel here. If you look at the date, we're very close to World War II territory. Look at the date. We're very close to World War II territory. So, you know, when and at this point, World War II is already being planned and damn near about to be carried out. So, like, everyone else kind of thought this plane was nuts. After viewing the test flight of the 176th General Oblast Ernst Udett, who is the Director General of Equ uh uh requisition for the uh the luftwaffe claimed that quote this is no airplane leave that thing alone i forbid you to fly it ever again how oh yeah and you almost feel bad for it you almost feel bad for the guy just like a sad kid

like with a science rare project like but it would fly if you gave it a chance he made it one of those like was it the the the elementary school volcano eruption things but it went too hard and he's like no no you can't do that um now hitler was also there when the the rocket plane took flight and uh even though in a couple years he would become fucking obsessed with the Wunderwaffen the wonder weapons or the victory weapons he would green light like 10 other things that were way dumber than this thing

America bomber yeah to include what we're going to talk about for the rest of the episode mind you and he thought the 176 was dumb as hell that's tough. Really? I mean, yeah. I was reading about the... I mean, this is the regime

that was just like, tanks the size of cities. Yeah, and like that again, he would also like reject the Sturmgewehr 44, which is... I thought that saw service. It did, because they ignored what Hitler said.

At first, he thought he didn't want to put in a production because he thought it was ugly it's 1944 you are sort of out of options my guy we are stamping this out of aluminum siding dude we can't go for aesthetics right now um yeah he thought it was mostly like it was terribly unsafe. The rocket engine was not super stable. It's a rocket. Yeah. And when one of the things that like that really did turn Hitler against the project is like he asked Heinkel like, well, what can you do

to make it safer? And Heinkel's like, oh, I don't know. I invented this last fucking week, man. What do you want from me? Buddy, I have been awake on math for the last 248 hours. And like, you know, we're only a couple months away from World War Two. And Hitler does not see the purpose into dumping material and further research into this, especially because soon all that's going to have to go into churning out propeller planes. Right. You know, the various other Messerschmitts.

Not for nothing, but Hitler was incredibly fucking lame, dude. He was dumb as shit. For someone who was an artist. Just as being like a genocidal maniac. He was not an engineer. He was a failed artist and I believe a corporal in the army. He didn't exactly understand the grand scheme of things, which is why he lost miserably. You know, and that and being a dipshit.

But, you know, with the beginning of World War Two, that did not mean our rocket bros were done. In 1939, Lippisch decided to leave his old job and began working for Messerschmitt, which brought him into becoming co-workers with a guy named Helmuth Walter. Now, Walter was the guy that designed Heinkel's rocket engine. Heinkel didn't design that. Walter did. So Lippisch said, you you know we can cram this rocket into one of these gliders that i

have just laying around remember these guys guys you remember these like using his uh his knowledge uh and from my understanding lippich is like one of the best glider designers who's ever lived uh using his title yeah right uh he he designed a glider around this rocket engine which would eventually end up becoming the messerschmitt 163 comet um now because of his background building gliders this was not a plane this was a rocket powered glider in every sense of the word and by that i mean it was even built out of laminated wood because you know it needed to glide very well need to have very good aerodynamics things like that um so it had to be light uh so you know for reasons that we will talk about later on this became very very big problem um now their goal was not to make an

interceptor or a fighter at first and there's some argument if this even started out as a military project it really seemed to be dudes with rockets yeah it was very much dudes rock get i'm not proud of that um you shouldn't be joe i you know what i actually have other stuff to to do no why don't you finish this one up by yourself okay bye guys I need to get a drop that's just people booing at me for bad attempts at jokes that's basically what I do on my own podcast

I just basically harass Roz and Alice until they let me talk and then I I make so that I say something stupid and then someone in the comms is like wow Liam's actually dumb as shit and I'm like it's a comedy podcast with slides go read a fucking wiki page i can't help you thanks for the money now um it really did seem like the the invention of the comet was like how fast can we fucking go

right um and of course they're gonna develop things like uh new on aerodynamics, aeronautical engineering, things like that. It really seemed like it was an experimental platform to try new shit on. Right. And they succeeded. Of all of the things they failed at, and we will talk about them, this is the one thing they did not fail at. In 1941, test pilot Heinrich Dittmar flew the comet at a record-breaking speed of over 1,000 miles an hour. Did he live? Yes, he did it again a few months later and broke 1,300 miles an hour.

I mean, that's the sound. Wait, wait, wait. That's the sound barrier. It sure is. Although Jaeger is the one credited with it, which is interesting. Yeah. Now, there's some controversy about this because it's 1941. It's Germany.

One, people don't want to give credit to a Nazi rocket scientist for breaking the sound barrier. And two, there's some argument if his measurements were super accurate. accurate though ditmar who did not understand what the sound barrier was did explain an experience that certainly sounded like someone breaking through the sound barrier like he heard a large a loud boom and thought the rocket engine exploded things like that fair can you imagine them and they probably didn't tell me that they're just like they're going to go very fast yeah exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. There is some evidence to suggest that

like they didn't know it was going to go that fast because the guy builds gliders. How the fuck is he going to know that? Yes, you go a thousand miles out like normally I glide at a gentle 50, you know, boy. Now this there is some evidence again to suggest that this is

did not go that fast though there is firsthand accounts that say he did break the sound barrier um but there's even more evidence suggests that if they did they did it on accident uh because this plane was not uh designed to go this fast. Dittmar explained... Nazis, everybody. Again, it's a rocket-powered wooden aircraft built by a guy who made gliders. Dittmar said the canopy rose up, like broke off, and the only thing keeping it attached to the plane

was the slipstream, like the pressure of the air passing to the plane was the slipstream like the pressure of the air passing against the plane i guess um his controls became completely unresponsive uh he nearly blacked out uh he broke all of the blood vessels in his eyes and uh it's estimated that he went through a negative 11 g's and uh i thought that would like that by most accounts that should have killed him uh but but i asked if he lived i was not expecting him to by ditmar's account he did almost die uh uh he is it says that like his memory is hazy but he did not black out which leads me to believe he blacked out multiple times and just didn't realize it.

Yeah. But the rocket thrust, this rocket only had the fuel for a couple seconds. This was a very, very quick burst of speed, which is probably why it was so violent for Ditmar, right? Normally, when you accelerate up to that speed, you do it over a very gradual amount of time uh let's just drop to a rocket in which case good luck to you unless you're strapped into a suicidal rocket sled fired into the air by nazi scientists like heinrich was now that was the best of us you know how it goes whoopsie daisy ended up almost breaking into the fucking into orbit on accident um i hate mondays

just being strapped in by fucking mangalo or whoever all right lip it's just made gliders i don't know if he ever killed anybody nazi nazi is a nazi is a nazi joe well actually he did kill a lot of people we're gonna talk about a lot of people that Lippage's design killed later on. And this was built by slave labor, but we'll get there. We always fucking do. There's actually a fair bit of things to suggest that this first one

worked really, really well because it wasn't built by slave labor, and that would change later on. And the plane itself would get more complicated. So at this point, it's being towed up to altitude, at which point it'd be cut loose. Rocket engine would cut on. Rocket engine would burn out after a couple seconds.

And then they would glide back down to Earth. Now, one of the problems is Lippitch designed a glider that worked so well, it was incredibly hard to land. It would be gliding, going at like 300 miles an hour. And it's apparently it's, it's lift abilities were so, so well-designed that even a slight gust of wind would push it back up again. And there's,

there's really nothing the pilot could do to settle it back down. In case you're curious, normal commercial airliners landed about 140. Yeah. So this is a problem like 190 jesus yeah i learned that yesterday actually um so yeah you you can see the problem here and another problem was it's a glider right you can't do a second pass there won't be enough speed left so uh something that Ditmar learned by just figuring this out while his brain is actively being turned into liquid by G-forces was because he's a good pilot. He realized I'm going way too fucking fast to land this thing. And he would have to circle it, bring it into tighter concentric circles and bring it slowly closer

and closer back down to earth but oh that sounds fucking terrifying yeah this is not something that was told to him beforehand either he's like i have to do this or i'm gonna die um now the rocket had an incredible rate of climb and also because of the way that the comet was designed it but you look like you go to fucking space in the thing right this this thing could climb so fast it could climb to an altitude of 39 000 feet in less than four minutes wow uh again this thing is built out of space launch shit yes yeah this is about the same level of scientific aptitude as whatever fucking Elon Musk

has designed actually no because he hasn't designed anything he just hires people to design it for him don't besmirch the good people of SpaceX who actually do the work my bad I apologize, SpaceX.

I did not mean to compare you to Nazis. They're happy. Only like all of the NASA rockets. Yeah. Aw. Now, this incredibly fast rate of climb required pilots to maintain a special low-fiber diet because you would

fucking rocket through the air so quickly it would cause gas in your lower intestines to expand and one it would be incredibly painful and two you just fill the cockpit of the rocket power death plane with terror farts laughing

laughing laughing laughing breaking this sound barrier shit in your pants you guys ever heard of the brown note the nazis developed the brown note you just have to strap a you guys have heard of Wunderhof alright we built the brown note

god of Rondoroth, alright? We built the proud note gun. Thank you. Not a bad day at work. I feel bad for whoever's editing this having to cut it. I was gagging over him laughs. I mean, the good news is like I said, the cockpit was kind of not sealed

very well so it was going to be vented by hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour of air so the farts would immediately get pushed out of the cockpit now uh here's where we get to talk about all the downsides of this thing which i I'm going to bet there were many. More than not. So as soon as this rocket-powered monster began to leave the ground, it began killing about half of anybody who touched it. Good. Welcome to the Resistance.

Fucking Messerschmitt Comet. Welcome to the Resistance. Now, this included pilots and ground crew for reasons we will get into. Now, what made this plane more dangerous than just about any other plane developed during the war? Well, a few things. For one, it had no landing gear. Because remember, it was designed by a glider guy it was it was it was to be towed up into the air right so when this eventually got turned to a military aircraft realized like oh we

we can't tow this thing that doesn't it doesn't work well we have to put wheels on it so it can launch itself right well this Well, that became a problem because to strap anything more onto it would have changed its flight characteristics and probably made it cartwheel hilariously through the air until it exploded. So in 1942, it was ordered to get into combat-ready status as quickly as possible.

And the top-secret testing... It was moved to the top-sec status as quickly as possible. And the top secret testing, it was moved to the top secret testing side of Pina Munda, which is a word I only know thanks to a battlefield 1942 expansion. Wasn't Pina Munda the, uh, also the heavy water plant or is that different? I think that one was in Norway. I'm not sure.

Yeah. Hang on. Yes. I also paid Pina Munda. Yeah. Pina Munda was pretty much the top secret testing site for all of the v2 i know from the v2 yeah yeah yeah it was where all the weapons were used and it also had a its own like slave labor camp that was building rockets in a in like a tunnel very weird shit going on there um now since this thing could break the goddamn speed of sound allegedly and it was mostly built by slave laborers at this point and dudes also just

kind of guessing on what happens next because they've never done this before either they didn't want to change the design so they had to think of a way to put wheels on it without it having to modify the body of the plane. They just kind of slapped together a wheeled dolly it would sit on. The plane would be sat upon this dolly system where it would then be towed to the runway by

a tractor. Here's the thing. These wheels had no shock absorbing properties whatsoever um this meant that as soon as the pilot took off yeah yeah because now remember it's not being towed anymore uh it has to take off under rocket power and the rocket is it has two settings off and you're being thrown into the fucking stratosphere so it would rip off the ground fast as hell uh and it would just shake the pilot like a motherfucker as soon as it tried to take off and for reasons that we will we will get to that it could not take off off a runway it was considered too unsafe to be anywhere near a normal runway. So they had to take off in the middle of open fields, you know, full of divots and stuff.

You know, if all of this worked, you know, when it took off under rocket power, the dolly was supposed to separate from the body, leaving it behind. Sure. That often didn't work great. Oh, no. it behind sure that often didn't work great um oh no sometimes it just becomes stuck and then pop off uh which would then cause it to strike the ground and then maybe bounce into the you know wooden plane with a rocket strapped onto it uh which would cause horrible explosions mind you um just hold on to that one for later another problem was landing because i'd already pointed out there was no landing gear uh and so how it was designed was

there'd be these little skids that would come off like within a couple inches they would uh come off off the body of the plane because this is what they apparently do on gliders, is that it lets you just skip across whatever you're landing on. So as they would glide in for the landing, they deploy these little skids, you're good to go. But that never worked either. They're skids. There's no shock-absorbing properties again. So even a perfect landing would shatter pilots' bones.

And most pilots who didn't just get killed by the fucking thing uh would just get mangled uh this included uh well for one ditmar but also uh nazi germany's favorite test pilot hanna reich who was like oh no not hans reich well she was like hit's favorite test pilot. Heck of a Nazi name, too. Yeah, yeah. I like to think she's like, no, my name is always kind of close to Reich. I totally didn't change it.

She was well known for being, like I said, Hitler's favorite test pilot, and she rode the thing, and when she landed it, she was a very good pilot, so she took off, didn't kill herself in the air, brought it back down for what should have been a very normal landing. Instead, her face got annihilated because she landed on the skids like you're supposed to, which caused the entire plane to jar wildly. Her face went right into the control panel and broke most of it.

Oh, no. what a shame. Yeah. Now, all of these things are nuts, but this leads us to the one thing that solidly puts the comet in the will there is your problem wheelhouse, right? That's us. The fuel.

Yes, tell me about the fuel. You've been hyping this you've been you've been hyping this shit up Joe honestly it is if there's more crazy fuel mixtures out there I've never heard of them but granted I wouldn't it's not something I study but Helmuth

Walter's engine was power that power the comet ran on a combination of two propellants sea stuff or substance tea highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide and C-Stoff or substance C, a 30% mixture of hydrazine, hyaluronate and methanol. Now, I probably pronounced this wrong. Sorry, chemistry people.

Now, these propellants were known as hypergolic. these propellants were known as hypergolic. Now for the non-chemistry nerds or people who don't listen to Liam's other show, first of all, go listen to that other show. Cause I know I've heard you talk about this before over there. Hypergolic means that if the two things ever react with one another, they'll become violently reactive within milliseconds.

These things cannot come close to touching one another now as you can imagine this is a bit of a problem when they have to be pumped into the same rocket engine uh furthermore other than being hypergolic with one another they were pretty much hypergolic with either hypergolic with air one of them i think yeah okay uh they were pretty much they would violently react explosively violently react with almost anything um now this included individual specks of dirt and dust uh and uh there's also virtually impossible to handle them in any safe manner. They resorted to washing out the engine with highly pressurized water in between flights to make sure there was no dust on there. But then they would have to wait for it to air dry because they also could not be mixed with water, which would lead dirt and dust together back in there. So there was a lot of on-the-ground explosions.

Also, if you handled them, I think it was mostly the tea stuff, if you handled them at all, they would literally melt human flesh and bone. That's Praxis, man. I need to underline something here. It did not burn you

it melted you and that is that is the the through line for all firsthand accounts of handling this stuff it wasn't that you you had chemical burns it would quote dissolve human flesh it didn't give you chemical burns it it melted you like candle wax. For our audience, I think you guys remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes. Yes, that's 100% what it did. Now, this extreme volatility meant that great care had to be taken when refueling the comet, with propellants being loaded one at a time and the engine being flushed out, like I said, with water between each flight. being loaded one at a time and the engine being flushed out like i said with water between each flight each component of the fuel had to be stored very specifically in very special kind of

containers now the funny part is they both had to be held in very specific but different kind of containers and if you ever mix them up everyone around you would die horribly right you're getting melted you're going full wicked which of these bro like one had to be like in a ceramic and glass enclosed container and the other one had to be like an aluminum one but if you mix them up the aluminum would make the other one react and the same you know vice versa

now the pilots had were worried about this as well because you know go figure they're strapped into it and so they were apply they were supplied with us acid proof asbestos flight suits oh which uh safety is job one yeah nazi osha is really hurting um the flight suits did not work um but like they were good for like incidental contact like a barely a splash any more than that they would just get melted now the germans came up with special safety

precautions because they knew how nuts this was uh for instance like trucks holding one component can be within uh 800 meters of the other truck holding the other component component uh but accidents were still more common than not having accidents because remember these guys the guys handling this stuff are not chemists no they're guys they're soldiers they're like flight crew guys they're not like

you know actually trained chemists who know um now one member of the ground crew mixed up one particular container and that and put the wrong chemical in it. One person said, quote, before he realized the magnitude of his mistake, his remains had been spread thinly over the entire test shed. Hmm. Jello.

Yep. Yeah. Getting turned into pasta sauce is not a thing I've ever desired. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it happened. i've ever desired yeah yeah exactly and it's it happened the only good thing i could see is it always happened so quickly that like nobody probably realized there's a problem well it also happened to nazis um uh so yeah you know nazis getting churned into marinara sauce by

fucked up chemistry experience experiment that they're running with slave labor i guess i'm fine with that but like if you would have made the mistake apparently these things were so uh reactive that you would never knew you made the mistake you just ceased to be um so i guess that's almost kind of a relief yeah uh so you don't have to worry about much you might just see a bright flash and then everybody has to scrape you up with shovels it's uh like that i read a an interview with a bomb disposal tech in afghanistan and they were just like how do you stay so calm when you work and he goes well either i do my job right or it's not my problem anymore yeah pretty much uh now the fuels the

fuel mixtures instability also that landing a comet even a drop of fuel left in it was a death sentence the rough why didn't they just drop the yeah why not just drop the rocket well the rocket engine itself can come out and there's still like fuel lines that

I was thinking okay okay I was thinking sort of like space shuttle booster type of thing but I imagine imagine that wasn't around yet. Oh no, this is not a multi-stage rocket. Now, the rough landings on the skids could cause lines to break.

Because remember, the lines, depending on which fuel it was, had to be made... One of the fuel lines is fucking ceramic and glass, because it's the only thing that could hold one component of fuel. So they weren't very reliable. So like if you had any fuel left in your lines and you had a particularly rough crash landing, because it seemed like all landings were kind of rough, you would just get nuked. um the one pilot joked quote if possible or sorry if you landed with fuel quote if possible head straight to the cemetery in order to save expenses yeah sometimes rocket would just cut

the rockets would just cut out and fail once they took off which was never really a big deal because you know this thing glides very very well uh so you're not just gonna fall out of the sky now if this happened to a comet pilot they were ordered to glide in a straight line this thing glides very, very well. So you're not just going to fall out of the sky. Now, if this happened to a comet pilot, they were ordered to glide in a straight line, never turn or bank or land, and hit an evacuate button that would dump out the fuel of both cells, mind you. So if the emergency evac had not been broken upon takeoff,

mind you, because of how horrible everybody's getting shook by this thing, or the very rapid acceleration as you rocket 40,000 feet into the air, it would then rain a horrible caustic shower of death onto everything below it. Maybe, possibly, saving the pilot's life. You win some, you lose some, I guess. life you would some you lose so i guess i would really like to see like someone point a video camera at the comet as this happens because like it has to just explode underneath of it as the two because the two chemicals are gonna mix yeah and one of them explodes on contact with the air so now sometimes none of this would matter every saw our pilots survived but we created air blast bombs uh send this to the japanese they're into the kamikaze thing um actually funny story that does happen um you know so everyone saw this just wouldn't matter um the rockets wouldn't burn all

of the fuel just right leaving fuel on the the lines, meaning best case scenario, they were a flying bomb. So this is a firsthand account of one of these such incidents. Quote, a certain failed viable Alois Bornel from Aschau, an excellent fellow and completely reliable flying and accuracy of precision of instrument, was chosen from among us pupils to make the first sharp start of the comet. Make it good, Alois, we shouted. And then he was off.

This is from the memoirs of Mano Zeigler, one of the few comet pilots to survive the war. As expected, Alois' rocket motor cut out at about 6,000 meters altitude. He then turned towards the field as precise as ever. And then without warning, side slip slip a shout came from the group aloys was much too high and a touchdown anywhere near the landing cross side slip side slip we all shouted as if he could hear us and then the comet shot past us and passed the landing cross too high too fast anxiously we watched the comet touched touchdown far outside the airfield perimeter

rebound into the air drop back down again like a brick and skid into some rough ground and turn over on its back. A split second later, a blinding white flame of a ball of flame shot up, followed by a mushroom cloud of smoke. Now, he was vaporized instantly. Everyone wasn't that lucky. However, there was Ober Lieutenantutenant Josef Poels, who on one flight released his takeoff dolly too early. The dolly bounced back up onto the ground and struck the aircraft, rupturing a T-STOP line. Poels immediately jettisoned his fuel like he was supposed to

and banked around to make an emergency landing. But just like Alois Verndel missed the runway, and you can't double back because it's gliding at this point, and he touched down on rough ground. Then it flipped over. Now, this generally wouldn't have been much of a problem if it wasn't for that broken T-stop flight, which just so happened to pour directly

into his cockpit. To the relief of those watching, his aircraft did not explode. So when they ran over there with some medics to see if he was okay, they opened the cockpit to find that he had been liquefied. Pasta sauce, yeah. Yep, he had just been churned

into liquid. His flight suit was mentioned as just floating in it. I don't want the Cronenberg body horror. Even when the fuel didn't leak, sometimes fumes would leak through the fuel lines, burning the pilot's eyes and nearly blinding them as they flew the aircraft

now despite all of this development went ahead and eventually the comet was armed yeah who cares they're just pilots right uh the comet was armed with a pair of small 30 millimeter cannons by 1944 it was considered a combat operational, though it was to be known as a... To do what? A point defense fighter. This meant that the little landing strips,

or fields rather, would be stationed on important infrastructure, you know, like factories, roads, bridges, whatever. And then when Allied bombers came overhead, they would quickly launch off a cloud of these little fuckers. They would climb out to 38, 35, 40,000 feet, cut off the rocket engine, and then dive back through, then in glider mode, and try to shoot down bombers before they could continue the Allied strategic bombing of Germany, a subject that is controversial and for a different podcast. Because I'm sure someone's just like,

you didn't even talk about strategic bombing. Not today. Moving on. It's all work, Robin. We do it. Scoreboard. Oh, that's not good. Now, this, in theory, worked okay.

But when the bomber showed up the pilots discovered there was another problem with the comet the plane went too fucking fast now due to the short range of these cannons during a high speed approach the pilot only had a window of around three seconds to aim and fire his guns oh no because it was flying at 800 miles an hour. Yeah, that was my next question. Yeah, it's just too fast. It's made it impossible for anyone to really hit anything other than just pure dumb luck.

So pilots would eventually learn once you get within the Kentucky windage of these bombers as you're rocking through the air, just let off on your cannons, which only held about 60 rounds because they weren't going to be in the air very long. So the Germans then came up with a new weapon, the SG-500 Jägerfaust, which consisted of five 50-millimeter cannon barrels pointed vertically at the wings of the comet, which would be fired automatically by a photo cell. If the photo cell was hit by a shadow of passing below a bomber, all 10 barrels would fire automatically.

What if it saw a cloud? I was just about to say that. That would also cause them to fire, which is one of the reasons why it didn't get rolled out. That, and you know, it's 1944, 45 at this point. Now,

allies are very confused at the super, super fast plane and there's nothing they had that could keep up with it. So they had to come up with a unique way of shooting down the comet. Oh, look, it's gliding gently down to that field, the land. Now we should shoot it down.

Once it was in glider mode mode it was helpless and they were very easily destroyed or they would wait for it to hit the ground knowing it could not take off again and then just shoot it there also they were they bombed pita munda they they bombed uh various other uh like fuel factories and things like that so the comet wasn't exactly very uh a robust airframe you know now by the end of the war, the comet killed around nine enemy planes. Some people say it was up to 10 to 15. That's unconfirmed. At the cost of 10 of their own in combat, I need to point out.

So even in combat, they lost more than they took down. Flying 800 miles an hour, that's just embarrassing. But remember how many people have died in testing? Probably five-fold that. They built around 300 of these things. The vast majority of them blew up on the ground. This meant this is probably one of the few

or maybe only planes to kill significantly more of its own pilots than the enemy during a war. Congratulations, Nazi Germany, you did it. Good job, boys. You killed the Nazis. Alexander Lippich high-fiving himself. I built a rocket that also killed Nazis,

but wait, I'm working for the Nazis? Fuck. Is this praxis? Accidentally becoming an anti-fascist via rocket science. Now, like I said, as the war rolled on, the comets were grounded. Point defense fighters were largely pointless. And they also began to run out of talented pilots and fuel

because they killed all their own pilots. And you did have to be a very good pilot to fly these things. This wasn't like the Japanese kamikazes by the end of the war where they're just like, nope, we're giving you two hours of flight time and good luck. These guys had to be very good pilots to handle this thing. So they quickly ran out of all of those. After the war, only one allied test pilot ever had the balls to try to fly one of these things and required a captured German ground crew in order to fly it. Now they actually refused to fucking help him because they realized like this

thing is going to kill you. If it kills you they're going to blame us. But he eventually wrote them a letter saying if I die while flying this thing it's not your fault. So after that he did one test powered flight which went fine. He said it handled amazingly

though landing and takeoff was a bitch. And after that, the RAF permanently grounded all powered flights of the comet, as did every other allied power. That was the only powered flight of a comet after the war. There's like 10 other

planes that survived, and the only way they ever flown was being towed behind another plane, because the only safe way to fuck with this thing. Um, also by that point, remember it's made of laminated wood. The lamination had begun to peel off, so couldn't fly it anymore.

However, this is not the only rocket plane of the war. The Japanese under agreement with the Germans developed their own based on the comment. Now, originally, as I'm sure some of us have probably heard at some point, the Germans were going to stuff on these comets in a U-boat and float it over to Japan so they could work

on it. Never happened, you know, because the war did not go well for the U-boats towards the end, and they were never able to actually ship the Japanese a full comet. But they did send them flight operations manuals and written descriptions for their pilots to begin studying in preparation for a comet. So the Japanese took a flight operations manual and reverse engineered an entire

comet from it. This did not go well. It's one and only powered flight on July 7th, 1945. The rocket engine sputtered and died crashing into the ground where it went up in a ball of flames, killing its test pilot. And that is the death of the comet.

Yeah, that is the comet. I really hope everybody enjoyed our more relaxed attempt at an episode. We didn't do a genocide. We did not do a genocide. We did not do a genocide. And you know, it's, it's, it's been a while since we've just got to laugh at something dumb that blew

up in everybody's face and, and kill, kill some Nazis, you know, literally. Yeah. This is practice folks. This is practice.

Now, uh, Liam, we do a, we do a segment on this show called questions from the Legion. Uh, if you'd like to ask us a question from Legion, there's currently a thread going on our Patreon.

You donate a dollar to get access to our Patreon. Throw a question in there. Just a quick reminder, a question from the Legion is not about an episode or a series because that can be simply answered. Yes, I will eventually get to that. But, yeah, there's no better way to answer that. But today's question from the Legion comes from,

I have to point this out, Yusuke Urameshi. For people who are not weebs such as myself and watch a lot of anime, it's from a Yu Yu Hakusho. Really liked that show as a kid. Who do you think the next country to invade Afghanistan will be? China. Probably. Pakistan

also may be likely. You know what? I'm going to go off the board here. Bhutan. Sleep. Fuck it. Sleeper pick. I'm going for the 16th seed. I'm going Bhutan. Oh yeah, but hey, every so often you beat Virginia. And nobody ever sees Bhutan coming into the final four.

This is their year. I believe in the Wang Chuk dynasty's ability to take over Afghanistan where we have failed. That's the Princeton offense. It's not for everybody, but... Liam, thank you for joining me on this relaxed fit... Nice, smooth jazz, Nazi Dev. Smooth jazz episode.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. The elevator music of podcasting. We got to talk about some Nazis melting and future imperial power uh the kingdom of bhutan uh so until next time uh i'll actually liam plug your show well there's your problem thanks joe yeah i'm on a podcast called well there's your problem it's a show with jokes about engineering disasters from a leftist perspective. And we have slides.

And honestly, this is something that, well, there's your problem, we'll probably talk about. But since the Nazis did it, I got to steal it. It's not a disaster if it kills Nazis, Joe. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for supporting the show. You make all the donations, make what we do possible. And until next time, break the sound barrier with a homemade rocket in your backyard.

Do it.