12. Was there really a bomber designed to fly to North America?
A round trip flight from German airbases to the American east coast is about 7,200 nautical miles, an impossibility for the aircraft prevalent during the Second World War. In 1938, before the war began, Herman Goering addressed the issue, saying in a speech, “I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5 ton bomb load”. Goering expressed the desire to possess such an aircraft, which he claimed would be able to stop American “arrogance across the sea”. Until May 1941 the Germans planned to operate heavy bombers against the United States from the Azores, but before a suitable airplane was ready the islands were leased to the British, and bombing missions would have had to be launched from occupied Europe, where Allied airpower was wresting control of the air from the Luftwaffe.
The Amerika bomber plan actually included five different bombers, not all of which developed prototypes, before one – the Junkers Ju-390 – was put into production. Difficulties in engine development were the primary cause of the project’s failure. The Amerika bomber program also selected targets in the United States and presented them to Hitler. They included industrial plants as far inland as Tennessee and Indiana, as well as along the American coastline. The Germans were never able to complete an aircraft capable of reaching the east coast and safely returning to Europe, let alone the American Midwest, and even if they had succeeded the payloads would have been too small to significantly impact the American war effort. Only had the Germans successfully created an atomic bomb would the Amerika bomber made any sense strategically, and the Germans never really came close to developing such a weapon.