The 10 Worst Aircraft of the Second World War

For every Spitfire, Mustang or Fw 190, there was a plane as terrible as these aeroplanes were fabulous.

Considering the pace of technology and the dire global situation, it is hardly surprising that more than a few downright diabolic machines found their way to the dangerous skies of the war. Here are 10 of them.

10: Blackburn Botha

The British Blackburn company is always represented in any list of terrible aircraft, and the Botha is the first of two Blackburn entries on our list. The Botha was damned from a chronic lack of power. Its poor performance meant it was never to enter service in its primary role as a torpedo bomber.

The type first flew in 1938, entering service after the war had started, two weeks before Christmas in 1939. It suffered from poor lateral stability, and though a slew of crashes followed, this was not unusual for a new type entering service in the late 1930s.

Had that been all, it would have been nothing worse than an obscure mediocrity, but Blackburn had also made it extremely difficult to see out of the aircraft in any direction except dead ahead due to the position of the engines. This was an untenable failing for an aircraft now intended for reconnaissance, and the Botha was supplanted by the Avro Anson, which it had been supposed to replace.

Passed to training units, the Botha’s vicious handling traits conspired with its underpowered nature to produce a fantastic amount of accidents, yet somehow a terrifying 580 were built, and the type soldiered on until 1944.

9: Breda Ba. 88 Lince (‘Lynx’)

Do you like aircraft that can go round corners? Seemingly, Italian company Breda thought that was overrated. Proof that the adage ‘If it looks right, it’ll fly right’ is a load of old cobblers, the Lince looked fast and purposeful yet it was so overweight, draggy and underpowered that it sometimes refused to fly at all.

The early life of the Ba.88 appeared extremely promising. Appearing in 1937, the aircraft featured many advanced features, notably a sleek low-drag design and a retractable undercarriage. It even smashed several world speed records. But once fully adapted for its ground attack role its weight grew, and flaws became apparent.

On the first day of the Italian offensive against British forces in Egypt, for example, three Bredas were committed from Sicily: one tried unsuccessfully to take off and another was found to be unable to turn and was therefore compelled to fly straight and level until it arrived at Sidi Rezegh airfield in Libya (which, fairly evidently, isn’t Egypt).

Later, once sand filters were fitted to the engines, the Lince could not exceed 155 mph (249 km/h) and there were occasions when entire units failed to take off. In an attempt to make the benighted craft viable, various items of equipment were left behind, including the rear machine gun, one of the crew (leaving the pilot all on his own), and half the fuel and bomb-load, but this never worked and the Lince was adapted to a role it fulfilled admirably – being parked on airfields to draw enemy fire. A noble task. 149 were built, until 1941.

8: Napalm bats

Not an aircraft type, just a truly horrible idea, bat bombs were the bizarre answer to the question of how small incendiary munitions could be accurately steered into the roofs of wooden Japanese buildings. The bomb consisted of a canister containing over 1000 hibernating Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis), each fitted with a small napalm-filled incendiary device with a timer.

The canister was dropped from a standard bomber aircraft, parachuting to a soft landing, after which the bats awakened and flew to roost under the eaves or attics of buildings within a range of about 40 miles (64 km), where the timed bombs they were carrying would, it was hoped, ignite and cause widespread fires.

The bat bomb was the invention of a dentist called Lytle S. Adams, who rather uncharitably described the bat as the ‘lowest form of animal life’ and asserted that, until that point, ‘reasons for its creation have remained unexplained’.

In fact, the sole damage inflicted by the bat bomb occurred during tests of the device in May 1943, when Carlsbad Army Airfield was accidentally set on fire after the armed bats roosted under a fuel tank and ignited it (pictured). Nonetheless, the bat bomb was judged to be very effective and it was only the advent of the atom bomb that prevented the bat bomb’s use in action.

7: Douglas TBD Devastator

The Devastator’s chronic vulnerability has become infamous. It was required to fly straight and level at a stately 115 mph (185 km/h) to deliver its torpedo, a speed that meant it could be easily intercepted by an SE5a of 1917 vintage, which is somewhat unfortunate for an aircraft touted on its debut as the most advanced naval aircraft in the world.

Furthermore, the poor old TBD had a woeful defensive armament and lacked manoeuvrability. Its problems didn’t stop there, as its main armament, the Mark 13 torpedo, was a dreadful weapon plagued with reliability issues and frequently observed to score a hit but then fail to explode.

As a weapons system, the TBD–Mk 13 torpedo combination was probably the least satisfactory of the entire air war. Instead of the torpedo, the TBD could also carry 1200 lb (540 kg) of bombs, thus extending the scope of its inadequacy into two roles.

Dick Best, who flew a Douglas SBD dive-bomber at the Battle of Midway, remembered the Devastator as a ‘nice-flying airplane’, but, like the Fairey Battle, it was committed to combat in a world that had overtaken it. Only 130 were ever built, a small amount for a US aircraft of this period, and, coincidentally, only six fewer than the equally dismal Blackburn Roc. A match made in mediocre-naval-aviation heaven.

6: Boeing YB-40 Gunslinger

This fighter is, as you have no doubt spotted, a B-17. Imagine ‘mixing it’ with single-engined Messerschmitt Bf 109s in this. In 1942 the Eighth Air Force thought they might create an effective escort by slinging a massive amount of guns into a bomb-free Flying Fortress.

The YB-40 could be equipped with up to thirty defensive guns, though it normally carried between fourteen and sixteen. Armament was mostly .50-calibre M2 Browning machine guns in various configurations, though 40-mm cannon were also tested.

No aircraft has ever flown with such a formidable defensive armament. Unfortunately, this made the aircraft so draggy and heavy that it couldn’t keep up with the bombers it was supposed to be protecting.

In a totally irrelevant but oddly satisfying aside, the YB-40 is the only aircraft on this list to feature in an Oscar-winning film, two of them appear in the scrapyard scene at RFC Ontario towards the end of William Wyler’s ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ which won nine Academy awards in 1947. Its film career was notably more successful than its operational one but did not save it from the scrapman’s torch.

5: Fairey Battle

Every fighting power of the Second World War seemingly pulled out all the stops to produce dreadful light and medium bombers, apparently designed solely for killing aircrew, but the Battle lowered the bar of uselessness to an unassailable depth. Despite being the first RAF aircraft to shoot down an enemy aircraft in the Second World War, and the first aircraft to be fitted with the superlative Merlin engine, the Battle was woeful.

It was a kind of anti-Mosquito, being too slow to evade enemy fighters yet too poorly armed to defend itself, too small to carry a decent bomb-load yet too large for a single-engined aircraft and lumbered with an extra crewman to no real purpose.

The Battle was unable to survive against any modern fighter aircraft and loss rates during 1940 regularly exceeded 50% and reached 100% on at least two occasions. It does not require a degree in mathematics to realise that losses at these levels are unsustainable.

Its shortcomings had been recognised before the war, but the Battle had one overriding trump card: it was cheap. In late thirties Britain, it was decided that having lots of second-rate bombers was better than having none at all, especially when announcing production totals to a hostile parliament and press.

4: Blackburn Roc

The wrong concept applied to the wrong airframe at the wrong time, the Roc was the answer to a question that should never been asked, namely: ‘Where’s the Navy’s Boulton Paul Defiant?’ Boulton Paul had gone to great lengths to make their turret-armed fighter as fast and handy as possible.

Despite carrying around a turret and a gunner, which added about a ton to the loaded weight of the aircraft, the performance of the Boulton Paul Defiant wasn’t much worse than a contemporary Hurricane and, although the concept was flawed, the aircraft was excellent.

Imagine what they must have thought when the Navy asked them to mount the same turret in the less-than-stellar Skua to produce the Roc, which was 85 mph (140 km/h) slower and infinitely less able to survive. Exactly how an aircraft derived from a dive-bomber, barely able to reach 200 mph (320 km/h) and with no forward-firing armament, was supposed to combat a Messerschmitt Bf 109 was apparently not a major concern.

Luckily for all concerned (except the Luftwaffe), the Roc was little used, but amazingly it did score one victory, against a Ju 88 over Belgium, an aircraft nearly 100 mph (160 km/h) faster than the unlovely Roc. Despite this unlikely success, the Roc remains the worst operational carrier fighter ever to grace a flight deck.

3: Saunders-Roe A.36 Lerwick

The whole unhappy Lerwick saga can be traced back to the British Air Ministry’s specification R.1/36, issued in March 1936, calling for an all-metal flying monoplane boat to replace the Saro London and Supermarine Stranraer biplanes, followed by the Ministry’s unusually dynamic decision to order the aircraft ‘off the drawing board’ rather than wait for it to actually exist and be tested.

The Saro Lerwick closely resembled a scaled-down, twin-engine Sunderland but the dismal nature of its service career was in inverse proportion to the success of its larger colleague. Perhaps the most unfortunate of British aircraft, the Lerwick’s persistence in active service, for three years, serves to show just how desperate RAF Coastal Command was for any kind of aircraft, even dangerously ineffectual ones, during the early war years.

Its main problems were a simple lack of power coupled with an inexplicable lack of stability. The Lerwick could not be flown hands-off, which is not good for a long range patrol aircraft,  nor could it maintain height on one engine. It was prone to porpoising on landing and take off and possessed a vicious stall. Added to this are structural headaches (the floats regularly broke off) and a woefully unreliable hydraulic system.

During its squadron service, from June 1939 to November 1942, thirty airmen and one civilian technician lost their lives in Lerwick accidents in return for 2000 lb (907 kg) of bombs dropped on one submarine with no measurable result. The obscure story of the dreadful Lerwick demonstrates how hard-won the successes were that were yet to come.

2: Heinkel He 177 Greif

Thankfully for the free world, Germany never managed to get a truly effective large heavy bomber force together in World War II. However, they did manage to make a staggeringly huge total of 1169 of the abysmal He 177. It had many issues, but number one was the two engines coupled into a complex, cramped pod on each wing, which tended to catch fire.

In an effort to fulfil their obsessive desire to reduce drag, Heinkel decided to use cutting edge technology to provide the aircraft’s defensive weaponry in three remotely controlled turrets. These offered other advantages such as reducing the vulnerability of the gunners and providing them with the best possible view.

Unfortunately for the He 177 effort, the development of the remote turrets lagged behind the airframe, and the aircraft had to be redesigned to allow the manned gun position to be fitted; this required strengthening the aircraft in the affected areas and increased weight gain.

The first production aircraft had an improperly designed wing and would begin to fail after only 20 flights (provided the engines hadn’t caught fire by then); extensive redesign and strengthening was undertaken, further increasing weight. Unreliable and prone to catastrophic fires, the infamous Heinkel He 177 also consumed massive amounts of valuable resources when most needed for better aircraft.

PICTURE: Captured He 177 wearing British markings

1: Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet

To defend Germany, the Luftwaffe needed extremely high-speed interceptors to smash Allied bombers out of the sky with the minimum of notice. The ideal interceptor would have an high rate of climb to meet the waves of bombers, and heavy armament to knock them out swiftly.

The best solution to this extreme performance appeared to be the rocket engine, and so Messerschmitt created the fastest aircraft of the war, the rather insane Messerschmitt Me 163. With a top speed of more than 900 km/h (560mph) the Me 163 was far faster than the bombers and escort fighters it faced.