Heinkel He 277 - The "He 177B" Versus He 277 Controversy

The "He 177B" Versus He 277 Controversy

For many years after the war, a substantial number of aviation history books and magazine articles that dealt with late World War II German military aviation developments consistently stated that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, early in World War II, was becoming so frustrated by the 177A's ongoing engine problems, caused by the twin DB 606 "coupled" powerplants selected for the He 177A design in the pre-war years, that he forbade Ernst Heinkel from doing any work on a separately four-engined version of the 177 airframe, or even mentioning a new "He 277" design with four separate engines - by one account, in the late autumn of 1941 - until Heinkel brought the disagreement directly to Adolf Hitler, who supposedly not only approved of calling the new, separately engined version of the 177 the "He 277", but overruled Goering's prohibition on working on the design (previously called the "He 177B" by Heinkel as a "cover designation" to hide its existence from Goering, and the RLM.)

Statements by Goering himself in August 1942, however, seem to directly contradict elements of the oft-repeated story, as those statements seem to show that Goering thought that the He 177A actually had four separate engines, and in late August of 1942 derisively labeled the He 177A's coupled engine arrangements, the DB 606 and DB 610 "power systems" at that time as monstrous zusammengeschweißte Motoren, or "welded-together engines", in his complaints about the He 177A's ongoing engine difficulties, and was anxious to see a truly four-engined version of Heinkel's heavy bomber fully developed and in production.

Facts that could have fostered the origin of the post-war aviation book storyline about the "He 177B"/He 277 controversy were that the RLM, in listing the He 177 development projects that they approved of the Heinkel firm doing work on as of February 1943 (six months after Goering's recorded engine complaint statements), only included the He 177 A-5 heavy bomber, A-6 high-altitude bomber, A-7 long-range version, and the "He 277" itself, with the RLM also expecting, during the late spring of 1943 (about one year after the mid-Spring 1942 Amerika Bomber proposal first arrived in Goering's offices) that a trio of He 277 V-series prototype aircraft, and construction of ten pre-production A-0 series machines were to be completed, as well as "progressive development" of the still-unbuilt and unfinalized design, were anticipated as coming from Heinkel's Schwechat southern plant complex in Austria. The initial starting place for the He 277's fuselage design had been meant to originate with the last "coupled-engine" proposed variant of the He 177 itself, the long-range A-7, which itself was to be the basis for a four-engined variant of the Greif as the He 177A-10, then redesignated the He 177B-7 in the late summer of 1943. The considerable changes in the He 277's overall design philosophy evolved after the Amerika Bomber proposal's emergence in May 1942, from the changes in the He 277's general arrangement proposal drawings during that time period. The original proposal, which was meant to use the He 177A-7's fuselage as the starting point, evolved into designing a dedicated, new and wider He 219-general pattern fuselage layout for the 277 from the Spring 1943 timeframe onward, which would be more capable of using a tricycle undercarriage then gaining favor with a few German aviation designers, even with the 277 not known to have been specifically considered by the RLM in the earlier timeframe for the Amerika Bomber proposal.

The main factor that seemingly required the lower-drag "coupled" powerplant format for the He 177A, the diving attack mandate by the RLM, which Ernst Heinkel vehemently disagreed with since the original Greif's beginnings in the late 1930s, was rescinded by Goering himself some five months before the "He 277"'s earliest-known February 1943 RLM approval date. The Heinkel firm started work on the He 177B as a straightforward, separately four-engined development of the 177A under the B-series designation at least as early as the late summer of 1943, when official Heinkel documents began referring to the He 177B, evidenced from an August 1943-dated, Heinkel factory-created general arrangement drawing of the He 177 V101 being labeled with the 8-177 RLM designation for the entire line of Greif airframes, and "B-5" elsewhere in the drawing's title block, as a fully RLM approved development of the original He 177 aircraft line, and not in any way directly related to the entirely separate He 277 advanced bomber design project, which by the summer of 1943 was considered to be Heinkel's Amerika Bomber aviation contract contender. The first development of the original He 177A to fly with four "individual" engines - using a quartet of He 219-style annular radiators to cool its Daimler-Benz DB 603 powerplants - was the second He 177B prototype, the He 177 V102, on December 20, 1943.

In total, there were three separate efforts, the movement toward which had been initiated by Ernst Heinkel as early as November 1938, to develop "true four-engined versions" of the A-series Greif: the He 177B, which culminated in four prototype examples being built, with three getting airborne before the war's end; the He 274, of which only two prototypes were started before the end of World War II and completed and flown in France after the war's end; and the He 277, for which only had a few airframe parts had been in the process of completion, with no completed prototypes at any time, before or after the end of the war.