Heinkel He 111
The Heinkel He 111 was a German twin-engined medium bomber, designed in 1934 by Siegfried and Walter Günter and first flown in February 1935. Presented to the world as a fast civil airliner, it became the Luftwaffe's most numerous bomber in the early war years and served on every European front as a bomber, torpedo bomber and transport. Daylight operations over Britain in 1940 exposed its weak defences and it shifted largely to night work, yet it stayed in German production until 1944, and Spanish licence-built versions remained in service until 1973.
Why It Mattered
The He 111 gave the Luftwaffe the backbone of its bomber force at the start of the Second World War: a fast twin-engined medium bomber employed as a spearhead of the Blitzkrieg campaigns. It was the most numerous bomber type in German service when the war began, and more than six and a half thousand were eventually built. Its origins were a deception: it first appeared as a high-speed commercial transport, a cover that concealed its development as a bomber. Designed in 1934, it was already ageing when it met modern fighters in 1940, and its defensive shortcomings were harshly demonstrated; Germany had little alternative than to continue production, and the type stayed in service on every front in the European theatre.
Design Notes
The He 111 was a twin-engined enlargement of Heinkel's single-engined He 70 Blitz mailplane: it kept the earlier design's elliptical wing and was nicknamed the Doppel-Blitz, the "double lightning". Later variants traded the elliptical wing for one with straight leading and trailing edges, which could be manufactured more efficiently. Early aircraft had a conventional stepped cockpit, but the He 111P introduced the type's signature feature, a fully glazed and laterally asymmetric nose with the bombardier offset to starboard, giving the bomber its distinctive greenhouse profile. Bombs were stowed nose-up in eight internal vertically aligned racks, an arrangement that limited the ordnance selection to bombs of only two sizes. Engines changed as supply dictated: the P series used the Daimler-Benz DB 601, while the H series standardised on the Junkers Jumo 211 series of engines.
Operational History
Deliveries of the bomber began in 1936, and aircraft were sent to Spain the following year, where support for the Nationalist forces let Germany test new equipment and tactics under operational conditions. In 1939 and 1940 the He 111 spearheaded the campaigns in Poland, Norway, the Low Countries and France. Over Britain in 1940, however, daylight formations proved vulnerable to fighter attack, too slow to take effective avoiding action and too poorly armed to defend themselves; after heavy losses the type was largely confined to night attacks against Great Britain from mid-September 1940, and it carried much of the night Blitz that followed. It went on to serve across the European theatre, as a torpedo bomber in the Atlantic and Arctic and as a medium bomber and a transport on the Western, Eastern and Mediterranean fronts. German production ran from 1935 to 1944; Spain then continued building the design under licence as the CASA 2.111.
Afterlife
The RAF Museum displays an H-20 in London: captured by Allied forces in 1945, it was briefly employed as a transport aircraft by an American fighter squadron before preservation. Most aircraft preserved in He 111 form are Spanish CASA 2.111s, licence-built versions re-engined with Rolls-Royce Merlins that remained in service until 1973. One, a German-built H-16 exported to Spain in 1943 and rebuilt by CASA in 1952, was acquired by the Kent Battle of Britain Museum in 2019 and is under restoration at Hawkinge; volunteers installed the top Jumo 211 engine cowlings in October 2025, and the aircraft wears the markings of an H-2 of Stab Kampfgeschwader 53. No He 111 flies today: the last flyable example was destroyed in a fatal crash landing at Cheyenne in July 2003.