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The Horten Ho 9 / Ho 229

Basically, what we have here is the raw research for the earlier book, in the form of interviews with the Horten brothers and their associates. Despite the titles, the two books are not distinct: the interviews fill all of volume one and the first half of volume two. If one set is "retrospective" and the other "technical," I wasn't able to see the difference. However, volume two is filled out with a bunch of short chapters with very long titles (one of them is contains 70 words in 5 sentences). These are indeed tehnical in nature, especially toward the end, when we get a chapter on the cockpit layout, another on the landing gear, und so wieter.

What fascinated me was the interviews. They begin, of course, with the Horten brothers. Myhra was especially close to Reimar Horten, the design genius of the family, and visited him in Argentina for what appears to have been a period of months in the 1980s. Of course he used much of this material in his earlier biography of the brothers, but it's a rare opportunity to be able to read the raw material. Necessarily, there's much repetition, and there's also conflict between the various accounts. Very little effort has been made to resolve the conflicts, though you can see the interviewer (almost always Myhra) wrestling with the problems they pose.

For example, Walter Horten was the pilot and organizer of the family. He'd flown in combat, and it was he who dealt with Hermann Göring's lads at the Reich Luftfahrt Ministerium, which handed out the contracts. In order to make the beautiful but radical all-wing turbojet more acceptable to the bureaucracy, and perhaps also because as a combat veteran he believed in the concept, Walter wanted to put a vertical tail-fin and rudder on the aircraft. Reimar of course was opposed. Myhra keeps returning to the conflict, which naturally is never resolved. Was the Ho 229 too unstable a platform for a fighter aircraft, or was Walti's notion of a vertical fin just a sop to more conventional minds? We'll never know.

Perhaps the most refreshing viewpoint in the book is that of Gerhard Hopf, who was a young pilot at the end of the war, with minimal contact with the Hortens or the all-wing concept. But he is tough-minded, opinionated, and quick to find the weak points and inconsistencies in the stories being told. (In most cases, Hopf doesn't seem to be present at the interview; he's providing commentary afterward.) Increasingly, as the pages wear on, he turns against the Hortens: "It makes me even more mad to see how our great nation's war effort was so influenced by the likes of Walter Horten and Hermann Göring and their crazy ideas.... Walter with his smart-looking uniform and talk of miracle aircraft ... would make even the disbelieving believe." (For some unfathomable reason, Myhra puts every proper name in italics.) I really wound up liking Herr Hopf.

Another refreshing voice is that of Rudolph Opitz, also a pilot, and one with experience in unconventional aircraft. "Any one of the old timers who flew Horten sailplanes ... knew that the Horten all-wing flying characeristics are horrible," he said. "Anyone who came from the outside and flew the Horten all-wing aircraft found that the aircraft flew, but that was about all. The All these aircraft required considerable changes, but the Horten brothers would never listen."

In the Schiffer tradition, the photographs are magnificent and plentiful. There must be a thousand pictures in these two volumes, though some (also in the Schiffer tradition) are duplicates. Sometimes, indeed, we get duplicates on the same page, with one a detail enlargement of the other.

At the end of the day, was the Ho 229 any good at all? I'm inclined to agree with Hopf that it was a waste of resources, whether or not it was as difficult to fly as Optiz claimed. Like Jack Northrop's XB-35 and YB-49 Flying Wing bombers, the Horten turbojet seems to have been a beautiful aircraft but a stinker of a flying machine.

And finally, are these books worth buying? Personally, I think Schiffer should have taken all of Myhra's raw material, given it to a good editor, and told him to turn the three volumes (including the biography) into one definitive study of Reimar, Walter, and their interesting but ultimately failed designs. But if you are an all-wing buff, or a Horten buff, or even a Luftwaffe buff, you should add these books to your collection. In that case, you can be the editor and draw your own conclusions.