Did German jets really run on diesel?

Jonathan Beard Discussion

Making Jet Engines in World War II: Britain, Germany, and the United States, by Hermione Giffard, is an unusual study of World War II aviation in that it almost ignores combat, and concentrates on engine production.  The traditional story of jets in the war is that Germany—despite being bombed, and under increasing economic pressure of all kinds—managed to put the Me-262 fighter and the Ar-234 bomber into the air, and into combat. Both were much faster than any Allied plane. Great Britain, by contrast, produced a small number of Gloster Meteors, but these planes were slower than the best British piston-powered fighters, and never saw combat (except against V-1 cruise missiles).  The United States, richly endowed with engineers and factories, produced almost no engines, and made a small number of P-80s, which, like the Meteor, never saw combat.

Giffard turns the usual story of German technological prowess upside-down, though. She claims that the Germans turned to turbojets because their engine-makers could not—unlike British and American companies—make increasingly powerful piston engines as the war went on. Nor could Germany provide the high-octane fuel they demanded. So Germany turned to jet engines which could be produced cheaply by slave laborers, and which could run on diesel oil. This last surprised me. American jet engines used to run on JP-4, which was half gasoline and half kerosene. JP-8, the current fuel, is less volatile, but still far from diesel oil. Does anyone know if the German jets really used the same diesel as motor vehicles?  

3 Replies

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I'll be very interested in any answers and other input that comes out of this. Nick Sambaluk, can you enlightened us?

Rob Kirchubel

Gas turbines, including jet engines, will run on almost anything (including powdered coal), given appropriate fuel metering & combustor details, since combustion is continuous rather than intermittent. All you really need is a heat source (hence US military work on nuclear-powered aircraft in the 1950s--a small reactor would have provided the energy source). The generic label kerosene applied to both diesel fuel and commercial and military grades of jet fuel. I don't recall details about German jets in WW II, but presumably was some variety of kerosene.

In Germany; in the initial conceptual stages, especially during design and prototype manufacturing and testing stage, jet engines used “gas”. That is; hydrogen and propane gas. Maybe that is why they are referred as “gas turbine powerplants”. Joke aside; one of the advantages voiced for jet engines in 1938 was “use of cheap home-produced fuels”. The widely used jet engine on the Me-262 jet fighter, the Jumo 004, “was developed from the outset to burn diesel oil”. To anyone pursuing a serious study of German jet engines and jet aircraft in the pre- and during WWII years, I would highly recommend the four volume work “Me 262” by J. Richard Smith and Eddie J. Creek.

Best regards,

Bülent Yilmazer
yilmazer1959@gmail.com
History of Aviation
Middle East Technical University
Department of History
06800 Ankara - Turkey
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