The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft

Book excerpt: The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft is the heretofore untold true story of Reimar, Wolfram, and Walter Horten's remarkable aeronautical achievements with the all-wing planform between 1933 and 1945 as told to aviation biographer David Myhra. Talking daily with Reimar Horten at his ranch at the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Argentina for two months, and also with Walter in Baden Baden, Germany, the two brothers described in detail their struggles in Nazi controlled Germany to perfect the all-wing planform. Astounding as their real-life story is of itself, the Horten brothers gave David Myhra hundreds of photographs to illustrate this new volume. In this remarkable book David Myhra tells the true story of the Horten brothers and their all-wing aircraft through the use of over 735 photos and three-view line drawings of their entire all-wing line. Most of these photos and drawings have not been available to the public until now. Even more astonishing, the Hortens, ridiculed in the mid-1930s for wasting their genius on silly all-wing aircraft, would be the only ones called on by Hermann Goring in December 1944 to build an all-wing "Amerika" atomic bomber and save Deutschland from certain and final destruction by the Allies through a negotiated peace settlement. The Horten Ho 18 "Amerika Bomber" was not meant to be. But it might have been if the war had not ended in May 1945 but, say, May 1946. This, then, is the fascinating true story of those naive boy-designers from Bonn, the Horten brothers and their silly all-wing airplanes. AUTHOR: