General Background

In 1937 the Me-109 was an excellent aircraft but the Reich Air Ministry wanted a new advanced fighter that could out perform any future foreign designs. Kurt Tank’s Focke-Wulf Fw-190 Würger (Butcher Bird) won the design competition by using an air-cooled radial engine. When the Fw-190 entered combat in the summer of 1941 it already was Germany’s premiere piston-powered WWII fighter. Over 20,000 of all variants of the Fw-190 were built with 13,291 of these being of the 9 different “A” variants.

The Aircraft

In early 1944 with things not going very well on the Eastern Front, the Luftwaffe found itself in dire need of a heavily armed attack aircraft that could destroy armored vehicles including tanks with something other than bombs. Germany had not developed weapons systems that would allow light fighter aircraft to be adapted to this role. This meant a trial and error method of finding the correct weaponry. One of the trials was labeled the Fw-190-8/R3 that along with the regular machine guns in the nose and wing roots, had two 30 mm Rheinmetall- Borsig MK 103 cannons mounted in under-wing pods. There were only two of this variant produced because recoil of the cannons were so great that it would over stress the wing structure and cause it to break apart.