Willy Emil Messerschmitt was born in 1898, the son of a Frankfurt wine merchant. He had been obsessed with aviation since, as a small child, he had seen a Zeppelin flying. It was Messerschmitt's good luck that, as a schoolboy, he was permitted to give a hand to the famous flyer Friedrich Harth, and help with his gliding experiments. Harth was the second man in Germany (after Otto Lilienthal) to experiment with flying machines. When Harth went into the army, in 1914, he gave the plans of a glider to Messerschmitt, who was still a schoolboy. Harth came home on leave and was astonished to find that young Messerschmitt had built the glider.

When Messerschmitt came of military age, Harth arranged for him to join him at the military flying school at Schleissheim. In spite of being eighteen years younger than Harth, Messerschmitt became his business partner. The two men worked together until Harth was badly injured in a crash.

Eventually Messerschmitt raised enough money partly through his wife's wealthy family to buy the Bavarian Aircraft Works at Augsburg. This was the factory that was started by the First World War fighter ace Ernst Udet.

Messerschmitt's contribution to aviation was very great. Perhaps it was genius, but if so it was an erratic genius, ranging too far, through too many aspects of aviation. His early record-breaking glider designs were far ahead of the times, but they left a legacy of frailty that continued even as late as his 1940 fighter. After that came an amazing collection of machines, from the disastrous Me 210 twin-engined fighter, and the aptly named Gigant six-engined transport, to the only rocket-powered fighter to see operational service — the Komet — and the most effective fighter of the war — the Me 262 jet.

Like most other things about Willy Messerschmitt, his relationship with the Nazis was ambiguous. Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, was an old customer and a life-long friend, but Erhard Milch, Göring's right-hand man, was an implacable enemy. Milch's hostility can be traced from 1931 when two Messerschmitt M 20s crashed killing the passengers, one of whom was a great personal friend of Milch, head of Lufthansa, purchaser of the machines. He blamed Willy Messerschmitt but the enquiry said that the specification was at fault. The specification was altered but the enmity remained. Milch cancelled the order for ten more M 20 aircraft and demanded the refund of money already paid. This bankrupted Messerschmitt's company and he had to start again almost from scratch.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Milch made sure that Messerschmitt did not share the contracts and subsidies that other German aircraft manufacturers enjoyed. It was part of Milch's vindictiveness that when political pressure (due to Messerschmitt's having secured a foreign contract) forced Milch to give him a German government contract, Milch ordered him to build Heinkel biplanes under licence. Messerschmitt hated Heinkel almost as much as he hated biplanes.

Even Messerschmitt's early gliders had been monoplanes, for his credo was lightweight, low-drag, high-speed simple design. Biplanes were everything that Messerschmit detested. But as Milch's power grew, so his influence in departmental decisions weakened. Udet became the Luftwaffe Inspector of Fighters and Dive Bombers and the chief of the Development Section — of its Technical Department. And when Messerschmitt's Bf 109 met his rival's H 112 in comparative trials, it was the flying demonstration that was the deciding factor at a time when the Heinkel still had wide support. But when Messerschmitt's chief test pilot came to the spinning test (considered very important by the German Air Ministry), instead of doing the ten spins to port and ten to starboard that the specification demanded, he did seventeen and twenty-one respectively. The aircraft gave no sign of developing the flat spin that many on-lookers predicted. Then he took the plane up to over 24,000 feet and did a terminal velocity dive that flattened out almost at ground level. At that moment the Heinkel team must have guessed that their cause was lost. Just as at Hawker's Sydney Camm had taken his Fury biplane fighter as the basis for his Hurricane, so Willy Messerschmitt used his previous design as a basis for his fighter. But Messerschmitt's Bf 108 Taifun was a civil monoplane, a lightweight four-seat 'tourer’, so far ahead of its times that a company was formed to rebuild the same design in 1973. But Messerschmitt had no engine that could compare with the Rolls-Royce Merlin. German engine design had concentrated on the reliability that civil airliners needed. All such engines were heavy. He chose the Jumo 210D to go into the production models of his fighters but it proved difficult to modify. While the Merlin was being pushed from 720 hp to 990 hp (in 1936), the Jumo, even in 1938, was still delivering a miserable 670 hp.

Knowing the limitation of German engines, Messerschmitt designed the smallest, lightest, and most aerodynamically efficient airframe that would fit round the Jumo engine. He used the lessons of his Bf 108 to evolve a very sophisticated all-metal, semi-monocoque airframe. To offset the inevitable high wing loading he employed Handley Page leading-edge slats for extra lift (an unprecedente device for a fighter), as well as slotted ailerons interconnected to the flaps.

The new speeds to which the designers of the monoplanes aspired meant that a highly efficient very thin wing was needed. But the wing sections that gave the aircraft its top speed were not efficient at low speeds, that is, during take-off and landing. Slats and slots were ways to change the effective shape of the wing for those lower speeds.

Messerschmitt kept to the German Air Ministry specification, which wanted only two machine guns. To this end, he inverted the vee-shaped engine so that there was room for guns along the top of the cowling. Within the engine there was also room for a 20-mm cannon, firing through the airscrew hub. This was an attractive idea because, it was reasoned, the mass of the engine would buffer the recoil. Messerschmitt took full advantage of a specification that left the wings free of guns, and concentrated upon making them totally functional as a means of lift.

The news that the RAF was putting eight machine guns into their new fighters came as a terrible blow to the men who had nursed the Bf 109 through its trials. Messerschmitt's wings were simply not suitable for guns. But now they had to be made suitable. The problem of wing armament is that the ammunition must be at the centre of gravity (otherwise firing guns will upset the trim). This means that the gun breeches must be at the centre of gravity. So the positioning of any gun is dictated to the designers.

As an interim measure they were given a redesign job that found room in each wing for one 7.92-mm MG 17 — a development of the infantry's light machine gun. But there was no room for the boxes of bullets so the new wing was given an incredible ammunition feed. It took the belt of bullets all the way out to the wingtip, over a roller and all the way back to the wing root, and then over another roller and out to the machine gun. It was absurd, but it worked.

Soon, another wing was designed. It had one 20-mm Oerlikon MG FF cannon (in each wing) but there were large bulges for the drums of cannon shells and it was obvious that the airframe could not take much more such tampering. But the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was the Luftwaffe's only single-seat monoplane fighter. The redesigned wing had become more and more vital to all concerned as the failure of the engine-mounted cannon became undeniable.

By the time of the Battle of Britain, cannons had replaced wing machine guns but the engine-mounted cannon — although its muzzle seems evident in many photos — was not fitted.[1] But by then the lightweight wings had created new problems that had nothing to do with guns.