In this video, we talk about the Heinkel He 177 Greif, a German heavy bomber constructed as part of the "Bomber A" project, a project that called for a new long range strategic bomber. We first talk about military strategy in Nazi Germany before and during World War 2 and why many in military leadership disliked the idea of a heavy bomber, exemplified in the results of the previous Ural Bomber project, and why they liked light bombers and/or so-called schnellbombers. We than talk about the designing of the He 177 and how it differed from most other heavy bombers in that it was a two-engine design, which was done to decrease drag and increase performance.

We then talk about the incredibly poor performance of the He 177 prototypes and how many of them either crashed or suddenly burst into flames, a problem that continued into pre-production and production models. We go over why this problem occurred so frequently and how the quest for high speed and performance played a major role in it. We look at how they attempted to remedy the issue and how the He 177 performed in combat (poorly, as it turns out). We conclude by talking about a British-captured He 177, British test pilot Eric Brown, and his opinion and experience with the plane.

Some sources on the He 177 (archive links):

Heinkel He 177, 277, 274: https://archive.org/details/heinkel-h...
Famous Bombers of the Second World War: https://archive.org/details/famousbom...
The Luftwaffe Album: https://archive.org/details/luftwaffe...
Wings of the Luftwaffe (Eric Brown): https://archive.org/details/wingsoflu...