Junkers Ju 188
1940 bomber aircraft family
The Junkers Ju 188 "Rächer" ("Avenger") was a German Luftwaffe high-performance medium bomber built during World War II, the planned follow-up to the Ju 88 with better performance and payload. More than 1,000 aircraft were built, although production of the Ju 188 was curtailed early, due to the emergence of improved versions of the Ju 88, as well as the increasingly effective Allied strategic bombing campaign against German industry, leading to an increased focus on fighter production.
Background
In 1936, Junkers submitted proposals for the Ju 85 and Ju 88 into competition for the new standardized Luftwaffe high-speed tactical bomber, known as the Schnellbomber (fast bomber). The two designs were almost identical, differing only in that the Ju 85 used a twin-rudder and the Ju 88 a single fin.
At the same time, they offered modified versions of each as the Ju 85B and Ju 88B, again similar to the original designs but using an "egg shaped" stepless cockpit forward fuselage design that comprised a greenhouse-like, well-framed network of some three dozen compound-curved window panels in total. This was another example of the "bullet-nose" design philosophy that almost all new German bomber designs exhibited, from the time of the Heinkel He 111P onwards. The new nose design for the Ju 88B also tightly integrated the forward end of the undernose Bola ventral gondola defensive gun position into the newer nose design, when compared to the "added-on" Bola unit pioneered on the Ju 88 V7 prototype. This meant the Ju 88B offered somewhat lower drag and better visibility. At the time, this was considered too radical and the Ju 88A with its simpler, separately-glazed dorsal cockpit "greenhouse" framed canopy, and "beetle's eye" framed, multi-flat panel nose glazing comprising a "stepped" cockpit design from the separation of the pair of glazed units by the sheetmetal of the upper fuselage nose winning the initial Schnellbomber production contract.
The Reich Air Ministry (RLM) was already in the process of looking for the replacement for the Schnellbomber, a new design that would be faster, fly higher, and have a larger warload.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128631. The Library of Congress control number is sh2012003005. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Junkers Ju 188” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.