WW2 Helicopters: 10 Rotorcraft That Flew in World War II, and What They Did

Yes, helicopters were used in World War II, but only a few hundred were built and almost none carried weapons into combat. They flew rescue, observation, liaison and ship-spotting missions, and most arrived in the last two years of the war.

Germany got there first. The Focke-Wulf Fw 61 became the first practical helicopter in 1936, and the Fa 223 and Fl 282 were ordered into series production, but Allied bombing kept output to a few dozen machines.

The Sikorsky R-4 was the first helicopter built in real numbers, about 130 of them, and in April 1944 it flew the first combat rescue by helicopter, in Burma.

Much of the war’s rotary-wing flying was done by autogyros and rotor kites, not helicopters. This list covers both, ranked by what each one actually did in the war, and it fits inside the bigger story of how airplanes were used in World War II.

1. Sikorsky R-4 (US)

The R-4 was the first helicopter to serve with the US and British armed forces, and the first to be mass-produced on a large scale. It grew out of Igor Sikorsky’s VS-300, which made its first tethered hop in September 1939 and its first free flight on May 13, 1940.

The XR-4 prototype first flew in January 1942. It flew 761 miles (1,225 km) cross-country from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Wright Field in Ohio, and beat the existing helicopter records for endurance, altitude and airspeed.

The Army Air Forces ordered three YR-4As and 27 YR-4Bs for testing, then 100 production R-4Bs. The type served with the Army Air Forces, the Navy and the Coast Guard (as the HNS-1), and with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, where it was called the Hoverfly.

It was a small, slow machine. The R-4B topped out at about 75 mph (121 km/h), had a range of about 130 miles (210 km) and could carry one passenger or one stretcher.

The first helicopter combat rescue

In late April 1944, Lieutenant Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group flew a YR-4B behind Japanese lines in Burma. A liaison plane carrying three wounded British soldiers had been shot down, and its pilot and passengers were stranded.

Harman could carry only one man at a time, so he shuttled all four to a sandbar where a light plane flew them out. His engine overheated partway through, the job ran over two days, and the Sikorsky Archives call it the world’s first military combat rescue.

It was not the R-4’s first lifesaving flight. In January 1944, after the destroyer USS Turner exploded and sank, Coast Guard Commander Frank Erickson flew blood plasma from New York City for the casualties.

The biggest wartime helicopter operation came in the Philippines. From June 15 to July 29, 1945, Lieutenant Louis Carle and five other pilots flew R-4s to evacuate 75 to 80 wounded soldiers from the highlands northeast of Manila, sometimes under Japanese machine-gun fire.

None of it was easy flying. The Chicago Tribune reported that the control stick “shakes like a jackhammer” and that the pilot could not relax his grip for a minute.

2. Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri (Germany)

The Fl 282 Kolibri (“Hummingbird”) came closer to front-line service than any other German helicopter. It was a single-seat synchropter: two rotors mounted side by side at an angle, meshing like an eggbeater and spinning in opposite directions, so it needed no tail rotor.

A 160 hp Bramo Sh 14A radial engine gave it a top speed of about 93 mph (150 km/h) and a range of about 110 miles (170 km). It grew out of Anton Flettner’s Fl 265, which pioneered the same intermeshing layout and was built in six examples.

The German Navy wanted it for scouting from warships. In 1941 the first prototypes made repeated takeoffs and landings from a pad on the cruiser Köln, and the naval version was tested in the Baltic, Mediterranean and Aegean, the same shipborne job navy helicopters still do today.

A two-seat B-2 version added an observer behind the rotors and proved useful for artillery spotting. In 1944, BMW was contracted to build 1,000, but bombing destroyed its Munich plant and only 23 or 24 Kolibris were completed, depending on the source.

By the end of the war, most survivors were at Rangsdorf near Berlin spotting for artillery, where Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft fire picked them off. US forces captured two from Transportstaffel 40, the Luftwaffe’s only operational helicopter squadron.

3. Focke-Achgelis Fa 223 Drache (Germany)

The Fa 223 Drache (“Dragon”) was the heavy lifter of the war. It started as the Fa 226 Hornisse, a six-seat transport helicopter that Lufthansa ordered in 1938, before the Air Ministry took it over and renamed it.

Its first untethered flight came on August 3, 1940. That October, at the Rechlin test center, it reached 113 mph (182 km/h) and climbed to 23,300 feet (7,100 m), far beyond what any other helicopter had shown.

A roughly 1,000 hp Bramo 323 radial sat in the middle of the fuselage, driving two three-bladed rotors on outriggers. The Drache could carry loads of over 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg).

Production never got going. Bombers destroyed the Delmenhorst factory in June 1942 and the replacement plant at Laupheim in July 1944, and only 20 Fa 223s were built.

The ones that flew did real work. In May 1944, one made 10 flights carrying the wreck of a crashed Do 217 bomber and a crashed Fa 223 off a moor in cargo nets, and mountain trials at Mittenwald ran to 83 flights moving loads that included artillery pieces.

A proposed four-rotor Fa 223Z, two fuselages joined in line, never got past an unfinished center section that Allied troops found at Ochsenhausen.

4. Focke-Achgelis Fa 330 Bachstelze (Germany)

The Fa 330 Bachstelze (“Wagtail”) had no engine at all. It was a rotor kite: a one-man seat, a stick and a three-bladed rotor, towed behind a surfaced U-boat so the airflow spun the rotor and lifted the lookout into the sky.

A U-boat’s conning tower sits so low that its lookouts see only a few miles. Towed up to about 720 feet (220 m), the Fa 330 pilot could see about 33 miles (53 km), and he reported by telephone along the tow cable.

Weser Flugzeugbau built about 200. The empty kite weighed about 150 pounds (68 kg), and it was stowed in watertight canisters on deck.

Only the large Type IXD2 boats were fast enough to tow it, and only in the far South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, away from Allied aircraft. Its one known success came in August 1943, when U-177 used its Fa 330 to find and sink the Greek steamer Efthalia Mari.

5. Cierva C.30A and Avro Rota (UK)

An autogyro looks like a helicopter but works differently. Its rotor is not powered in flight: a normal propeller pulls it forward, and the passing air spins the rotor to make lift, so it cannot hover.

Juan de la Cierva’s C.30 was by far the most numerous prewar autogyro. Avro in Britain, Lioré-et-Olivier in France and Focke-Wulf in Germany built 143 production examples under license, and the type could reach about 110 mph (180 km/h) with a range of about 285 miles (459 km).

The Royal Air Force had 12 as the Avro Rota and pressed civilian C.30As into service in 1939 and 1940. They went to 1448 Flight at Duxford and later to 529 Squadron at RAF Halton, flying radar calibration work until the squadron disbanded in October 1945.

France’s license-built LeO C-30 autogyros served with its air force and navy, and all of them were destroyed or captured when Germany invaded in 1940.

6. Kayaba Ka-1 (Japan)

Japan’s rotorcraft in wartime service were autogyros, not helicopters. The Ka-1 was developed after the Imperial Japanese Army imported an American Kellett KD-1A in 1939 and wrecked it in testing, and it first flew on May 26, 1941.

Meant for artillery spotting in China, it ended up hunting submarines. Flown as a single-seater to save weight, it carried two 130-pound (60 kg) depth charges, and from August 1944 it operated from the army’s assault ship Akitsu Maru until she was sunk that November.

Patrols then moved to island airstrips guarding the sea lane between Fukuoka and Pusan. Around 50 Ka-1s were delivered to the army, and they spotted and reported many submarines without being credited with a kill.

7. Kamov A-7 (USSR)

The Soviet A-7 was an armed autogyro, with a forward-firing machine gun and a twin machine gun in a rear turret. Later modifications added racks for bombs and unguided rockets, and its top speed was about 137 mph (221 km/h).

Only seven were built: two experimental machines and five production aircraft. They spotted artillery during the Winter War with Finland, and in 1941 flew artillery spotting and night leaflet drops near Smolensk. One crew brought their autogyro home with both men wounded and the fuselage, wings and rotor blades shot through.

8. Sikorsky R-6 (US)

The R-6 was a streamlined R-4. It kept the same rotor and transmission, added a 235 hp Franklin engine and a redesigned fuselage for less drag and better visibility, and first flew in October 1943.

Sikorsky built six test machines and Nash-Kelvinator built 219 R-6As in 1944 and 1945. Many could carry litters in capsules on each side of the fuselage, and the Royal Air Force received 27 as the Hoverfly II.

Deliveries to the Army Air Forces began in late 1944, too late to shape the war. The bigger Sikorsky R-5 first flew in August 1943, but its first service-test machine was only delivered in February 1945, and it found fame later as the H-5 among the helicopters of the Korean War.

9. Focke-Wulf Fw 61 (Germany)

The Fw 61 never went to war, but every German helicopter on this list descends from it. It is widely credited as the first successful, fully controllable helicopter, and its first free flight came on June 26, 1936.

It is often mistaken for an autogyro because of the propeller on its nose. That propeller only blew cooling air over the engine: lift and control came from two powered, counter-rotating rotors on outriggers, which also canceled out each other’s torque.

In February 1938, test pilot Hanna Reitsch flew it indoors inside the Deutschlandhalle arena in Berlin. That June it set an altitude record of 11,243 feet (3,427 m) and a straight-line distance record of 143 miles (230 km), part of the longer story of who invented the helicopter.

Only two were built, and neither appears to have survived the war. Sikorsky’s VS-300 took its endurance record on May 6, 1941, staying up for 1 hour and 32 minutes.

10. Doblhoff WNF 342 (Germany)

The WNF 342 was the strangest helicopter of the war. Its piston engine did not turn the rotor: it drove a compressor that pushed air through the hollow blades to small combustion chambers at the tips, where fuel burned to spin the rotor like a pinwheel.

Because nothing drove the rotor through the fuselage, there was no torque to cancel and no tail rotor. It first flew in 1943, the first tip-jet helicopter to fly anywhere, though the jets were very loud and thirsty.

The last prototype, the two-seat V4, flew about 25 hours before US forces captured it. It was shipped to the United States in July 1945, and the idea later reached production in France as the Sud-Ouest Djinn.

Other WW2 rotorcraft that flew

A few more rotorcraft flew during the war without reaching the front. The Platt-LePage XR-1, a side-by-side rotor design inspired by the Fw 61, was the first helicopter the Army Air Forces tested, in 1941, and it was canceled in 1945.

The US Army also bought Kellett autogyros, designated YG-1 and later XO-60 and YO-60, for observation trials. Britain experimented with the Hafner Rotachute, a one-man rotor kite for landing troops that was never adopted, and Germany with small one-man helicopters from Nagler-Rolz and Baumgartl.

Were there attack helicopters in WW2?

No WW2 helicopter was built as a gunship. The Fa 223 could mount a single hand-aimed MG 15 machine gun, and a planned anti-submarine version was to carry two 550-pound (250 kg) bombs or depth charges, but in service it hauled cargo.

The closest things to armed rotorcraft were autogyros: the Soviet A-7 with its machine guns and rockets, and the depth-charge-carrying Ka-1. The gunship came later, as told in the history of the attack helicopter.