Awsome! thanks for posting this schmawy!
I don't recall where but I heard/read something once that stated that if you can dream up or conceive a concept for something like this the military probably already tried and tested it 20 years before hand. Really amazing that we already had jet engine technology only 40 sum years after the first ever powered flight by man... and a large portion of the country didn't even have electricity running to their homes yet.
On a side note I think the F-14 was the last operational fighter that wasn't fly-by-wire.

I thought the fast-and-loose development practices were neat, very "back yard" for a military program. It's important to note that the US was fairly late to develop jet air power, after the Germans and the British.

True. I've always been amazed with the "out of the box" concepts that the Germans came up with let alone actually took all the way to fruition. Thats not to say that just because something doesn't look similar to what's already being built and used it wouldn't work, but they sure had some pretty amazing and outlandish concepts. No surprise the Bauhaus originated in Germany.

Here's some footage of a Heinkel He 280 (test flight in 03/41 under its own power) and of a Messerschmitt Me 262 as well as an Arado Ar 234.