12
The months of March and April 1945 drew the war pitilessly towards its conclusion. Endless streams of refugees from the eastern provinces of the Reich made their way westwards almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Stalin’s advancing divisions. Penetrating ever deeper into Germany from the West, not quite so impetuously but still conscious of approaching victory, were the Americans, British and French. For German forces there was really no point in fighting on, in dying for the cause: it served no useful purpose to offer further resistance, but yet they did. They fought on, not knowing why, defending a Reich that no longer existed. They defended it on land, at sea and in the air, as soldiers always have. The air was full of bullets, shrapnel and splinters as was the ground, but it was more dangerous in the air because things happened faster and gave you no time to reflect.
Enemy fighters roamed as if in peacetime the skies of the land they had been taught to hate. Rarely did they come up against opposition. Enemy bombers dropped their bombs, and carried on the killing while the fighters machine-gunned any useful target that presented itself. The nation below them had forfeited its right to live. Kill them then!
The months of March and April 1945 were the hardest in the short career of the Me 262, those crowned with the greatest success and mourned for the most losses. III/JG7 was now joined by Jagdverband 44, whose brief existence will be described towards the end of this chapter. JV44 was commanded by Adolf Galland, deposed General der Jagdflieger.
Wherever the gaze fell in Germany, in whatever province, something could be seen exploding, burning or smouldering. Military order within a Luftwaffe squadron or group community was no longer possible. The enemy dictated the course of events. Supply, maintenance, repair, the number of operational machines, training, trials, delivery flights – over them all hovered the need to improvise, and this was successful if the hour favoured the undertaking.
The men and women of the communications networks and the ground-crew Spartans achieved the nigh-impossible, at work day and night in the hangars, hardly able to keep their eyes open for lack of sleep, their only opportunity for rest was when collapsed in a bunker or slit trench at the approach of enemy aircraft. And whenever a pilot, whose machine or weapons they had overhauled the previous day, failed to return, in a sense they shared in the loss. And right up to the last day, no pilot had to be asked twice to fly a mission.
The story of the Me 262 in March and April 1945 is written in the sky in blood. One dramatic air-battle followed another. Bombers exploded while the jet’s armoured windscreen splintered. A Rotte [flying formation consisting of a pair], or four, or six Me 262s would venture into the field of defensive fire of a swarm of ten to fifteen four-engined bombers whose tail-gunners would keep firing as long as the finger could be crooked around a trigger.
Almost daily III/JG7 received a warning of bombers approaching. One day, four jets rose to intercept, one Rotte led by Georg Eder, the other by Quax Schnörrer. Eder was an old warhorse: seventy-eight victories in the West by the war’s end, twelve in jets, in all thirty-six heavy bombers. He had won the Oak Leaves and had deserved them, but his refusal to know when he was beaten was what really made him stand out. His list of ‘special engagements’ was considerable and his operational reports read like an adventure story. If asked how many times he had been shot down, he had to think back before he could answer. He was as au fait with his parachute as his umbrella and, since he had survived this far, was endowed with more than his fair share of good luck.
As the pilot of a defective Me 109 once, he crashed into a wooden communications chalet on the edge of the airfield. The occupants were out at the time. The collision demolished the structure, the W/T equipment and the Me 109 was a total write-off. Eder had a few bruises to show for his experience. Apparently he did a cartwheel of joy when he was offered the opportunity to fly the Me 262. He never forgot his first take-off in a jet, nor the day which preceded it. He was drafted to Achmer, where he was looking forward to meeting up again with an old school friend, Alfred Täumer, who was already a pilot in the Kommando Nowotny. Upon his arrival, Eder was informed that Täumer had crashed fatally the day before. On the day of his first flight, he was waiting to take off behind Oberleutnant Bley’s machine. He watched as Bley roared down the runway, had some kind of problem getting off the ground and crashed into an adjoining field. There was a burst of flame and that was the end of Bley.
Stabsingenieur Leitner, supervising Eder’s first take-off, told him to get out of the machine. Leitner explained that he considered it very unfavourable to attempt a maiden take-off after having witnessed Bley’s demise. Leitner thought it best for Eder to have an successful example to follow. Eder got back in his machine and prepared to follow Leitner’s take-off.
At first all went well. Once in the air Eder noticed his left turbine billowing smoke and he realised that the machine was describing a long, curving turn which would bring him over the main hangar. He had little enough height, just enough to scrape the hangar roof. The contact knocked off a wing and the remainder of the airframe went through the roof into the hangar below. Eder took off again in another aircraft, admitting his fear that if he did not do so at once, he would never fly again. The second flight passed off without incident.
He reported that his first victory as a jet pilot was made ‘by mistake’. He took off from Lechfeld, was directed by W/T to an enemy machine and enveloped himself in the condensation stream of the enemy aircraft. He released the safety catch of his weapons, glanced at his instrument panel and decided to attack. At that instant, before having fired, the Lightning was suddenly huge and near in front of him and there occurred forthwith the sickening crack of a collision. He had tangled with some part of the enemy fighter as he tried to rise above his opponent. Eder paused during his baling-out procedure when he noticed that his aircraft seemed in no difficulty. Both turbines were running, there were a few large bumps in the wing, but these seemed harmless, and in the end he landed safely at Lechfeld. The adventure joined the thick sheaf of reports in his personal file.
Quax Schnörrer and wingman Oberfähnrich Petermann were in a loose formation behind Eder’s Rotte when they sighted the large bomber formation. Schnörrer reported:
We saw two waves of bombers, the larger with about twenty-seven machines and a smaller one with nine. Eder told me by W/T we would attack the smaller formation as there were only four of us. Then he said, ‘Come on, Quax, we’ll all attack together!’ I followed his Rotte. The enemy formation was putting up a massive defensive fire yet I saw Eder get so close to the bombers’ tails that I thought his intention must be to ram. A few seconds later two or three of the bombers were spinning through the depths to destruction. Eder got the first, Petermann, my wingman, and I the other one or two. We banked to disengage, then Eder called: ‘We’ll attack again!’ We banked sharply to re-establish contact with the bombers and while doing this I noticed that both our wingmen had vanished. I closed up with Eder, covering his rear as another four-engined bomber began to disintegrate under his fire. After that we landed undamaged at our home airfield, where we also discovered our two wingmen had returned without mishap.
Nobody would have taken it amiss of Karl Schnörrer if he had had a breather after this intensive and successful burst of action. He had flown over 500 combat missions, had been shot down five times, landing by parachute each time and had old wounds to both knees. When he went swimming after the war he would demonstrate how his knees worked sideways as well as backwards when flexed. He had suffered his worst injury on 12 November 1943 when shot down from an altitude of 200 feet and hit the ground below a half-open ’chute; the result was a fractured skull, broken ribs, both knee joints broken and a broken arm. Not fully recovered, he resumed active flying until his final combat encounter on 30 March 1945.
On that last day his trio had been invited to a party at the Küps estate near Parchim. The splendid house was situated in magnificent parkland and many beautiful young ladies of the district would be attending. The morning had been quiet, no enemy aircraft alarms, the afternoon appeared likely to be the same, and what had happened in the air that night did not concern them. Karl Schnörrer and his friends shaved, showered, put a parting in their hair, took their best walking-out uniforms and highly polished shoes from their wardrobes and were in the act of admiring their reflections in the mirror when the alarm came: bombers over the Zuider Zee, target probably Hamburg.
Back into the wardrobes went the uniform jackets, to be replaced by flying blouses; the freshly pressed trousers and the polished shoes could remain – and they sprinted to the hangar. The Me 262s were towed to the runway, the men climbed up into cabin and strapped up – off! There were only three of them, but they made a good swarm – Schnörrer, Oberfeldwebel Helmut Lennartz, one of the best jet pilots, and the veteran ensign, Oberfähnrich Viktor Petermann. A few minutes later they were all in the air, and after a few curses at their misfortune, the young ladies of Küps were forgotten.
The destination was Hamburg, weather was good, and the three jets rose swiftly and smoothly. No enemy aircraft were yet in sight when, over Ludwigslust, Lennartz suddenly reported by W/T: ‘Look me over, Quax, my turbine is smouldering.’ Schnörrer bore away and drew back to let Lennartz fly past him and saw a thick ribbon of smoke pouring from the machine. ‘Go back, Helmut,’ he shouted, ‘and make sure you get there safely.’ He watched as the Oberfeldwebel’s aircraft sheered out of the swarm and disappeared at the end of a wide turn.
Now he was alone with Petermann. Me 262 pilots were used to being in a laughable numerical inferiority on every combat mission: it was very rare for an airfield to be able to have more than half-a-dozen jets ready to send up at any one time. In any case, Petermann was an old and reliable flyer at age twenty-nine. He was credited with sixty-four victories, plus one gunboat and fifty troop ferries in Russia on low-flying missions and had been awarded the Knight’s Cross in 1944. Flak had robbed him of his left arm, and he flew with a prosthesis; he had been offered the opportunity to sit out the war in a sheltered ground job but preferred the cockpit of an Me 262 fighter.
Over Hamburg it was thicker than they had expected. Near Ludwigslust they reached their operational altitude and soon saw over the city a great swarm of four-engined B-17 bombers such as neither had ever seen before. Wave upon wave crossed the horizon, an endless procession. ‘Another nice mess we’ve got ourselves into,’ Quax muttered, but there was no alternative: they had to attack.
Almost wingtip-to-wingtip the two machines banked to get behind the first bomber formation where they ducked and weaved through long streams of tracer bullets and a hail of defensive fire. Petermann fired his rockets first and dismembered a heavy bomber. Parts of it spun away lazily and then the burning enemy aircraft tumbled into the depths. Schnörrer fired fractions of a second later into a bomber, but as he climbed above the wave he saw only traces of smoke and so could not claim the kill. He searched around and could not see Petermann. Schnörrer called to him over the W/T: ‘Go home, Petermann, I’m attacking again!’
‘Victor, Victor,’ came the confirmation as Schnörrer made a wide turn in order to re-engage the American force. As he straightened up, he saw the enemy machine he had disabled enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke. He watched it begin its death dive, then roared into the murderous fire of the enemy tail-gunners. The whole formation was now concentrating on the single jet fighter attacking them. Schnörrer remained as nonchalant as if the rain of lead were hailstones, although he could feel the enemy fire ripping through the airframe. A turbine stopped, forcing him to break off and as he turned away he saw the gaping holes and bumps in the surfaces of the Me 262 wings. He looked down, picked out the familiar layout of Lüneburg and decided to attempt a forced landing. He still had 18,000 feet below him, so plenty of time still. His speed had fallen away, and he was now easy pickings if the American fighter escorts found him. For a while he thought he had got away with it, but then they were suddenly there. High to his rear he spotted the first points coming closer, two, three, four P-51s; they overshot him because he was flying so slowly and Schnörrer fired off a long burst without finding a mark. He realised at once that there was no use in continuing with the one turbine. He gained a little height, threw off the cabin hood, released the clasp of his straps and was sucked out of the cockpit before he could turn the machine on its back. A fraction of a second later he heard an sickening crash which drilled through his marrow and bones. After that it went quiet.
He let himself fall. Pulling the ripcord at this height would allow the Mustangs easy target-practice. He tumbled through the depths, felt how how his initial fast rate of fall slowed as he encountered wind resistance until finally he was dropping at a consistent 250 kph.
It was not the first time he had fallen in such a manner. It was almost like gliding, unimpeded pure flight which allowed one every freedom of movement. Before the war he had been a parachutist of wide renown who gave exhibitions from high towers; he knew now that as long as he remained a small bundle in the air, he was in no danger of being machine-gunned by an enemy fighter. They wouldn’t be able to see him.
Falling inverted, slightly on his back with head down, he suddenly noticed how his right leg waggled uncontrollably between upper thigh and foot as if the joints and bones had gone. Now he understood the loud noise he had heard when leaving the aircraft: he had struck his leg against the jet’s tailplane and injured himself seriously. He felt no pain, but was concerned, trying to hold the leg in both hands to stop the pendulum movement. In this manner he kept falling and finally tugged the ripcord of his parachute only when over a wood, as close as possible to the ground.
He fell between the trees without the canopy snagging fully, heard the silk rip above him, felt a short jerk and collapsed on the brown earth. He was unable to stand. With his pocket-knife he cut open the blood-soaked trouser leg and, severing the cable from his headphones, used it as a tourniquet to staunch the flow of blood. As a sensation of drowsiness swept over him, he took a Pervitin stimulant tablet, but it didn’t seem to help. He bound the leg above the knee and, as the flow of blood stopped, attempted to treat the wound. His knife severed ribbons of flesh and peeled away dirty pieces of skin from the wound, then he cleaned it as well as he could from his first-aid pack before applying a sterile dressing. Once the job was finished tiredness overwhelmed him and he lost consciousness.
The sound of a discussion brought him to. An elderly nursing sister and some men were tending him. He learned that he had landed close to Nettelkamp near Uelzen. The men removed the remains of the parachute from the trees, folded the silk panels together and laid Schnörrer on the improvised hammock before carrying him to the nursing sister’s house at Nettelkamp to await the ambulance from Uelzen. In the hospital there the doctors managed to save the leg, but as footballers say, he was left with one good leg and a swinger.
In the early hours of 4 April 1945, another great formation of enemy bombers was reported approaching. Major Rudolf Sinner, commander of III/JG7 and seven of his pilots prepared for the encounter. Before they took off, the information centre reported enemy fighters at 24,000 feet over Parchim. Immediately after receiving this report, they took off. The first seven jets circled the airfield widely to allow the formation to build while the eighth remained in visual contact and on lookout. The skies were nearly fully overcast, but the cloud layer relatively thin.
Sinner came out of the swathes of mist through a hole at about 1,200 feet and at once saw at a few hundred feet above him four aircraft with lancet-shaped wings. ‘Thunderbolts!’ he cursed, for he had not expected to make contact with the enemy so quickly after receiving information that they were at 24,000 feet. There was no avoiding the clash. At this low height, the Me 262s were still too slow to distance themselves from the threat and make a fresh approach. Surprised by the enemy tactic, to climb and level out into horizontal flight at superior speed would take too long; the only response was to bank towards the enemy fighters in a steep ascent.
At first it appeared that this might have been successful. The Thunderbolts turned away sharply and offered Sinner the opportunity of following in a shallow dive, but scarcely had he begun this manoeuvre than he saw four Mustangs pursuing Schall’s 262. His aircraft was in the same dilemma as he had just been in himself. Without firing off his rockets, which he wanted to keep in reserve for the bombers, he decided to try forcing the Mustangs away with his machine-guns, but immediately he saw above him to his right four more Mustangs about to fall on him in a dive. He succeeded in banking away below them but then came under fire from the rear. He was fenced in and no possibility remained to escape by climbing or diving, and at this height the jet didn’t have the speed to outpace them. Oh shit! was his initial thought. Eight Mustangs had him in a pincer movement from just about every direction, and Sinner had no time to reflect on his position. It was not his failure – the fault lay with the controller who had warned of enemy fighters at 24,000 feet but not of those at 2,400 feet skirting the tops of the low cloud. This should have been evident from radar observation. He was alone with the enemy, but even if the rest of the group had been with him, the enemy were too many. Wherever he looked he saw Mustangs banking, wheeling and turning and he had the sensation that the only matter which remained to be resolved was which American fighter would fire the coup de grâce.
Sinner dived for the cloud. His machine was hit by the first burst before he reached it, but luck was with him and he sheltered in the mists. To rid himself of unnecessary weight and reduce the risk of explosion, he attempted to fire his R4M rockets. They failed to ignite. Two Mustangs had managed to cling to his tail. Why didn’t they fire? Feverishly Sinner worked at the weapons panel, trying everything he could to set off the rockets. Nothing worked.
Thick smoke poured through the cockpit. The Mustangs below had opened fire as soon as they spotted the outline of the jet from below the cloud cover. Sinner saw at once that the left wing of his aircraft was aflame, and the fire set alight the cabin. Pointless to go on with it. Watching the enemy fighters close to his tail, he put his machine through a last evasive manoeuvre, threw off the cockpit canopy and jumped. His speed was 700 kph. He saw the tailplane pass him at a safe distance, but noticed straightaway that his parachute was damaged. The straps and some of the shroud lines entangled his right leg, and the pack was tugging and pulling from all directions.
‘I’m done for,’ he decided, convinced that the parachute canopy had separated from the harness and that he would fall head first into the depths with his undeveloped bundle. He was low and had not long to wait to see whether his assumption was correct. More by instinct than design he found the rip cord, jerked it – and the miracle happened. He was very close to the ground when the canopy deployed, a number of shroud lines dragged violently at his leg and revolved his body once or twice, but in the turbulence of the moment he hardly felt the braking jolt as the parachute blossomed.
Seconds later he landed – attached to the parachute by a thigh and his left arm – in a freshly ploughed field. At once he tried to unfasten the harness quick-release catch to prevent himself being dragged over the ground. The catch was jammed, and the canopy, bulging in the breeze, pulled him across the furrowed moist earth until it caught in a barbed wire fence. Two Mustangs, apparently the aircraft which had pursued him earlier, now made a low level machine-gun attack on the brightly coloured parachute. Shoulders hunched, Sinner crouched low for cover along a furrow. He heard the sharp tack-tack-tack of the machine-guns but they missed. Poor shooting, he told himself gleefully. As the two enemy fighters climbed away, Sinner at last manage to free the quick-release catch, got free of the canopy and shrouds flapping from the barbed wire and ran 30 metres to where the furrows were deeper. Being dragged by the parachute through the damp earth had given him an effective camouflage, and he felt fairly safe.
They decided on a fresh attack. The enemy fighters – two P-51s from 339 Fighter Group – had executed a wide circle, dived to the treetops of a nearby wood from where the two fat points between the delicate paintwork of their wings came directly for him . . . and the flak battery on the perimeter of the nearby Redlin airfield came alive at last to what the American aircraft were up to. Tracers hissed through the air, close to the attacking fighters which, despite the danger, lingered long enough to fire a few parting salvoes towards the flapping parachute silk. Their aim was too high. Clumps of earth and grass spurted up beyond the material, and then the fighters disappeared below the horizon at low level ducking under the cannonade of flak.
‘Damned fuel,’ Sinner murmured as he arose from his furrow, having only now noticed that he was in pain from burns. It was ten minutes before two operators from a radar station found him and drove the casualty to Jagdgruppe 10 at Redlin. He had serious burns to both hands and his face, as well as other injuries. He was not released from hospital until after hostilities had terminated. Oberleutnant Schall was shot down by the four fighters pursuing him, but landed by parachute. Six days later his luck ran out when, landing at Parchim after a mission, he hit a bomb crater and his Me 262 exploded. Nine of JG7’s thirty aircraft were lost on this date.
In late 1944, General der Flieger Adolf Galland and many other top fighter pilots were in direct conflict with the Luftwaffe High Command. Their anger was directed mainly at Reichsmarschall Goering who had identified the fighter arm as the cause of all his problems. When he relieved Galland of his post as fighter chief, the confrontation erupted into what is frequently called a ‘mutiny’. The revolt involved demands for Galland to be reinstated, and at this point, Christmas 1944, Hitler intervened, asking Galland to form a unit of small squadron strength which would demonstrate the superiority of the Me 262 as a fighter. Thus Jagdverband 44 came into existence under Galland’s command in early January 1945.
Of the veteran pilots of JV44 Galland wrote:
Nearly all of them had been on operations since the first day of the war. Hardly a single one had not been wounded at least once. Among the better known, there was not one who besides the highest awards for valour did not also carry a permanent reminder of battle. The Knight’s Cross was almost an insignia of the uniform of our unit, so to speak. Now, after a long period of technical and numerical inferiority they wanted to experience again the feeling of superiority as aviators. For that purpose they were risking their lives once more...
Among ‘the better known’ besides Galland were the banished Oberst Lützow, the despised Mäcki Steinhoff, and the walking wounded: Barkhorn, Bob, Fährmann, Hohagen, Krupinski, Schnell, Wübke and others. Heinz Bär was among them. Operating from Lechfeld, mostly alone, he had been very successful with the Me 262, and finished the war with sixteen victories, one of the two most successful jet pilots. He had been commodore of JG Udet and eventually commanded JV44 from 26 April 1945 once Galland stepped down through injury. Twelve years later, on 28 April 1957, Bär lost his life when he crashed the harmless little Zaunkönig aircraft on a demonstration flight. As well as the known aces there were inexperienced pilots, practically novices, whom nobody would have thought to draft to the new unit had they not put their names forward voluntarily.
Jagdverband 44 came into being at Brandenburg-Briest on 10 January 1945. Preparations, flying-in of aircraft, re-training pilots, setting up the technical apparatus took two months. No sooner were they operational than the unit transferred on 31 March to Munich-Riem for the last murderous month of the Second World War.
Munich-Riem airbase became the target of endless strafing and bombing attacks by enemy aircraft. Perhaps they knew the quality of pilots who were going to operate from there. ‘Two General-leutnants, two Obersts, one Oberstleutnant, three Majors, five in the rank of Hauptmann, eight Leutnants and about the same total of NCOs,’ Galland wrote. Never before had there been a unit of squadron-size with so many fighter aces flying combat missions.
Munich-Riem went through a devastating experience of fire. The aerodrome was soon sown with bomb craters, scarcely an hour went by without Allied fighters arriving to vent their spleen on any target which took their fancy, weather permitting. When he took off in an Me 262, no pilot knew whether the runway would still be there when he got back. Yet none of the available reports ooze despair. Men jumped into slit trenches or holes in the ground when the bombs rained down, pilots together with ground crew and radar operators. Aircraft were towed away from the danger-spots during the alarm or raid and were then towed back once the all-clear sounded. They hammered day and night on repair work in the improvised hangar. Ground staff achieved the impossible for pilots who fought as though the war had just begun.
Unteroffizier Eduard Schallmoser was a small and doughty farmer’s son from the Allgäu. One of the few attached to JV44 whom one could never call ‘a veteran’ or ‘an expert’. On 4 March 1945 Schallmoser returned from a mission, reported a victory. It was noticed on checking his ammunition belts that he had not fired a single round. Hohagen asked for an explanation. ‘I rammed him,’ he confessed, more modest than proud. He had not fired his weapons because it had slipped his mind to release the safety catch. Even Galland had been guilty of this error in the heat of battle.
On 20 April 1945 Schallmoser flew as Galland’s wingman against a formation of B-26s; Hohagen and his wingman made up the swarm of four. They attacked. Galland fired his rockets, knocked down two Marauders. The other aircraft fired and registered hits. Schallmoser roared past Galland, guns spitting fire, kept going and rammed a Marauder. Naturally he was reported missing, when the other three landed at Munich-Riem. Concern grew. The hoped-for telephone call never arrived. Another fine guy gone under the grinding wheels of death. A few hours later the telephone rang in the orderly’s office. Schallmoser was calling from Kempten where his family lived. They sent a car for him. A little later he arrived, parachute over his arm like a raincoat. He had been so close to his parents’ farm that he decided to drop in for coffee, he said shamefacedly.
Others were not so lucky, among them the best, such as Lützow, whom they never found.