The creation of the Luftwaffe which, like the Greek goddess Athena from the forehead of Zeus, sprang fully armed into view in 1936, had been part of Hitler’s policy of re arming Germany in secret. One of the many punitive provisions of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which ended the First World War, had been a ban on a German air force as well as substantial reductions in the size of the German army and navy. Clandestine rearmament took place nevertheless, and Hitler announced it to a shocked world in 1935.
Karl Born remembers how the existence of the new air force was revealed.
‘There was an air show in London, and Hitler disguised his men, the NS flying corps, so that they could take part. He wanted to see if the English would object, but when they made no objections, then they were told ‘This is the German Luftwaffe!’
The build up of the Luftwaffe had been concealed behind an apparently innocent interest in gliding and flying clubs. The manufacture of warplanes had been masked by Lufthansa, the German civil airline, which flew passengers in Junkers, Fokker, Messerschmitt and other aircraft that were designed for easy conversion to military use.
The Hitler Youth, the Hitlerjugend, had been at the core of the policy of rearming Germany while at the same deceiving her erstwhile enemies. Outwardly, the Hitler Youth catered for boyish enthusiasms and a sense of adventure. What was really happening was the creation of the most highly trained, highly motivated and most militarised teenagers in the world. The future pilots of the Second World War joined the Flieger-Hitlerjugend and began their training building and flying model gliders in order to learn the principles of flight. Afterwards, they graduated to a gliding test which involved being shot into the air attached to a simple glider wing. They used this to fly a short distance, and then come safely in to land. Eventually, the Flieger-Hitlerjugend graduated to flying gliders and piston-engined aircraft, all ostensibly in the name of boyish fun.
The degree of enthusiasm invoked in the ‘flying’ Hitler Youth was exampled by Alfred Wagner who was so keen to fly for the Fatherland that, during the Second World War, he volunteered for duty on every possible occasion.
‘When you’re young, enthusiasm takes you over. It’s like a driving force you can’t control. I volunteered for the Luftwaffe when I was 17. To me, it was a marvellous adventure. Flying was enormous fun, and I was full of enthusiasm for it, if we were asked to volunteer to fly somewhere, I was always first in the queue!’
The heroes young men like Alfred Wagner longed to emulate were the intrepid aces of the First World War whose daring in dog-fights with the enemy had made them into legends - Baron von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, Verner Voss, Max von Muller, Ernst Udet and Hermann Goering, who later became head of the Luftwaffe.
Goering, who first met Adolf Hitler in 1922 and became a keen disciple, was the son of a diplomat. He made a distinguished name for himself in the First World War and became famous as one of Germany’s top air aces, with twenty ‘kills’ to his credit. At age twenty-five, after the ‘Red Baron’s’ death in action in 1918, Goering succeeded him as commander of the renowned Richthofen Squadron. Goering was commander for only four months before Germany’s defeat and surrender and his great personal vanity as well as his strong sense of nationalism were mightily offended by the terms of the Versailles treaty. Like many Germans, Goering felt the armed forces had been dishonoured and after falling under the extraordinary spell Hitler exerted over his followers, he joined the Nazi Party determined to right this wrong.
From Hitler’s point of view, Goering’s personal devotion and his exploits in the First World War fitted him perfectly to head the new Luftwaffe he intended to forge. With Ernst Rohm, another veteran of the War and chief of the SA, the Nazi stormtroopers, Goering became a principle lieutenant of the future Führer.
Although Goering was awed by Hitler’s personality and often acted like his minion, he had a charisma of his own which could fuel enthusiasm in others. One of those he personally inspired was Hajo Hermann, who later flew 370 missions with the Luftwaffe and downed ten Allied aircraft.
‘Goering actually determined my career as a flier. I was an infantryman and scrabbling around with a steel helmet and machine gun on the army training ground near Berlin. He rode up, wearing the uniform of an infantry general, and called down to me, ‘Well, what’s it like down there, then? Isn’t it a bit tough? Wouldn’t you rather come up here to me?’ and he pointed upwards towards the sky.
‘At the time, I had no idea who he was. We didn’t have television, so we weren’t familiar with the high-ups in the armed forces. But he pointed to the sky and said: ‘Up there, become an airman.’ And I said, ‘Yes indeed, Herr General!’ Shortly afterwards I was ordered to go to Berlin for an air force medical examination and then it began.’
Later, during the War, Hajo Hermann received special favour from Goering after he had developed the night-fighter technique known as the ‘Wild Boar’. This was an attempt to put a stop to the night bombing of Berlin by the Royal Air Force in 1943 and 1944, and involved the use of Messerschmitt 109s as nightfighters. Guided only by ground radio, the Me-109s successfully hunted down the RAF bombers. Hajo Hermann refined his ‘Wild Boar’ with camouflage: the undersides of the aircraft were painted black and an additional flame dampener was added over the exhaust stubs. Some of the Me-109s were equipped with a whistle device that helped the ground crews identify the Luftwaffe aircraft as they returned from their missions.
The ‘Wild Boar’ and its successes came to Goering’s attention and Hajo Hermann found himself shooting up the ranks.
‘Goering promoted me immediately, that happened quite rapidly. At the beginning of 1944, I was a captain and at the end of the year I was a colonel. He put me up for a higher decoration, which I was then awarded by Hitler.’
Hitler followed Goering’s recommendation even though, at that stage in the War, he was out of favour with the Führer. Hitler’s disillusionment dated from 1940, when, despite Goering’s swaggering and boasting about ‘his’ Luftwaffe, they had lost the Battle of Britain and therefore ruined the chances for another successful German invasion.
Hajo Hermann acknowledges that Goering made mistakes but this had no effect on his loyalty.
‘I cannot with the best will in the world make a disparaging judgment about this man because he did too many good things for me. He gave me his trust and raised me to higher positions. I don’t bear an absolute admiration for him, but as Shakespeare said, ‘Taken all in all, he was a man,’
In 1936, Hajo Hermann flew with the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion in Spain, where they supported the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco and gave an awesome demonstration of what Europe could expect from a future war. The seeds of the Spanish Civil War, which began on 18 July 1936, had been sown five years earlier, when the rise to power of republican liberals had forced the King, Alfonso XIII, into exile. Franco, who proved to be a dictator in the Hitler-Mussolini mould, rebelled against the anti-militarist policies of the liberal government and invaded Spain from Spanish Morocco. In Germany, Hitler’s sympathies were naturally with Franco and the Condor Legion was detailed for ‘special duty’ in Spain.
The Legion consisted of four bombers squadrons, forty-eight aircraft in all, and four fighter squadrons backed by anti-aircraft and anti-tank units. With this, the curtain went up on a new and terrifying form of air warfare: the blitzkrieg, with its heavy bombing raids and dive-bombing tactics, as demonstrated by the Ju-87 ‘Stuka’. The First World War in the air had been a relatively gentlemanly business, with pilots jousting in dog-fights like medieval knights in the lists and adopting a chivalrous approach to their opponents. By 1936, all that had disappeared. The Condor Legion in Spain was out to terrorise, annihilate and paralyse the republican forces and on 27th April 1937 was accused of atrocity over the bombing of Guernica, the cultural and spiritual home of the Basques.
The He-111 was the most common bomber in service with the Luftwaffe. Although it was officially designated as a medium bomber this twin-engine machine was in fact the heaviest bomber, which was widely available to the Luftwaffe. Although this aircraft was never as common as the more successful Ju-88 it achieved much more fame. Designed by Siegfried and Walter Günter in the early 1930s it was often described as the “Wolf in sheep’s clothing”, as in the pre-war era it masqueraded as a transport aircraft in order to avoid the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles.
The He-111 is perhaps the most famous symbol of the German bomber force (Kampfwaffe) due its distinctive leaf like wing shape and “Greenhouse” nose, which gave excellent all round observation. The Heinkel 111 was the only medium/heavy Luftwaffe bomber during the early stages of the Second World War. lt proved reliable and efficient in all the early campaigns suffering only modest losses until the Battle of Britain, when its weak defensive armament exposed its vulnerability. As a combat aircraft the He-111 proved capable of sustaining heavy damage and remaining airborne. As the war progressed the He-111 was used in an ever increasing variety of roles on every front throughout the war and in every conceivable role. The He-111 saw service as a strategic bomber during the Battles for Poland, Norway, Holland and France. lt was heavily involved in the Battle of Britain, but also saw service as a torpedo bomber in the Battle of the Atlantic, a medium bomber and a transport aircraft on the Western Front, the Eastern Front and the North African Fronts. Later in the war, with the German bomber force redundant, the He-111 was converted to use as a transport aircraft and downgraded to a logistics role. Despite being constantly upgraded it became obsolete during the latter part of the war, but the failure of the Luftwaffe to design and produce a worthy successor meant the He-111 continued to be produced until 1944. Some 5600 of all variants were produced.
It was market day, and Guernica was crowded with visitors from the environs round about. Suddenly, it was later reported, the sky filled with Heinkel 111s and Junkers-52s, escorted by fighters, and the crowds in the town square were pounded with high explosives and strafed with machine-gun fire. Incendiary bombs rained down, setting fire to buildings. The Mayor of Guernica later told newspaper reporters: ‘They bombed and bombed and bombed.’
One reporter arrived in Guernica soon after the aircraft departed:
‘On both sides of the road, men, women and children were sitting, dazed. I saw a priest and stopped the car and went up to him. His face was blackened, his clothes in tatters. He couldn’t talk and pointed to the flames about four miles away, then whispered: ‘Aviones…bombas…much, mucho…’
Smoke, flames, the nauseating smell of burning human flesh and the dust and grit from collapsed buildings filled the air.
‘It was impossible to go down many of the streets, because they were walls of flame. Debris was piled high. The shocked survivors all had the same story to tell: aeroplanes, bullets, bombs, fire.’
Despite such dramatic reports, the bombing of Guernica became controversial when the Condor Legion denied involvement, even though the town contained military installations - a communications centre and a munitions factory - that could have counted as legitimate targets. Blame was ascribed instead to the Nationalists, who, it was said, had destroyed Guernica themselves. Experts called in to examine the ruins confirmed that the pattern of destruction evidenced explosions from the ground rather than from the air. However, the style and power of the attack on Guernica, as described, bore a chilling resemblance to the way the Luftwaffe later fought in the blitzkrieg campaigns against Poland and in western Europe. Then, it became clear, the destruction of Guernica, as reported, had been only a rehearsal.
Hajo Hermann found that the Condor Legion did not always have things their own way. The Republicans, too, were receiving aid from the outside. On receiving suitable payment in gold, the Russians sent them their best fighter, the Polikarpov 1-16 Rata. The Rata was the first in the world to combine cantilever monoplane wings with retractable landing gear at a time when almost all fighters were biplanes.
Hajo Hermann remembers what happened when the Luftwaffe aircraft had to confront the Rata, an aircraft the German pilots came to respect, with good reason.
‘The Polikarpov 1-16 Rata was the best plane that turned up in Spain. On one occasion, I was shot at by a Rata. It flew in an arc from in front of me, flying past and the rear gun was fired directly into the cockpit. Afterwards, there were quite a lot of bullet holes in my plane. Some of my comrades in the Condor Legion got as many as 250 bullets in battles with the Rata.
‘They were really hard planes to fight against. You couldn’t see them against the horizon. They used to come from Alcala de Henares, Getafe, the areas around Madrid and climbed up rapidly and you couldn’t really see them over that area. Then, suddenly there they were!
‘You couldn’t hear the Rata, either. That was the peculiar thing.
In the air, everything takes place absolutely silently, secretively, and then suddenly, from out of the silence, comes death. That’s what it was like. You thought you were watching the Ratas from a distance, then a tiny spot suddenly becomes enormous, with a huge engine in front of your nose, and they’re firing at you.
‘The Ratas often approached our planes head on. That was dangerous for us. We could defend ourselves very well from the rear. We had a rear gunner and down below in the bowl, in the ‘pot’ as we called it, we had an observer who could fire to the rear. We also had machine guns pointing out of the side windows but we were vulnerable in the front. That was why an officer on the General Staff, Kraft von Delmensingen, ordered machine guns to be fitted to our wings.’
The deadly nature of the Rata was made clear when Hajo Hermann was flying a JU-52 to attack a Republican position at Bilbao, in northern Spain.
‘Another of the Condor pilots flew in front of me to the left. Suddenly, the Rata flew between us and our man was a goner. His aircraft began to burn and immediately turned into a fiery, red ball. The plane just disintegrated and fell to Earth flaking into pieces.
‘It was a tremendous shock, but only for a tenth of a second or so, and it taught me a lesson for the future. When you’re flying in war, you have to keep on towards the target. That’s your duty and you must do it.
‘Of course, you know you can suffer the same fate - that’s the way war is. But it’s no good dwelling on it, even when you’ve just seen a comrade blown out of the sky. It always seemed to me to be so futile to expend a lot of emotion on the victim. Later, I went to war having made the decision once and for all, to engage in war, do it well, do it with determination. You have to reach your targets and you have to win.’
In the assembly shop, leads and cables are still being laid and connected. Another Ju-87 dive bomber can soon leave the works tended by the skilled hands of capable experts.
Hajo Hermann had had other plans for his Luftwaffe career when he was sent to Spain. An unfriendly commander, he believes, was responsible.
‘I went to Spain, I think, because my commander in Thuringen wanted to get rid of me. I had done something undisciplined for an airman, and when this commander was told to send one man from our group to Spain, he chose me. ‘At first I regarded it as a punishment and I was dismayed because I had other aims. I was just about to go on a ‘blind-flying’ course in order to train as a ‘blind-flying’ tutor but he said ‘Listen you can do that later, go to Spain first. Sign this paper stating that you will keep everything we talk about a secret, because officially, the government isn’t supposed to know anything about sending German airman to Spain. Off you go, then, you will be there for three weeks and are to fly Nationalist troops from Morocco over the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain. General Franco is waiting there for them’.
‘After a while in Spain, I changed my mind and instead of a punishment, it began to look like an adventure. I travelled to Cadiz on a steam boat together with several others from another garrison and in Cadiz we had our first experience of war. A very simple double-decker plane approached, a French plane and dropped a few small bombs. It didn’t look like much of an attack, but the bombs exploded smack against the hull of our ship. A little later, a Spanish battle ship sailed up and fired shells across the harbour so that fountains of water spouted up all round us. I used to like the pictures of the sea battles in the First World War, Skagerrak and so on where water fountains spouted up, but I had never experienced it and here I saw it for the first time. That’s how the Spanish episode began.
‘When I arrived in Toledo, it was in October 1936, there had been a lot of fighting and it looked pretty grim. I saw the corpses and awful scenes where the Republicans had killed priests and nuns. They lay everywhere on the ground, blood everywhere, in the villages too.
‘Later, we flew from Salamanca to attack Madrid, where the Republicans had ensconced themselves in the university district. Madrid was a very heavily defended town. But we didn’t spread terror there, like some people say, or drop bombs down into the middle of the city. Our task was to bomb the front line positions.
‘We also attacked the northern front line. But it was all very primitive down there in Spain. The Spaniards were totally unprepared for fighting on their own territory, as I discovered after we were ordered to fly from Burgos to attack the front line in the north. Most of the harbours in the north, like Bilbao or Oviedo, had been occupied by the Republicans. It was an important industrial area, with iron ore and coal deposits. I was given the task of flying in advance to Burgos to prepare the airfield for missions and it turned out to be very, very difficult. There was nothing there. I had hardly any materials and so I spoke to the Archbishop of Bilbao and said that I needed the floodlights he had at his cathedral to use on the airfield. He didn’t like that at all. He refused at first, but then I told him: ‘We are fighting against atheists, you must surely agree with that’. Well, that changed his mind and I got my floodlights.’
Service with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War afforded Hajo Hermann a great deal of varied experience in air warfare.
‘I flew transport missions, carried over two thousand troops across the sea, and was then re-equipped for bombing. I carried six 250 kg bombs in the JU 52 and flew different missions, mostly against ships, mainly against Mexican and Soviet supply ships that sailed into the harbour at Cartagena with supplies for the Republicans.
‘When we flew on missions, we were escorted by the Italian Savoya Marchetti 81. I think it was called, and the C 32. They were quite ingenious machines, equally good as our Heinkel- 51 fighters.
‘There were substantial air battles during attacks on the suburbs of Madrid which the Republicans defended bitterly, the university quarter. We were busy dropping our bombs and our Heinkels suffered considerable losses’
Hermann used his opportunities in Spain to experiment with new ways of fighting from air. He flew out one day and dropped stones and iron bars into the Straits of Gibraltar.
‘That was an invention of mine. It was considered quite mad, of course, but it wasn’t a bad idea at all. When we flew over the Straits - we were heavily loaded with armed men - the Russian destroyers used to fire up at us. We were hit too, in the front and the rear. Many of our passengers were badly injured. They made a terrible fuss. You’d think the world was coming to an end.
‘So I told them: ‘Now we’ll send our greetings to the people down below’ and got together some bars and old junk which I’d loaded up into the rear of the plane close by the door, where the commander of this unit sat. I said to him that when he got the signal he should open the door a little and push all the junk out with his foot, that would make some lovely noises down below and it did too. The noise caused by non-dynamic objects like that is enormous. I know because I once experience it myself. A toolbox fell out of a plane by accident and landed on the ground with a tremendous crash, it was indescribable. So I did it on purpose this time, and though we didn’t hit much, there was plenty of noise and people on the ground were terrified.’
If Hermann had been sent to Spain in the first place because of indiscipline, his behaviour did not improve that much once he was there.
‘General Mola was Nationalist Commander in Chief of the northern front line in Spain and I had to report to him to apologise for being rude about the Spaniards. I had complained that they worked too slowly, and I was to apologise, but before I even had time to open my mouth to excuse myself, General Mola said, in French which I myself spoke: ‘Listen, why have you given me so few flak guns?’ At the time I was involved in training the Spanish soldiers to use flak, so I assured General Mola that more of the guns would be coming and he seemed satisfied with that. He seemed to forget all about my rude remarks. I was supposed to be sent home in disgrace, but instead, I was allowed to stay in Spain.
Clouds, waves, and far-flung wide open spaces - there the seaplane pilots hold away.
The fighter pilot at the front airdrome is attentively following the return of his comrades who have just paid one of their numerous visits to Tommy Atkins in his island home.
‘After that, I was on a mission, flying from Melilla in Morocco to attack Cartagena, but there was a problem. Italy, Germany, Britain and France had agreed to patrol the coasts of Spain so that neither the Nationalists nor the Republicans could bring in new forces. At least that’s what we, the Germans, said we were there for and the others, I suppose, would have done their best to turn back my aircraft. Fortunately, Admiral Fischl was with his fleet, anchored outside the three-mile limit by the Costa del Sol, near Almeria and Cartagena. He ordered a floodlight to be switched on so that I could see my way to Cartagena. That was his idea of non-intervention!’.
The Spanish Civil War ended with a Nationalist victory on 28th March 1939, when General Franco marched into Madrid. The Condor Legion departed for home just as events were prefiguring the outbreak of the Second World War less than six months later. Two weeks before the civil war in Spain came to an end, the forces of Nazi Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia, contrary to the agreement made with Hitler by Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, the prime ministers of Britain and France, at the time of the Munich Crisis late in 1938. This latest aggression on the part of the Third Reich was followed by another, the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and this time, Britain and France did not stand by and watch, but declared war.
The campaign in Poland, which barely outlasted September, was the first illustration of what the Luftwaffe could do in a full-scale, all-out war. At the time of Munich, the Luftwaffe had already been a mighty force, with 1,669 aircraft, including 453 fighters, 582 bombers and 159 dive-bombers. By the eve of the War only nine months later, it had more than doubled its size, with 3,7500 aircraft, of which 1,170 were bombers, 335 were dive-bombers and 1,125 were fighters, mainly Me-109s, and 195 twin-engined fighters, mostly Me-110s. Energetic aircraft production ensured that these numbers grew as the War progressed, particularly after the brilliant Albert Speer assumed responsibility. No other European power had an air force as large or as impressive as this, nor did any have experience comparable to the ‘rehearsal’ by the Condor Legion in Spain.
The value of that experience was clear during the prelude to the invasion of Poland, when the Luftwaffe bombed, strafed and destroyed virtually at will and while not entirely destroying the Polish Air Force as had been planned, rendered it more or less useless. The Poles had only around 500 aircraft, compared to 1,600 Luftwaffe planes, but it was not simply a question of numbers. The Polish planes were primitive compared to their state-of-the-art opponents and the shock surprise of blitzkrieg attack caught the Polish armed forces critically off balance.
Hajo Hermann was there in the opening moments of the Polish campaign.
‘Surveying the army advancing from the air, It looked just overwhelming.
Wherever we were advancing, over an area of around 200 kms., you could see where the guns were firing or the houses were burning and the fighting was taking place. The whole landscape seemed to be consumed by war. But I thought about the way the Poles had betrayed us after the First World War and I said to myself: ‘Well now you are taking part, this is your chance to erase the great injustice the Poles have done us.’
By 1940, other landscapes ‘consumed by war’, blitzkrieg war, enabled the German armed forces to conquer Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France, all in quick, unstoppable succession. Norway, together with Denmark, was invaded on 9th April. Oslo was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe and a British newspaper corresponded was there to record the result.
‘With German bombers wheeling overhead like birds of prey, the rattle of machine gun fire on the outskirts of Oslo and the heavy thud of bombs echoing down the fjord, the bewildered crowds in the city’s streets were sheltering in doorways and flattening themselves against the walls. With a piercing crescendo of noise, a great four-engined machine dived right over the housetops and streaked skywards again, its tail gun covering the length of the street.
‘The Germans had landed at Moss, twenty miles from Oslo on the east side of the fjord. Their ships were in the fjord and their aircraft had bombed the airport. German bombers were wheeling over a ridge at Fetsund, also twenty miles from Oslo. Black puffs of anti-aircraft fire pitted the sky for the whole length of the ridge. The thud of bombs, the rattle of machine guns echoed in the air. The Luftwaffe’s target was Kjeller, the Norwegian military air base.’
Norway was conquered and occupied. So was Denmark, but the one flaw in the run of German success in western Europe in the early summer of 1940 was the escape of the British Expeditionary Force together with large numbers of French and Belgian soldiers, from the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France. Hermann Goering believed that these men, vulnerable and exposed as they waited for rescue from England, could be easily finished off by the Luftwaffe. He was wrong. In a foretaste of what they would encounter in the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe was fended off by the Royal Air Force in a series of punishing, hard-fought battles. Hajo Hermann was flying over the Dunkirk area while the Royal Navy and the fleet of private ‘little ships’ were lifting the soldiers off the beaches and piers and the RAF was on guard.
‘We found ourselves on our own over the harbour at Dunkirk. It was teeming with British soldiers down below and I attempted to unload my bombs onto two of the ships. I missed, and the Hurricanes came after us, blazing gunfire. Our plane was hit and smoke began pouring out of one of the engines. The other engine packed up. The plane slid down into the water about one hundred metres from the beach. The entire cockpit was smashed up. ‘Suddenly, we were under the water. But thank goodness, we all got out. I had a hand injury, but I had to ignore that. What was more important was that the escaping English weren’t too far away. So we crawled cautiously onto the beach, through the surf, always crawling, always to the east, away from the English. So, we were saved. But for us, the operation at Dunkirk was over.’
The Luftwaffe destroyed the town and the harbour at Dunkirk, setting them alight with incendiary bombs. But they were unable to make good Goering’s boast that they could annihilate the men on the beaches. A total of 338,000 escaped back to England, to fight another day. It was a day that would soon arrive.
By 22nd June 1940, when France capitulated and Britain became the only combatant still free to oppose the Nazis, it seemed only a matter of time before the island country was invaded and added to Hitler’s new European empire. Despite the failure at Dunkirk, Hermann Goering, in his flamboyant buccaneering fashion, was certain that his Luftwaffe was on the brink of another spectacular victory.
There were several reasons why he was mistaken. Firstly, the R.A.F. was the first up-to-date air force the Luftwaffe had encountered. On the brink of the Battle of Britain in mid-1940, statistics appeared to prove that the Royal Air Force had scant chances, with only 1,911 first-line aircraft compared to the Germans’ 4,161. Three Luftflotten, numbers 2,3 and 5 were deployed on airfields stretching from Brittany to Norway, including 898 bombers, 708 single-engined and 202 twin-engined fighters. Lutflotte 2, based in northeastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and northern Germany was to attack the southeast of England. The western half of England was the responsibility of Luftflotte 3, which used airfields sited from the French Atlantic coast to west of the River Seine. Luftflotte 5, based in Norway and Denmark was to make diversionary attacks on targets in northern Britain.
These forces, though formidable, suffered from several disadvantages.
The first was that it was being required to act out of character. The Luftwaffe had been designed as ‘flying artillery’ acting in support of ground forces, not for a strategic bombing campaign or for a prolonged air war.
Until the Battle of Britain began in mid-August 1940, Germany’s pilots had not yet faced a well-armed, well-equipped, up to date air force. They had enjoyed a comparatively easy run, operating in attack areas close to Germany against inferior enemies, and operating over land. Britain, too, was not that far from the Germans’ reach after the conquests of 1940, a minimum of only twenty one miles across the English Channel. The Channel, however, was an important deciding factor, as it had always been when the defence of Britain was at stake. So was the presence there of the Royal Navy. That made it potentially hostile territory for Luftwaffe aircraft flying over it, whether it was to tangle with the RAF or to ‘blitz’ British cities.
Although they appeared well placed, on the coasts of Europe nearest to Britain, the range of the Luftwaffe aircraft was limited by this narrow, but deceptive waterway. The Me-109, for instance, had a radius of action, out and home, of little more than 100 miles, with only around 80 minutes of tactical flying time. This was barely enough to reach London and do damage before having to fly home and, hopefully, avoid ditching in the Channel.
The rapid conquest of western Europe had been exhilarating for the Germans, but the very speed of it presented new and taxing problems. There was no time before the attack on Britain to prepare new air bases and set up adequate supply lines. There were no local facilities for the repair of damaged aircraft, which had to be taken back to Germany instead. There was also a critical lack of reserves, no reliable method of plotting the positions of RAF aircraft and no ground-to-air facilities for guiding the Luftwaffe planes.
The new difficulties the Luftwaffe encountered in the Battle of Britain were largely due to Hermann Goering’s lack of foresight, his poor planning and overweening confidence in the might of ‘his’ Luftwaffe. These faults at the top were compounded by the fact that many Luftwaffe aircraft were too poorly armed to be certain of a safe flight across the Channel without a fighter escort. Hajo Hermann remembers how hamstrung he felt when he flew over London.
‘I bombed London, because the English were already at work bombing Berlin and very heavily. And we only did it, by way of retaliation. We hit back, and Adolf Hitler, the evil man, always used to say, if the British stop, then we will stop too. But the British didn’t stop. So God help me, I flew to London twenty-three times and dropped my bombs down onto it. There was no precise targeting, no strategic purpose in what I did. I felt bad about that. In the city and I don’t know what other parts of the town, it was very regrettable.’
Unteroffizier Peter Stahl, pilot of a Junkers 88 had similar misgivings when engaged in bombing London in October 1940.
‘During our approach flight to London, it becomes almost spooky in our glazed housing. The searchlights have lit up the clouds, so we are flying blind and feel as if we are hanging in our fuzzy surroundings, sitting inside a white cotton-wool ball with no idea what is happening above and below us. I had to concentrate really hard to ‘pull together my whole brain’ as we used to say, to avoid making errors. That takes nerve! My only wish was to be out of here and quick.’
The blitz on London began on 7th September 1940, with a raid on the capital during the evening and the East End suffering most of the damage.
The description of the raid by a 16-year old eyewitness living in the London docklands was typical of the capital’s first experience of being directly under German fire.
‘The air raid siren went at quarter to five in the afternoon. We heard gunfire and the sound of aircraft, so we all went into our Anderson shelter. The planes came over in three batches, we could hear them very clearly, and the guns sent up a terrific barrage. We could hear bombs whistling down all round as we cowered in the back of the shelter, expecting to be hit at any moment.
‘Bombs were dropping in a field behind us, and we thought that if they didn’t hit us, they would surely hit our house. Our shelter shook and so did we. We ate sweets and tried not to mind. All the time, fire engines were rushing past clanging their bells.
‘When the All Clear sounded and we started to come out of the shelter, my brother said: ‘Hasn’t it got dark?’ It was a great smoke cloud all over the sky, thick, black smoke which made our faces dirty, just standing there. We thought for a moment that our house was on fire, but it was red from the reflection of burning buildings round about. We could see at least half a dozen fires blazing and great flames shooting up into the sky.
The cloud of smoke rising over the East End of London could be seen miles away. Another eyewitness saw it from far out in the countryside.
‘I was driving back from Oxford with friends early in the evening and we were still miles out in the country when we saw a huge column of smoke hanging far away over the house tops. At first we didn’t know whether it was merely a cloud. But we guessed what it was when we came on the dramatic spectacle of street after street lined with people, every head turned upward and eastwards. I reach home in London to find a bomb had dropped in the next street. I was trying to investigate this when I got a call to go to the scene of the fire. A general’s daughter, a girl of 19, an ambulance driver, begged to come with me.
‘We were waiting for the bus when the air raid warning sounded again. We knew at once where the fire was, because this line of buses immediately came to a halt. They were held up at the other end. We walked some distance. There were heavy bursts of gunfire and we put on our tin hats. A taxi drew up in the middle of the road. ‘Will you take me to the fire?’ I asked. ‘I’ll get you as near to it as I possible can’ said the driver. Then began a mad ride through London.
The Ju-52 was the workhorse of the Luftwaffe for logistics transport and logistics missions. The aircraft was easy to maintain and carried a reasonable payload. It could take great punishment, which was fortunate, as the machine was sluggish and in consequence was easy prey for enemy fighters. First introduced into service in 1931, over 5000 of these rugged machines saw service with the Luftwaffe in every theatre of war.
‘In one street, about a dozen firemen, with hoses and fire-pumps, had just managed to extinguish one fire. They told us factories had been hit. It wasn’t too easy to breathe. Above the glare, we could see the curtain of smoke and above that two balloons.
‘Suddenly, we heard a whirring, rushing sound. ‘That’s a bomb’ someone shouted. ‘Fall flat!’ We flung ourselves in the gutter, in a sort of human chain. A few moments passed. Afterwards, we took shelter in a garage. When the activity overhead died down, we came out again. What we had seen before was nothing to what we saw now.
‘The whole air was a bright blaze of gold, with those two balloons still floating above. We shouted for our taxi man. When he arrived, he said he had been blown to the ground by a bomb. Just as we started off again in the taxi, we heard first a rushing, then a heavy explosion and a brilliant firework display in the road directly in our path. A bomb had blocked the road.
‘Later, I talked with a woman who drove in a car over London Bridge and back over Tower Bridge during the evening. She said that nothing moved her so much as the sight of the Tower of London. ‘It stood there squat and solid and contemptuous, with the whole sky on fire behind it,’ she said. ‘It symbolised the whole of our history. It will take a good deal more than Hitler to shake us.’
Defiant attitudes like this were bad news for Hermann Goering. He had assumed that the British could be terrorised into submission by bombing and strafing. Gripped by this delusion, he had made a serious blunder in sending his Luftwaffe to attack Britain’s cities while neglecting to press home the offensive against the British Fighter Command.
Goering’s blunders multiplied when he dispatched bombers to assault cities as far apart as Swansea, Aberdeen and Belfast. On one raid, attempting to safeguard the dispersed bomber streams, the Luftwaffe lost twenty-four fighters to the RAF’s fourteen. The effect of the Luftwaffe offensive was also blunted by poor intelligence gathering. The wrong airfields and factories were targeted.
As the Battle of Britain progressed, the loss of RAF fighters was heavy, but the loss to the Luftwaffe was heavier. On 15th July, fifty German aircraft were destroyed in one day. Between 13th and 18th August, three hundred and fifty German aircraft were lost. The RAF lost one hundred and seventy.
In Britain, the summer of 1940 was bright, sunny and warm, the perfect flying weather, and thousands of people in the south east and along the coast had perfect visibility as they watched Spitfires and Me-109s jousting high above in the bright blue summer sky. Luftwaffe bombers could be clearly seen as they flew over in packed formations. One eyewitness watched Spitfires attacking a fleet of Luftwaffe bombers over Surrey.
‘The whole panorama of the beautiful Surrey countryside was laid out before us, but soon the German bombers could be heard high up above. Our Anti-aircraft batteries opened fire immediately and the sky seemed full of fighter aircraft going up in pursuit. A German bombers suddenly hurtled out of the sky like a falling leaf. The pilot managed to regain some control as he near the earth and it seemed as if a safe landing might have been possible, but he made a sudden dive, hitting the ground. The machine immediately burst into an inferno of flame and smoke. It was a terrible scene, taking place just down below us in the valley in brilliant sunshine.
‘Meanwhile, the RAF fighters were zooming in all directions and we could hear the rattle of machine gun fire above us. A big black German bombers planed right across our vision about three hundred feet from the ground, with engines off, obviously trying to land. Then came a burst of machine gun fire as he scraped over the roof of a farmhouse nearby. it was astonishing to us that the occupants of the bomber in such a perilous position could still think of machine-gunning the farmhouse as they passed over the roof and pancaked into a field half a mile further on, apparently undamaged.
‘While this was going on, anti-aircraft batteries were sending up shells at a terrific rate. Shells were bursting in the wood behind us and we felt that any moment, some splinters might descend upon us. After a short interval, we saw a formation of Spitfires bring down two more bombers on the distant hills.
‘The next thing we saw, a group of German bombers, hotly pursued by Spitfires, were seen making for the coast. The action had lasted thirty-five minutes. When it was over, the Surrey countryside was peaceful once again and the only evidence of the battle were the smoking ruins of the German bombers in the fields below us.’
The rate of loss suffered by the Luftwaffe in engagements like this was a particular nightmare for Ernst Udet, whose friend, Hermann Goering, had appointed him chief of Luftwaffe supply and procurement and head of its technical office. Udet may have been an ace pilot in the First World War, but he was no organiser. He made a complete mess of the flow of new aircraft required to replace the Luftwaffe’s losses. When Goering found out, his first thought was to hide the truth in order to protect his friend, but Udet had another solution. Ostensibly, he was killed in an aircraft crash, but in fact committed suicide.
The shortcomings of the German aircraft, especially the Messerschmitt 110 were also exposed during the Battle of Britain. Later in the War, after 1942, Anton Heinemann was a less-than-satisfied Me-110 pilot.
‘The Me-110 had six guns facing forwards, but because the plane couldn’t fly for too long, they were retired. We were given the Junkers-88, which a large additional tank, so that we had a larger margin of safety if we encountered fog or had to be diverted to another airfield.’
The Me-109, whose dogfights with the Spitfire gave it a gladiatorial image, had a different Achilles Heel, but a no less serious one. It consumed aviation fuel at a great rate, so much so that by the time it had reached the war zone over southern England, it had only about half an hour of combat time left.
Luftwaffe pilots were at a disadvantage here. If they were shot down or had to parachute to safety, they found themselves in enemy territory, full of people who were only too glad to turn them over to the authorities. The classic image was of a German pilot baling out and landing in a field, to be confronted by a farmworker with a pitchfork. It was not entirely fiction. It happened more than once.
On 8th July 1940, for example, Mrs. Nora Cardwell disarmed and captured a Luftwaffe pilot whose plane had been shot down over the northeast coast of England. She described the incident.
‘One of my farm men came to the door and said some German parachutists were coming down. I went to the telephone, but found it was out of order. I told a boy to go on his bicycle for the police. But in the meantime, I had to do something myself. We had been told that we had to deal with these parachutists very quickly before they had a chance to do any damage.
‘I went out into the garden and saw an airman limping hanging across the paddock near the house. There were two or three people about, but they didn’t do anything, so I walked up to this young man and told him to put his hands up. He didn’t understand until I made signs and then, he raised his hands in the air. I pointed to the automatic pistol he had in his belt and he gave it to me.
‘He was about 6ft.3ins. tall and about twenty five years of age. I walked with him in front of me to the road. We waited for about half an hour before the police and soldiers arrived and took him away.’
One of the most unfortunate of the Luftwaffe pilots was Gefreiter Niessel who was Flight Engineer on a Junkers-88 bomber when the engines began to fail. The pilot ordered the crew to jump out, but only Niessel did so. He landed safely, but the pilot changed his mind. Realising that despite the failing engines, he had a chance to get back to Germany, he flew on and managed to reach base. The stranded Niessel was later captured near Tangmere. It had been his first and last flight.
The airman has a pilot’s helmet, goggles and a laryngaphone, which transmits his words directly from his larynx and permits of intercommunication between the members of the crew, in spite of the noise of the engines. That is of the utmost importance for concentration of fighting force.
The Luftwaffe’s opponents, by contrast, had the luxury of operating over home territory, with a much shorter run home to their airfields and friendly faces all round if they were forced to bale out. Many of them returned immediately to base and were flying again the same day, or the next.
Despite the ferocity of combat in the Battle of Britain, it did not always occur to pilots on either side that they, not the other fellow, might be shot down and killed. The first time he went into battle, the famous pilot Richard Hillary ‘felt an empty sensation of suspense in the pit of my stomach.’ It was not fear for himself, but fear at the thought that he was about to kill.
Hillary found himself tangling with a Messerschmitt.
‘He came right through my sights and I saw the tracer from all eight guns thud home. For a second, he seemed to hang motionless; then a jet of red flame shot upward and he spun out of sight. For the next few minutes, I was too busy looking after myself to think of anything but the rest of the enemy aircraft turned and made off over the Channel and we were ordered to our base. My mind began working again. It had happened.’
Like Hillary, Ulrich Steinhilper, an Me-109 pilot, who took part in a raid on RAF Manston in Kent on 19th August 1940, was chilled by the thought that destroying an opponent’s aircraft also meant killing him.
‘We roared over the coast just east of Margate and within seconds we were approaching Manston. I spotted a tanker that was refuelling a Spitfire quite close to the airfield boundary. Dropping height to about three or four metres, I saw the tanker rapidly filling my illuminated red firing ring. Increasing the pressure on the trigger and the button, I felt all four machine guns begin to fire. I saw the strikes and flashes as the bullets began to hit home and the tanker began to burn.’
Next, Steinhilper turned his attention to two Spitfires waiting nearby to be refuelled in their turn. His machine gun fire tore up the ground and then the Spitfires were hit. The tanker blew up in a ball of fire and the Spitfires began to burn. Despite the elation of success, Steinhilper knew there were men as well as machines down there.
‘I was assailed by a conflict of feelings. First, I had done what I had been trained to do and done it well. It was a victory for me, and a victory for Germany. I had set fire to thousands of litres of precious fuel and left three Spitfires in ruins. But I had also seen that my attack had cost the life of at least one man and that was, and still is, hard to take.’
Ten weeks later, Steinhilper was shot down near Canterbury in Kent. He baled out safely and was imprisoned for the rest of the War.
The difficulties the Luftwaffe was encountering in the Battle of Britain tried Goering’s patience to extremes. He had very little patience in any case, for he was easily dissatisfied with anything less than quick success. As the Battle wore on into September, and the RAF showed no signs of cracking, Goering took to criticising the Luftwaffe fighter pilots for failing him and for lacking aggression. He also drove them hard, refusing to allow rest days or to rotate the front-line units so that they could refresh themselves. The pilots became tired out and disillusioned and for the first time began to doubt their own effectiveness.
It was also a matter of shame for the Luftwaffe when the much-vaunted JU-87 Stukas had to be withdrawn from the Battle because they proved too vulnerable to RAF attack. The Stukas’ undoing was the very feature that had once been considered its advantage: the moment when the JU-87 positioned itself for its eighty-degree dive-bombing run, and was about to shriek down on its target below was also the moment when it was most open to attack. The Stukas suffered very heavy losses, most of which occurred as they stooped to make their dive.
The Stukas were so vulnerable that they had to be escorted by Messerschmitt-109Es. The JU-87s were very slow-flying aircraft and the Me-109s, which were superior aircraft, had to cut down on their own speed capability because of it. The Spitfires and Hurricanes were frequently waiting for them and their losses were tremendous. One Luftwaffe squadron lost its group commander, its adjutant and all three of its commanders within two weeks. This made a young lieutenant, Gunther Rall the new squadron commander and he was only 22 years old.
The Luftwaffe pilots were frustrated, too, by the serendipity of the RAF squadrons which invariably managed to be in the right place at the right time to intercept them. The explanation was the RAF’s radio detection and ranging equipment - RADAR - which had already been in operational use before 1939 and was now playing its first vital defensive role in the War. Adolf Galland, the famous German fighter ace wrote:
‘We realised that the RAF fighter squadrons must be controlled from the ground by some new procedure, because we heard commands skillfully and accurately directing Spitfires and Hurricanes onto the German formations…For us, this radar and fighter control was a surprise and a very bitter one.’
The Germans had RADAR themselves, and used it very effectively during the War. Horst Ramstetter was convinced the British has stolen it from them and then prevented the Germans from using it themselves.
‘They blew us out of the sky after our RADAR system had been stolen by the English. Our RADAR was able to register approaching formations, to register the numbers and say what was up there. Our control room could say there are fighters in the air, they come from such and such a place. English advance troops picked up this sophisticated technology, the whole thing, from the Channel or wherever, and took it to England. The Battle of Britain was won by the English because of that. They were able to switch off our radar system, all the frequencies, so we couldn’t use it. They were very sneaky lads, those English’.
Combined with their other disadvantages, German losses in the Battle of Britain, 1,733 aircraft overall to the RAF’s 915, were so high that it became impossible for the Luftwaffe to carry on. It had become evident that they were not going to seize command of the air and without command of the air, there could be no invasion. On 12th October, Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain, was postponed ‘indefinitely’ by Adolf Hitler. This postponement was meant to last until the following year, but the campaign was never resumed. Britain, which had not been successfully invaded for almost nine centuries, remained the only opponent still able to confront the Nazis for a year to the day, until Russia was forced into the War by the German invasion of 22nd June 1941.
Adolf Hitler never forgave Goering for the failure of Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. The shine had gone from its dazzling, invincible image and its reputation was never quite the same again. After the cancellation of Operation Sealion, Hitler and Goering met only when it was unavoidable and Goering contrived to keep out of the Führer’s way at every possible opportunity. Some Luftwaffe pilots, just as disillusioned as their Führer, came to realise what lay behind Goering’s outward bluster. One of them was Anton Heinemann.
‘Yes, Goering was a great bragger. He boasted he could be called Meyer - a Jewish name - if any enemy plane flew over German territory. What nonsense! How could he have forgotten that the RAF raided the Kiel Canal and the German naval bases at Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbuttel on the second day of the War, in 1939? Besides, against the British, we never had command of the air, certainly not during the day, though the night fighters managed to function until the end of the War.’
On 10th June 1940, a few weeks before the Battle of Britain began, Il Duce Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, had entered the war on the German side. Italian operations were at first concentrated in Africa, where Mussolini was intent on building an empire which, he boasted, would one day rival that of the Romans. The Mediterranean, he bragged, was ‘Mare Nostrum’, Our Sea.
The Italians were not entirely willing combatants. When Il Duce announced his declaration of war to a large crowd in Rome, voices were heard telling him, among other epithets, to ‘Drop dead!’ Mussolini’s ambitions in Africa prevailed, just the same, and on 4th July, the Italian forces invaded the British protectorate of Somaliland. By 13th September, the Italians were moving towards Egypt, where there was a large concentration of British forces and the vital Suez Canal. The British hit back, destroying the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940, and invading Italian Eritrea in January 1941. Before long, the Italians were in difficulties and Mussolini was appealing to Adolf Hitler for help. It was the first, though not the last time, that Italian ineptitude made them a liability to their German Allies.
An airman’s equipment would be incomplete without a parachute, the life-belt of the air to which many an airman owes his life.
Hitler’s response was to send General Erwin Rommel and his crack Afrika Korps to help the Italians. At the same time, the Luftwaffe’s Air Corps X, with five hundred aircraft, was sent from Norway to Sicily. Their principle task was to harass enemy shipping and maintain the supply lines to North Africa. The Luftwaffe also went into action in direct support of the German and Italian ground forces on 16th February 1941, when they raided the port of Benghazi, which had fallen into British hands a week earlier. By the time the Luftwaffe had finished, Benghazi was unusable as a base for the British forces in Libya.
Two months later, when the Germans rescued the Italians again by invading Greece, Luftwaffe power proved so strong that the small RAF fighter force on Crete was forced to withdraw from the fray. The Luftwaffe, for once, had command of the air and used it in intensive air raids designed to smash the British forces on Crete.
This was only the preliminary to the first major airbourne assault in military history, which was carried out by the XI Airbourne Corps in May 1940. Despite very heavy losses, the mass parachute drops continued. The losses so shocked Hitler that he never again attempted another large-scale airbourne assault, but within less than two weeks, by 31st May, the British had been forced to evacuate Crete and the island was in German hands.
An important target for the Germans in the Mediterranean was the island of Malta, a British possession strategically sited where RAF aircraft operating from its airfield could endanger the supply lines of the Afrika Korps. The Luftwaffe had already raided Malta 114 times by the first week of March 1941. Between September 1941 and June 1942, nearly 14,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the island, the maximum in a day being 500 tons and on one occasion, the anti-aircraft guns were manned continuously for sixty-six hours.
Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air in the wartime coalition government, delivered a graphic report of one of these raids to the House of Commons.
‘The first time the Luftwaffe raided, they came over in the afternoon in two waves. There was quite a good number of planes, too, and they kept diving over the Grand Harbour for half an hour. Then came an interval of about fifteen minutes, and they started all over again…. Although the Germans had guts to come down that low, they were terrible shaken. Plane after plane zoomed over very low indeed with engines sparking and smoke coming out from wings and tail. Every imaginable anti-aircraft shell was used against them. The sky was ablaze and I was nearly deafened by bomb and shell explosions. During that engagement, the Germans lost eleven aircraft. When they returned a couple of days later, they lost another nine and next day another nineteen.’
For the Luftwaffe, Malta and in particular its capital and chief port, Valletta, was not an easy target. Hajo Herman was familiar with some of the difficulties.
‘When we flew in to attack Valetta, where warships were moored, we had to fly very exactly, maintain height, course and speed with mathematic correctness so that the bomb aimer’s measurements could be correct. For us, that was the critical and very dangerous moment. Down below, the flak could also measure exactly, and when they begin to drive up their barrages, then that is quite something, and you can hear it. You can see when a shell explodes in front of you, it seems quite close which it is, close to the side. You can tell from the fact that if a plane is hit, then it explodes beside you in the air. Those are very, very tricky situations - the clean, correct approach to definite targets where the ground fire is aimed exactly.’
The battle over Malta was to continue in the same punishing vein into 1942 and 1943 and the Luftwaffe also acted to bomb and strafe in best blitzkrieg style during advances by the Afrika Korps, for instance, during the battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943. Hitler had been unenthusiastic about diverting German troops to Africa. To him, it was a sideshow that absorbed men and matériel better used elsewhere. His hand was forced, however, by the dashing, charismatic Rommel. Under Rommel’s leadership, the daring exploits of the Afrika Korps made them popular heroes in Germany and the publicity and morale value of their successes were too great for even the Führer to ignore. Hitler’s real interest, a very longstanding one, was the invasion and conquest of Russia.
Russia posed significant geographical problems for an invader. It was the first really extensive area the Germans had attempted to bring under their control and its vast size made it a completely different battlefield from Poland or France. Their much smaller land areas and the good ‘tank country’ provided by their terrain had been well suited to the swift blitzkrieg advance, while allowing the defenders little room for safe strategical withdrawal and no time for regrouping.
The Luftwaffe’s style of warfare was an integral part of blitzkrieg, but Russia offered no opportunities for winning quickly by lightning war.
Not only was there too much territory to cover, but the Russians were able to hide away their reserves in places beyond reach. They were able, too, to disperse their weapons manufacturing facilities over a very wide area. In November 1941, for example, as the Germans neared Moscow, the city’s important SKF ball-bearing factory was evacuated and set up on a new site hundreds of miles to the east.
The destroyer Me-110 zooms up with incredible manoeuvrability and irresistible fighting power.
An angry armoured insect dives from the clouds - a Henschel Hs-123 during a nose dive.
Dornier Do-215 bombers thunder against the foe, like medieval heroes in armour with their visors down.
The Germans lacked the long-range bombers needed to deal with these widely dispersed industrial centres. They were still relying on the twin-engined Heinkel 111 medium bomber which had first been used by the Condor Legion in Spain in 1938. During the Second World War, the 111 comprised the major part of the Luftwaffe’s bomber arm. It could fly 1,212 miles at 205 miles per hour with a full bomb load of some 5,500 pounds, but this was a very modest range and capacity for the task of destroying the Russian arms industry.
Although the Luftwaffe never managed that, its presence in Russia was considerable. The first, second and fourth Luftflotten were deployed, comprising a total of 2,770 aircraft, more than half Germany’s total front line strength. This included 775 bombers, 310 Ju-87 Stukas and 920 single- and twin-engined fighters.
Within a week of the invasion, on 29th June 1941, Adolf Hitler was already issuing so-called ‘victory communiqués’ detailing, inter alia, a dazzling series of Luftwaffe successes.
‘The German air force delivered a crushing blow at the Russian air force. In air battles and by anti-aircraft fire on land, 4,107 Russian planes have been destroyed. In contrast to these losses are the comparatively moderate German losses of 150 planes.’
The Russian High Command countered these claims with a communiqué of their own on 30th June, putting Luftwaffe losses at 1,500 aircraft to the Russian Air Force’s 850. The real figures, by the end of September, were nearer 4,500 Russian aircraft destroyed, to Luftwaffe’s losses of around 2,000.
Despite the propaganda put out by both sides, the Luftwaffe certainly dealt the Russian air force some very heavy punishment. Early on in the campaign, they seized command of the air and by the end of September 1941, they had destroyed around 4,500 Russian aircraft for the loss of around 2,000 planes of their own. The Polikarpov 1-16 Rata, which gave Hajo Hermann such problems in Spain, was still the best and most numerous Russian fighter in 1941 and hundreds were destroyed on the ground when the Luftwaffe raided their airfields. In the air, the Ratas were outclassed by the Me-109s and FW-190s and many were shot down.
Karl Born had a very poor opinion of the Russian air force.
‘It was very bad. The Russian pilots were cowards. They used to turn away when we came on the scene. They never attacked us, except once when we were in a Fieseler Storch. But we were able to run out the landing flaps and reduce speed, so the Russian shot past us before he could pull the trigger. The closer we were to the ground, the worse it was for him, because he had a large turning circle and couldn’t follow us any more.
‘There was one Russian aircraft we came to know very well. We called it the ‘sewing machine’. It was an ancient double-decker which always arrived at night and hurled all sorts of stuff down, stones, bits of iron. It was all very primitive.’
Command of the air enabled the Ju-87 Stukas to fulfil their traditional role as tactical support for the German ground forces. Horst Ramstetter spent three years in Russia piloting dive-bombers.
‘At the beginning of the Russian campaign, I was immediately sent into action in the last open-cockpit biplane, the Henschel-123, the forerunner of the Ju 87 Stuka. The HS 123 had an engine power of about 900 hp and it was so manoeuvrable that in the pilot’s jargon ‘you could turn it around a lamp post’. It was a robust plane . They shot at me from below through the lower wing into the upper wing, there was a hole that I could almost crawl through and the thing still kept flying. I think you’d have to take the wings off then it would stop flying, and not before. It was that robust.’
Ramstetter flew missions that seemed to take him back to a form of warfare from the past.
‘We flew missions against mounted units at the beginning of the war in Russia. Just imagine that, the Cossacks. Horse drawn. I was up in the HS-123 when I saw some galloping horses and riders. One of them looked around and I saw his eyes, full of fear. I couldn’t fire. I couldn’t fire. I couldn’t fire at the enemy. He suddenly became a human being for me. Why? In war, it’s either you or me, that’s the rule for every soldier the world over, either you or me and whoever is faster, he survives longer. But I couldn’t fire, not that time.’
‘I flew 300 missions in the HS 123, in the southern sector in Russia. Early on, I never got further north than Kiev in the Ukraine, but later, I flew over Stalingrad, supporting the ground troops. Afterwards, I was sent on missions all over Russia as a fighter bomber. But the HS-123 was very ancient. so I was retrained on the FW-190’
Alfred Wagner was very enthusiastic about the FW-190, which was introduced into the Luftwaffe after 1941 as a replacement for the Me-109s.
‘The FW-190 was much more manoeuvrable in the air than many other aircraft. It had good loading capacity and weaponry and the technical standard was very high. It was also faster and had the advantage of being able to evade other planes quite easily. It swerved away beautifully, and was marvellously manoeuvrable - not as much as the Spitfire, of course, but a great improvement on what we’d had before.’
A Heinkel fighter shows its manoeuvrability in a steep turn.
Work now begins in earnest. The formalities of acceptance have been completed, the Do-215 is ready to take off, and the first flight to the front airdrome will soon begin.
In 1942, an FW-190 on patrol along the Norwegian coast sited a large convoy heading through the arctic seas towards Murmansk. The convoy was carrying vital supplies for the Russians: armour plate, steel, nickel, oil, aluminium, cordite, TNT, aircraft parts, guns, planes and food cargoes. For six days, the Luftwaffe strove to prevent the ships reaching port and the battle was of mammoth proportions.
One Heinkel bomber flew through a hail of fire from one of the corvette escorts and dropped a torpedo that blasted a huge hole in the engine room of one ship, which had to be abandoned. Soon afterwards, twenty-four twin-engined Luftwaffe bombers came in at no more than 30 feet above sea level. Nineteen failed to get through the defensive fire, but the other five torpedoed three vessels.
Hajo Hermann describes the so-called ‘Turnip’ technique, the Schtekrübe, which the Luftwaffe used to sink ships.
‘If you attack a steamer in order to sink it, then mostly you drop the bomb down either horizontally or so that it descends almost vertically and strikes amidships, or in the funnel if possible, or by diving or gliding towards the ship and then releasing it. But there was another technique contrived by people who believed it was not possible to sink a ship by striking it from above because there is so much junk lying around on deck. Sometimes there are armoured tanks and the bomb explodes in the tank, but the ship doesn’t sink. ‘With the ‘Turnip’ technique, you flew in very low, diagonally towards the ship’s side, and released the bomb when you’re very close. The bomb goes tearing into the side of the ship and rips open a huge hole. The water floods in and the ship sinks. Of course the ‘turnip’ technique involved enormous risk because the men on deck could see an attacker coming slowly in straight at the target, so they fire at him with precision and can hit him very easily.’
An eyewitness on board one of the ships in the convoy later described the experience of being attacked from the air by the Luftwaffe.
‘We had six days of almost constant bombing raids. Our escort ships put up a magnificent barrage, but the German pilots came right through it and gave us all they had. A catapult plane on our ship was shot off to meet the attackers. The pilot, a young South African, took off to break up the Luftwaffe formation. We saw him bring down a large bomber and then go off to chase another. But a signal reached our ship that the pilot was wounded and had been forced to bale out. He jumped clear of the machine and made a perfect parachute drop into the sea. A destroyer went to his rescue and got him safely on board.
On the following day, a direct hit was made on our vessel. She immediately began to sink. Two boats were launched. One was only an oar’s length from the ship when a bomb blew it to pieces, killing five men. In the other boat, we had to lie down on our faces during a machine-gun attack by a German plane. Luckily, none of us was injured, but our boat was shattered. We found ourselves in the freezing water, clinging to driftwood. We were not left long in the water. The rescue ship did magnificent work, ignoring risks to save our lives.
A large “Condor” airplane of the type Fw-200 is given start permission.
‘There was never any darkness to give protection from attacks. We were too far north for that and it was summer, when daylight was perpetual. Every man in the convoy had to be on duty throughout the six days and so-called nights without thought of rest or sleep.’
Attacking the convoys was not as easy as it might have appeared, as Hajo Hermann realised when he targeted an aircraft carrier in the arctic waters.
‘It was up in the Polar sea, and the prevailing weather was heavy snow showers with very clear intervals. The British had an aircraft carrier cruising around, covering a convoy that was sailing there. I flew beneath the clouds towards the aircraft carrier -you could see for a great distance from beneath the clouds if there wasn’t a snow shower. I pulled up high, staying very close to the clouds because I always had to reckon with the fighters from the aircraft carrier climbing up and shooting me down.
‘I thought, if the carrier sails into an area of blue, completely clear weather and sunshine, then you are in a dreadful situation. For this reason I thought, when this aircraft carrier comes out from beneath the next shower, that will be the right moment for me to dive down the cloud wall, when the carrier’s snout is just emerging, and then I’ll drop the bombs in the middle. That, at least, was my plan.
‘At the moment I began to dive there was clear visibility and I was fired at heavily from the bow of the carrier. As I dived, it came further and further out and then the English let loose such a violent barrage in front of us, that they hit my right hand engine. It wasn’t disabled but they’d shot through the rods. I had both engines idling during the dive so that I wouldn’t be too fast, and this engine with the damaged rods was now running at full speed.
‘The plane spun away and I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep on target and my bomb, an armour-piercing bomb weighing 1,400 Kg fell about 5 metres from the ship. It was so terribly difficult to get close to those aircraft carriers.’
In Russia, the conditions under which the Luftwaffe had to operate were appalling. When the fearsome Russian winter closed in, pilots found their radios refused to work. The weather hampered accurate intelligence gathering. Aircraft coming in to land skidded off the runways, with the result that the Luftwaffe was able to operate at only one quarter of its strength. There were just as many planes lost through accidents as were lost in combat. The antiquated Russian air force which had been so easily destroyed at the start of the campaign had been replaced by modern aircraft which, even before the start of winter, made the Russians twice as strong in the air as the Luftwaffe.
At the beginning of 1942 an extra strain was put on the Luftwaffe after the first major Russian offensive of the War attempted to push the Germans back along the entire 2,000-mile front. Despite the seas of mud of the notorious Rasputitza, caused by the autumn rains of 1941 followed by one of the worst winters even Russia had seen, the Germans had managed to advance into the suburbs of Moscow by the end of the year. The Russian winter offensive of 1942 ensured that they got no further. The pressure was taken off Moscow as the north-south battle line in the vicinity of the capital was forced back and the German salients came under threat. For the Luftwaffe, Moscow was a dangerous area. The capital was ringed with mighty - and accurate - antiaircraft batteries and the toll of German planes was such that their last raid, on the night of 24th October1941, was carried out by only eight aircraft.
The Luftwaffe was called in to airlift supplies to the beleaguered German units on the ground, but there were too few available personnel. To fill the gaps, flying instructors and students from the air training schools were drafted in as pilots for the Junkers-52s, the capacious tri-motor freighter aircraft. The Russians did not achieve all their objectives. Besieged Sevastopol and Kharkov remained in German hands, but the invaders were thrown out of Rostov, near the Sea of Azov, and thrust back a distance of 120 miles.
Long before this, according to Adolf Hitler, the forces of the Third Reich should have home, dry and victorious. Instead, they found themselves still battling the mammoth of Russian resistance, which as yet, showed no signs of weakening let alone collapsing. German prospects brightened, however, after June 1942 when the Caucasus proved to be a weak link in the Russian defences. The Germans managed to relieve their forces inside besieged Sevastopol and organised Russian resistance in the Crimea came to an end.
Horst Ramstetter had flown in support of the German ground forces and personally experienced the ferocity of the Russian resistance.
‘The fighter bombers had to fly low, we had to support the attacking troops, our troops, destroy supply positions, destroy tanks, bomb troop positions, those were our tasks. We flew down at house height immediately in the range of the Russian guns, which of course then raked us with fire. I was shot down, as I pulled up the plane it began to burn, I couldn’t bail out with the parachute, so I set my HS-123 down on the ground at an angle.
‘The undercarriage sheered off, so I couldn’t land properly. But I managed to get down and leapt out of the plane before it burst into flames. I was wearing the flying overalls, so the heat only burned me a little. I leapt into a shell hole. Everything boomed and whistled, I felt so miserable, completely alone. Then, a tank rolled up, a German tank. ‘Hey pilot,’ I heard someone say. ‘Come here’ I said ‘I can’t, they’re shooting.’ The tank drove up, I jumped up onto it and went through the whole tank attack. I was never so afraid as I was in that tank.’
Ramstetter went on other dangerous missions and once came down to land in ‘no man’s land’ between the Russian and German lines. A fierce battle was taking place at the time.
‘There were certain mission targets that were, shall I say, dangerous, heavy concentration of flak, of troops, there were flak tanks sent against us, and I fell between Russian and German troops in the front line and sat in a shell hole. I put my head up and thought ‘They were all firing at me! They couldn’t be firing at anyone else.’ ‘Hallo, hallo’ I heard; ‘Come here, come here.’ It was an infantryman, a sniper from the German lines, who came leaping over to me because I was stuck there and must have made an impression of helplessness. We called these men the ‘Frozen Meat Award Warriors’, the corporals, they were the hard-bitten men, nothing touched them, they were unshakeable. ‘He said ‘come here’. I said, ‘I can’t they’re shooting.’ He said ‘I’ll come to you. Look, we’ll jump from here to there to there.’ I said: ‘Where?’ ‘Over to our lines.’ I said, ‘through that firing?’ ‘Look’ he said ‘I’ll go first and you follow.’ Then he called ‘Where are you?’ and I said ‘The firing is so heavy, I can’t just run through it.’ I finally got over with the corporal and was glad that I was in the German position and had some cover.’
The prime purpose of the Germans’ 1942 campaign in the Caucasus was the capture of Stalingrad which was strategically sited on the River Volga. In German hands, Stalingrad, one of the foremost Russian industrial centres, would open the way into Astrakhan, an important terminus of rail and river communication for the south. The Russians’ supply of petroleum would be drastically reduced and they would be unable to use Stalingrad as a jumping off point for a new offensive in the winter of 1942-1943. The Germans now expected to consolidate their conquest of the Caucasus as a prelude to winning the war in Russia.
The Russians were well aware of what the fall of Stalingrad would mean to them, and in late August 1942, when the German Sixth Army attacked from the northwest and the Fourth Panzer Army from the southwest, the Russian 62nd Army under General Vasili Chuikov was ordered to stop them, no matter what the cost. He had every intention of doing so. ‘Every German soldier,’ Chuikov remarked ‘must be made to feel that he is living under the muzzle of a Russian gun.’ In the event, the cost to the Russians was enormous, but to the Germans, it was infinitely greater.
The World War airman, the young officer of the new German Air Force, and two young lads of the Flieger-Hitler-Jugend (Aviation Section of the Hitler Youth).