Typical pilots laughed a lot, were addicted to music, playing Connie Boswell singing ‘Martha’ over and over again on the gramophone. They didn’t read much, except for thrillers like No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a risqué bestseller. They were ordinary, until they stepped outside. ‘The moment that he starts to walk towards the flarepath you see the transformation take place before your eyes…He becomes impersonal, merciless and completely self-disciplined.’
And, Winn did not need to add, more than a match for the Germans. Unofficial propagandists were already reassuring the public that any imbalance in the odds would be compensated for by the superiority of British machines and men. The air reporter of the Daily Express revealed that the Luftwaffe ‘use machines with a life of 50 flying hours. That is as long as they are made to last…staking all on numbers they don’t attempt to train their crews carefully.’ O. D. Gallagher in the same paper declared that ‘our Spitfire boys enjoy a confidence in themselves that the Luftwaffe pilots cannot have’. He told a recent story of an intelligence officer going over to debrief a pilot who had just returned from a sortie. ‘It was some minutes before he could get anything out of the fighter. He sat in his cockpit, eyes bright, grinning, saying: “God they’re easy! God they’re easy!”’ These fantasies provided the pilots with a cynical laugh as they read them in the mess. Only they knew how far they were from the truth.
12
The Hun
The German airmen attacking Britain respected the enemy they were facing and liked to think the feeling was mutual. Contacts between the two air forces in the approach to the war had been frequent, cordial and remarkably open. In October 1938, General Erhard Milch, one of the main architects of the reconstructed German air force, led a senior Luftwaffe delegation to Britain and was given a tour of important installations. His hosts were nothing if not hospitable. When Milch went to Hornchurch, the pilots were told they could answer any questions put to them by the visitors except those concerning defensive tactics, the control of operations and the recently arrived reflector gunsight. Inquiries about the latter were to be turned aside with the reply that it was so new they had not yet learned how to use it.
General Milch chose Bob Tuck’s aircraft to clamber on to. He peered into the cockpit, noticed the gunsight and asked how it worked. Tuck prevaricated, as ordered, only to be interrupted by an air vice-marshal accompanying the Germans who offered a detailed demonstration. Tuck said later he had to stifle the urge to ask: ‘Sir, why don’t we give General Milch one to take home as a souvenir?’1
The visit followed several encounters in which each side had tried to intimidate and deter the other by ‘revealing’ the extent of their preparedness in the air. It was a phoney exercise in which candour was mixed with deception, leaving everyone suspicious and confused. Milch did take away with him a strongly favourable impression of the cadets he met during a trip to Cranwell and told Hitler of their high quality. Afterwards he sent a thank-you gift, two fine, modernistic portraits of Richthofen and the first German ‘ace’ Oswald Boelcke, which still hang in the college library. With them came a letter expressing the hope that the images ‘might encourage the feeling of mutual respect and help to prevent that our two Forces have to fight each other again as they were unfortunately forced to do some twenty years ago’.2
But less than three years later they were fighting each other once again, and British pilots who had served in France could feel little respect for men they had seen machine-gunning and bombing refugees. Brian Kingcome’s sardonic style wavered when it came to Stukas. It was, he said later, ‘a great tragedy in my life’ that he had never had a chance to shoot one down. He had conceived ‘a special hatred’ derived from images of them ‘strafing the endless queues of refugees’.3 For pilots who had not seen such sights in France, the July battles over the Channel were straightforward military encounters which did not strongly engage their emotions. They were shooting, as they often said later, ‘at the machine not the man’. This attitude was to harden when the focus of the German attack shifted inland and over the homes of those they loved.
Many German airmen believed that they shared with British pilots an experience and outlook that transcended differences of nationality and the fact that their governments were at war. Some of those who survived were to claim they had no desire to fight Britain, had assumed the war was over with the fall of France and were saddened when told they would now have to try and kill men whom, from a distance, they admired.
Their feeling that they had much in common with their British counterparts was to some extent justified. The pilots facing Britain in 1940 in both fighters and bombers had mostly been attracted to the Luftwaffe, not by ideological reasons, but because they loved flying, or the idea of it. ‘Flying brought me a lot of happiness,’ Georg Becker, who piloted a Junkers 88, said later. ‘I knew I was good at it.’ The air offered him an escape from genteel poverty. He was the son of a civil servant who died in a train crash, leaving his wife struggling to bring up four children on a state pension. It was also ‘a glamorous thing to do…more romantic than being a foot soldier’.4 For Gerhard Schöpfel, who was to become famous for shooting down four Hurricanes in three minutes in August, flying in the Luftwaffe was ‘new and exhilarating’.5
Many aspects of the pre-war existence lived by German airmen would have been recognizable to their British counterparts. Off duty, Becker and his comrades ‘went to the officers’ mess and drank. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner all together. We had the week planned out so we knew when we would be working and we arranged our free time around that. In Brandenburg, we had a boat and would take it out with friends. Some of us had cars. We’d drive to the coast or into Berlin at weekends.’
They called each other by nicknames and enjoyed dogs, cars, sport and jokes. Like the pre-war RAF, they thought of themselves as an élite, semi-detached from the drab, terrestrial world. But this was Germany in the 1930s. At Becker’s base they ‘had dances where the officers could invite girlfriends but they also had to invite people like the town council and the mayor who we used to call the little Nazis. They had joined in 1933. We used to get them drunk and stick them in a corner and basically ignore them. There were some nice Nazis there too, people who didn’t really believe it. We used to stick them in the corner as well.’
German airmen were required to take an oath of personal loyalty which committed them to ‘yield unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and Volk, Adolf Hitler’. So did every other member of the German armed forces. Few of the pilots were active Nazis. That did not mean they were reluctant to fight. As with the expansion of the RAF, the birth of the Luftwaffe offered young, modern-minded German men an opportunity for adventure and an escape from mundane lives. They had not joined the air force necessarily to go to war, but inside its ranks war became simply an extension of duty.
The Luftwaffe had been conceived in subterfuge. Civil aviation in the inter-war years was developed with one eye on military potential. The bombers and fighters of 1940 took their names from men – Claude Dornier, Hugo Junkers, Ernst Heinkel, Willy Messerschmitt – whose companies started out manufacturing commercial aircraft. A state airline, Deutsche Lufthansa, was created in 1926, and its training schools were to provide the Luftwaffe with many of its pilots. The government encouraged youth to be ‘air-minded’ through gliding clubs which provided a cheap and practical way of teaching the elements of flying and by 1929 had 50,000 members. Some of the preparations were secret. In 1923 Germany negotiated a hidden agreement with Soviet Russia to supply military training at the Lipetsk air base, south-east of Moscow, an arrangement that lasted ten years. By the time the Luftwaffe’s existence was officially announced in March 1935, it could rely both on the design teams and factories of the strongest aircraft industry in Europe to provide machines and a large reserve of young air enthusiasts to supply pilots and crews.
Adolf Galland, one of the two most famous of the German pilots of 1940, first took to the air in a
glider. The flight lasted only a few seconds and carried him only a few feet above the ground near his home in Westphalia, but it was enough to persuade him he had found his vocation. The family were descended from a Huguenot who had left France in 1742 and become bailiff to the Graf von Westerholt. Successive Gallands had held the post ever since. Adolf’s father was a traditionalist, an authoritarian who administered discipline with his fists. His mother was profoundly Catholic, so much so that her devotion was to get her into trouble with the Nazis.
Like some of the most successful Fighter Boys, he learned to handle a gun early, and by the age of six he was shooting hares on the Westerholt estate. At school he was dull. When he read anything, it was war stories, particularly the sagas of Boelcke and Richthofen. At the local glider club, the Gelsenkirchen Luftsportverein, he shone and became the star pupil. Later he would claim that pilots who served a long apprenticeship on gliders ‘felt’ the air better. In 1932, aged twenty, he was accepted for pilot training at the commercial air school at Brunswick. His talents were recognized and he was summoned to Berlin to ask if he was interested in undergoing secret military training. He spent a few, mostly wasted months training alongside Mussolini’s air force. There was a stint as a Lufthansa pilot flying airliners to Barcelona. Then, at the end of 1933, excited by the prospects opening up in military aviation after the Nazis came to power, he joined the air force. In April 1937 he went back to Spain as a pilot in the fighter section of the Luftwaffe-directed Condor Legion, flying inferior He 51 biplanes. By the time the new Messerschmitt 109s were arriving in sufficient numbers to dominate the air, he was back in Germany in the Air Ministry. It was not until May 1940 and the blitzkrieg that he started to do what he became famous for.
Galland had a complicated and deceptive personality. He seemed, at first glance, to resemble some of the more flamboyant of his RAF counterparts. He liked wine, women and cigars. He appeared good-humoured, gregarious and relaxed in his attitude to discipline and senior officers. All this was true. But Galland also brought a chilly analytical intelligence to the war against the British and was harsh with pilots who failed to reach his standards. He was one of the boys, but also intimate with the big men who ran the war. He was an admirer of Goering until his chief’s intolerable behaviour made admiration impossible. He admitted to his biographer that, after leaving his first private meeting with Hitler, ‘he felt a mutual respect had been forged…for the rest of his life [he] would remember how on that Wednesday afternoon he had been drawn under the intensely focused spell of Hitler’s personality’.6 His high-wattage bonhomie allowed him later to play the part of a professional Good German. He was a prominent guest at post-war fighter-pilot reunions. He and Douglas Bader were photographed together and he enjoyed a sort of friendship with Bob Tuck. Some pilots were never persuaded. In the view of Christopher Foxley-Norris, ‘Galland was a shit.’7
At the start of July, Galland was still in the shadow of Werner Molders, who, flying an Me 109, had shot down fourteen aircraft in Spain followed by a further twenty-five during the French campaign. Molders was tactically intelligent and in Spain developed the system of flying in pairs that was eventually adopted by the RAF. He was introverted and grave-looking, a serious Catholic who passively disliked the Nazis. This did not prevent them loading him with honours and high rank, nor him from accepting. He was the recipient of the first Knight’s Cross to go to a fighter pilot and became a general of fighters before he was twenty-nine. Molders had been shot down early in June by a young French pilot and taken prisoner but released after the armistice was signed between Germany and France. At the end of July he was put in command of the fighter wing, JG51. On Sunday, 28 July, he made his first outing at its head. He shot down one Spitfire from 74 Squadron but was then engaged by Sailor Malan. His Messerschmitt was badly damaged and he received leg wounds that kept him out of action for a month. He was, however, to make his presence felt later on.
He was inspirational and a good teacher. Galland acknowledged that much of his skill was learned from Molders. Another successful pupil was Helmut Wick, whom Molders instructed during advanced training and who ended the French campaign with fourteen ‘victories’, just behind his mentors. Galland, Molders and Wick shared the same, atavistic approach. When they wrote, they expressed themselves in the same language, drawn from forest and hillside, as that used by Richthofen, whom they regarded as a spiritual forebear (although Molders saw himself more as Boelcke’s successor). Wick declared that ‘as long as I can shoot down the enemy, adding to the honour of the Richthofen Geschwader [his fighter unit] and the success of the Fatherland, I am a happy man. I want to fight and die fighting, taking with me as many of the enemy as possible.’8 A Spitfire from Fighter Command fulfilled one of these wishes by shooting him down and killing him near the Isle of Wight in November. Galland saw his task as being ‘to attack, to track, to hunt and to destroy the enemy. Only in this way can the eager and skilful fighter pilot display his ability. Tie him to a narrow and confined task, rob him of his initiative, and you take away from him the best and most valuable qualities he possesses: aggressive spirit, joy of action and the passion of the hunter.’9
Such words could never have been spoken or written by a pilot of Fighter Command without provoking bafflement, embarrassment or derision. Then there were the medals. The leading German pilots were encrusted with layers of Ruritarian decoration. They started off as holders of the Knight’s Cross, rising through clouds of glory to acquire the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, culminating in the highest honour of all, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. These honours were worn prominently at the neck, and the condition of wanting one but not having one was known as ‘throatache’. The RAF had the Distinguished Flying Cross, to which further exploits might add a bar or two, and which was signalled by a scrap of cloth sewn over the left-hand breast pocket of the tunic. Only one Victoria Cross, the highest gallantry award, was won by Fighter Command in 1940. To qualify for consideration for the honour, candidates had to have demonstrated outstanding courage in the face of overwhelming odds. It might have been argued that most pilots in 11 Group in the summer of 1940 were doing this most days.
When the Kanalkampf began in earnest, the German pilots were rested, warm with the afterglow of a succession of victories and enjoying the fleshly comforts of a sybaritic country which had come to a fairly rapid accommodation with its occupiers. It was perhaps with some reluctance that they resumed operations. But they went off cheerfully enough and morale remained high as the scope of the campaign widened, deepened and lengthened. Partly by design, partly by force of circumstances, the German air campaign would climb an ascending scale of violence. The bombing attacks on shipping and the free hunts to draw up the British fighters would give way to raids on aerodromes and defence installations, culminating in an all-out air assault. The escalation, in theory, would deliver one of two results. Either Britain would be beaten into submission, making a full-scale invasion unnecessary. Or it would hold out, forcing a landing, in which case much of the preparatory destruction would already have been achieved.
After the war Galland and several other leading veterans of the campaign would claim that they knew from the beginning that the Luftwaffe on its own could not achieve a strategic victory in the air. ‘We didn’t believe at any time that we could win the battle, to the effect that Britain would surrender,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t force England to surrender by attacking without any operation from the army or navy…We were asking that the High Command order the invasion.’10
But the army and navy commanders, even the Luftwaffe’s own leader, agreed that the invasion could not go ahead until Germany had air supremacy, or at least air superiority. The chances of resolving this conundrum were reduced by Goering’s ignorant, impetuous approach. The gap between the airmen’s understanding of their own capabilities and their commander’s expectations was wide. Goering had latched on to the most optimistic pre-w
ar feasibility study to persuade himself that a war of attrition was winnable and had gone on to assure Hitler that the air force was capable of bringing Britain to negotiations. The pilots and crews learned early that praise was abundant when the going was good, abuse lavish as soon as the momentum faltered. ‘At the beginning we had great respect for him,’ said Gerhard Schöpfel, ‘but later our feelings changed. He began to complain that we were not doing enough, but we needed far more machines and manpower to achieve what he wanted.’11
It would not take long for it to become clear that the Luftwaffe was facing a daunting task. But that was not how it seemed at the outset. Many of the men arriving at the airfields of northern France in July believed their superiors’ predictions that the campaign would last only a few weeks. The operation was not being mounted from a standing start, but in the flush of several victories won with relative ease.
The German bombers and fighters had suffered steady losses during July – 172 from enemy action and 91 in accidents – but their pilots and crews were confident that when the big push came they would be able to overwhelm the British defences. The fighter squadrons accepted that they were facing the most difficult opponent to date, but were none the less sure they could wipe the Hurricanes and Spitfires from the sky. ‘We wanted to make the invasion work and we were sure it would work,’ said Schöpfel, who was serving with Galland in Jagdgeschwader 26. ‘We believed that we had beaten the English over France and we did not think that here was a force which could defeat Germany. We believed the landing would be possible with our help and that our wings would be able to reach out to London. We thought it would be possible to beat the English in England the way we had beaten them in France.’
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 30