But the strongest bond of friendship that I forged at LKS 4 was with my regular instructor, Feldwebel Maurer. We were to remain in touch well into the post-war years. It was then he told me that he had still been flying the Fw 44 Stieglitz right up until the end of hostilities. During those final weeks, however, he was no longer instructing–his machine had been crudely armed with machine guns and he was carrying out low-level attacks on American troops advancing on Munich.
CHAPTER 5
TRAINING TO BE A FIGHTER PILOT
After successfully completing the course at Fürstenfeldbruck, we were all given our next postings. I was delighted to find that my application to join the fighter arm had been approved. I had half-hoped to be sent to the fighter school at St. Raphael on France’s Côte d’Azur, but was more than content to settle for JG 107 based at Nancy-Essay in eastern France instead. As it turned out, the eight months I spent at Nancy were to be the happiest of my entire flying career.
JG 107 was a fighter training Geschwader comprising just one Gruppe. It had been brought into being less than a week prior to my arriving at Nancy, created by the simple expedient of redesignating the previously resident Jagdfliegerschule 7. I was introduced to the harsh realities of life at a fighter-training unit on my very first day. It was 1 February 1943 and I was eating lunch in the officers’ mess when there was the dull thump of an explosion outside. An Me 109D had spun in while approaching to land. This fatal accident had personal consequences for me. As the newest arrival, I was detailed to command the guard of honour at our late comrade’s burial in Nancy cemetery. I am sad to say that this was not an isolated incident. By the time I left Nancy on 1 October, six more of the school’s trainees had been laid to rest with full military honours.
But before beginning my fighter training proper, I was given the opportunity to enjoy an unexpected spot of leave. I had my Bavarian nationality to thank for my good fortune. Some ancient dictionaries defined Bavarians as ‘native mountain folk’. It was assumed from this–not altogether wrongly–that I therefore had to be an experienced mountain skier. And so a few days after my arrival at Nancy I was on the move again. This time I had been ordered to take a group of ten men to the Geschwader’s alpine ski chalet at Zug near Lech, high in the Arlberg Pass, where the weather was to remain perfect throughout the whole of our two weeks’ stay.
The day’s duties began–not too early, it goes without saying–with morning parade, after which I gave skiing lessons just like any civilian instructor would. These continued after lunch and occupied the rest of the afternoon. Unlike morning parade, the evening meal was taken early–again for obvious reasons: it gave the men that much more time to explore the delights, both natural and physical, of the nearby ski resorts of Lech and Zürs.
One of the unit’s mess cooks had accompanied us and so the inner man was also well catered for. Together with his pots and pans, he had brought along with him half a wild boar, compliments of our Gruppenkommandeur, Hauptmann Franz Hörnig, who was a keen huntsman and had bagged this particular specimen during one of his frequent hunting expeditions into the woods of the Lorraine.
Although they were undoubtedly enormous fun, there was also a more serious side to these organized skiing trips. The reason behind JG 107 having its own chalet in the Austrian Alpslay in the belief that the sport of skiing demanded split-second reactions, a quality essential in a successful fighter pilot and one to be developed by any and every means possible. But despite this semi-official side to our ‘holiday’, I was permitted to invite my mother to join us at the chalet for the last few days. She enjoyed her brief stay immensely. But then, on the day of our departure, the weather finally broke. Snow fell heavily and we had to make our way down to the local railway station packed together like sardines on two horse-drawn sleighs.
This proved altogether too uncomfortable for mother, who declared that she would rather take her chances on the small toboggan we had with us. This was duly tied to the back of the second sleigh with a lengthy piece of rope and off we set again. Some little while later I was startled to hear one of the men shouting, “Herr Leutnant, we’ve lost Mama!” (I always addressed, and referred to my mother as ‘Mama’). I peered behind me and, sure enough, there was the empty toboggan weaving about from side to side, but not a sign of mother. She must have fallen off. Several of us immediately set off back up the track to look for her. Luckily, the mishap must have only just occurred, for we soon caught sight of her, clearly none the worse for her ordeal, as she appeared out of the driving snow calling and waving energetically.
Refreshed and reinvigorated by two weeks of mountain air, I finally got down to the serious business of fighter training. At Nancy I had been assigned to 3./JG 107. This Staffel was commanded by Hauptmann Adalbert Sommer, a fifty-victory ace who had previously served as Staffelkapitän of 7./JG 52 on the eastern front, where he had been awarded the German Cross in Gold. Initially I found myself carrying on from where I had left off at Fürstenfeldbruck by flying standard trainer types. Later I would progress on to real fighters. The big difference was that at F Bruck we had been taught to fly, whereas at Nancy, under Sommer’s supervision, we would be taught to fly operationally–in other words, we were there to learn the tactics used in fighter combat.
We began by mastering the art of flying in pairs. The Rotte, or pair, was the smallest tactical formation employed by the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm. During our training sessions the instructor would take the part of the Rotte leader, while the trainee flew as his wingman (or ‘Katschmarek’, to use the peculiar Luftwaffe jargon of the time.) In combat formation the two machines were required to fly at exactly the same level and about fifty metres apart. Due to the restricted rearward visibility in a frontline fighter aircraft, no pilot was permitted to fly a combat mission on his own.
The Rotte formation allowed each man to cover the other’s back. This is why it was absolutely essential for the wingman always to remain level with his leader and not to lag behind. Even in straight flight this was not as easy as it sounds. And during a change of course it was downright difficult. For then the wingman would immediately have to cut either behind or above his leader in order to maintain correct station.
Training flights spent practising the Rotte formation usually lasted about an hour, with the final five minutes almost invariably being devoted to a ‘Karussell’, or ‘merry-go-round’. This was when the instructor would pull ahead and start to fling his machine about all over the sky. It was the pupil’s job not just to stay on his tail, but also to try to manoeuvre into a good firing position. Again, this seemed simple enough when demonstrated on the ground with the aid of models. But trying to get–and keep–a twisting, weaving machine in your sights when in the air was a different matter entirely. The ideal firing position, directly astern of an opponent who was holding to a steady course in front of you and sitting squarely in your gunsight, hardly ever occurred in real life. Very few enemy fighter pilots were obliging, or dim enough to fly straight and level in hostile airspace.
This is why such great importance was placed on our Karussell sessions. Firstly, they got the trainee pilot accustomed to judging distance and space relative to his target, and thus how much angle of deflection, or lead was required–in other words, how far ahead of his opponent he needed to aim–in order to score a hit. Secondly, in particularly steep turns the instructor’s machine could easily be obscured momentarily by the engine cowling of the pupil’s own aircraft and then be lost altogether. The Karussell was a way of teaching the trainee to fly ‘by the seat of his pants’ and not risk losing sight of his opponent by continually glancing down at his instruments. The golden rule was always to fly smoothly–any untidy or skidding turns meant increased drag and thus an inevitable reduction in performance.
But smooth flying alone did not automatically guarantee victory in aerial combat. We were also taught two rather unorthodox manoeuvres that could help us gain a decisive advantage over our opponent. One of these, I’ve already menti
oned, the slip–taken over directly from the English–was a fairly straightforward affair. It entailed the use of the rudder alone to make the aircraft slip, or crab sideways. The stick and ailerons were not touched, so there were no outward signs of a turn. The theory was that, although the machine appeared to be holding its course, it was actually sliding to one side out of the line of fire of an enemy attacker.
The other manoeuvre was more violent and potentially more dangerous, involving as it did the deliberate disruption of the airflow over the wing surfaces. The Gerissene Kurve (crafty turn), as it was known to us, was, in fact, a turn with full ninety-degree bank. If there was an enemy machine on your tail this could get you out of a tight corner and, if executed properly, could quickly transform you from the hunted into the hunter. The procedure was as follows: chop the throttle to kill speed, at the same time full rudder and stick in the desired direction–say to the left–in order to stand the machine on its wingtip in a slightly nose-up attitude, then immediately start to dump flap in measured doses to reduce the angle of attack.
By this stage the aircraft has practically turned on its heel and instantaneous–but smoothly applied–full throttle is now required so that, for a split second, the machine is quite literally hanging on its screw. If a stall is to be avoided, it is at this precise moment that the aircraft has to be returned to normal flight attitude by pushing the stick slightly forward and retracting the flaps to increase the airspeed. As can be imagined, the Gerissene Kurve called for great delicacy of touch and took a lot of learning.
But, in the course of numerous mock combats, learn it we did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these sessions also brought home to us the fact that, in a classic dogfight between two equally matched aircraft, the pilot who stood the greater chance of winning was the one who executed the smoothest manoeuvres and displayed the better mastery of his machine.
The next stage of our training saw us flying in Schwarm formation. The Schwarm was one step up from the Rotte and consisted of four aircraft made up of two pairs, each comprising a leader and a wingman. The process of changing course when operating as a Schwarm demanded even greater concentration from the two wingmen as they cut behind and above their respective leaders. The movement was akin to a brief aerial ballet and resulted in the Schwarm flying on a new heading, but in a mirror image of its previous formation.
Each lesson spent carefully practising these set moves would then, as usual, end in a heady five-minute Karussell. In addition to aerobatics and orientation flights, the training programme now also included gunnery practice firing at ground targets. Our flying was still being done mainly on the Arado Ar 96, but we also made use of the Fw 56 Stösser on the firing ranges.
The first anniversary of my father’s death–15 March 1943–occurred during this period. As the airspace in which we did much of our training happened to extend northwestwards from Nancy along the line of the River Meuse, I took the opportunity to make an orientation flight in an Ar 96 on this date. Once aloft, orientation turned into commemoration as I followed the course of the Meuse northwards from St. Mihiel to Verdun. For it was in this area, among many others, that father had fought during World War I when he and his company had captured the Camp des Romains fortress on the east bank of the river in the autumn of 1914.
It must have been around this time too that Franz Brosius, who had been a fellow pupil of mine at the air warfare school and, like me, had been posted here to JG 107, met a particularly tragic end. We were both scheduled for aerobatics in an Fw 56 and had to decide who was to go up first. As it was rather a cold day and I was only wearing ordinary shoes, I suggested that he take the first stint while I went to fetch my fur-lined flying boots.
As I gave him a hand to strap himself in, I reminded him to make sure that the safety hook behind the central lock of his parachute harness was pushed fully home. While making my way back to my quarters I glanced up now and again to watch his performance. As he pulled out of a left-hand turn, I was horrified to see him roll over the edge of the cockpit and fall out of his parachute. It was a truly awful thing to witness. The Focke-Wulf bored into the earth in a near-vertical dive and I saw Franz hit the ground not far away from it.
We raced to the spot and were confronted by a gruesome sight. Franz lay on his back; both arms dislocated and distorted, his lifeless eyes wide open, and his flight overalls and tunic ripped apart from top to bottom. He must have been thrown back into the air by the force of the initial impact, for there was a twenty-centimetre deep depression in the soft soil right next to him. The skin of his face looked as if it had been singed.
The Luftwaffe flew a number of captured Spitfires. This is believed to be a photo-reconnaissance version that forced-landed in Holland. The author found the British fighter’s cockpit ‘too roomy’ after the snug confines of the Me 109.
Subsequent investigation established that this had been caused by a small explosion on board the aircraft, although there were no signs of a fire. It was also found that the vital safety hook had not been secured properly. When Franz had thrown himself out of the cockpit, his parachute harness had come undone. His death, the enquiry concluded, had been brought about solely as a result of his own negligence.
On 2 May 1943, three months into my time at Nancy, I finally got my hands on a Messerschmitt Me 109. Admittedly, it was only a Dora, the obsolete and relatively unsophisticated Me 109D variant with a 700hp Junkers Jumo 210 liquid-cooled engine, but even this early example of the type was an absolute revelation. Just to sit in its cockpit, which seemed sculpted to accommodate the human form with not a centimetre of superfluous space to spare, to look out through that tiny windscreen over the impossibly long engine cowling, gave the pilot the feeling of being at one with the aircraft–that man and machine were a single lethal organic entity.
The only weak point in the design of the Me 109–and this afflicted not just the Dora, but every other variant of the breed as well–was the spindly, knock-kneed undercarriage. Take-offs and landings, the latter in particular, called for the utmost concentration on the part of the pilot. When speed was reduced after touchdown, the Me 109 showed a marked tendency to swing to the left due to the reverse torque of the propeller. If the pilot did not act in time to correct this swing, it could all too easily develop into a fully blown ground loop, which invariably resulted in the undercarriage legs being sheared off.
Take-offs presented slightly less of a problem. The answer was to do a ‘tail-dragger’. If all three wheels were kept on the ground for as long as possible, the combined effect of the tail wheel and the increasing pressure of the slipstream on the rudder were enough to compensate for the torque effect. But the pilot then had to display a fine sense of judgement for the feel of the aircraft as it lifted off. Torque could also prove deadly if the pilot had the misfortune to overshoot on landing. If he was trying to go round again, but shoved the throttle forward too abruptly while the aircraft was hanging in the air, its speed too low and with insufficient lift, the sudden torque could flip the machine over onto its back–almost always with fatal consequences for the unfortunate occupant.
But once these foibles had been explained to us and accorded their due respect, the Me 109 proved an absolute joy to fly. It was light on the controls and extremely responsive. The only exception was in a fast dive, when the stick had to be kept pushed fully forward. This required a considerable amount of brute force. The pupil pilot was also strongly advised not to exceed the machine’s stability limit–the point at which he could expect to see the wings part company with the rest of the airframe and wrap themselves round his ears!
After the Dora we progressed first to the Me 109E Emil, which was powered by a 1,100hp Daimler-Benz DB 601A, and then on to the more aerodynamically refined Me 109F Friedrich with its uprated DB 601E, before finally being entrusted with the Me 109G Gustav. This latter, powered by a 1,500hp DB 605 engine, was, at that time, the latest variant of Professor Messerschmitt’s famous design and currently the Luftwaffe’s standard fro
nt-line fighter. We at JG 107 had been presented with a grand total of two Gustavs.
As well as being used for training purposes, this prized pair had to be kept at operational readiness in case there was an emergency scramble. For by now, as well as the occasional RAF reconnaissance Mosquito passing by high overhead, allied Jabos, or fighter-bombers, were beginning to poke their noses down towards our corner of France. This gave added impetus to our air-to-air gunnery practice. But not once did an enemy aircraft deign to show itself in front of our Revi gunsights.
And so we continued to revel unmolested in the freedom of the early summer skies, throwing our machines about with still youthful abandon and indulging in exciting games of chase against a backdrop of majestic and ever-changing cloudscapes. I remember on one occasion flying between two enormous cumulus clouds and finding myself above a field of pristine white, some 100 metres across and 500 metres long, which sloped gently upwards to end in a magnificent celestial arch where the two clouds met and intertwined. I could not resist the temptation to perform a slow roll just above the floor of this aerial valley before exiting through the arch and pulling into a steep turn through the clear cobalt sky that surrounded the whole mighty edifice.
Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot Page 7