In the temporary absence of the Gruppenkommandeur, Major Erich Hohagen, I was welcomed by the senior MO, Oberstabsarzt Klappich. A larger than life character, whose solid build belied his inevitable nickname of ‘Klapprich’, or ‘Rickety’, the doctor went out of his way to put me at my ease. Somewhat unusually for a man of his calling, he even explained to me in great detail exactly how to shoot down a Spitfire! Only two of the Gruppe’s four component Staffeln were currently in residence at Aix. But the anti-malaria jab that I was given clearly indicated that I was destined for one of the other two: either 3. or 4./JG 2, both of which were then operating over central Italy.
It took me three days by rail to make the journey from Aix to Viterbo, some forty-five kilometres to the north of Rome. There a Kübelwagen and driver were waiting to chauffeur me through a scenic landscape steeped in history to Canino, where our two Staffeln were based. The airfield was situated a few kilometres outside the village on an open plain at the foot of Monte Canino, whose distinctive shape, so my knowledgeable driver informed me, provided a very useful landmark in bad weather.
On arrival at Canino I was shocked to hear that my erstwhile instructor, Hauptmann Sommer, had been killed in action just a few days earlier. In fact, he had been shot down on 14 March–while attacking a formation of enemy medium bombers, it was believed–although nobody seemed sure of the exact circumstances. I will always remember him as a very outgoing and sociable type. At Nancy he would often invite the course leader, Oberleutnant Lesch, and myself to his room where he would proudly serve us a so-called ‘Kalter Arsch’, or ‘cold arse’, which he had prepared himself. This dish consisted of nothing more than layers of biscuits soaked in brandy with chilled liquid chocolate in between, but it was typical of the man to go to such lengths to entertain his guests.
A more pleasant surprise was to find those two old comrades from my days with the air warfare school at Fürstenfeldbruck, Peter Ullmann and Otto Wania, both of whom were serving with 4./JG 2, the Staffel to which I had been assigned. And when I reported to the Staffelkapitän, I discovered that he was no stranger to me either. Hauptmann Georg Schröder had been treated as a special case by JG 107 at Nancy, being given one-on-one tuition by Hauptmann Sommer while I acted as ‘training assistant’. He was a fair bit older than the average pupil–a good thirty, I would guess–and had previously been a course leader with FFS A/B 123, the Luftwaffe elementary flying training school based at Agram (today’s Zagreb) in Croatia.
I thought his volunteering for fighter training and subsequent combat duty was highly commendable, even though I did not find him all that sympathetic as a person at the time–which just goes to show how wrong first impressions can be. After being appointed Gruppenkommandeur of II./JG 2 in May 1944, Hauptmann Schröder was to be shot down and captured during Operation Bodenplatte, the Luftwaffe’s costly New Year’s Day attack on enemy airfields in northwest Europe on 1 January 1945. We were to meet up again in Munich long after the war when he was a completely different character. Freed from command responsibilities and mellowed by civilian life, he proved to be a very agreeable acquaintance and old comrade, with whom I remained in close touch until his death in 1993.
The unexpected presence of Paul and Otto at Canino, and the renewal of friendships first made at F Bruck, meant that my assimilation into the Staffel was both smooth and easy. But having finally arrived at the sharp end of the fighting, I now quickly discovered for myself that the reports on the progress of the war published in our press were clearly intended for home consumption and bore very little relationship to the realities of the front.
At the time of my posting to Italy there could be no question of our still enjoying air superiority; at least, not in the west. Allied numbers were growing by the day. Technically, too, our machines no longer had the edge. For pilots like ourselves flying the Me 109, the British Spitfire and American Thunderbolt were proving particularly hard nuts to crack. As a consequence our own losses were increasing the whole time. This naturally had an effect on morale. While remaining high, it was no longer based on the conviction of certain victory that had characterized the early years of the war–now it was more a feeling of standing with our backs to the wall and having no alternative. Despite everything, however, we still retained a semblance of our boyish humour, even if it was more often than not of the gallows variety.
For the past eight weeks and more, JG 2’s two Italian-based Staffeln had been operating with some success against the Anglo-American beachhead at Anzio. Now they were on the point of being rotated back to the relative peace and quiet of Aix-en-Provence for rest and recuperation. Our Staffel was equipped with the Me 109G-6 and before departure for southern France two refurbished Gustavs had to be collected from the works at Perugia. These machines had been assigned to Peter Ullmann and myself and we were detailed to go and fetch them.
Immediately upon take-off from Perugia I could tell that the trim settings on my machine were completely wrong. So much so, in fact, that the moment I took the pressure off the rudder the aircraft immediately tipped over into a violent dive to the left. I was able to adjust the tailplane incidence to some extent by means of the trim wheel down beside my seat, but had to keep the stick pulled back hard to the right to compensate for the incorrect rudder setting. What I should have done, of course, was to put down at Perugia again and have the problem corrected at once. But I knew that there were no operations on the cards for that day as the flight back to Aix was scheduled for early the next morning and so, with the light already beginning to fade, I decided to continue on to Canino, make the return flight to Aix with the rest of the Staffel, and have the trim sorted out there.
At 09.00hrs the following morning–6 April 1944–our eight machines lifted off from Canino for the one-and-a-half-hour hop across the Mediterranean to southern France. Each of the Gustavs was fully armed and carrying the maximum amount of fuel, including a 300-litre ventral drop tank. We pilots had stuffed all our worldly goods into the small luggage space at the back of the cockpit. Among my items were my camera, a 9.5mm cine-camera and my prized photo album.
We had set course northwestwards aiming to cross out over the coast near Grosseto. After about twenty minutes we were at a height of around 1,500 metres just south of Grosseto when I noticed fountains of earth climbing into the air close to a railway bridge. At that very same moment the ‘Old Man’ shouted an urgent warning over the R/T, “Achtung, Mustangs!” Several hundred metres below us were some two-dozen British P-51 Mustangs with roundels on their fuselages and wings. One group was diving in line astern attacking the bridge, while the rest seemed to be concentrating on the town’s railway station.
All thoughts of a peaceful and uneventful ferry flight back to France were forgotten. Our first priority now was to tackle these ‘Indianer’–‘Indians’ was our codeword for all enemy fighters. Initially, our greater height gave us a brief tactical advantage, which we were able to capitalize on. Jettisoning our belly tanks, we dived down and quickly accounted for six of the enemy machines.
The remaining Indianer promptly scattered and the encounter fragmented into a series of bitter individual dogfights with aircraft twisting and turning no more than 100 metres off the ground. Outnumbered and with the element of surprise gone, we found ourselves hard pressed. Four Gustavs were shot down, but fortunately we suffered no casualties other than the slightly wounded Leutnant Schorsch Schneider, who took a small calibre bullet cleanly through the left wrist as he was baling out.
Having settled myself comfortably into the cockpit, intent on enjoying the glorious weather and the fascinating landscape unfolding beneath my wings, it had come as an enormous shock to me when our routine ferry flight suddenly turned into my first combat mission–and no easy one at that, for we were facing odds of at least three to one against. So abrupt was the turn of events that there was no time for the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I would later come to experience while awaiting the order to scramble against an approaching enemy.
One moment I was cruising along without a care in the world, the next I was putting into practice all those skills I had amassed while training. And it immediately became clear that I was going to need every single one of them, not just to distract the Mustangs from their bombing, but to save my own skin.
For as soon as our formation had been split apart, I was singled out by three of the enemy fighters, who came at me head on. I stood the Gustav on its wingtip and pulled a Gerissene Kurve–the manoeuvre described on page 69–which gained me some breathing space. I was now behind the three Tommys, who had flashed past me in line abreast. But their reactions were lightning-fast and I was soon under pressure again. I employed every trick I knew, juggling flaps and throttle to prevent any of my three opponents from getting on my tail.
But it couldn’t last. I lost track of one of the P-51s for a split second. I caught sight of him again a moment later, but it was already too late–he was barrelling in on me from one side. I yanked the Me’s nose up in a desperate effort to escape his fire, but felt the machine jolt as it was hit–in the underside of the engine cowling, I thought. The bang was accompanied by my first true ‘whiff of powder’, but a quick glance at the instrument panel told me that nothing vital had been hit. The Gustav was still answering to the controls and the uneven contest continued.
Once or twice I even managed to jockey into position behind one of my opponents. But it was never long enough to get off a carefully aimed burst of fire and before having to take violent evasive action as another of the trio came boring in at me again. Then I had a stroke of luck. Two of the P-51s got in each other’s way and were forced to break off for a few vital seconds. In the meantime I had just succeeded in latching on to the tail of the third. He was right down on the deck and I was all of twenty metres above him. With my excess of speed I was able rapidly to close in on him. At a range of thirty metres I had a perfect close-up view of my adversary. His engine cowling, cockpit and wing root area filled my Revi gunsight. It was impossible to miss.
But it was at that precise moment that Lady Luck decided to transfer her allegiance to the Tommy pilot–or my ‘comrade from the other FPO number’, as we often referred to our aerial opponents. My guns jammed! Despite my frantic attempts to recharge them, they refused to fire. That earlier hit in the engine cowling must have damaged the so-called ‘Waffenautomat’, the device mounted below the engine block that governed all the on-board weapons. The few seconds I spent wrestling with my guns had enabled the other two P-51s to slip up behind me. Sitting on my tail, one to the left, the other to the right, they had me completely boxed in. Whichever way I turned, I was for it. I tried to climb away to the right. It was the move the enemy pilot on that side had been waiting for. His fire must have hit my coolant system, for I immediately started to trail a long thin banner of white vapour. The fate of my lovely Gustav was sealed.
I knew that I had to get out as quickly as possible. But I needed at least 250 metres of altitude to allow my parachute to open properly. The question was, would the engine hold out long enough for me to reach that height? And heaven be praised, it did. When I judged I was high enough to be safe, I began to go through the bale-out procedure. It was a routine I had practised dozens of times during training and gone over in my mind on countless occasions before dropping off to sleep: close the throttle, snap the helmet’s R/T lead, undo seat harness, unlock and jettison cockpit canopy, let go of stick, push up, roll over cockpit sill to either left or right, wait, pull grip to open parachute. All went like clockwork until I got to the bit about letting go of stick. The moment I did so, I paid the penalty for yesterday’s foolhardiness in not having that rudder trim fixed at Perugia.
The machine instantly fell away viciously to the left, trapping my booted feet beneath the instrument panel. Due to the strong negative g forces, I was completely unable to move my legs to free them. With the upper half of my body hanging out of the cockpit, I had only a few seconds to get the aircraft under control again. With a strength born of desperation I battled against the 180 km/h slipstream–this is the minimum speed at which an Me 109 could be held in the air without stalling, but is the equivalent of a ground wind strong enough to uproot trees–and somehow managed to slide back down into my seat.
I regained some of the height I had lost and tried again. But the second attempt was as unsuccessful as the first. Finally, at the third try, I made it. This time the sudden rush of air as I heaved myself up from the seat pulled me bodily out of my furlined flying boots. I could swear it sounded like a couple of champagne corks popping, and I can still clearly see my two boots as they whirled around my head. Then the force of the slipstream hit me like a ton-weight cushion and sent me somersaulting through the air.
Instinctively I pulled my ‘chute release. In the few seconds it took for the parachute to open fully, I watched the ground below come rushing up towards me. Every detail, including the wavelets rippling the surface of a small lake, was so sharp–and growing in size so terrifyingly quickly–that it was like looking through the zoom lens of a camera. Convinced that the parachute was not going to open in time and that my last moments had come, my thoughts automatically turned to my family. But the ‘Boandlkramer’–Bavaria’s ‘old man with the scythe’–was not quite ready for me yet. I felt the sudden jerk as the ’chute finally opened and, almost immediately afterwards, was drenched by a fountain of water as I landed with a colossal splash in the small lake. Miraculously, or so it seemed to me, I had gone from virtual free fall and near certain death to standing on my own two feet, up to my chest in water, all in the blink of an eye.
Incidentally, it was only many years later that I discovered–thanks to research carried out by the eminent British aviation historian Chris Goss and his contacts in America–that our opponents on this 6 April had not been RAF Mustangs at all, but P-39 Airacobras of the United States 12th Air Force…so much for those hours spent poring over aircraft recognition charts. The combat reports filed by pilots of the 350th Fighter Group operating out of Corsica on this date appear to leave very little room for doubt. They had been briefed to skip bomb rail and road bridges to the south of Grosseto and describe encountering Me 109 (and Fw 190) fighters, which dropped their belly tanks and attacked them in a shallow dive. The P-39s were jumped just as they were pulling up after delivering their bombs and didn’t get the chance to regroup. The engagement dissolved into a series of individual dogfights–‘it was every man on his own, with most of the combat taking place down on the deck’.
Standing in my small Italian lake, it was totally immaterial to me at the time who had shot me down. I had more pressing matters to attend to–the recovery of Luftwaffe property, for a start. This was something else that had been drummed into us during training: never abandon items of equipment vital to the war effort. First my parachute, which, driven by the light breeze, was tugging me gently but insistently through the water. Although the metal release disc was just below the surface, I had no difficulty in twisting it and giving it a good hard thump to open it. Disentangling myself from the wet harness was slightly more of a problem, but I managed it in the end and gathered the folds of the ’chute together into as small a bundle as possible before slinging it over my left shoulder.
The feel of the sandy bed of the lake beneath my stockinged feet then reminded me of my flying boots; or rather the lack of them. I gazed around and was relieved to see them both floating, half submerged, some distance away. I waded out into deeper water to retrieve them, fished them out and clamped them under my right arm. At least I wouldn’t now have to return to base minus my official footwear. It was well known that the Gruppenkommandeur had a bit of a thing about flying boots. He had even added what almost amounted to a private rider of his own to Luftwaffe regulations by decreeing that boots were always to be tied firmly below the knee. This was to prevent them from flying off when a pilot baled out. It was a sensible enough measure as far as it went, but I was mightily glad that I had not observed the rules–otherwise I might sti
ll be trapped by the feet beneath that instrument panel.
Having snapped the R/T lead in two before baling out, I was still wearing my lightweight flying helmet. So that was about it. The last and most important item of equipment entrusted to me I could do nothing about. My poor Gustav had also come down in the shallow lake. But it must have bored itself deep into the sand, for all I could see was its tail sticking up above the surface, surrounded by a cloud of steam and smoke.
My next priority was to find some sign of life. The nearest dry land was only about fifty metres away where a row of tall poplars lined the bank behind the thick belt of reeds that fringed the lake. And beyond the poplars I could make out a pale grey column of smoke curling up into the blue sky above. I began to breast my way through the water towards the shore. The bed of the lake was very uneven and I kept stumbling into deep channels. Every time I did so, the water closed over my head. But despite these frequent duckings I retained an iron grip on the items of state property that I had so dutifully retrieved. As I neared the reeds the water grew shallower and I waded the last few metres through a thick green soup of algae and assorted underwater flora.
Climbing the bank on to terra firma, I made my way through the bushes between the poplars and there found a lush green meadow, bathed in sunlight, sloping upwards in front of me. At its far end stood a small farmhouse, whose chimney was the source of the smoke I had sighted earlier. After what I had just been through, it was picture of utter peace and tranquillity.
Standing in front of the house, lined up as if for inspection, was an entire Italian family: grandfather, grandmother, mama, papa and five bambini. They were all motionless and staring fixedly in the direction of the lake. The moment they clapped eyes on me, however, they fell to their knees as one. Raising their arms to the heavens, they began to sway rhythmically back and forth, loudly intoning what was obviously some Italian prayer or other. I caught the words ‘Santa Madonna Maria’ being repeated over and over again.
Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot Page 11