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The Quality Of Their Service

From the beginning of the war the Germans had concerned themselves with the problem of increasing the effectiveness of their aircraft against armoured warships and merchantmen. The long-term answer to the problem, since the aircraft with sufficient range were too heavy to dive bomb, lay in the use of an airlaunched weapon that could be controlled from the parent aircraft during its flight to the target. In this way the aircraft could stay out of range of the antiaircraft fire, but still counter any evasive action the ship might take. Two German firms - the Henschel and the Ruhrstahl companies - each produced a radio guided, anti-shipping weapon.

Life at rustic forward bases After the fall of France in June 1940, Luftwaffe units began moving to forward bases along the Channel to be within striking distance of England. Scattered around the countryside, the strips were mostly primitive affairs; the French had concentrated on fields in the east to protect their border with Germany. While workers went about the task of improving the bases, pilots and crews amused themselves on leave on sunny Channel beaches or strolled along boulevards where shopkeepers had hastily replaced signs advertising "English Spoken Here" with newly printed placards: Man Spricht Deutsch. Their idyll was short-lived. On July 16, Hitler issued his top-secret order for the invasion of Great Britain. Some 2,600 aircraft, including 1,480 bombers and 980 fighters, were now in position at the bases, and the air battle was soon under way. So accustomed did pilots become to flying missions across the Channel that for many it was "just like going to the office in the morning and coming home in the evening." Yet all knew that they could die any day. "Those of us who returned from a combat mission," remembered an Me 109 pilot, "were able to enjoy a few more hours of life, and we let ourselves go so as to enjoy life's pleasures to the fullest. At the slightest excuse we gambled, drank, laughed, talked shop or acted the fool." To relieve tensions and lift spirits, pilots were taken by bus to the beaches. At one base, a Ju 52 called "the vitamin bomber," flew to Guernsey, a British Channel island occupied by the Germans, for tomatoes, fresh vegetables, grapes, cigarettes and whiskey. The vegetables and fruit came as a welcome treat to men fed up with canned food. German films were screened regularly, and from loudspeakers around the bases came music (the same speakers would flash word of upcoming raids against England). Radios brought news from Germany. And then there were the women; the uniformed Helferinnen uom Dienst (female helpers of the service) operated the telephone and telegraph and performed clerical duties, but their presence on the bases - and their obliging natures - did as much as anything to bolster Luftwaffe morale.

The Henschel Hs 293 glider bomb was in fact a miniature aeroplane, with a wing span of 10 feet 2 inches. In the nose was fitted a 1,100 pound warhead, and after release the liquid fuel rocket motor under the fuselage accelerated the weapon to a speed of 370 m.p.h in 12 seconds. Then, the fuel exhausted, the motor cut and the missile coasted on in a shallow dive towards the target. The glider bomb's range depended upon the height at which it was released from the parent aircraft; the maximum was over eight miles if it was launched from 22,000 feet. At the rear of the weapon was a bright flare, to enable the bomb aimer in the parent aircraft to follow its progress in flight. The bomb aimer operated a small joy-stick controller, the movement of which fed the appropriate up-down-leftright impulses to a radio transmitter which in turn radiated them to the missile. Thus the bomb aimer had merely to steer the missile's tracking flare until it was superimposed on the target, and hold it there until the weapon hit. Since the impact velocity was only about 450 m.p.h. the warhead had little penetrative capability, and the weapon was intended mainly for use against lightly armoured warships, and freighters in escorted convoys.

The second of the German anti-shipping weapons, the Ruhrstahl Fritz-X guided bomb (Also known as the PC 1400 X and the X-1.), was intended for use against heavily armoured targets. In appearance it resembled an ordinary bomb, except for the four stabilizing wings mounted mid-way along its body. Like the glider bomb, the Fritz-X was radio controlled by means of a joystick controller in the parent aircraft, and was tracked by means of a tailmounted flare. The 3,100 pound bomb was unpowered; released from altitudes between 16,000 and 21,000 feet, it accelerated under the force of gravity to reach a speed close to that of sound.

Seven days after the Normandy invasion, a German pilotless aircraft exploded in the center of London. As early as 1939 there had been reports that the Nazis were working on secret weapons with which to attack Britain; by 1943 the reports had become alarming enough for the Royal Air Force to keep a constant watch on Peenemuende and other unusual German installations. The reconnaissance left no doubt that the Nazis were getting ready to use a new weapon, and Allied air power was given the job of combating it. The air battle against the V-weapons was called CROSSBOW, and this operation continued until the surrender of Germany.

In the six months before the Normandy invasion, 36,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the new missile launching sites; after the landings, Crossbow targets continued to have a high priority. There is no doubt that this, plus the attacks on French railroads, delayed the German missile program; nevertheless, 8,000 V-1's were launched between June and September, 1944. On September 8, 1944, the first twelve-ton V-2 rocket struck London. More than a thousand were to follow, but the rocket had come too late.

Fighter aircraft were the first line of defense against the flying bomb. It took a fast plane to bring down a bomb traveling at 400 miles an hour. The P-51, P-47 and the Spitfire were among the most successful at this.

When a V-1 appeared on the coastal radar screens, controllers flashed the information to the patrolling fighters, who then went after it. Pilots found that they could spot the bombs best in twilight, but it was never easy; the high speed of the bombs allowed the fighters to make only one pass. Yet, aircraft destroyed a total of 1,847 V-1's.

Of a total of 3,957 bombs destroyed, antiaircraft fire accounted for 1,866. The broken bright line falling from left to right in the picture at the bottom of the page marks the path of a flying bomb that has been knocked down by flak. The breaks in the line are caused by the off and on pulsations of the V- I's engine.

Some of the bombs fell short of their targets. Below: Members of the Ninth Air Force found this flying bomb in France, where it had landed without exploding. Right: These flying bombs never reached a launching pad. They were part of a train load of 120 bombs that was attacked and destroyed by the Royal Air Force in September, 1944. Imperial War Museum, London.

Peenemuende was a Nazi experimental station located on the Isle of Usedom in the Baltic Sea. In May, 1944, reconnaissance photos revealed an unusual amount of activity there connected with the German "secret weapons." Close watch was kept on the installation until July when Peenemuende was subjected to its first massive heavy bomber attack.

To the aeronautical engineer working to develop a faster airplane, jet propulsion was the answer to the problem posed by the limitations of the piston engine and the propeller. The credit for developing the first workable jet engine goes to an Englishman, Frank Whittle, who took out his first patents in 1930. In 1939 the Air Ministry awarded his company, Power Jets, Ltd., a contract for an engine to be tested in a special plane built by Gloster Aircraft Company, Ltd. This plane flew on May 15, 1941. In Germany, the world's first jet aircraft, the Heinkel He-178, powered by an engine designed by Hans von Ohain, made a successful flight on August 27, 1939.

The advantages of speed in military aircraft were amply demonstrated during World War II. By the end of the war, jet fighters were in production in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan. The Nazis were many months ahead of the Allies in their development of jet aircraft. During the last days of the war in Europe, when the Luftwaffe put several types of jet-propelled aircraft into operation, the Allies had nothing to match the fast new jets.

The Allies used their resources to produce conventional aircraft in overwhelming numbers; the Germans, realizing that they were far behind in production levels, tried to catch up by producing jetpowered planes. The threat was serious enough to force the Allies to fly a great number of missions solely against jet factories and airfields. If Germany had begun to use jets sooner and in greater quantity, she might have won back some control of the air over Europe.

In their frantic attempts to find an effective antidote to Allied bombing, German scientists developed a number of advanced, LAST-DITCH weapons that were discovered by the Allies when they invaded Germany. Most of them had not yet become operational.

The Luftwaffe was disintegrating rapidly, some units were transferred into the Army and others simply disbanded. Only the jet pilots stubbornly continued flying. Goring and what was left of the Luftwaffe command retreated to Berchtesgaden in southern Germany.

On May 5, three days before Germany surrendered, the Reich Marshal was taken prisoner by American forces. Along with other German leaders, he was convicted a year later of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging. Goring asked that he be shot instead, as befitted a soldier. When his request was refused, he swallowed a poison capsule that he had managed to conceal ever since his capture and died in his cell on October 15, 1946, two hours before his scheduled execution.

Some 265,000 members of the Luftwaffe had been killed or reported missing in action during the War. Another 213,000 had been wounded. Their achievement was great. When the War eventually turned against Germany they had fought on with devotion and skill, although they were "wrongly equipped and wrongly engaged," as Steinhoff put it. They destroyed some 70,000 enemy planes while losing 62,500 of their own. Their individual records surpassed those of any other air force: 103 Luftwaffe pilots had more than 100 kills each to their credit by the end of the War; 13 had more than 200, and two fliers, Erich Hartmann and Gerhard Barkhorn, had downed more than 300 enemy planes each. Most of the world condemned the cause the Luftwaffe fliers served, but few among their critics could find fault with the quality of their service.

Major Gene Gurney, (USAF). : Pictorial History of World War II Air Forces in Combat. Bonanza Books, NY. 1962.

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