Fighter Aces of World War II by Robert Jackson

Author:Robert Jackson [Jackson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Adolf Galland — Fighter General

Like a school of sharks, the six sleek Messerschmitt 262 fighters arrowed through the sky over the Danube, high over the ruins of Hitler’s Third Reich. It was 26th April, 1945, and the ring of steel was tightening remorselessly around the heart of Germany. Ahead of the advancing American, British and Russian armies, the Allied fighter-bombers roved at will, harrying the shattered remnants of the Wehrmacht and slaughtering what was left of the Luftwaffe on its few remaining airfields.

The Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter had been the Luftwaffe’s great hope; a year earlier it could have wrought havoc among the formations of American daylight bombers, but its entry into service had been delayed by internal wrangling and now it had come too late. The missions its pilots flew, like that on this April day in the last fortnight of the war in Europe, were little more than futile gestures in the face of overwhelming odds.

Each of the six pilots who flew these 262s was well aware of the grim truth — the man who led the formation most of all. For General Adolf Galland had been one of the Luftwaffe’s first combat pilots, and now he was one of the last. He had witnessed its heady climb to success in the early days only five years earlier, and now he was participating in its collapse.

Like so many other Luftwaffe pilots of his vintage, Galland had first taken to the air in a glider in the decade after World War I, eventually going solo in 1928 shortly after his seventeenth birthday. Later, he learned to fly powered aircraft at one of the state-sponsored flying clubs, and in 1933 — when Hitler came to power and the clubs were incorporated into the new military structure of the Third Reich — he was one of a group of young pilots selected to go to Italy for secret training. At the end of his course he qualified as a commercial pilot and was attached to Lufthansa, the German airline, flying on the regular European services. Finally, in 1934, he joined the ranks of the embryo and clandestine Luftwaffe, receiving his commission as a Second Lieutenant in October of that year after military training in Dresden. In April 1935 he was posted to the first fighter unit of the reborn Luftwaffe: No. 2 ‘Richthofen5 Fighter Wing (Jagdgeschwader 2), named after the World War I ace. The unit was equipped with a mixture of Heinkel He 51 and Arado Ar 68 fighters, and Galland survived a serious crash in one of the latter.

In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, and both the Germans and Italians lost little time in sending men and equipment to Spain to serve General Franco’s Nationalist cause. A few weeks later, the Soviet Union intervened in a similar manner on the Republican side. The initial German contribution consisted of aircraft and crews, and Luftwaffe personnel posted for a tour with the Condor Legion — as the contingent

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