Sky My Kingdom: Memoirs of the Famous German World War II Test Pilot (Vintage Aviation Series) by Hanna Reitsch

Author:Hanna Reitsch [Reitsch, Hanna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS027100
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2009-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

First Flights for the “Luftwaffe”

THE WEEKS and months passed, the tests on the dive brakes were concluded and the festive mood of the celebration party held at the Institute in honour of my appointment as Flugkapitän evaporated as we set to work on new plans and new experiments.

The German aircraft industry had meanwhile taken up Udet’s suggestion and was fitting dive brakes to military aircraft. The Luftwaffe testing station was at Rechlin and in September, 1937, Udet ordered me to report there for duty as a test-pilot. This was my first incursion into the military sphere and I little suspected that it marked the beginning of a new chapter in my life, in which I was to be increasingly involved in military flying.

Before me stretched the great airfield at Rechlin, now for some weeks to be my “home,”—a very different picture from Darmstadt-Griesheim. There the slim, silvery birds would be assembled, light as swallows or the clouds that sail across summer skies. But at Rechlin, such similes were out of place. Here there were none but military planes, bombers, Stukas and the fighters that seemed like lean arrows, straining towards their mark. To me, who would naturally feel such things more strongly than a man, Rechlin had an air of grim and purposeful menace, with its continual thunder and whine of aircraft engines.

Germany was rearming. We saw it. The world saw it. But we saw it with different eyes than the world.

We young men and women wanted peace—but a just peace, which allowed us to live. And the German people wanted it, though today the world will no longer believe it. But they were a people, occupying a small living-space with neighbours on either side, who were beginning now, after years of poverty and insecurity, to have bread again and prosperity, a people who knew that the weak are always threatened and, believing themselves to share the universal right to self-protection, therefore saw in the growing national strength an increase in their own power to maintain the peace. What country in the world would not have felt a justifiable pride in the achievement?

Thus I lived through these years, little suspecting the tragedy that was being prepared. “If you wish for peace, prepare for war”—that was how I saw it, though not in those precise words. Stukas—bombers—fighters! Guardians at the portals of Peace! And in this spirit I flew them, each time in the feeling that, through my own caution and thoroughness, the lives of those who flew after me would be protected and that, by their existence alone, they would contribute to the protection of the land that I saw beneath me as I flew: ploughland and meadowland, mountains and hills, forests and lakes—the land that, though there might be others in the world more splendid, was the only land for me—for it was my home. Was that not worth flying for?

I had never before had an opportunity to test a military machine but now, in Rechlin, I flew a wide variety of types, in fact, anything that happened to be there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.