The First and the Last by Adolf Galland

Author:Adolf Galland
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 2014-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

18

The House Without a Roof

The year 1943 saw Germany in retreat on all fronts. After the fall of Stalingrad the Red army went over to the attack at the Donets. In February they took Kursk, Voroshilovgrad, Rostov, and Kharkov. Manstein's Caucasus armies partly fought their way back over the Isthmus of Kerch into the Crimea. The Soviet advance toward the Dnieper was halted. In July the German troops at Kursk lined up for the last large-scale offensive. It was repulsed.

Badoglio's coup d'état followed the Allied landing in Sicily. The Italian resistance until the capitulation was only a token one. On September 9 the first Allied troops landed at Salerno on the European mainland. With the few German troops, and with those of the Duce who had been freed from the Gran Sasso by paratroops, Generalfeldmarshal Kesselring organized some tough and extremely able resistance.

Hitler had coined the idea of the European Fortress. This fortress was to be defended to the last breath. Roosevelt, in a message to Congress on September 17, 1943, doubted its invincibility, because "Hitler forgot to put a roof over this fortress."

This may well have been true at the time. If one understood by a roof the German Luftwaffe, then this had not been forgotten in the beginning. On the contrary, there had been a time when we had reason to fear nobody in the air. But instead of strengthening this roof once it was in existence, so that it could stand up to coming loads, it had been burned piecemeal since the opening of the Eastern Campaign. And now when the tempest of war raged over the German house, the roof offered insufficient protection to the inhabitants.

On January 27 Germany experienced the first American daylight raid. It was directed against Wilhelmshaven. The bombers of the Eighth AAF were escorted by P-38 Lightnings. This was a twin-engine long-distance fighter which had similar shortcomings in combat as our ME-110. Our fighters were clearly superior to it. The Americans achieved no particular results in their first operation against the Reich. But they had arrived. Their existence could not be denied. Nevertheless the German High Command did not take this event seriously enough. As before, they were of the opinion that the American multiengined bombers could not succeed in day raids. They thought that even numerically inferior German fighter forces would inflict such heavy losses on them that larger operations with greater penetration would prove too costly. Their own failure over England was still fresh in their minds, but they overlooked the new possibilities that were opened to the Americans by improved technics. The range of the American bombers covered all targets in Europe. They could allow themselves wide detours in order to circumnavigate the strongly defended areas. Their bomb load, cruising height, defensive fire power, and invulnerability assured the USAF right from the start better conditions than the Luftwaffe ever had. Notwithstanding all these, the Americans first had to solve the problem of fighter escort. So far they had flown

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