Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (18 page)

Left to right: Colonel Stolle, commander of a flak regiment; General of Infantry Hans Zorn, commander of the XXXXVI Panzer Corps; and Luftwaffe General Ritter Robert von Greim, commander of the 6th Air Fleet—on the Eastern Front, 1943.

Col. Gen. Ritter Robert von Greim (left) shakes hands with Col. Guenther Luetzow (right) while Col. Walter Oesau looks on. Luetzow shot down 115 enemy aircraft during his career; Oesau shot down 127.

A Junkers Ju-88 bomber.

Lt. Ernst Udet of the Richthofen Fighter Wing. He shot down 62 aircraft during World War I and later served, less effectively, as head of the Luftwaffe’s technical and air armaments office.

Maj. Walter “Nowi” Nowotny, command -er of the first jet fighter unit. He scored 258 confirmed kills—255 of them on the Eastern Front—before being killed in action in November 1944, a month before his twenty-fourth birthday.

Alfred “Bomber” Keller, who commanded Imperial Germany’s 1st Bomber Wing during World War I. At the age of fifty-eight, he personally led his fighter squad rons into action at Dunkirk in 1940.

CHAPTER 5

Blitzkrieg

T
he war on the western front began with a whimper. Hitler categorically forbade the Luftwaffe to take any offensive action at all against the Western alliance, and small wonder: in September, 1939, France had 110 divisions available for use against Germany. Behind the West Wall, Germany had only thirty divisions to defend 300 miles of frontage. Only a dozen of these were first-class units, and none were panzer. Fortunately for the Third Reich, France and Great Britain let the opportunity pass; they did not help their Polish ally at all.

By the second week in October, Hitler was demanding the army launch a major offensive in the West during the winter of 1939–40. Col. Gen. Walter von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief of the army, and Gen. Franz Halder, the chief of the General Staff of the army, both favored waiting until the spring of 1940, but Hitler would not listen. He demanded that the Army General Staff prepare an offensive plan for a winter attack. Halder therefore presented an unimaginative rehash of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. It called for an advance through the Low Countries with the bulk of the panzer and motorized divisions on the right (northern) flank. Hitler did not like it, but could not come up with a viable alternative, so he ordered its execution. The weather would not cooperate, however, and the attack was delayed time after time. Then, on January 10, 1940, the plan was compromised altogether—by members of the Luftwaffe.

On January 9, 1940, over a beer at the Officers’ Mess in Muenster, Maj. Helmut Reinberger complained to his friend, Maj. Erich Hoenmanns, about the long train ride he had to face the next day in order to attend a staff conference at Cologne. Hoenmanns, a World War I aviator and commandant of the nearby airfield at Loddenheide, needed some flight time and wanted to visit his wife at Cologne, so he offered to fly Reinberger to the conference. Even though he was carrying secret plans concerning the offensive, Reinberger accepted the invitation—a clear violation of security regulations.

The weather was bad the following morning when the majors took off. Hoenmanns got lost and then accidentally shut off the fuel supply to his Me-108 communications plane, an aircraft which he had only flown once before. They crash-landed near the Belgian town of Mechelensur-Meuse, about twelve miles north of Maastricht. Neither major smoked, so they had no matches. Reinberger was unable to burn his top-secret documents before he was seized by Belgian gendarmes.
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Hitler was beside himself with rage when he heard the news the next day. “It is things like this that can lose us the war!” he snapped.
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No one in Germany knew whether or not Reinberger had destroyed the top-secret documents. The Fuehrer summoned Goering at once and, for the first time, gave his designated successor a devastating rebuke. He even considered relieving Goering of command of the Luftwaffe.

In keeping with his character, Goering found scapegoats immediately. He sacked Gen. Hellmuth Felmy, the commander of the 2nd Air Fleet, and his chief of staff, Colonel Kammhuber, even though they were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Kammhuber would overcome this blot on his record and go on to greater things, but Felmy, who was already out of favor due to his frank appraisal on the capabilities of the Luftwaffe vis-à-vis the R.A.F., would not. He lived in forced retirement until the spring of 1941, when he was placed in charge of Special Staff F in Greece and later in the Caucasus. Gradually working his way back into the good graces of the Nazi High Command, he later commanded the army’s LXVIII and XXXIV Corps in the Balkans (1943–45). Kammhuber, on the other hand, was allowed to remain on active duty. He was named commander of the 51st Fighter Wing (the “Edelweiss Wing”), which he led with considerable distinction in the Western campaign, until he was shot down and captured near Paris on June
3.
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Hoenmanns and Reinberger were both sentenced to death in absentia, but the sentence was never imposed, because they spent the rest of the war in prison camps, mainly in Canada.

Goering was still shaken on January 12, when he summoned Kesselring into his presence. “You will take over 2nd Air Fleet,” he told the former chief of staff, “ . . . because I have nobody else.” Kesselring later remembered that Goering was more depressed that day than he ever saw him, even in the darkest days of the war.
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Kesselring retained Wilhelm Speidel as his chief of staff. General Stumpff assumed command of the 1st Air Fleet in Poland, and the capable Maj. Gen. Heinz-Hellmuth von Wuehlisch soon became 1st Air Fleet’s chief of staff.

It is interesting to note that one of the applicants for the command of 2nd Air Fleet was Erhard Milch. He had no intention of giving up his other posts, but felt he needed command time to improve his standing and better his position. His appointment, however, was blocked by his bitter enemy, Jeschonnek.

On January 13, the day after Kesselring received his appointment, Holland and Belgium began to mobilize on a massive scale. Obviously they expected a German invasion—a sure tip-off that the plan had been compromised. The Belgian General Staff ordered its units not to resist if the French army crossed the frontiers.
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Hitler had no choice but to cancel the invasion, at least for the time being.

Hitler’s next invasion did not come in the west, but in the north. Correctly fearing that Britain planned to occupy northern Norway to cut off Germany’s vital iron ore supply, he ordered the Wehrmacht to seize both Norway and Denmark. The invasion began on April 9.

Initially Hitler planned to invade Sweden, as well as her neighbors. Goering did not learn of these plans until March, but when he did he immediately went to Berchtesgaden and stood up to Hitler for perhaps the only time in his life. Sweden, it will be recalled, was the home of Goering’s first wife. He had lived there, off and on, during the 1920s, and his stepson, now fighting against the Russians in Finland as a volunteer, was a Swede. In anguish, Hermann told Hitler that he had given his word to King Gustav of Sweden through Count Eric von Rosen (his former brother-in-law) that Nazi Germany would never violate Swedish neutrality. Should Hitler invade Sweden, he would have to insist that the Fuehrer accept his resignation.