Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (24 page)

Perhaps the most fateful meeting in the history of the Luftwaffe took place between Goering and his two principal air fleet commanders at The Hague on September 3, the day before Hitler made his public pronouncement about erasing British cities. Goering suggested that the current tactical plan of concentrating on smashing the R.A.F. and its bases be abandoned in favor of large-scale bombing of London, the hub of the British war effort. He wanted to know if the R.A.F. had been sufficiently weakened to accomplish this task without undue risk to the bomber force.

Sperrle had always advocated the destruction of the R.A.F., and he correctly stated that it was still a force to be reckoned with. His chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Paul Deichmann, the Cassandra of the Luftwaffe, agreed with him. Kesselring, optimistic as usual, believed Luftwaffe intelligence reports that the British had only a few fighters left and was convinced that massive aerial attacks on London would end the war. “By the time we have killed a few thousand Cockneys, the British will be screaming for peace,” he declared.
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Sperrle, on the other hand, was not an optimistic man. He estimated that the British had about a thousand fighters and strongly urged that the battle continue exactly as it was being fought. The pressure on the R.A.F. was intolerable to them and must not be relieved, he cried. The argument became heated, but Goering—under pressure from Hitler—ruled against Sperrle in the end. The first major attack on London took place two days later.
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The British capital superseded the R.A.F. as the primary target of the Luftwaffe. The British Fighter Command quickly recovered and was never again threatened with annihilation, as it was in early September, 1940. The decision to suspend the attacks on the R.A.F. Fighter Command was perhaps the decisive turning point of the entire air war.

It should be noted here (as Sperrle did) that Luftwaffe intelligence reports were usually wrong. They reflected the personality of Col. (later Lt. Gen.) Joseph “Beppo” Schmid, whom General Plocher called “a colorful and sometimes controversial character.”
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General Galland was less diplomatic. “Beppo Schmid was a complete wash-out as intelligence officer, the most important job of all,” he told his interrogators in 1945.
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Milch agreed, saying that Schmid “was a man who trimmed his sails to the wind for fear of Goering. Besides which he wasn’t an airman and didn’t understand the significance of the reports he received.”
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Unlike most intelligence officers, who tend to overstate the strength of their opponents, Schmid consistently underestimated the strength and production capacity of the enemy, especially that of the R.A.F., the Soviet Union, and the United States. His efforts tended to confirm the overly optimistic views of Goering, Jeschonnek, and the Nazis, and, by telling Goering what he wanted to hear, he contributed to the Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain. His reports the following year also led the Luftwaffe leadership to believe it faced a much easier task when it invaded Russia than, in fact, was the case.

Joseph Schmid, who was born in Bavaria in 1901, first saw action as a member of Gen. Ritter Franz von Epp’s Freikorps. An early Nazi, he took part in Hitler’s unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Schmid joined the Reichsheer as a private and received his commission in the infantry in 1924. He transferred to the Luftwaffe as a captain in 1935 and, as a major, became chief of the Military Intelligence Branch on January 1, 1938, a post he held until November 9, 1942. During his long tenure, Schmid did nothing to upgrade the low quality of the intelligence service. Galland wrote later that the most sophisticated piece of technical equipment the Intelligence Branch used, up to 1944, “was a pair of binoculars. The personnel consisted of some old reservists of the intelligence battalions, pensioned policemen, unfit men, or overaged civil servants from the local authorities, and a horde of female assistants.”
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In late 1942, as a colonel, Schmid took command of a battlegroup of Goering’s Panzer Division in Tunisia. He showed no great talent in commanding ground forces but was nevertheless flown out of the Tunisian pocket at the very last moment on the personal orders of his friend, Hermann Goering. Promoted to major general on February 1, 1943, and lieutenant general on July l, 1944, he served as commander of I Fighter Corps (September 15, 1943, to November 15, 1944) and was commander-in-chief of Luftwaffe Command West (formerly 3d Air Fleet) from November 15, 1944, until April 28, 1945. Apprehended by the Western Allies on May 15, 1945, he was a prisoner of war until April 1, 1948. Thereafter he lived in Augsburg
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and contributed to the U.S. Air Force’s German Historical Monograph Project in Karlsruhe. He died suddenly on August 30, 1956.
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Hugo Sperrle was disgusted after the Hague conference. The Luftwaffe was defeated over the skies of London. In October, Goering seized on the pretext of deteriorating weather conditions to call off daylight operations over the United Kingdom. Great Britain remained in the war, and the Luftwaffe had suffered its first major defeat.

It is clear that Hitler, Goering, and Kesselring were wrong in changing their tactics, but was Sperrle’s assessment of the situation correct? It would appear so. After the war, Churchill wrote:

If the enemy had persisted in heavy attacks against the adjacent sectors and damaged their operations rooms or telephone communications, the whole intricate organization of the Fighter Command might have been broken down. This would have meant not merely the maltreatment of London, but the loss to us of the perfected control of our own air in the decisive area . . . It was therefore with a sense of relief that Fighter Command felt the German attack turn on to London on September 7, and concluded that the enemy had changed his plan. Goering should certainly have persevered against the airfields, on whose organization and combination the whole fighting power of our air force at this moment depended . . . he made a foolish mistake.
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The third phase of the Battle of Britain began during the late afternoon of September 7, when the Luftwaffe raided the London docks with 650 bombers and more than a thousand fighter sorties. The aerial bombardment continued throughout the night, as 660 tons of high explosive (HE) bombs and thousands of incendiaries rained down on the British capital. The terror raids were soon expanded to Southampton, Portland, Brighton, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Norwick, and other cities. This delighted Winston Churchill, who realized that the changing focus of the battle had saved the United Kingdom. The Luftwaffe’s losses were soon more than doubling those of the R.A.F. During the period September 7 to 15, British fighters lost 174 aircraft but shot down 321 German warplanes. More important, British fighter units were given a much-needed and well-deserved respite, and losses declined from an average of 19.5 aircraft a day in phase two to 14 a day in phase three. British factories could now once again make good R.A.F. losses.
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On the other hand, Luftwaffe morale was hurt by these casualties. Typically, the Reichsmarschall put the blame for this defeat on his pilots. “The fighters have let us down,” he said on September 16.
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The next day, Hitler made the decision to postpone Operation Sealion indefinitely—in effect cancelling it altogether. Goering realized that the battle was lost and on October 20 called off all but nighttime harassing operations over England. During the six weeks of the third phase of the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe bomber units had lost 30 to 35 percent of their strength and the fighters 20 to 25 percent. According to General Galland, the overall combat strength of the Luftwaffe in the latter part of October was only one-quarter of what it had been when the battle began. Great Britain had been saved and the western front had become what Moelders called a “Verdun of the air.”
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Goering grew tired of the Battle of Britain even before it reached its climax. On one occasion Goering was caught by his signals officer in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, telling his wife on the telephone that he was at that very moment on the cliffs of Calais, watching his squadrons crossing the Channel for Britain. Now that the battle could not be won, he completely lost interest in the campaign and went back to Berlin. He still found time to interfere with operations at the front, however. Werner Kreipe, then chief of operations of 3rd Air Fleet, recalled later:

. . . at the highest levels there continued to be constant vacillations in the matters of strategy, and nowhere was this more apparent than at the Air Force High Command. Goering and his staff had by now retired to Berlin . . . Quite frequently, and often at the very last moment, he would order the cancellation of a well-prepared operation, and on the basis of unconfirmed intelligence . . . would order an altogether different operation to be undertaken at once.
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At last Goering grew tired of even this. On November 14 he went on an extended leave. Because he could not bear to work with Milch, Hans Jeschonnek also went on leave. His chief of operations, Maj. Gen. Hoffmann von Waldau, became acting chief of staff. The pair did not return to duty until January, 1941. For over a year after that Goering took little interest in the air force and mainly devoted his time to pleasure and collecting art treasures; in fact, Goering will probably go down in history as the greatest art thief of all time.

Goering managed to deceive Hitler for a very long time into believing that he was working tirelessly for the Luftwaffe. He and Gen. Karl Bodenschatz, his liaison officer at Fuehrer Headquarters, developed an excellent arrangement. Bodenschatz would attend Hitler’s afternoon situation conference and learn the Fuehrer’s views on a particular matter. He would then inform Goering, who would appear at the evening conference and voice Hitler’s own ideas as if they were his own. This gave the Fuehrer much pleasure and reinforced Goering’s own standing in Hitler’s mind.

Hitler continued the nighttime blitz against London because he had publicly committed himself to heavy bombing raids, there was still an outside chance that British morale would collapse, the raids were damaging to the economic framework of the United Kingdom, and they were a safe way to continue the air war against Britain without significant loss to the Luftwaffe. The number of German sorties gradually declined, from 3,884 in December 1940, to 2,465 in January 1941, to only 1,400 in February.
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The Battle of Britain faded into history with a whimper, not a bang. The last major raids took place on the nights of April 16, April 19, and May 10, 1941. In the first two of these, well over 1,000 Londoners were killed and about 148,000 buildings (mostly houses) were destroyed. During the raid of May 10, London suffered its worst night of the war. More than 1,400 people were killed and 1,800 wounded. One-third of the city’s streets were blocked, and some fires continued to burn for eleven days.
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It was a prelude to the end, however, as the Luftwaffe was secretly withdrawing most of its units to the east, for its invasion of the Soviet Union. The 1941 attacks on London had, in reality, been only a diversion aimed at fooling the Allies into thinking that Hitler was planning to resume his air war against Britain, when in fact he had set his sights on the Russian Bear. On May 21, as Kesselring moved his headquarters to Posen in occupied Poland, Field Marshal Sperrle became the sole air commander in the West. Of the forty-four bomber groups previously operating against Britain, however, Sperrle retained only four. Of the fighter wings, only Maj. Wilhelm Balthasar’s JG 2 “Richthofen” and Col. Adolf Galland’s JG 26 “Schlageter” remained in the Channel area. By the end of June 1941, there were only 780 aircraft left in the 3rd and 5th Air Fleets, which became a reservoir of reserves for the eastern front.
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