Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (25 page)

Meanwhile, Hugo Sperrle also gradually lost interest in the air war. His decline began in 1940, when he transferred his headquarters to Paris and took up residence at the Palais du Luxembourg, the former palace of Marie de Medici. Prior to this General Veith described him as “very unpretentious,” but now “gradually everything went to his head.”
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The brewer’s son was corrupted by the debauchery of Paris. He became addicted to laziness, luxurious living, and gambling, Munitions Minister Albert Speer later commented: “The Field Marshal’s craving for luxury and public display ran a close second to that of his superior Goering; he was also his match in corpulence.”
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As early as September 1, 1940, Sperrle was seen in the company of Field Marshal Milch, enjoying life in the gambling casinos of Deauville, where Sperrle had a command post.
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While Hugo Sperrle enjoyed the life of Riley, training went to seed. On March 1, 1943, the R.A.F. attacked Berlin. When the last bomb fell, 35,000 people in the German capital had lost their homes. Hitler immediately ordered Sperrle to raid London in reprisal. On March 3, Sperrle’s men flew across the Channel. They dropped 100 tons of bombs, but only 12 tons fell on London. Hitler was furious. In his conference of March 5 he lambasted 3rd Air Fleet’s inability to find London, a target thirty miles wide and only ninety miles from the French coast.
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The Fuehrer was still criticizing Sperrle on March 9. Propaganda minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler’s views (and his own) in his diary: “Field Marshal Sperrle . . . was not equal to his tasks. Like all air force generals he had withdrawn to a castle and was there leading a sybaritic life. Air warfare against England probably didn’t interest him much more than, say, an excellent luncheon or dinner. The Fuehrer wants to recall him.”
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Hitler’s attitude toward Sperrle had mitigated by early July 1943. Perhaps because Sperrle was in debt due to his luxurious lifestyle and gambling, the Fuehrer sent him a gift of 50,000 reichsmarks. The field marshal was not found at his headquarters, however; he was busy vacationing on the Atlantic coast south of Biarritz at the time.
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With the command of the air war in the west in such hands, the actual conduct of operations naturally fell to Sperrle’s more responsible subordinates. With about 250 largely obsolete aircraft, Joachim Coeler continued to inflict costly casualties on British shipping with his hit-and-run mine-laying operations. His 9th Air Division was upgraded to IX Air Corps in October, 1941, and the dependable Coeler was promoted to general of flyers on January 1, 1942. Later in the war he would be named commander of the XIV Air Corps (on April 30, 1943) and commander of transport aircraft (from October 15, 1944). He was sent into reserve on February 5, 1945.
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The most important Luftwaffe commander in the West in late 1941, however, was Lt. Col. Martin Harlinghausen, the air commander Atlantic (
Fliegerfuehrer Atlan -tik
). The main aircraft in his arsenal was the FW-200, better known as the “Condor.”

Although Hans Geisler was not successful as an air corps commander (he was replaced as commander of the X Air Corps on August 25, 1942, and was never reemployed), he was good at antishipping operations. In late 1939 or early 1940 he suggested to Jeschonnek that the Focke-Wulf 200, a four-engine civil aircraft, be converted into a military aircraft until the He-177 four-engine bomber could be brought into production. Jeschonnek saw the merits of such a proposal, and the first Condors joined the squadrons as long-range maritime reconnaissance-bombers. The converted civilian airplane had a number of weaknesses. It was too slow (224 mph. maximum), it was vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, and it had a weak structure. Nevertheless it had a radius of action of 1,000 miles with 2,000 pounds of bombs, or 1,400 miles with a single 550-pound bomb. Because of their range, the Condors enjoyed considerable success early in the war, before the Allied convoys developed defenses against them. From August 1, 1940, to February 9, 1941, Naval Air Group West at Lorient, equipped with fifteen He-111s and six to eight Condors, sank eighty-five merchant vessels, totalling 363,000 tons.
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In early 1941, with all hope of defeating Britain by direct aerial bombardment gone, the Luftwaffe General Staff turned its attention to helping the navy defeat her via the blockade. To direct the Luftwaffe’s part in these operations, OKL established Air Command Atlantic under Harlinghausen, a pioneer in antishipping operations.

Martin Harlinghausen, a native of Rheda, was only thirty-nine years old in 1941. He had entered the navy as a seaman in 1923, serving in torpedo boats. He received his commission in 1929 but remained with the torpedo boats until late 1931, when he began his pilot’s training. Transferred to the Luftwaffe in 1933, he trained as an aerial observer until October 1934, when he joined the training section of the Reichs Air Ministry. In late 1937 he earned his first distinction as commander of the sea reconnaissance squadron with the Condor Legion in Spain. Back in Germany, he joined the operations staff of the 2nd Air Fleet in 1938 and attended a brief General Staff course at the Air War Academy in early 1939. Harlinghausen’s first General Staff assignment was as operations officer of the 10th Air Division. After a brief period as air commander Trondheim (April 17–May 21, 1940) during the invasion of Norway, he won his Knights Cross and was named chief of staff of the X Air Corps on May 21, 1940. He was promoted to captain (1934), major (1938), and lieutenant colonel (January 1, 1941).
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Harlinghausen directed his new command with considerable skill and daring. He had already developed the “Swedish Turnip” system of attack, which was based on the old naval premise that ships present the best target when approached directly from the beam. Harlinghausen also concluded that the lower an aircraft was when it approached its target, the higher and clearer its victim’s silhouette stood against the horizon. Using these tactics, Condor pilots alone sank fifteen vessels (63,175 tons) in January, 1941, and twenty-two more (84,515 tons) in February, in what was called “armed reconnaissance” missions. They also guided U-boats to dozens of other targets, at a time when Great Britain was threatened with starvation. Unfortunately for Germany, few Condors were produced (only about five per month in 1941), serviceability was low (seldom above 25 percent), and the British took countermeasures by equipping their merchant ships with light antiaircraft guns, which were very effective against the slow Condors. Aircraft losses were so heavy that Harlinghausen was forced to prohibit the Swedish turnip tactics that he himself had invented. Worse still for Germany, the British antisubmarine tactics were equally successful, forcing Adm. Karl Doenitz to withdraw the U-boats from the sector around Britain and Ireland in mid-July, 1941.
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The Battle of the Atlantic was lost.

Colonel Harlinghausen continued to patrol the North Atlantic until November, 1941, when his low-flying He-111 was hit by anti-aircraft fire over the Irish Sea. He managed to nurse his badly damaged airplane to the French coast, where he crash-landed and was rescued by French fishermen. He spent the next three months in the hospital. Discharged at the beginning of 1942, he was named commander of the 26th Bomber Wing and inspector of aerial torpedoes.
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He was replaced by Lt. Gen. Ulrich Kessler, who had commanded the 1st (previously 152nd) Bomber Wing in Poland and was chief of staff of the 1st Air Fleet from December 1939, to April 25, 1940. Although he had little success, this World War I naval observer was a favorite of Goering and remained air commander Atlantic until 1944. Promoted to general of flyers in 1944, he was named air attaché to Tokyo and was on his way to Japan when the war ended.
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As air commander Atlantic, Kessler’s post was looked upon as one of little significance, because the focus of the air war had long since shifted elsewhere.

CHAPTER 7

The Balkans Campaign

A
xis military involvement in the Balkans began on October 28, 1940, when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Greece from Italian-held Albania with his Ninth and Eleventh Armies: about 150,000 men.
¹
They advanced across the Kalamas (Thiamis) River on November 1, but were halted by a Greek counteroffensive in the Pindus Gorge on November 8, in which 5,000 men of the Italian 3rd Alpine Division were captured. Mussolini sacked his commander, Gen. Sebastiano Visconti-Prasca, and replaced him with Gen. Ubaldo Soddu, but there was little Soddu could do. By November 14 Gen. Alexander Papagos’s Greek forces had pushed into Albania. On the 22d they routed the Italian ninth Army at Koritsa (Korce) and overran their principal forward air base. By December 4, when they captured Permet, the Greeks were claiming to have captured 28,000 men. The defeats forced the resignations of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the chief of staff of the Italian army, and Adm. Domenico Cavagnari, the commander of the Italian navy. They were replaced by Gen. Ugo Cavallero and Adm. Arturo Riccardi, but again it did little good. By December 9 the Greeks had captured Porto Edda and had taken Pogradec On Lake Ohrid, more than forty miles from the Greek border, and Italy was calling for German military intervention in the Greek war.
²

Hitler was at first reluctant to assist his ally, especially since he had not conquered Britain and he was seriously considering invading the Soviet Union the following year. On January 19–20, 1941, however, following a similar Italian rout in the desert, he met with the Italian dictator at Berchtesgaden and agreed to intervene in Greece in April. He also consented to send two German divisions to Libya (the Deutsche Afrika Korps) and Geisler’s X Air Corps to Sicily, to preserve the Italian position in the central Mediterranean.
³
The task of supporting the German invasion of Greece fell to Col. Gen. Alexander Loehr’s 4th Air Fleet, which headquartered in Vienna. Loehr was still assembling his forces on March 26, when the political situation changed dramatically.

On March 25, the Yugoslav government of Prince Paul yielded to intensive Nazi diplomatic pressure and agreed to join the Axis, rather than be subjected to German military occupation. The following night Gen. Richard D. Simovic, the former commander of the Yugoslavian air force, launched a coup d’état and ousted Paul. The new government immediately assured Hitler of its friendship and sent out diplomatic feelers to Moscow. Hitler did not credit the friendship of the new government; instead he expanded Loehr’s mission. Fourth Air Fleet was now to support Twelfth Army’s invasion of Greece and Second Army’s invasion of Yugoslavia. These ground forces were commanded by Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm List and Col. Gen. Baron Maximilian von Weichs, respectively.

To fulfill its new mission, 4th Air Fleet was hurriedly reinforced with 576 aircraft, rapidly deployed from Sicily, France, and Germany. Many of these belonged to Geisler’s X Air Corps. By April 5, Loehr controlled about one thousand aircraft.
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The bulk of his strength belonged to Gen. Baron Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps.

Baron von Richthofen had a blot to remove from his escutcheon in the spring of 1941. The architect of the close air support doctrines of the Luftwaffe, he had failed miserably during the Battle of Britain. His vaulted Stukas had been shot to pieces on Eagle Day and had done no better on August 15. Three days later, on August 18, the Stukas tried again. Richthofen sent up four Ju-87 groups, which attacked the British airfields at Gosport, Thorney Island, and Ford, as well as the radar station at Poling on the southern coast. Thirty Stukas were lost or critically damaged in the attack. One group, I/StG 77, lost twelve of its twenty-eight aircraft, and six of the survivors were so badly damaged that they only just managed to reach the Continent.
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Such losses were more than could be tolerated. Eighth Air Corps was withdrawn from the battle. For Richthofen, the Western air offensive was over.