Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (33 page)

Hitler considered going into winter quarters after his victory at Kiev, but Bock, Brauchitsch, and the ever-optimistic Kesselring convinced him to launch a drive on Moscow. There would be other victories, to be sure, and the Luftwaffe continued to support the army well, but the momentum of the blitzkrieg was ebbing. So was the Luftwaffe’s combat strength. The continuous operations, losses, damage to aircraft due to combat action and poor landings by exhausted pilots, primitive Russian airfields, and long supply lines made it harder and harder for German ground crews to keep the planes in the air. Already fewer than half of the aircraft in some units were serviceable. Things became even worse in November, when the problems of icy runways and a lack of heating equipment led to a further decline in serviceability. Long hours of flying, primitive airfields, and inadequate maintenance time had taken their toll. Operational readiness in the Stuka groups was down to 50 percent and was even lower in the fighter units. Bomber units were down to an operational readiness of 34 percent by December 27 (see Table
13
), which meant that only one out of every three aircraft was battleworthy. Despite losses of 1,400,000 killed and 3,600,000 captured,
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the Soviets used their seemingly limitless manpower reserves to strengthen their Moscow defenses, which Army Group Center proved unable to penetrate. The German offensive ground to a halt within fifteen miles of the Kremlin. The blitzkrieg had failed. As Milch had predicted, the war against Russia would be a long one.

TABLE 13: THE DECLINE IN OPERATIONAL READINESS, EASTERN FRONT, JUNE-DECEMBER, 1941
Total Aircraft Strength	Operational
Type of Unit	Date	Actual	Operational	Percentage
Bombers	28Jun 41	1,310	754	57.6
27 Dec 41	1,332	458	34.4
Fighters	28 Jun 41	1,266	885	69.9
27 Dec 41	1,472	670	45.6
Dive-Bombers	28 Jun 41	410	278	67.8
27 Dec 41	326	163	50.0

Source: Plocher MS 1942.

The Luftwaffe had performed magnificently during Operation Barbar -ossa. By the end of the campaign it had destroyed 15,500 Soviet airplanes,
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3,200 tanks, 57,600 vehicles, 2,450 guns, 650 trains, and 1,200 locomotives, and had cut Soviet rail lines in 7,000 places. In addition, it had prevented the Red Air Force from launching any significant aerial bombardments on German troops. It had lost 2,093 airplanes (largely to bad landings; only 900 were lost in combat), including 758 bombers and 568 fighters, with another 1,361 airplanes damaged. Replacements were not slow in coming, however, so the overall strength of the eastern front air fleets never fell below 1,700 aircraft.
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On the other hand, the Luftwaffe had served almost exclusively as an appendage of the army. It had dealt effectively with the Soviet air and ground forces at and near the front, true enough, but it had never attempted to bomb the Soviet industrial complexes—and would never do so. The Luftwaffe must therefore be rated a strategic failure. By the end of 1941, 80 percent of the Soviet war industry was in the East. Russian tanks, guns, and airplanes would continue to be destroyed en masse at the front, but the undisturbed factories continued to grind them out until the Wehrmacht—and Nazi Germany—was destroyed. From July to December alone Russian factories had turned out 5,173 of the new Soviet fighters. In the same period, Great Britain manufactured 4,408 fighters, but German factories only produced 1,619 fighters for the Luftwaffe.
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The Russian campaign of 1941 ended the predominantly tactical phase of the air war. From this point on, the Luftwaffe would be engaged in a conflict that was more and more strategic in character, a type of war that the German Air Force proved singularly unable to fight or adapt to. The question must now be asked: Why was the Luftwaffe such a mammoth strategic failure? Part of the responsibility, of course, can laid at the door of Adolf Hitler, who pursued a multifront war, but most of the blame lies with the Luftwaffe itself, and especially with two men—Hermann Goering and Ernst Udet.

CHAPTER 9

The Fall of Ernst Udet

I
t would be hard to envision a man less suited to the post of chief of the Technical Office than Ernst Udet was in 1936. He had had no long-term responsibility for seventeen years, had a happy-go-lucky attitude, trusted the wrong people (especially industrialists), disliked regular hours, and hated to be tied to a desk. He also had a talent for appointing the wrong subordinates. His chief of staff, Maj. Gen. August Ploch, was incompetent. His chief engineer,
Generalstabsingenieur
(lieutenant general of engineers) Rulof Lucht, a thirty-four-year-old former naval aviator, was inexperienced and incapable of properly evaluating an aircraft technologically (“even Udet’s understanding was regarded as more profound,” Cooper wrote later).
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The head of technical planning,
Generalingenieur
(major general of engineers) Guenther Tscherich, who managed to acquire a great deal of influence over Udet, was far more interested in aircraft development than production and procurement, which he neglected.
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Because of Udet’s lack of management and supervisory abilities, the Tech -nical Office was already out of control by early 1939. However, since it took four years for an aircraft to go from the drafting board to the flight lines, this fact was not yet apparent. Hermann Goering, who was not interested in the day-to-day activities of the Air Ministry, certainly did not see the warning signs that Germany was beginning to lose its edge in military aircraft technology. His “conferences” with Udet (as Goering himself later admitted) were little more than “bull sessions” about the days when they flew together as part of the old Richthofen Fighter Wing in World War I.

On February 1, 1939, partially to further reduce Milch’s power, Goering appointed Udet
Generalluftzeugmeister
—a post roughly translatable as chief air armament officer of the Luftwaffe. The new office included not only the thirteen departments of the Technical Office, but also the five aircraft testing stations, an industrial section, and the Supply office, which was taken from the Air Defense Office. There were now twenty-six department chiefs directly responsible to Udet—more than any one man could hope to manage. “The Technical Office soon became a department in which the Engineer Generals did pretty much what they liked,” Col. Werner Baumbach, the famous bomber pilot, wrote later.
³

Udet’s new appointment also earned him a bitter enemy in Erhard Milch. The two men had had a father and son relationship prior to 1933. Udet even taught Milch how to fly. This relationship continued during the 1933–36 period. Udet still asked Milch for advice, and Milch was pleased to give it, for he was happy that he was still able to exercise his influence in the field of air armament. The relationship cooled in late 1936, when Udet submitted a major production plan to Goering without consulting Milch, who felt slighted and offended. After Udet became Generalluftzeugmeister, however, Milch was largely excluded from aircraft design, production, and procurement, and the two men became enemies.

Other than accepting the post in the first place, Udet’s major mistake was in his selection of aircraft to succeed current models. He decided to base the Luftwaffe’s offensive capability on four main combat types by early 1940—the Me-109, Ju-88, Me-210, and He-177. The Me-109, as we have seen, was fairly successful, but the Ju-88 had a great many problems, and the Me-210 and He-177 were total failures, thus considerably inhibiting the Luftwaffe’s ability to wage war from 1940 on.
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The Ju-88 was developed by Dr. Heinrich Koppenburg, the managing director of Junkers. Originally designed as a superspeed, unarmed, six-ton bomber, it was first successfully test-flown in March, 1938. Dubbed the “Wonder Bomber,” it never lived up to expectations, largely because the Technical Office kept adding requirements for it and modifications to it. “Probably no other aircraft in history has been developed in so many quite different forms,” Wood and Gunston wrote.
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The Technical Office ordered that it be equipped with guns and defensive armament, greatly increasing its weight, reducing its speed, and retarding its performance. Even its basic structure had to be changed, as now it needed an extra crewman to operate the guns. The worst added requirement, however, was that it be able to dive. Both Udet and Jeschonnek were firm believers that an effective bomber had to be able to dive, to increase the accuracy of its attack. This requirement meant that the structure had to be strengthened again—further reducing its speed. Essentially they had tried to convert it into a twin-engine Stuka. Eventually some 25,000 changes were required and the weight of some models exceeded thirteen tons. Performance was, of course, greatly reduced and, since it weighed three times as much as the Ju-87 (4.2 tons), it never did dive well. One of the most distinguished pilots of the Luftwaffe, Capt. Baron Rudolf von Moreau, was killed trying to test-dive a Ju-88 at Rechlin. Engineer-General Marquardt later wrote—with considerable justification—that the dive-bomber concept ruined the Luftwaffe.
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It certainly ruined the Ju-88. The maximum speed of the original prototypes exceeded 400 miles per hour, but the Ju-88A-4 could not even reach 280 miles per hour. Its climbing rate and handling characteristics were also reduced to the point that Milch referred to it as a “flying barn door” in 1939.
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