Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (47 page)

Over the skies of Sicily, the 2nd Air Fleet lost air superiority and even air parity over the western and central Mediterranean for all time. The demands of the home front also began to take priority during this period, for the British Bomber Command razed Hamburg in July and the United States Eighth Air Force’s precision daylight bombing of Germany was also becoming a threat, although not yet a decisive one. Second Air Fleet lost its priority for replacements and reinforcements, for more and more fighter aircraft were needed for the defense of the Reich. Richthofen was forced to transfer several squadrons—a total of 210 combat aircraft—to the Fatherland. Only one of these squadrons ever returned to Italy.
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The air war was lost in the Mediterranean.

Richthofen made one more bid for glory in his career and that was at the Battle of Salerno (September 9-17, 1943), where the Allies firmly established themselves on the Italian peninsula. Here, Col. Gen. Heinrich von Vietinghoff, the commander of the Tenth Army, counterattacked the Allied invasion force and almost succeeded in pushing Gen. Mark Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army into the sea. Despite being outnumbered 4,000 to 300 in aircraft, Richthofen attacked with reckless abandon.
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His fighters fired rockets into Allied ships and sank several of them. Ground targets were attacked in support of the Tenth Army and, at one point, General Clark was making contingency plans to evacuate the beachhead. However, Richthofen was unable to interfere with the advance of the British Eighth Army, driving up the Italian peninsula from the south. On September 17 he was forced to begin the evacuation of his airfields at Foggia, the best air bases on the entire Italian peninsula. The heavy fighting had also depleted his combat formations. Salerno was the last hurrah for the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean. Thereafter it was strictly a backwater theater of operations, as far as the German Air Force was concerned.
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Richthofen’s personal prestige also fell after Sicily and Salerno. In Aug -ust, 1943, after the Hamburg raids, he was looked upon by Goering as a possible successor to Jeschonnek as chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe.
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By 1944, however, Kesselring complained: “air support had practically ceased, even our air reconnaissance being inadequate,”
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and Richthofen’s star was on the wane. Second Air Fleet was of no help to the XIV Panzer Corps in the battles of Cassino, made no impression on the Allied landings at Anzio in January, 1944, and was of little value in the ensuing German counterattack in February. In early 1944 Richthofen controlled 370 aircraft, but he received little in the way of reinforcements and could not make good his losses. By mid-1944 he had only 125 airplanes and his best unit, II Air Corps, had been transferred to France. “The Luftwaffe had ceased to play any part in the events in the South,” Matthew Cooper concluded.
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Despite his defeats in Italy, Richthofen was the most successful of the Luftwaffe air commanders in World War II. He might have been transferred from the Mediterranean sideshow in 1944 to a more important assignment, except that he fell ill. It was discovered that he had an inoperable brain tumor. He nevertheless remained at his post long enough to see 2nd Air Fleet downgraded to the status of Luftwaffe Command South on October 28, 1944.
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This was, in effect, a personal demotion for Richthofen, who was now stripped of his status as an air fleet commander. Exactly one month later he transferred to Fuehrer Reserve for reasons of health, and he was never able to return to active duty.
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He was succeeded by Gen. Maximilian von Pohl. Although he occasionally raged against Hitler for treating him and other senior officers as “nothing more than highly paid NCOs,” Richthofen had maintained his admiration for the Fuehrer throughout his career.
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Richthofen was in great pain in the last months of the war. He lived to see the end of the Third Reich, but just barely. Had he been in good health he undoubtedly would have been tried as a war criminal; however, he was near death when he was captured in May 1945, so the Allies took no steps in that direction. He passed away in Austria on July 12, 1945.
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Meanwhile, both the air and ground war on the eastern front were entering another decisive phase. By the spring of 1943, the industrial might of the Soviet Union and her allies had begun to tell, and the Red Air Force had a five-to-one superiority in aircraft. The Luftwaffe fighter wings nevertheless continued to extract a terrible toll on the Russians and maintained air parity in the critical sectors, despite tremendous odds. On November 1, 1942, the 51st Fighter Wing “Moelders” passed an incredible milestone when it scored its 4,000th victory. It was followed by the 52nd Fighter Wing, which shot down its 4,000th victim during the Stalingrad campaign (on December 10, 1942), and by the 54th Fighter Wing, which registered its 4,000th kill on February 23, 1943.
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On this sector, the highest number of individual victory totals in the history of aerial warfare were run up by the veteran pilots of the fighter branch. The leading killer was Lt. (later Maj.) Erich Hartmann, a Wuerttemberger in JG 52 whom the Russians nicknamed “the Black Devil of the Ukraine.” He would score an incredible 352 victories in his fighter career—seven against American Mustangs in 1945 and the rest against the Russians.
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Hartmann was certainly not the only German ace to turn the eastern front into a shooting gallery for the Luftwaffe. Gerhard Barkhorn, for example, had joined JG 52 soon after the start of the war. Not only did he fail to score in the Battle of Britain, he was shot down twice by the R.A.F. and had to be fished out of the English Channel by the German sea rescue service. He shot down his first enemy airplane on the eastern front on July 2, 1941, a victory that was followed by 300 others—all in the East. Like Hartmann, Major Barkhorn survived the war.
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Other major aces of the eastern front included Maj. Guenther Rall, 275 kills; Lt. Otto Kittel, 267 victories; Maj. Walter Nowotny, 258 victories; Maj. Wilhelm Batz, 237 victories; Col. Hermann Graf, 211 kills; and Anton Hafner, 204 victories. And there were dozens of others with scores of downed Russians to their credit.
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Unfortunately for the Luftwaffe, the bulk of its victories were registered by its experienced pilots. As training deteriorated, the younger replacement pilots were unable to keep up the pace. By early 1943, 25 percent of the new pilots did not survive their fourth mission. As a result, Jeschonnek committed more of his
Lehrgeschwadern
—advanced training wings—to action on the eastern front in the spring of 1943.
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The Luftwaffe in Russia was literally living on its veteran aces and skilled instructor pilots, who were gradually being killed off or burned out in a war of attrition. When they were gone, the end of air parity in the East would be in sight.

Following Manstein’s brilliant victory at Kharkov, a lull descended on the eastern front, as both sides prepared for the German summer offensive of 1943. Hitler picked as his target the Russian salient at Kursk, against which he concentrated Col. Gen. Walter Model’s Ninth Army (of Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge’s Army Group Center) and Fourth Panzer Army (Col. Gen. Hermann Hoth) and Army Detachment Kempf (Gen. Werner Kempf) of Army Group South. The plan was for Model to attack from the north and link up at Kursk with Fourth panzer Army, advancing from the south. If successful, several Russian armies would be encircled and destroyed. Col. Gen. Ritter von Greim’s 6th Air Fleet (formerly Luftwaffe Command East) was to support the northern pincer, while Otto Dessloch’s 4th Air Fleet supported the advance from the south. The Luftwaffe concentrated about two-thirds of its combat aircraft in the east to support this offensive. They were nevertheless outnumbered three to one.

The Red Air Force—although still inferior to the Germans in tactical skill—was significantly improved from 1941. They were also more aggressive. On April 22, for example, they attacked Orsha airfield and destroyed two of Greim’s three long-range reconnaissance squadrons—another ill omen for the Luftwaffe.
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As early as the second week in May Greim’s reconnaissance and radio intercept units reported that the Soviets were concentrating large units in the Kursk sector and that these were being backed by the First, Second, Third, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Soviet air armies. Beginning on May 12, 6th Air Fleet began day and night attacks on Russian railroad traffic and installations. It also took temporary control of the bomber forces of 1st Air Fleet (Combat Zone North) and the 4th Air Fleet (Combat Zone South) for anti-industrial operations: the first strategic bombing the Luftwaffe had conducted in the East in months. Among the targets severely damaged were the huge tank factory at Gorky, the rubber processing works at Yaroslavl, and the marshaling yard and supply base at Yelets. Too late the Luftwaffe was attacking strategic targets in the Soviet Union, albeit on a very limited scale. Meanwhile, Greim’s fighters continued to concentrate in the Orel vicinity, to protect the crowded airfields at Orel, Bryansk, and Sechinskaya.
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The mainstay of Greim’s fighter defenses was the 51st Fighter Wing. It shot down forty Russian aircraft in the Orel vicinity on June 5, sixty-seven more on June 10, and sixty-five more two days later. In the same sector, 12th Flak Division shot down 40 aircraft in June, while 18th Flak Division in the Smolensk-Roslavl sector shot down 130 Russian aircraft in daylight operations and 617 at night. Despite the apparent magnitude of these victories, they were really only minor tactical successes. Greim inflicted serious losses on the Russians, but he was unable to seal off the Kursk battle zone or to annihilate the Soviet troop concentrations in that all-important sector.
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Meanwhile, the Soviets detected the German buildup. They poured reinforcements into the salient and constructed several huge belts of minefields, while Hitler delayed the offensive until the arrival of the new Ferdinand tanks.

During the Battle of Kursk in early July, 1943, 6th Air Fleet controlled Maj. Gen. Paul Deichmann’s 1st Air Division (730 operational aircraft) and Lt. Gen. Ernst Buffa’s 12th Flak Division, which had twelve motorized and four truck-drawn flak battalions (with three heavy and two light batteries each), seven light flak battalions, three railway flak battalions, and two or three searchlight battalions. Greim also directed a special night fighter wing, a strategic reconnaissance wing, two Luftwaffe signal regiments, and the 3rd Air Command, an ad hoc unit held ready to commit its attached units to the sector northeast of Bryansk, in case the Soviets counterattacked in that thinly held sector. The XXVII Special Air Administrative Command (formerly Air Administrative Command Moscow) under Lt. Gen. Veit Fischer was in charge of the ground service organizations, supplies, and logistical operations, including Reich Labor Services (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or R.A.D.) battalions.
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Greim’s main headache was fuel. In June, 6th Air Fleet used 8,634 tons of B-4 (blue) fuel (91 octane, used by bombers and general purpose aircraft) but received only 5,722 tons. The same month it received 441 tons of C-3 (green) fuel, against a consumption rate of 1,079 tons. This high octane fuel (97 octane for weak mixture and 110 to 130 for rich mixture) was used almost exclusively by fighter aircraft. Major General Plocher, Greim’s chief of staff, wrote later: “Every assignee mission had to be carefully examined to determine whether it was really worth the fuel expenditure.”
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