Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (48 page)

The 1st Air Division (Deichmann) of 6th Air Fleet was responsible for supporting the northern arm of the Kursk pincer. To the south Dessloch concentrated 1,100 aircraft under the command of VIII Air Corps (Seidemann) to support Manstein’s advance. Like Greim, he stripped his other units (I Air and IV Air Corps) to provide support for the main thrusts.
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Operation “Citadel,” the Battle of Kursk, began on July 5, 1943. For the Luftwaffe, it almost ended before it began. Early that morning the majority of the German bomber and dive-bomber wings were preparing to take off at the Kharkov airfields when the First, Fourth, and Sixteen Soviet air armies took off and, with 500 bombers, fighters, and ground attack aircraft, headed for the mass of bombers. The German He-111s, Ju-87s, and Do-17s seemed doomed, but 140 Me-109G fighters from JG 52 and JG 3 “Udet” quickly took off to meet them. “It developed into the largest and fiercest air battle of all time,” Musciano later wrote. The veterans of the 52nd and 3rd Fighter Wings shot down 432 Soviet airplanes and completely neutralized the threat. Lt. Joachim Kirschner alone shot down nine Soviet airplanes. The Luftwaffe only lost twenty-six aircraft in this bitter struggle.
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Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s bombers, dive-bombers, and ground attack aircraft took off and flew dozens of missions in direct support of the army. In all, the pilots under Greim and Seidemann flew 4,570 sorties, mostly in direct support of the ground units.
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They suffered heavy losses in this dangerous work, and the operational strength of the combat units declined steadily, as replacement services could not keep up with aircraft attrition. The Red Air Force was much stronger than the Luftwaffe and began to attack German supply routes and airfields, although the Germans won almost every head-to-head dogfight. Greim’s chief of staff later wrote: “The Russians were quantitatively very strong, but were mediocre in quality and inadequate in development. Yet they . . . had come a long way from their primitive condition of 1941.”
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Still they were generally outclassed by the veterans of the Luftwaffe. On July 7 JG 52 shot down its 6,000th enemy aircraft, and a few days later the Moelders wing reached the same total.
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It was not enough. The vaulted Ferdinand tank (a Porsche product) turned out to be a complete failure. Ninth Army’s attack bogged down on July 9, and two days later vastly superior Russian forces attacked the thinly manned German line in the Orel salient, north of Ninth Army. Greim immediately rushed all available forces to the aid of the Second Panzer Army in the endangered sector, but the area was too forested to allow for very good air support. Soon the Russians were driving on the Bryansk-Orel Railroad, the lifeline of Ninth Army. They broke through to Khotynets, where no German ground forces were stationed. No reserves were available, so Greim committed the 1st Air Division, which had been reinforced by antitank squadrons from VIII Air Corps. The air-ground battle lasted from morning to nightfall. Hundreds of Soviet tanks were destroyed in low-level attacks, and the Red spearheads were all but wiped out. “For the first time in military history,” Model signaled, “the Luftwaffe has succeeded, without support by ground forces, in annihilating a tank brigade which had broken through.”
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The offensive was not over, however, for Stalin poured eighty-two infantry divisions, fourteen tank corps, twelve artillery divisions, and a number of independent tank brigades into the Orel attacks alone. The 12th Flak Division had to be committed to the front lines in an antitank role, leaving German troop concentrations and installations vulnerable to air attack. Soviet fighters took advantage of the situation, roaming Army Group Center’s rear at will, blasting supply depots, railroads, and other facilities.
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During the Battle of Orel, 1st Air Division’s aircraft averaged five to six missions per day. The division flew 37,421 sorties and shot down 1,733 Russian aircraft, against a loss of only sixty-four German planes. It destroyed or put out of action more than 1,100 Soviet tanks and 1,300 trucks and dropped more than 20,000 tons of bombs on Russian targets. The 12th Flak Division also shot down 383 Russian aircraft and destroyed 229 Soviet tanks and inflicted heavy losses on advancing infantry units.
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The Communists, however, took full advantage of their vast manpower reserves and threw unit after unit into the fighting. It was a battle of attrition, and in the end Germany could not win. On the evening of July 31, Second Panzer and Ninth armies began to withdraw to the Hagen position, immediately east of Bryansk. First Air Division covered their rear guards. It was the beginning of a retreat that would continue, with a few interruptions, all the way to Berlin.

Orel, Bryansk, the Desna River, Vyazma, Orsha, the Dnieper, the Sozh, Smolensk, Roslavl. All were names of the bloody battles in Army Group Center’s westerly retreat. Sixth Air Fleet fought in every battle, rushing from danger point to danger point, crisis to crisis, growing progressively weaker, just like the rest of the Luftwaffe on the eastern front. It had invaded Russia with almost three thousand aircraft, but now strong forces were needed in the West and over the skies of the Fatherland. By early 1944, the Eastern air fleets could muster only 2,000 aircraft, and many of these were obsolete—some were even biplanes. The Eastern fleet’s striking power was less than half of what it had been in 1941 and would decline even more rapidly thereafter.
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Meanwhile, Russia had 8,800 military aircraft on the front, excluding reserves, and their strength was growing.
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The veteran German fighter wings still continued to perform brilliantly. The 51st Fighter Wing ran its total number of victories to 8,000 on May 1, 1944, a feat that was duplicated by the 54th Fighter Wing “Gruenherz” on August 15. Two weeks later the pilots of JG 52 brought down their 10,000th enemy airplane—an astronomical figure! Nevertheless they were struggling against the tide, fighting the industrial might of most of the world. By the fall of 1944, the Luftwaffe on the eastern front was outnumbered 20 to 1.
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Clearly the writing was on the wall.

Despite the enemy’s technical and material superiority, which had existed as early as 1941, the Luftwaffe had maintained aerial superiority on some sectors and air parity on the others, largely due to the undeniable skill of its pilots. This situation, too, was changing, as had been demonstrated over the Mediterranean during the Battle of the Tunisian Bridgehead. Although he would remain the superior of the Soviet pilot for some time to come, the average German pilot of 1943 was simply not as good an aviator as his 1939–41 counterpart, who was beating everyone in sight except the R.A.F. during the Battle of Britain—and even that had been a close run. Before we examine his last battles, we must answer the question: Why did the quality of the German pilot decline?

Richard Suchenwirth called training “the Step-Child of the Luftwaffe.”
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This was certainly the case, especially after Hans Jeschonnek became chief of the General Staff. Easily the most important of the chiefs, Jeschonnek neglected training to an incredible degree. Indeed, he virtually renounced any claim to influence in this most vital area by making the pilot schools directly subordinate to the air fleet commanders. When the Luftwaffe was committed to war two and a half years ahead of schedule, Jeschonnek said: “We must conduct a short war: everything must therefore be thrown into action at the outset.”
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Jeschonnek blindly believed Hitler’s assurances that it would be a short war, and he committed everything he had from the first day—even the instructor pilots. He knew that the Luftwaffe lacked both the men and material to fight a long war, so he sacrificed the long-term plans for development of the Luftwaffe for short-term gains, in effect mortgaging the future of the air force on the hope of a quick victory. When this victory did not materialize, the Luftwaffe found itself in deep, deep trouble.

The Office of the Chief of Training was created in February 1939. Its chief, Lt. Gen. Bernard Kuehl, realized that there were not enough pilot training schools to meet the requirements for the activation of new frontline units and for personnel replacements in the event of war. At that time Germany had only three bomber schools, one naval aviation school, and one school for fighter pilots. It took a full year to train a good fighter pilot and even longer to train bomber crews. Kuehl immediately requested authorization to establish new pilot training schools, but Jeschonnek turned down his request, stating that all resources were to be used for the activation of new frontline units.

The Training Office did not get control of the schools until after the Polish campaign, when Jeschonnek was finally convinced that the air fleet commanders had been too free in raiding the training establishments for the frontline units. Jeschonnek himself, however, seemed to view the training branch as some sort of reservoir of reserve pilots, to be dipped into whenever a crisis arose. He requisitioned Ju-52s and their instructor pilots for the Norwegian campaign, for the attack on Holland, and for the Balkans campaign, where they suffered tremendous losses. He raided the Training Command for Ju-52 and He-111 airplanes and crews to resupply Kholm and Demyansk in Russia in the winter of 1941–42. During the Stalingrad campaign he (and Goering) went to the well once too often and dealt the training arm a blow from which it never recovered.

In 1940, Lt. Col. Paul Deichmann, the chief of staff of the Training Office, came up with a plan to solve the problem, as far as the air transport branch was concerned.

Deichmann was an interesting man and a brilliant one. Very far sighted—one might say extremely so—he was the champion of the four-engine bomber after General Wever’s death and became the champion of the training schools after that. Deichmann saw the necessity of creating a well-balanced, strategic air force more clearly than anyone on the General Staff of the Luftwaffe (except Wever), and he also argued against the Ju-88 when everyone else was calling it the “Wonder Bomber.” He always seemed to be right. His problem was that he could never get anyone in authority to pay attention to his ideas.

Deichmann was born in Fulda, in the province of Hesse, on August 27, 1898. Educated at the prestigious Gross-Lichterfelde Cadet Academy (the closest thing Germany had to West Point), he was commissioned second lieutenant in the infantry in 1916 and led a platoon in the trenches on the western front. He became an air observer in 1917 and served in France and in the Baltic States until 1919, when he joined the Reichswehr. Deichmann transferred to the Air Ministry as a technical advisor in 1934 and remained on the Luftwaffe General Staff in Berlin until 1940, except for a part of 1937, when he commanded a bomber group at Erfurt.
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In 1940, just after the Norwegian campaign, he hit upon the idea of using old Ju-86s as trainers. This obsolete twin-engine aircraft had been used as a bomber in Poland but was then dropped from the armaments program without advanced warning to the German aircraft industry. Junkers, therefore, still had enough component parts on hand to make 1,000 airplanes. Furthermore, the Ju-86 had excellent flight characteristics and would make an excellent trainer. Deichmann drafted a plan to replace the Ju-52s taken from the training schools with Ju-86s. All that would be required was a small factory to assemble them. Although Milch approved the plan, Goering decided against it, apparently believing that the training schools would never again have to be raided for Ju-52s. He brushed aside Deichmann’s arguments that the future demands for the Ju-52 at the front would be “tremendous.”
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Shortly thereafter, the highly capable Deichmann left Berlin to become chief of staff of II Air Corps. Perhaps he was fed up with losing major arguments. In any event his subsequent career was distinguished. He succeeded Seidemann as chief of staff to Kesselring’s OB South in Italy (1942–43) and was commander of the 1st Air Division in Russia (May-November, 1943). Later he led I Air Corps in Russia, Hungary, and Austria (November, 1943–April, 1945). In the last days of the war he directed Luftwaffe Command 4 in Austria, and he surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war. At last report he was living in Hamburg, a retired general of flyers.
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