Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (49 page)

Goering and Jeschonnek did not raid the training establishment merely to obtain transports and transport instructor pilots—they took fighter and dive-bomber instructors as well. Jeschonnek was especially guilty, as he gradually changed the ratio of combat aircraft to trainers, transports, and reconnaissance aircraft. When the war broke out, the ratio was 57 to 43. By 1942 it was 75 to 25, and in 1944 it reached 88 to 12.
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The training establishments simply no longer had the instructors or the aircraft to do their jobs properly. By 1944, British fighter pilots were receiving 360 hours of flight training before being sent to the combat units. American fighter pilot trainees were receiving forty hours more than that. New Luftwaffe fighter pilots were being sent to the
Gruppen
with only 160 hours of flight time.
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Then they were committed to combat in obsolete aircraft, facing American and British pilots with more than twice their experience, flying modern aircraft. The results were predictable: the Luftwaffe began to suffer higher combat losses and more accidents, especially upon landing. The quality of the new Luftwaffe pilot continued to deteriorate throughout the rest of the war.

Deteriorating, also, was the Luftwaffe’s military domination over the skies of the Reich itself. In January, 1943, the United States Army Air Force
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made its first major bombing raid over the Reich. Its target was the U-boat base of Wilhelmshaven. The raid was partially successful, and the Eighth U.S. Air Force lost only three of the ninety-one aircraft participating in the daylight attack.
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Although unimportant in itself, the Wilhelmshaven raid boded ill for the future, because the Americans were pouring the bulk of their industrial might against Germany. This attack also set a precedent that would remain almost uninterrupted until the end of the war: the Americans would engage in precision daytime bombing, while the British concentrated on nighttime raids against area targets. Even though this strategy evolved by accident, the strategy of nighttime area bombing and daytime precision bombing was to prove a devastating combination.

The R.A.F. resumed its nocturnal activities in January and February, 1943, with raids against Cologne and Nuremberg. The attacks did more damage to the surrounding countryside than to the cities themselves. In some places the civilian populations gathered in crowds and danced while they watched the fireworks displays provided by the air raids, but this was soon to change.
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Gradually the R.A.F. raids increased in number, accuracy, and severity. On March 2, 1943, Bomber Command dropped 600 tons of bombs on Berlin, killing 700 civilians and leaving 35,000 homeless. Hitler was furious. He wanted to know what Goering was going to do in response to these terror tactics, but Goering was not available for an answer: he had scurried off to Rome in some haste—on a vacation.
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A mark of Goering’s declining power was reflected in what happened to Rosette Korwan and her husband. Rosette, a Jewish actress, had been a close friend of Emmy Goering since they worked together at the Wiemar National Theater. After the Nazis banned Jewish performers, Rosette had lived on a small monthly stipend from Emmy. She passed up the opportunity to escape Nazi Germany, however, in order to be with her lover, whom she later married. In March 1943 he got into an altercation with an SS man, who arrested him. At Gestapo headquarters the SS discovered he was Jewish, but was not wearing his yellow star—a major criminal offense in the Third Reich. Rose telephoned Emmy, pleading with her to intercede on her husband’s behalf. Alarmed, Emmy persuaded Hermann to intervene once more. Goering spoke to Heinrich Himmler about the couple. Although he refused to release Herr Korwan, the SS chief granted Rose’s request to join her husband and promised to look after them. They would be sent to a “nice” camp, he said, and would be furnished with a private room and a servant to clean it for them. Instead, Himmler sent them directly to the gas chambers. He would never have dared to do such a thing to Frau Goering’s friends at the height of the Reichsmarschall’s power.
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Meanwhile, the bombing continued. The night of March 5–6 saw the beginning of what the British later called the Battle of the Ruhr. The Luftwaffe met the challenge with an assortment of technologically obsolete aircraft which had all been designed before the war. They were also short on trained pilots and air crewmen, while many of their instructors lay dead in the snows of Russia. Jeschonnek’s short-sighted policies were now paying monstrous dividends. The first Anglo-American attack struck Essen with 442 heavy bombers. One hundred sixty acres of the city were devastated, and three-quarters of the buildings on another 450 acres were destroyed or seriously damaged by the bombs or the fires which they caused. Essen would be attacked four more times during the Battle of the Ruhr.
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Although the Allies concentrated against the Ruhr in March 1943, they did not limit their attentions to Germany’s major industrial district. True, they blasted Essen, Duisburg, Duesseldorf, Geisenkirchen, Wuppertal, Dortmund, and Bochum, but they also attacked Berlin, Aachen, Stettin, Pilsen, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg in strength. Hamburg was subjected to its first heavy bombing that month, while Nuremberg was set ablaze by 800 tons of bombs on the eighth. The next day Munich was heavily raided, and two days later Stuttgart was attacked. That day Hitler ordered Goering home from Rome. His presence did little good. On the night of March 15 Essen was hit again. This time the vital Krupp steelworks and armaments center was heavily damaged.

The raids continued until the thirtieth, when the Luftwaffe finally hand ed the R.A.F. a significant defeat. Seven hundred British bombers set out for Nuremberg that night. The German night fighters under General Kamm huber did not engage them until their fighter escorts, at the limit of their fuel range, turned back for home. The German fighters then attacked the British formations and shot down ninety-five bombers. Another dozen were so badly shot up that they later crashed or crash-landed in England. These heavy losses forced the British Bomber Command to temporarily suspend their attacks, but not for long. During the Battle of the Ruhr, Bomber Command had flown 18,506 sorties and lost 872 aircraft. Another 2,126 had been damaged, for a total casualty ratio of more than 16 percent. Nevertheless, British production had proceeded at such a pace that the R.A.F. had almost 200 more bombers at the end of the battle than it had when it began.
⁷⁶

The temporary halt of massive British bombing did not stop them from launching minor raids, especially with their Mosquito bomber. A wooden-framed aircraft, it was faster than any German fighter and at least equally as maneuverable. It was employed in several roles but was most effective as a nuisance bomber. The Mosquitoes robbed the already tired German worker of his rest and served as a constant reminder that the enemy might strike anytime, anywhere. This fact would soon have its effect on German civilian morale.

U.S. precision bombing continued, mainly on the fringe of German airspace. On April 4 they killed more than 200 Parisians in an attack on the Renault factory and more than 200 Italians in an attack on Naples. The next day they struck the port city of Antwerp and killed more than 2,000 Belgian civilians. The British were also back in action, bombing Essen again. Through out May there were violent attacks on the Ruhr. The R.A.F. dropped another 1,500 tons of bombs on Duisburg, Dortmund, and other cities, while a special squadron blew up two dams supplying much of the water to the Ruhr. Several R.A.F. Mosquitoes carried out a daylight raid on the Zeiss optical factory at Jena, in the center of the Third Reich, without suffering a single casualty.
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The attacks intensified in the last week of May. Dortmund took another 2,000 tons of bombs on the twenty-third, and Duesseldorf was hit by about the same force on the twenty-fifth. Two days later Wuppertal was attacked. Some 2,450 civilians were killed and about 118,000 left homeless in fifteen minutes of stark terror. On June 11 another 2,000 tons of bombs fell on Duesseldorf and another 100,000 people were left homeless. Fifteen hundred tons of bombs were dropped on Bochum the next day, and Oberhausen was severely bombed the day after that. In the third week of June, the R.A.F. deposited 2,000 tons of bombs on Krefeld, 1,640 tons on Muelheim and Oberhausen, 1,660 tons on Wuppertal, and 1,300 tons on Gelsenkirchen. In the two attacks on Wuppertal alone, 8,000 civilians were killed. And still the raids continued.
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Cologne was raided on the night of June 28-29. Five hundred forty R.A.F. planes dropped 1,614 tons of bombs, killing 3,460 people and leaving 400,000 homeless in sixty terrifying minutes.
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Hitler ordered the fighter defense of the Reich increased in early July, 1943. The veteran 3rd Fighter Wing “Udet” (under Col. Wolf-Dietrich Wilcke) was recalled from the Russian front, II/JG 27 was transferred from Italy to Weisbaden, and II/JG 51 “Moelders” was moved from Sardinia to Germany to defend the Munich area.
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Other
Gruppen
would follow. By autumn there were five fighter divisions in Germany: the 1st under Doering defended Berlin and central Germany, the 2rd (Lt. Gen. Walter Schwab-erdissen) headquartered at Stada and defended the German Bight on the North Sea coast, while Werner Junck’s 3rd fought over Holland and the Ruhr. The understrength 7th and 8th were responsible for defending southern and eastern Germany, respectively.
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The 4th and 5th Fighter Divisions were assigned to Sperrle’s 3rd Air Fleet for the defense of occupied Europe. Goering also strengthened the Reich’s flak defenses. By early 1944, there were no fewer than twelve flak divisions guarding German and associated airspace, as opposed to the equivalent of five in late 1942. Table
15
shows the flak arm’s order of battle in early 1944. Note that only eight of Germany’s twenty extant flak divisions were at the front, while 60 percent guarded Nazi airspace. It was a terrible drain on the front.

TABLE 15: ORDER OF BATTLE OF THE FLAK ARM BY DIVISION. EARLY 1944
Flak Division	Area of Responsibility
1st	Berlin
2nd (Mtz)	Russian Front
3rd	Hamburg
4th	Duesseldorf
5th	Southeastern Europe
6th (Mtz)	Russian Front
7th	Cologne
8th	Bremen
9th	Russian Front
10th (Mtz)	Russian Front
11th (Mtz)	Southern France
12th (Mtz)	Russian Front
13th	France (around Caen)
14th	Leipzig
15th (Mtz)	Russian Front
16th	France (around Lille)
17th (Mtz)	Russian Front
18th (Mtz)	Russian Front
21st	Southwestern Germany
22nd	Western Germany