Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (55 page)

The report concluded that the rail network in the western region had been completely wrecked and that “the Reichsbahn authorities are seriously considering whether it is not useless to attempt further repair work.”
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On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Normandy resembled a strategic island. Rommel was completely unable to bring up his panzer units quickly enough to launch a counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the Allies, with more than 5,400 fighters and 3,500 bombers, absolutely dominated the airspace above the battle zone, destroying tanks, strongpoints, supply installations, and gun emplacements. To oppose them, Sperrle had only two operational day fighter wings—JG 2 “Richthofen” and JG 26 “Schlageter.”
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Sperrle’s units were only able to operate on the fringes of Eisenhower’s air umbrella. His operations against the Allied naval forces were equally devoid of success.

In the critical period from June 7 through 16, for example, the Allies lost just sixty-four naval vessels. The Luftwaffe accounted for only five of these. During the period June 6–August 31, 1944, the Allies landed 2,052,299 men, 438,471 vehicles, and 3,098,259 tons of supplies in Normandy. They were supported by the 4,101 aircraft of the British Bomber, Air Defense, and Coastal commands, the British Second Tactical Air Force, and the Eighth and Ninth U. S. air forces. Meanwhile, the poorly trained pilots of the 3rd Air Fleet and Air Fleet Reich lost 644 airplanes destroyed and 1,485 damaged in flight accidents not involving combat. In combat operations they lost 3,656 airplanes (2,127 of them by 3rd Air Fleet).
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Clearly, after five years of war, the Allies had finally achieved air superiority not only over the battlefield, but over the pilots of the Luftwaffe as well. In fact, in the latter part of June 1944, Goering met with Sperrle and promised him 800 fighter planes. Sperrle thought for a moment and then told the Reichsmarschall that he had not more than 500 fighter pilots available to fly them.

After failing to reinforce 3rd Air Fleet prior to the invasion-when Germany still had a small chance of success—Goering rushed twenty-three groups of fighters to the invasion sector after the landings were an accomplished fact. Units sent to Normandy by June 12 included III/JG 1; II/JG 2; II and III/JG 3; I and II/JG 5; II/JG 11; I and II/JG 27; II/JG 53; and I/JG 301. Most of these units were taken from home air defense, and all were ground to bits within weeks.
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The Luftwaffe thus weakened the air defense of the Reich by committing irreplaceable fighter units to a battle of attrition, without significantly affecting the outcome of the battle in the West. One fighter pilot bitterly commented that the fighter arm followed the last shell crater.

Two weeks after D-Day, II Fighter Corps was reporting “fighter operations now only conditionally possible. Effective reconnaissance and fighter operations entirely ruled out for the invasion area. Thirty Anglo-American airfields constructed and operational in the bridgehead.”
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About the same time, the operations officer of the 3rd Air Fleet reported a general enemy air superiority of 20 to 1, which increased to 40 to 1 during major operations.
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Baron Heinrich von Luettwitz, the commander of the 2nd Panzer Division, reported: “The Allies have total air supremacy. They bomb and shoot at anything that moves, even single vehicles and persons. Our territory is under constant observation . . . The feeling of being powerless against the enemy’s aircraft . . . has a paralyzing effect . . .”
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Because of the massive enemy air superiority, the Allies gradually ground Rommel’s divisions to bits. The Desert Fox himself was critically wounded by an enemy fighter-bomber on July 17. On July 25, 1,507 heavy bombers, 380 medium bombers, and 559 fighter bombers dropped more than 4,150 tons of bombs on the Panzer Lehr Division. Lt. Gen. Fritz Bayerlein reported 70 percent casualties, and virtually all of his tanks were destroyed.
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The next day American armor poured through the hole in the German lines. Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge (Rommel’s replacement) had positioned his reserves in the wrong place and reacted too slowly, and the Battle of Normandy was lost.

When the Anglo-Americans broke out of the Normandy bridgehead, most of the Luftwaffe ground service and signal units simply headed east as rapidly as they could. Hitler charged them with running away (with considerable justification) and held Sperrle responsible. This was the last straw. On August 19 he relieved Sperrle of his command and replaced him with Col. Gen. Otto Dessloch. A month later, on September 22, he downgraded 3rd Air Fleet and redesignated it Luftwaffe Command West.
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Sperrle was very much embittered after the fall of France and was no longer considered fit for important assignments. He was unemployed for the rest of the war. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, some sources, including Field Marshal Milch and General Speidel, charged that Sperrle was a scapegoat for Goering’s failures in the West.
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Field Marshal Rommel, however, expressed disappointment over the Luftwaffe in France as early as the end of 1943,
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and David Irving described Sperrle as “indolent and harmful.”
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Suchenwirth noted that in 1944 Sperrle was unaccustomed to the rigors of war and attributed at least part of his failure in France to that fact.
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Maj. Lionel F. Ellis, the Official British historian, summed it up well when he wrote of the Luftwaffe’s battle in Normandy:

Greatly outnumbered by the Allied air forces they had, perhaps, been as active as their strength and supremacy of Allied air forces allowed, but their resulting effort was of little account to the Allied armies. Their most effective operations were the dropping of mines in the shipping-infested waters of the assault area. The commander of the Third Air Fleet, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, had held that appointment during the whole of the German occupation of France, ‘living soft’ in Paris. He does not seem to have had any lively reaction when the Allies landed and none of his subordinates is distinguishable in the air fighting in Normandy. The war diaries of the army commands in the West have few references of the Luftwaffe that are not critical and they give no indication that Sperrle had any voice in shaping the conduct of operations.
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Field Marshal Sperrle was captured by the British on May l, 1945.
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He was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes, but on October 27, 1948, he was acquitted of all charges. Officially denazified June 9, 1949,
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he moved to Munich. Here he lived quietly (although bitter and depressed) until his death on April 2, 1953.
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He was buried in Munich on April 7.
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As the Luftwaffe’s position continued to deteriorate, General Korten was, predictably, in trouble with Hermann Goering. Their former close relationship had cooled by late 1943 as the Reichsmarschall lashed out at Korten, just as he had done with Jeschonnek. Korten privately confided to Milch that he planned to resign by August 1944, at the latest. On July 20 he attended a Fuehrer conference at Rastenburg. Also present was army colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the chief of staff of the Replacement Army, a leader in the anti-Hitler conspiracy. The one-armed, one-eyed count had a bomb in his briefcase. He set it to detonate and then left the room.

When the bomb exploded, General Korten was leaning over the table, pointing to a map. He was probably within four feet of the bomb when it went off. Hitler, the target of the assassination, was painfully but not seriously injured. Although initially reported as only slightly wounded, Korten was in fact very seriously injured.
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A wooden splinter from the table had lodged in his abdomen, and for five days he hung between life and death.
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He expired on July 25, 1944, only two days after his promotion to colonel general.
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Karl Bodenschatz, Goering’s liaison officer to Fuehrer Headquarters, was also seriously wounded in the legs by the blast.

Hitler proposed that Korten be succeeded by Col. Gen. Ritter von Greim, but Goering would not hear of it, so he appointed Lt. Gen. Werner Kreipe instead. The Reichsmarschall also took the opportunity to rid himself of Korten’s chief of operations, Maj. Gen. Karl Koller, whom he did not like, and replace him with Maj. Gen. Eckhardt Christian.
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Kreipe was another young officer who had risen rapidly. Born in Hanover in 1904, he was too young to serve in World War I. He enlisted in the 6th Prussian Artillery Regiment in 1922 and first came under fire in November 1923, when, as a young Nazi, he participated in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. Commissioned in 1925, he did his flight training in Bavaria from 1928 to 1930. He joined the Luftwaffe in 1934 as a captain and was assigned to the Command Office of RLM as a General Staff officer. Later he worked under Milch and accompanied him to France and Britain prior to the start of the war.

Promoted to major in 1937, Kreipe was commander of the 122d Reconnaissance Group when the war broke out. In the next five years he climbed to the rank of lieutenant general and was promoted to general of flyers on September 1, 1944, one month after he became the sixth chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff. In the meantime he served as commander of the 2d Bomber Wing in the French campaign of 1940 and in the early stages of the Battle of Britain (1940), was on Sperrle’s staff (1940), was chief of the Development Office at RLM (1940–41), and was Sperrle’s chief of operations from February to November, 1941. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1940, he went to Russia in November, 1941, as chief of staff of I Air Corps. He later served as chief of staff of Korten’s Luftwaffe Command Don before returning to Berlin as chief of training.
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Kreipe would probably have made an excellent chief of staff had he been left to his own devices. Hitler, however, was now interfering in the internal affairs of the Luftwaffe, as he had been doing with the army since 1938. He had not done this in the early years of the war—until Goering had proven himself incompetent. By 1944, however, Hitler was hamstringing the Luftwaffe. Stumpff, for example, complained that he could not move even a single AA gun without permission from Rastenburg. Kreipe tried to alleviate this situation. An enthusiastic supporter of the Me-262 jet fighter, Kreipe also tried to get Hitler to reverse himself on the issue of using the Me-262 as a fighter-bomber. The result was several heated arguments between the Fuehrer and the young chief of staff. By this point in the war, Hitler wanted only yes-men around him, and this the youthful Hanoverian definitely was not. On August 30, Kreipe noted in his diary: “In growing temper he [Hitler] made short work of me. Now I was stabbing him in the back as well! Irresponsible elements in the Luftwaffe like Milch and Galland talked me into it!”
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In mid-September, 12,000 civilians were killed in a half-an-hour raid that destroyed that heart of Darmstadt. As a result, Hitler considered replacing Goering with Col. Gen. Ritter Robert von Greim. He was so angry at the Luftwaffe that he banned General Kreipe from Fuehrer Headquarters, although how he managed to blame Kreipe for this disaster is anybody’s guess. Since Goering was now afraid to go near Hitler and only appeared at Rastenburg when summoned, and General Bodenschatz was still recovering from his wounds, a command vacuum existed between the Luftwaffe and the High Command. Only General Christian represented the air force at Fuehrer Headquarters.

The Hitler-Kreipe arguments climaxed on September 18, when the chief of staff was asked to submit his resignation.
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Oddly enough, Kreipe’s career did not end here. He remained at his post for several weeks, until a suitable replacement could be found. Then, on December 5, 1944, he became commandant of the Air War Academy in Berlin, which was responsible for training Luftwaffe General Staff officers. After the war he was employed by the West German Traffic Ministry.
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