Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (56 page)

The seventh and last chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe was General of Flyers Karl Koller, who replaced Kreipe on November 27. Goering’s first choice for the post had been Col. Gen. Kurt Pflugbeil, the commander of the 1st Air Fleet in Russia, but his reply to the offer had been uncompromising: he refused to accept the job under any circumstances.
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Perhaps Pflugbeil later regretted this decision. He surrendered his air fleet to the Russians in May 1945, and died in a Soviet prison camp ten years later. He never saw Germany again.

Karl Koller was born in Bavaria in 1898 and entered the army when World War I broke out. He was sixteen years old at the time. Nevertheless he became a pilot in 1917 and flew on the western front. Discharged in 1919, he joined the Bavarian State Police in 1920 and re mained there for sixteen years. He reentered the service as a major in the Luftwaffe in 1936, attended the Air War Academy, became operations officer of Luftwaffe Group 3 (later 3rd Air Fleet) in 1938, and was moved up to chief of staff of the 3d in 1941. After serving on the eastern front, he became chief of operations at OKL in 1943. Despite his solid but rather undistinguished record, Koller had been promoted rapidly: lieutenant colonel (1939), colonel (1941), major general (1943), and general of flyers (November 27, 1944). He bypassed the rank of lieutenant general altogether.
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The uninspiring Koller’s tenure as chief of the General Staff was undistinguished, but it is doubtful that even a brilliant, charismatic leader could have made much difference against the vast air armada that was leveling the German cities and grinding her depleted ground divisions into bits. The cities of the Reich were given a respite in April and early May, and to a lesser extent until after D-Day, for the Anglo-American air units were busy pulverizing the French transportation system and sealing off the Normandy battle-field. However, they still managed to concentrate against the German oil industry and, after D-Day, they resumed their raids on German cities on an unprecedented scale.

The destruction of the German oil industry began on May 12, 1944, when 935 heavy bombers of the Eighth U.S. Air Force, with massive British and American fighter support, bombed the German synthetic oil plants at Zwickau, Merseburg-Leuna, Bruex, Luetzkendorf, Bohlen, and others.
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In all, twenty synthetic oilworks were attacked. They had a total production capacity of 374,000 tons of fuel per month, including 175,000 tons of aviation fuel.
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Forty-six bombers and ten Allied fighters were shot down, but Luftwaffe fighter losses were almost as high, and all the oil plants were destroyed or severely damaged.
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On May 23, Albert Speer and his “crisis manager,” Hans Kehrl, met with Goering and Hitler. Calling the flak defenses ineffective, they set forth the dire consequences for the German war effort if effective fighter protection was not provided for the defense of the fuel industry. The Fuehrer and Reichsmarschall remained unconvinced. Within three weeks they stripped the Reich of the bulk of its fighter defense and sent it to Normandy, but the raids against the fuel industry continued. “The loss of the struggle for oil refineries was the ‘Stalingrad’ of the German war production,” Beck wrote later.
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By the end of May, German oil production had declined significantly. By September, not a single synthetic oil plant was in full operation. After that, production increased slightly, but Germany’s oil famine continued until the very end, seriously affecting and sometimes dictating ground operations, especially among panzer units. Things were equally bad in the air. Synthetic output of aviation fuel, which had been 175,000 tons per month in the spring, was down to 12,000 tons per month by September, 1944, and the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania had been captured by the Russians. The oil shortage caused what Franklin called the “virtual collapse” of the night fighter arm. The statistics bear out this comment: the night-flying British Bomber Command suffered 11 percent losses in June. By August this figure was down to 3.7 percent, and the following month it suffered an even smaller casualty rate. Allied bombing, however, intensified. From July through August, 1943, the Bomber Command and Eighth U.S. Air Force had dropped 44,500 tons of bombs. Over the same period in 1944, they dropped more than 200,000 tons, not including the considerable efforts of the Fifteenth U.S. Air Force.
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The situation became so bad that, on September 5, Hitler went into a tirade in which he enumerated the lies he had been told about production figures and aircraft performance year after year. He ended the outburst by announcing his decision to disband the Luftwaffe as a separate arm of the service. Only a private discussion with Goering changed his mind, and only then because the Reichsmarschall managed to provide new parachute regiments to plug the gap then existing between the Seventh Army and the North Sea.
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Goering himself only managed to keep his job because he was Hitler’s designated successor and the Fuehrer could never quite forget the dashing World War ace who had fallen beside him at the Feldherrnhalle more than twenty years before.

Because of Hitler’s increasingly hostile attitude, Goering took to imitating General Galland. When Hitler was mad at him (which was more often than not those days), he would appear at Fuehrer Headquarters for conferences he could not avoid dressed very simply, without decorations, and with a terrible-looking hat perched on his head.
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Hitler was, in fact, growing more and more publicly critical of Goering and expressing himself more and more rudely. “Goering!” he yelled at one conference, “Your Luftwaffe isn’t worth a damn! It doesn’t deserve to be an independent branch of the service any more. And that’s your fault! You’re lazy!” Tears of shame streamed down Goering’s cheeks, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
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As the enemy armies advanced on both the eastern and western fronts, a deep sense of gloom descended across Germany. “No longer was there any relief from the hardships of the overly strenuous work, the fear of the next bombing raid, the struggle to keep outworn clothing wearable . . .” Beck recorded.
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The cities were characterized by ruins and rubble, lice, and rats. The danger of strafing was now added to the peril of bombing, and the distances from the enemy air bases to the German cities were so short that raids were now frequently conducted in the early morning, at the lunch hour, and in the mid-afternoon. The enemy now had so many airplanes that they attacked any convenient target, including individual farmhouses and cattle in the fields. Meanwhile, Gen. of Fighter Forces Adolf Galland came up with a plan to turn the tables on the Allied bombers in one massive stroke.

Lt. Gen. Adolf Galland was the leading figure among the German fighter pilots in the second half of the war. Born in Westerholt, Westphalia, in 1912, he was the descendent of a family of Huguenots who fled France to escape religious persecution. This accounts for his French name. An early glider enthusiast, he enrolled in Alfred Keller’s German Air School (in reality a secret air force pilots’ training base) at Braunschweig in 1932. After crashing a plane and injuring an eye, he should have been washed out of the program for failing his flight physical. He memorized the eye chart, however, and passed every subsequent exam. He completed his advanced flight training in Grotaglia, Italy, and briefly served as a flight instructor for the secret Luftwaffe. Assigned to the 10th Infantry Regiment and the Dresden War Academy in 1934, he underwent officer training and was commissioned Leutnant on January l, 1935.

Second Lieutenant Galland did his fighter pilot’s training in 1935 and was posted to the Richthofen wing (later JG 2), where he served as pilot, training officer, and technical officer. Sent to Spain in May, 1937, he commanded 3/J/88—the close support squadron of the Condor Legion. Because this unit was equipped with obsolete He-51 biplanes, he scored no victories in the civil war. He was a squadron commander in II/LG 2 when the war broke out, and, as part of Richthofen’s division, flew Hs-123 ground attack aircraft in support of the panzer spearheads during the Polish campaign. He was promoted to captain on October 1, 1939.

Galland transferred to the 27th Fighter Wing in the winter of 1939–40 and, after scoring several victories in France, assumed command of III/JG 26 in June, 1940. He was promoted to major and awarded the Knights Cross on July 19, 1940. He was named commander of the 26th Fighter Wing on August 22, 1940.

Adolf Galland distinguished himself as a fighter pilot and a wing leader on the western front in 1940 and 1941. On May 1, 1941, he shot down his seventieth victim and was himself shot down. Picked up by a liaison airplane, he returned to his base, ate a hurried lunch, took off again, and was shot down again—twice in one day! This time he injured his ankle when he bailed out. He was picked up by French peasants and taken to a hospital.
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During his career, Adolf Galland shot down 104 airplanes, most of them British. he succeeded Moelders as general of fighter forces in November, 1941, and was only thirty years old at the time of his promotion to major general (November 11, 1942)—the youngest general in the Wehrmacht at the time.
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General Galland was a persistent advocate of heavier concentration on fighter production. The number of fighters as a percentage of all aircraft manufactured was 30.2 percent in 1941, virtually the same as 1939 (30.1 percent), when the war broke out. Gradually this figure increased, to 35.8 percent in 1942, 43.9 percent in 1943, 62.2 percent in 1944, and 65.4 percent in 1945.
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This was too slow for Galland, who believed in 1940 that more fighters should be produced. Galland also strongly advocated the use of jets as fighters, not fighter-bombers. Politically Galland allied himself with Erhard Milch, who believed as he did—a move hardly designed to ingratiate himself with Hermann Goering.

In the fall of 1944, Galland hit upon the idea of creating a huge fighter reserve of 2,000 aircraft under the command of I Fighter Corps. He planned to unleash them all in a surprise attack against the Allied bomber formations on a single day. Galland predicted that they could destroy at least 400 enemy bombers in one swoop and possibly destroy the morale of the Allied airmen and their leaders in the process. In September, 1944, he pulled the 4th, 76th, and 7th Fighter Wings back to the Reich for rebuilding and placed JG 1, 16, 11, and 17 in reserve. If combined with JG 3, 300, and 301 of Air Fleet Reich, this would give him ten fighter wings for the attack. At that time Luftwaffe Command West had only four fighter wings (JG 2, 26, 27, and 53) and there were only four operational wings on the entire eastern front (JGs 5, 51, 52, and 54).
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Galland’s plan was a desperate one, but so was Germany’s military situation in the latter part of 1944. Although he probably would not have broken the back of the Allied bomber offensive, Galland would almost certainly have succeeded in inflicting heavy casualties on the Allied air forces and perhaps made them more cautious about bombing the Third Reich. On November 12 he was ready and awaiting only a favorable opportunity to strike. He never got the chance. On November 20, Goering took his fighter reserves away from him. Leaving only JG 300 and 301 for the defense of the Reich, the Fat One committed the reserves to the support of the army, which was about to launch the Battle of the Bulge. As a result, the irreplaceable fighters were wasted against nondecisive ground targets. Hitler’s last offensive in the West began on December 16 and had shot its bolt by December 25. Casualties among the fighter squadrons were all out of proportion to the damage they inflicted. “The Luftwaffe received its death blow in the Ardennes,” Galland moaned.
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He was right. The war was lost.