Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (12 page)

Hanna was excluded from the plans for glider warfare, much to her chagrin. She had tried to offer her expertise to the new glider unit, but had been rebuffed. When it had initially looked as though the invasion of France would begin in the winter, Hanna had been testing landing skids for the gliders. She was sent to demonstrate the new skids to the glider unit and at last had an opportunity to speak with them. She also learned that the pilots were worried; they had not been allowed practice in the gliders, or to conduct a full-scale rehearsal of the invasion. Most vocal of those concerned was Otto Bräutigam, an expert glider pilot to whom Hanna took a shine: ‘[He] was the liveliest among us, fizzing with vitality, full of pranks and jokes, yet speaking plainly, almost harshly to the point and, with it all, a most able and courageous flyer.’ Bräutigam flew and survived the Eben Emael mission, but Hanna was not destined to enjoy this new friendship for long.

The success of Eben Emael had convinced the German Air Ministry that a similar stealth approach could be used in the planned invasion of Britain. However, in that case it would not just be a matter of transporting men, but vehicles, guns, even tanks. A glider that could carry such a load would need to be very big, so, appropriately it was given the name Gigant. The Gigant was a variant on the Messerschmitt Me 321 military glider with engines to assist take-off and flying. In October 1940 Junkers and Messerschmitt were both given just fourteen days to submit a new glider design. Messerschmitt was the only one to succeed after Junkers found problems obtaining the high-quality timber he needed for his design, along with problems with its stability.

The Gigant also had its problems: it was hard enough to get such a large glider airborne empty; loaded was almost impossible. A Junkers Ju 90 was originally used to tow the Gigant into the air, but it struggled to leave the runway. Messerschmitt knew he would have to alter the designs and ended up giving his Gigant liquid-fuelled rockets to assist take-off. When the lumbering machine finally reached flying height it then had to cast off its undercarriage, another task that was not always successful and could lead to disaster. Eventually a system of three twin-engined Me 110s in a formation known as a Troika-Schlepp
were used just to get the Gigant airborne. This added yet another complication: all four pilots had to work in harmony to launch the glider. Once the Gigant had fired its rockets to assist take-off there was no means of shutting them off. This could prove disastrous, if not deadly, if an engine on the planes failed or a rocket didn’t fire. The Gigant could end up skewing and sliding across the runway, potentially dragging the tow-planes into a collision. On the first trial of the Troika-Schlepp launch, an accident was only narrowly avoided when the main tow attachment broke.

Hanna was not initially involved in testing the Gigant, but she badly wanted to try out these enormous gliders. Karl Franke eventually agreed to take her up in one. He stood in the empty space where troops and machinery would be stored while Hanna wrestled with the controls. ‘It was so primitively built that it was so difficult to fly! You needed so much strength and you see, what is too hard for me in a five minutes flight that is too hard for a strong man in a one hour flight,’ Hanna later explained. ‘So I tried with this argument to convince Udet to stop it, but he didn’t believe me because Messerschmitt said “she is too small, a little girl, not the strong men we have fighting, so don’t believe her.”’

On only her second test flight in a Gigant, Hanna’s fears came true when she had problems while being towed by the Troika-Schlepp:

The left bomber, even while still just above the ground went out [sideways] and he had to release the [tow] cable, and two couldn’t do it alone. We had six rockets on the wing which when they once were blowing you could not stop them, so when you lost one towing bomber, also the right bomber was lost. I was hanging on one bomber that was like a little fly compared with my giant! And all six rockets were burning, I knew I couldn’t stop it. I could get 150ft high then the rockets were finished after three or four minutes and I knew the single tow bomber had to release me otherwise he would [crash]. So I could just as he released me [glide], before I touched the ground it was [nose pointing down], but I had the good luck as I touched the ground I bounced [and the nose came up]. One [of those in the Gigant] had broken his knees, another had nerve shock, but I was well and only deeply thankful no one was killed [
sic
].

That was enough for Hanna: ‘I finished because I was so much against it because it was too big.’

There was another reason for her reticence about the Gigant. Otto Bräutigam had also been testing the giant glider, though he was unwilling to share the experience with Hanna. He took off twice before she could join him in the glider. On the second occasion Hanna was so furious she burst into tears, but within moments she was grateful for being grounded. Bräutigam’s Gigant flew into a thunderstorm. It crashed and both Bräutigam and his co-pilot were killed. In Hanna’s
The Sky My Kingdom
, her memoirs of her early days of flying, she makes no mention of Otto’s painful and untimely death. In fact, the Gigant episode is glossed over, like so much else of her personal history and the experiences of her country, yet the accident had a marked impact on her.

As a glider the Gigant was unfeasible. Realising this, Messerschmitt redesigned it with six set engines and a fixed multi-wheeled undercarriage, making it the largest service transport plane in existence. Hanna was happier with the redesign: ‘This was very simple to fly, you see the engine did it all.’ Few in the Luftwaffe agreed with her. The Gigant was easy prey for Allied planes and many were shot down before they reached their destination.

The urgency of war was sparking more and more bizarre designs and propositions. Hanna was next called upon to test a flying petrol tanker. The idea was that this could be towed behind the parent plane as a glider and used for refuelling in the air. To work successfully, the tanker needed to be inherently stabe so that it would level itself off after take-off and not hinder its parent plane. The prototype, therefore, would need to be piloted so that notes could be taken on its behaviour in the air and what improvements were needed. Naturally Hanna was suited to this task as she was small and could fit inside the compact tanker with the addition of flying controls. She hated every minute of the flights. In order to ascertain how well the tanker flew she had to lock off her controls during take-off and wait to see what happened. She had to let the tanker get into trouble to identify any problems that needed to be overcome. Very often the tanker flipped over completely and Hanna, helpless inside, fought back waves of violent airsickness and a dreadful sense of fear. Having only just returned from the Gigant experiments, this was hardly surprising. Very soon it became plain that the tanker was impracticable, there was no way to stabilise it and it interfered too much with the flight of the parent plane. Hanna was greatly relieved when the tests were over.

Next she was involved in tests to find a way to land small observation planes on warships, using the smallest deck space possible. Someone had had the idea of stretching several ropes around 100ft in length across the deck at an angle. One end of each rope was attached to the deck, the other to a 20ft-high wooden scaffold, forming a primitive cradle for the plane to land in. Hanna looked at this uneasily; the idea was that the wings would rest on the outer ropes and the fuselage and would slip into the 3ft space between the lower ropes. Each rope was fitted with braking devices to assist the landing in the limited space available. Yet again, precision on the pilot’s part was everything. There were many things that could go wrong. The ropes might shear the wings, so the latter were fitted with a steel tube on the underside. The plane might bounce and spring out when it hit the ropes, so a device was made that caused the ropes on either side of the fuselage to spring out into a rigid channel, fixing the plane on a straight course.

Hanna practised on a separate airfield before attempting the real landing. Very soon she realised there was a problem: from the air it was almost impossible to make out the placing or angle of the ropes, so eventually she had several small fir trees placed between the ropes to create depth. Hanna was still worried and decided to make these tests a rare occasion for wearing a crash helmet. In those early days of flight, test pilots often flew without any form of protection – it was seen as a mark of under-confidence or even cowardice to want a crash helmet, though a parachute was normally carried. Like her contemporaries, Hanna never usually bothered with a helmet, but on her very first test of the landing cradle she was glad she had changed her mind. Though her landing was perfect, at the last moment the plane was buffeted by a strong wind. Still going at some speed, the plane twisted and plunged between two of the ropes. Hanna ducked instinctively, but it was the crash helmet that saved her from worse injuries by deflecting the rope. Hannah always insisted in her dramatic way that it had spared her from being decapitated by the rope. In the second test Hanna once more landed perfectly. This time no wind buffeted her, but even with the braking blocks on the rope she seemed to speed towards the 20ft scaffold far too fast. For an awful moment Hanna thought she would crash, but, remarkably, with a few yards to go, the glider stopped. The third test was the worst. A new type of braking system had been introduced after the near failure of the second test, but it might as well not have been. This time, when Hanna landed, she didn’t stop at all and the scaffold loomed alarmingly. There was no doubt she would hit it. Hanna ducked her head, closed her eyes and could only thank God that somehow her glider’s tail became caught in the scaffolding, preventing a nosedive to the ground. She hung over the edge, the fuselage seemingly poised in mid-flight, as worried onlookers ran to get a fire-ladder so she could climb down. That was the end of landing on ropes.

Next came an experiment in cutting balloon cables. Barrage balloons were a nightmare for the Luftwaffe when making raids over Britain. The cables were often invisible when flying fast, and certainly at night, so planes flew into them, usually resulting in a wing being sheared off, if not worse, and the downing of the plane. Hans Jacobs had come up with the idea of a fender that could be fixed to the front wings of any plane to protect them by diverting the cable and causing it to run into a cutting device at the tip of the wing. The first version looked incredibly unwieldy, like a box section fixed to the front. Naturally, Hanna was sent in to test its capabilities.

Starting with steel cables 2.7mm in diameter, before moving on to cables of 8.9mm, Hanna had the taxing task of flying directly at mock-up barrage balloons and hoping that Jacobs’ designs would stand up to the assault. Her aircraft was equipped with sensitive equipment to measure the force of impact as Hanna flew into the cable to help improve the fender. In the initial test there was no knowing if Jacobs’ fender would provide adequate protection to the plane’s airscrew. If it did not, then there was a real risk that the airscrew would be shattered and broken fragments would be launched backwards into the cockpit – and, of course, into the pilot. Anticipating the worst, Hanna had a second pilot’s seat with duplicate controls set into the rear gun-turret of her test plane (a Dornier 17 bomber), near to the escape hatch. Though the plane could not take off or land using the duplicate controls, they could be used to fly in the air, thus lessening the chance of Hanna being injured.

Hanna flew with a fitter who could act as co-pilot when she made the necessary change from front to back pilot seat. The fitter would then ready their parachutes and sit by the escape hatch. In the event of a disaster, Hanna was hopeful both of them would be able to jump out and parachute to the ground. There were some tests she would have to conduct at low altitude, too low to enable anyone to bail out. On those occasions, she informed the relieved fitter, she would fly alone.

With all precautions in place, Hanna took to the air. The designers had fake balloons specially built for Hanna to run the tests, and one now hovered innocently over the Rechlin test fields. Hanna flew high and looked down on it. At a certain angle the cable would flash silver in the sunlight and she caught a glimpse of it. Hanna dived to the level of the cable, but now it vanished from her sight, invisible against the blue sky – this was what made barrage balloons so deadly to Luftwaffe pilots. Hanna circled up again, caught the flash of silver and memorised its position. Then she flew down once more. Using guesswork as much as anything, she aimed at the cable and flew headlong into it. There was a jerk as the cable struck the fender. Hanna and the fitter braced for the shards of plane they were expecting to tear through the cabin. There was nothing. The Dornier flew on as if nothing had happened. ‘Next time they need to put something on that cable so I can see it better,’ Hanna muttered to herself as they headed in to land. Next time they did: long strings of coloured bunting set at intervals of 100ft. Hanna could fly up and fix on a spot between two strips of bunting, then zoom down, level herself with the same spot and fly forward. Over and over she aimed at the balloon cables and over and over she hit them and returned the data to Jacobs and his team.

Initial results were not conclusive. The fender needed tweaking as each new set of data came in. But for Hanna the constant retests did not feel like a chore, not when she knew that every time she took her Dornier into that cable she was coming closer to saving the lives of other pilots: ‘For every test I flew brought us a step nearer to overcoming some of those perils which pilots and aircrews had daily to face in operations against the enemy. Such was my enthusiasm, I was hardly aware that for days I had not been feeling well.’

Hanna brushed aside the headaches that had begun to plague her. She ignored the fever that had her burning one moment and shivering the next. The tests were reaching their conclusion; all that remained was to fly a Dornier fitted with a fender into the thickest cable available and see if it could withstand the impact. Hanna was determined to be a part of that test, but her body had other ideas. One morning she was shivering worse than ever when she noted a faint rash on her skin. As much as she wanted to fly, Hanna could not ignore this new symptom – she had scarlet fever. Scarlet fever, a bacterial infection spread through the air, was a known killer in the early twentieth century. The development of antibiotics would turn it into a minor illness, easily treated, but for Hanna it was going to leave lasting effects. Penicillin had been discovered in 1929, in the 1940s it was slowly coming into use, but that very much depended on the type of doctor one saw. Progressive doctors risked these new antibiotics, old-fashioned ones stuck to their tried and tested methods. Besides, penicillin was virtually unheard of in Germany and impossible to obtain. Hanna Reitsch found herself in the isolation wing of Virchow Hospital, with the windows blacked out, left to lie in bed for hours upon hours and wonder what was to come. The rash had spread to Hanna’s eyes; before long she was suffering from common complications of the disease: rheumatic fever and heart problems. Hanna lay on her bed and wondered what was to become of her.