Fighter, p.4
Fighter, page 4
In 1940 the victories in the west gave the 47-year-old Göring new power, and new tastes of luxury. He went shopping for diamonds in Amsterdam, and took a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Göring liked Paris so much that he decided to move into a fine house on the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. That this was the British Embassy – now unoccupied except for one caretaker – made it no less attractive.
Göring took the German ambassador with him to inspect the property but when they explained the purpose of their visit, the custodian said, ‘Over my dead body, your Excellency’, and closed the door in their faces.
As far back as 1933, Hitler had authorised Göring to start a national art collection which would remain in Göring’s hands for his lifetime but then become a public collection. The conquests of 1940, and the way in which the European currencies were all pegged artificially lower than the German mark, gave new impetus to this collection. Many art treasures were simply seized: ‘ownerless’ Jewish collections and ‘enemy possessions’ were taken into new custody. To obtain paintings from unconquered countries, Göring simply swapped his surplus. A dealer in Lucerne, Switzerland, received 25 French Impressionist paintings in exchange for 5 Cranachs and 2 German Primitives.
The regal splendour of Göring’s life-style was completed by his train. Code-named ‘Asia’, its vanguard was a pilot train which accommodated the staff – civilian and military – in comfort that extended to bathing facilities. There were also low-loaders for cars, and freight wagons for Göring’s shopping.
The train in which Göring travelled, and sometimes lived, was specially weighted to provide a smooth ride. This luxury meant two of Germany’s heaviest locomotives were needed to move it. One coach was designed as bedrooms for himself and his wife, and a study. Another coach was a modern cinema. A third was a command post with a map room. A fourth was a dining car.
There were also carriages for his senior commanders and for guests, some of whom (Milch, for example) had a whole carriage to themselves. At front and back, there were special wagons with anti-aircraft guns and crews, although whenever possible the train was halted near tunnels as protection against air attack.
In the spring of 1940 Göring, who liked to be called ‘the Iron Man’, ordered his train west to Beauvais in France, a suitable place to command his Luftwaffe for the attack upon England. Few doubted that Der Eiserner was about to lead his Luftwaffe to a unique military victory. To do it would be nothing less than a personal triumph.
The Rise of the New German Air Force
In November 1918, a defeated Germany was forbidden the use of military aviation. Since there was at that time virtually no other sort of aviation, about a hundred large companies were without work.
AEG (manufacturer of the G.IV twin-engined bomber) had already planned for such a contingency. As early as 1917, they had formed Deutsche Luftreederei, an airline which would use the aircraft they built. So within three months of the war’s end, the world’s first civil aeroplane airline* connected Berlin with Leipzig, Weimar and Hamburg.
Professor Hugo Junkers, another German aircraft manufacturer, was just as quick to adapt to the changing times. On the very morning that the Armistice was signed, he had held a senior staff conference to discuss the changeover to manufacturing civil aircraft. By 25 June 1919 – three days before the signing of the Versailles Treaty – the outstanding Junkers F-13 was test flown. And while the other transports in use were cumbersome old wood-and-fabric biplanes, Junkers’s new machine was an all-metal cantilever monoplane, and such a breakthrough in design that sales were made in spite of the thousands of war surplus aircraft that were available at give-away prices. It was a period when many wartime flyers formed one-man airlines. But the manufacturers were in the most advantageous position to prosper, and Junkers had shares in several airlines.
Professor Hugo Junkers came from an old Rhineland family. He was a scientist, a democrat and a pacifist. He was also a genius. While working on gas-stove design he became interested in the efficiency of layered metal plates for heat transfer. He built himself a wind tunnel to study the effect of heated gases on various shapes, and ended up as the most important pioneer of metal aircraft construction.
By 1918, as the First World War ended, Hugo Junkers was already 60 years old. He was a white-haired old man with a large forehead and clear blue eyes. He had a large family but was ready to ‘adopt’ brilliant newcomers.
The most successful of Junkers’s protégés was a small, rather pop-eyed man named Erhard Milch. No account of the Luftwaffe, its victories or its failures, would be complete without devoting some words to this strange personality.
Erhard Milch did not create the Luftwaffe (that was the role of General Hans von Seeckt and dated from his memo of 1923), but Milch wet-nursed the infant air force, and dominated it right up to the end.
Milch was born in March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, where Milch senior was an apothecary of the Imperial German Navy. ‘Loyalty to the Kaiser and loyalty to my country were the only political doctrines I received either as an officer or earlier in my parents’ home,’ he told the judge at Nuremberg at his war-crimes trial.
But the dominant influence upon Milch’s life was a secret that troubled him throughout it. So much so that when, near the end of his life, a biographer discovered the truth, Milch suppressed it still. The facts are simple, but, even in this permissive age, bizarre.
Klara, who was to become Milch’s mother, fell in love with her uncle. Such a marriage was forbidden not only by her parents but by Church law too. Eventually she did her parents’ bidding and married another man – Anton Milch – but did so on the strict understanding that he would not father her children. It was a decision endorsed by the discovery that his mother was in an asylum, and incurably insane. And so she agreed to the arranged marriage on condition that her uncle – the man she truly loved – would be the father of her future children. Erhard Milch grew up to know the wealthy man who visited them as ‘uncle’, not realising that the visitor was his father.
So carefully did his parents guard their secret that it was not until 1933 that the by then middle-aged Milch discovered the truth behind the mysteries that had haunted his youth. And this was the result of an investigation started by an informer who said that Milch’s father was Jewish. It was an accusation calculated to get him removed from the key job he had in the Nazi regime.
The rumours said that because Anton Milch was Jewish, his mother had invented a story about Erhard’s illegitimate birth in order to get Erhard classified as ‘Aryan’. The rumours continued throughout the war and after it. They were fomented by Milch’s evasive replies at the post-war Nuremberg trials. Milch allowed these stories to circulate all his life, for the only way that he could refute them was by revealing a secret that he was determined to take to his grave.
‘I’ll decide who is Jewish and who is not Jewish,’ Göring told several men who came to him with stories of Milch’s birth. But such replies only convinced the accusers that Göring was a part of the cover-up.
But Göring knew all the facts of Milch’s birth. He had in fact been behind the Gestapo’s investigation of the mystery. It is difficult not to wonder what Göring himself made of the curious fact that his right-hand man had a secret about his mother that was even darker than Göring’s own.
Milch was an observer with the German Army Air Service in the First World War. His organisational abilities gave him command of a fighter squadron in spite of the fact that he could not fly an aeroplane! So it was no surprise that Milch proved to be such an able employee in the Junkers organisation. And yet his next change of job took him to the very top levels of commerce. When the German government bullied and cajoled thirty-eight separate airlines into becoming just one subsidised state monopoly, Milch was selected to be one of its bosses. This choice remained ‘inexplicable’ even to Milch: he still couldn’t pilot a plane, had very little business experience and no technical knowledge of aviation or manufacturing.
But Milch learned very quickly. Soon he was paying Hermann Göring – by now an influential Nazi Reichstag deputy – a regular ‘consultancy fee’, and his private papers later revealed the extent to which he was already compiling files of damaging material about his rivals and superiors.
By 1929 Milch was the chief executive of Lufthansa and a secret member of the Nazi Party. His enemies said that his membership was kept secret so that when he falsified Lufthansa accounts (so that the Nazi Party never paid for the aircraft chartered from Lufthansa) no suspicion would attach to him. In 1932 alone, Hitler and other Nazi leaders flew 23,000 miles. Aircraft played a vital part in the Nazi political campaigning. If Milch provided this facility for nothing he certainly earned the rewards he subsequently collected.
Milch became a figure of growing political importance as Lufthansa built airport facilities, organised signal and meteorology networks, and radio beacons for air-corridors. Its personnel were trained in administration, supply and engineering as well as all the mysteries of blind-flying and long-range navigation. Even in its first year, Lufthansa had a night passenger service Berlin–Königsberg to connect with Moscow, and was sending experimental flights far afield. Its G-24s went to Peking and its Dornier Wal flying boats to Brazil. As early as 1930, civil aviation in Germany (measured by passengers or by mileage) was as big as all the British and French civil aviation services combined! All gliding records were, at this time, held by Germany and Austria.
By 1932 (and this was a year before the Nazis came to power) Germany had a claim to be the leader of world aviation. The Graf Zeppelin airship – carrying about sixty people and freight – had circumnavigated the world, been on long cruises to Egypt, Iceland and the Arctic, and in March 1932, begun a scheduled service between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. This was to be the only transatlantic air service for another seven years! The experimental twelve-engined Dornier Do X had crossed both the South and North Atlantic and a German pilot in a German plane had made the first east–west crossing of the North Atlantic.
Professor Junkers’s series of all-metal monoplanes had culminated in the classic Junkers Ju 52/3m. By 1932 it was in service on the Berlin–Rome and Berlin–London routes. Lufthansa now connected Berlin with Barcelona, Moscow and Athens, flying a daily average of 30,000 miles.
No country in the world had training facilities to compare with the Deutsche Verkehrsflieger Schule (German Air Transport School), where so many of the Luftwaffe’s pilots learned to fly bombers. To supply candidates for Lufthansa’s training, there were about 50,000 active members of gliding clubs of the Deutsche Luftsportverband. In 1932, the 20-year-old Adolf Galland, already a skilled glider pilot, applied for training as a Lufthansa pilot: of 4,000 applicants, only 18 were accepted. The examinations lasted ten days.
This intense interest in aviation was shared by the general public. The 14-year-old apprentices, working at any aircraft factory, would find glider construction a mandatory part of their apprenticeship, and would not become qualified tradesmen unless they possessed the glider pilot’s licence.
When the Nazis gained power, Erhard Milch was the obvious choice to build in secrecy a new air force. Professor Hugo Junkers had by now become an outspoken critic of the Nazis. He was one of the most powerful individuals in German aviation, and by far the most brilliant. Milch decided that he could gain control of the aviation manufacturing industries by making an example of his one-time benefactor and employer.
Milch sent the police to arrest Junkers. He was accused of many offences, including even treason. Armed with the terrible power of the totalitarian state, Milch broke Junkers. The end of the interrogations came only when Junkers assigned 51 per cent of his various companies to the State. This was not good enough for Milch. He then demanded, and got, chairmanship of the companies for his own nominees. Still not satisfied, Milch put the ailing old man under house arrest, until he gave the State the remainder of his shares. Less than six months afterwards, Hugo Junkers died. Milch sent a delegation of mourners from the Air Ministry, with a suitably inscribed wreath. This so angered Junkers’s family that the men from the ministry returned to Berlin without attending the ceremony, rather than face their wrath.
Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that Milch found in the Nazis, with their despotic regality and regalia, elaborate rallies and displays, something to appeal to the ardent monarchist he had always been. Although his role as Göring’s right-hand man brought him sometimes into arguments with his boss (who was marginally younger than Milch), his loyalty to Hitler and his Nazi kingdom was unquestioning.
And Hitler gave his two airmen a comprehensive slice of the kingdom. They had control of everything from Lufthansa ticket clerks to fighter pilots, and from the secret construction of military aircraft to the gliding clubs, which were now a part of the NSFK (Nazi Flying Corps). Such flexibility made these men the envy of other service chiefs, who had no such access to semi-trained personnel, and no access to Hitler via civil channels. Nor did other service chiefs have such control over the design and development of their weapons, and the supply of them, as the Air Ministry had over the aircraft industry.
But there is little to support the allegation that, even before the Nazis came to power, the German aircraft industry produced fleets of warplanes, thinly disguised as civil aircraft. Of seven major aircraft types used by the Luftwaffe for operations in the Battle of Britain, only two had prototypes flying before 1935. One of these – the Ju 52/3m – was undoubtedly designed as a transport aircraft, as its sale to the airlines of twenty-nine foreign countries, and its brief and unsuccessful career as a Spanish Civil War bomber, indicated. The other aircraft was the Dornier Do 17, which flew in prototype form in the autumn of 1934. But this ‘Flying Pencil’ was put into storage after flight testing, and was adapted for military use only after being discovered there.
Hitler gained power when the Reichstag passed his Enabling Act in March 1933. The Luftwaffe must be dated from the big aircraft-building programme that started in January 1934. But few of these machines were suitable for modern warfare, for air forces do not start with warplanes: the first need is training aircraft. And so, of the 4,021 aircraft the Luftwaffe ordered in January 1934, 1,760 were elementary trainers (Arado Ar 66 and Focke-Wulf FW 44). Only 251 were fighter types, and all of these were biplanes.
On 1 March 1935, the existence of the Luftwaffe was officially announced. It was accepted as a fact of life by the Allied powers that had forbidden it. In Berlin a huge and grandiose Air Ministry building provided a thousand offices, where ambitious men bickered. Göring had neither the technical knowledge nor the inclination to give the new air force a clear directive. Hitler asked only for the greatest possible number of combat aircraft in the shortest possible time. It was in this atmosphere that all thoughts of a long-range strategic bombing force languished.
There was no strong opposition to the four-engined long-range bomber (possession of which would have totally changed the Battle of Britain), it was simply a matter of priorities. The complex problems of manufacturing such aircraft would delay all the other programmes.
The priorities of the new air force preoccupied the men in the German Air Ministry. Petty jealousies and vicious vendettas flourished as empires were built. Milch was tough enough to handle the men under his command but this did not endear him to Göring. On the contrary, the relationship between the two men became steadily worse as time went on. Frustrated by the technicalities of a new sort of air war that he could not master, Göring condemned them all as unnecessary ‘black boxes’. He sought out men who could share his memories of the Red Baron and the wind in the wires. And he gave them jobs.
FIGURE 3. Ernst Udet
War hero, stunt-flyer and bon vivant, Ernst Udet made this self-portrait in 1933.
Ernst Udet, although no close friend of Göring, was just such a flyer. Udet was an amiable, much-travelled man who lived only for flying. Germany’s second most successful fighter ace (after von Richthofen), Udet had continued to fly after the war. He had got finance for an aircraft factory that bore his name, took one of his products – a U.4 – to South America, and won an air race from Rosario to Buenos Aires. He severed his relationship with the Udet factory, and lived by giving stunt-flying demonstrations round Germany. He flew for an expedition filming African wildlife, and went so low that one of the aircraft was damaged by a lion that jumped at it. He made an impressive showing at the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio, where he stunted his old Flamingo biplane. He flew in Hollywood and in Greenland, where he worked with Leni Riefenstahl, the famous German woman film-maker.
In the USA, in September 1933, Ernst Udet watched a flying demonstration of Curtiss F8C biplanes. These were rather old by American standards and the Americans had no objection to Udet’s buying them. The Curtiss company called this design a ‘Helldiver’ and gave the same name to all their subsequent divebomber designs. Although the exact way in which Udet found enough money to buy two such machines has not been established, it seems virtually certain that on Udet’s recommendation, Göring paid money into Udet’s bank account, and the aircraft, when shipped to Germany, were tested for the new air force. The concept of aircraft using machine guns and small bombs against front-line infantry had been discussed by German theorists since the First World War. Now Udet demonstrated his Helldivers, and the accuracy of this sort of bombing attack – within 30 yards of the target was not unusual for an expert pilot – persuaded the German Air Ministry to ask Junkers and other companies to design such a machine. The Junkers Ju 87, the famous Stuka, was the result. It became the world’s most successful dive bomber.
Many times Udet was offered a job with Göring, but he was unable to decide what he wanted to do. And yet during these years, when the air force was being created, Udet always had access to the top levels of command. It was a memorandum of Udet’s in 1933 that first considered the military application of the glider. This idea eventually brought far-reaching changes to military operations. And Udet kept in touch with the aircraft industry too, and could prove as suspicious of new ideas as Göring was. In August 1935, 39 years old and still a civilian, he sat in the cockpit of the Bf 109 prototype.* Professor Messerschmitt said that Udet looked uneasy as the mechanic closed the canopy over his head. The prototype was not yet ready to fly but Udet pronounced on it. ‘When he got out, he patted me on the back and said, “Messerschmitt, this will never be a fighting aeroplane. The pilot needs an open cockpit. He has to feel the air to know the speed of the aeroplane.”’
