An extract from Bertold Jochim's biography ("200 Luftsiege in 13 Monaten", Moewig, 1998) of his former JG 11 Kommodore Hermann Graf. Graf returned a handful of claims in the 'defence of the Reich' before being shot down and injured on 29 March 1944. Jochim flew with 1./JG 11 and was shot down and injured on two occasions, the last on 27 June 1944 over the 'Invasionsfront' after claiming three P-51s downed. Post-war he was a journalist and co-founder of 'Der Landser' often criticised for presenting a 'sanitised' and 'idealised' view of the German Wehrmacht....
Below; "At first glance, [Graf's] machine resembled an American Mustang; the camouflage paintwork had been imitated so skillfully. The Balkenkreuze on the fuselage and wings were almost completely obscured under a layer of the blue-grey paint..."
"..Despite their carefully couched phrasing, the reports from the Wehrmacht High Command in the ensuing period amounted to an unbroken series of grim tidings. This day, March 29, 1944, was no exception.
The Kommodore of JG 11 switched off the radio. Images rose in his memory—images that would likely never be banished: Stalingrad, Pitomnik, the command train in the woods near Vinnitsa, his second meeting with Hitler and an animated conversation about German Shepherd dogs, the graves at the edges of makeshift airfields—in the Ukraine, in the Crimea, along the Dnieper, Donets, Terek, Volga, and Don! The faces of so many comrades before their final combat mission...
Hermann Graf stood up and stepped outside, a leather jacket draped over his shoulders—a jacket that had once been brought to Germany by an American Mustang pilot. Between the lapels, the diamonds of his Knight’s Cross glittered.
The tarmac of the Rotenburg airfield, near Bremen, lay bathed in the midday sun. At the 1. Staffel dispersal two BMW radial engines roared into life. A ground crew was working on several Focke-Wulf 190s that were being readied on the hangar apron for a new mission.
An hour earlier, these men had been part of a parade formation drawn up in a square in front of the command building. The occasion had been no ordinary one. Hptm. Hermichen, Kommandeur of I. Gruppe of JG 11, had been awarded the Knight's Cross—presented by the Kommodore himself, acting on behalf of the Reichsmarschall.
Göring! That encounter in the woods near Vinnitsa would not be the last. Several others followed in the interim—including one at Berchtesgaden.
A telex had summoned the then-commander of the Ergänzungsjagdgruppe Ost (Replacement Fighter Group East) from southern France: "Major Graf to report to the Reichsmarschall immediately!"
So, a flight to Germany in an Me 109, followed by reporting to the small country house above the Plattenhof. Before that, a reunion with Major Herbert Ihlefeld, who had also been ordered to the audience. And then Göring’s urgent words: "Every day, a British Mosquito flies all the way down to Vienna, triggering air-raid alarms that paralyze our entire industry. You have to bring that damned bird down for me—and in one piece, too, so we can get our hands on its secret detection equipment."
They had parted ways and given the matter some thought. Some time later, at an altitude of 12,000 meters over Groningen in the Netherlands, a high-altitude Me 109 G-10 fighter actually succeeded in intercepting one of the Mosquitos. Hermann Graf was at the controls. However, the pilot of the "Wooden Wonder"—as the British called this twin-engine aircraft, which was incredibly fast for the time—refused to comply with the order to land. All signals, such as lowering the landing gear served no purpose. So it was downed.
A second Mosquito was shot up but the damaged aircraft retreated to Switzerland—where, reportedly, it remains to this day as a war souvenir..
Those days were in the past ! Just like the months spent with the high-altitude flight test unit in Wiesbaden, known as JG 50. That, too, was merely a stop along a path that seemed to have lost all direction. Flights to extreme altitudes, carrying that hellish mixture known as GM-1 on board every time. One day, there was even a world record: 14,300 metres, logged by five altigraphs.
Yet, no one took much notice. After all, what did that matter at a time when a different German city was being ravaged by terrible air raids every single day?
In the 1.Staffel crew barracks, they knew, too, that it wouldn’t be long now. The airfield loudspeakers had blared the order for "30-minute readiness" quite some time ago—a sign that the "heavies" were on their way again. Perhaps 500 or more of them—American Boeing B-17 bombers or "Liberators"—flying in wave after wave, with hundreds of escort fighters overhead. Scenes like this had become part of their daily routine— such hard-fought sorties that they could hardly be surpassed.
For several months, they had been a "Defense of the Reich" unit. Their frontline airfield was located right in the heart of the homeland. Didn't that say it all? Some of them had previously flown missions over England, in Africa, the Mediterranean, Russia, or elsewhere. But what awaited them here eclipsed everything that had come before.
Sitting by the window was
Josef Zwernemann—known as "Jupp"—an Oberfeldwebel in Hermann Graf’s "Karaya Staffel" now an Oblt. and Kapitän of the 1st.
He glanced across the room at the man he had accompanied on so many daring flights—most recently over Stalingrad.
Near him sat a stocky Ofw. who had had the name "Jim" painted on the radio ear-cups of his flight helmet. No one knew why, yet that was what they called him.
He had sent the first Flying Fortress plummeting to the ground on December 31, 1943, over the French fighter base at Corme-Écluse, near the Gironde estuary. Many more had followed in the months since.
A few rays of sunlight flitted across his face, which still bore the traces of barely healed burn scars—souvenirs of the marksmanship of an American tail gunner who, two months earlier, had forced him to bail out over the Emsland moor.
Separated from him by a Luftwaffe magazine and the corner of a table,
Norbert Schücking lounged in an armchair. A rugged native of Holstein and an officer-cadet Feldwebel, he sat with his fur-lined boots stretched far out in front of him. His combat record was as remarkable as his penchant for speaking his mind. By now, he had resigned himself to the fact that his career would end at the rank of officer cadet.(Fahnenjunker)
Beside the door stood a gaunt figure: Uffz.
Koch, a farmer’s son from the heath who sometimes spoke fewer than twenty words in a month. He was never heard during missions, either. The best proof of his flying ability was the simple fact that he was still alive and could count himself among the "old hands" of the Staffel.
That was not the case for the senior officer cadet standing by the door. They had whipped him through an accelerated training course in just a few months, moving him from a biplane to an Me 109 and then to an FW 190. His name was
Dreizehner; he was barely twenty, and upon his arrival a week earlier, he had elicited nothing more than a pitying smile from the pen-pushers at the Gruppe operations center. After all, they knew the score when it came to these young fellows.
Most of the time, they failed to return from their very first mission—so it wasn't worth the trouble of creating elaborate personnel files; the officers simply noted down the bare essentials, wished them luck, and saved themselves a great deal of work when, a few days later, news arrived of the new man's death.
The man with the burn scars looked at the Oberfähnrich and felt pity for him. He could imagine the struggle the young pilot faced just trying to manoeuvre that powerful, hellish machine—the Fw 190—through the air.
But how must he feel when the formations of four-engine bombers rose up from the horizon, with swarms of enemy fighters above them, and the first bursts of fire streaked past his cockpit? Or when, in the chaos of a dogfight, sky and earth spun dizzily, and shrill screams pierced the headphones—commands, curses, warnings, a final, rattling gasp? Wouldn't he drift through the high altitudes like a lost soul, separated from his flight leader, easy prey for some American Mustang, Thunderbolt, or Lightning? It was inevitable.
(Blog note: Oberfähnrich Gerhard Dreizehner survived two months in the Defence of the Reich with 1./JG 11 and claimed five Viermots during this period. His 5th - a B-17- was downed on this date, 29 March. He was KIA on 9 April 1944 in his Fw 190 A-7/R6 'white 13' - Luftkampf, Absturz bei Steinfeld, Krs. Schleswig 100% - see Jfv Teil 13/ V)
Yet, on the other hand: didn't they themselves need every ounce of seasoned experience when caught in the cauldron of those air battles? Didn't they often have to scrape together the last shred of courage just to keep from surrendering in the face of that wall of aircraft fuselages and thousands of muzzle flashes? Could any attack on those staggered formations of four-engine bombers be seen as anything other than a form of suicide—a desperate gamble with fate? Was it not usually that sudden flare of rage—that desperate fury felt as hits slammed into one’s own machine—that drove a pilot through the defensive fire, compelled him to aim his illuminated sight at one of those massive aircraft silhouettes, and made him trigger his six onboard guns just a few hundred meters out? Or was there something else at play, something carried deep in the subconscious from one mission to the next? Was it perhaps also the recollection of devastated cities, the knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of innocents torn apart by American and British bombs or meeting a ghastly end in the firestorms of conflagrations?
Whatever the reason, there was no point dwelling on it. Had things not reached the pass described so mockingly in that British leaflet: "Fortress Europe has no roof left"? Was there any way to stop those endless streams of enemy bombers—British by night, American by day? What good were all the shoot-downs when, for every destroyed aircraft, five others could be deployed for the next raid? And at what cost to our own side had those successes been won?
Wasn't the end inevitably approaching? Had a single city ever been successfully spared from the hail of bombs? And how could that have been done anyway? With fifty planes against a thousand enemy ones? Sometimes even fewer? And on the fronts across Europe—didn't the situation look much the same? Kharkov was back in Russian hands; in September, the Allies had landed in Italy; that same month, Smolensk had to be abandoned, followed in October by the Kuban bridgehead, the Crimea...
Where, then, was the Führer’s much-vaunted military genius? Had he really sacrificed the 6th Army at Stalingrad, as some claimed? And here, in the so-called home war zone? Did he not see where this had to lead—with city after city being smashed and destroyed, along with the major armaments plants? Where was that new jet fighter, the Me 262—the one people spoke of as a true marvel? A machine that was supposed to be 200 kilometers per hour faster than any enemy fighter? Why didn't he have it put into serial production, given his reputed expertise in aeronautical engineering? And Göring—why did he do nothing? Was his mind really still stuck in the biplanes of the First World War? Did he really just reply
"Yes, sir" when his leader made it clear to him that these jet aircraft were simply too fast for fighters—or so the rumors went? Did it not bother him that his best pilots were being relentlessly expended, and that even the great aces were being hounded to their deaths by American escort fighters that were vastly superior in both numbers and equipment?
What must the Major at the Geschwader command post over there have been thinking? He, with his more than 200 aerial victories? Or Galland, Lützow, Wilcke, Gollob, and all the others? Must their hearts not have bled as they witnessed this madness day after day?
The Oberfähnrich smiled like a boy feeling embarrassment rise within him. He could have no inkling of the gruesome fate that would end his young life just two months later—in the fiery vortex of a crash-induced blaze.
A few curses cut through the silence. Schücking, the Fahnenjunker-Feldwebel, had woken up. He glanced at the aviator’s watch on his wrist, pushed himself up, and walked to the window.
Hermann Graf was still standing at the far edge of the airfield.
Behind him stood his Me 109, in which he flew further missions day after day, despite the flight ban imposed on him. At first glance, the machine resembled an American Mustang; the camouflage paintwork had been imitated so skillfully. The Balkenkreuze on the fuselage and wings were almost completely lost under a layer of blue-gray paint.
About three hundred meters away, Schücking shook his head;
"He must be nuts!" ****
Zwernemann stopped his brooding and turned around, a cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth.
"Who?"
"Him over there!"
".. the Kommodore?"
"Yes!"
"And why's that?"
A sigh followed, then the explanation:
"Because I want to know what else he could possibly want besides the Diamonds? Why the hell doesn't he just eat the nice, bland staff-officer rations like so many others who’ve got the Iron Cross First Class on their chests? Why does he sit in his crate almost every day—despite a ban on flying—and zip around between the Boeings and the escort fighters?"
Zwernemann shrugged and studied the ash of his cigar.
"That’s just how he is. He always did it that way back in Russia, too. When the others flew, he had to fly as well."
The Fw. said nothing more. But one could tell from his face that this explanation hadn't satisfied him.
What was the real story behind the man who, as a holder of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, continued to defy death? Was he truly "nuts," or did he, too, see fields of ruins or destroyed cities before every new mission his Geschwader flew? Or was he actually the arch-fascist the Russians sometimes made him out to be?
He was certainly not the latter; he was something else entirely: a German. Something for which—depending on one's ideological standpoint—he might still be forgiven for today... "
( ****Original dialogue, paraphrased by the author from memory )
