Battle of Britain Emil - Helmut Bennemann I./JG52

Helmut Bennemann served as Adjutant I./JG 52 during the Battle of Britain. He gained his first victory on 26 August 1940 when he shot down an RAF Spitfire near Dover. On 15 September, Bennemann shot down three RAF Hurricanes to record his sixth through eighth victories. This is a build of the Tamiya 1/48th kit in the colours of Bennemann's 'Black 5' as depicted by Thierry Dekker in the recent two part 'Batailles Aériennes' quarterly devoted to the history of JG 52. Bennemann was based at Coquelles just south of Calais on the Channel coast, close to where the Eurotunnel terminal is located today. My model is photographed on the cockpit detail pages published in the superb Emil monographs from Kagero. Click on the images for a larger view.

More on the 'Batailles Aériennes' quarterly magazine special issues on JG52 at http://avions-bateaux.com

Kanalgeschwader JG2 1941 - Bf109 F into service - Circuses over France, Channel Front aces (1)

..II. and III./JG 2 started conversion onto the latest 'F' variant of the celebrated Messerschmitt fighter during March 1941. The 'Friedrich' presented a number of enhancements over the successive improvements introduced to the venerable "Emil" with which the Jagdwaffe had gone to war over Poland. The basic airframe had undergone a redesign with the aim of improving aerodynamic efficiency - especially in the area of the wing and tailplane. Both spinner and wingtips were rounded and more streamlined and the Emil's horizontal stabilizer brace supports had been eliminated. In addition the tailwheel was now fully retractable. However the Friedrich did not feature wing armament and weight of fire was thus reduced in comparison to the older sub-type. There were also some structural issues with early examples, a number of pilots being lost after tearing the wings off in high 'G' manoeuvres. The most notable loss was JG 2 Kommodore Wilhelm Balthasar on 3 July 1941. Despite this, the first Bf 109 F-2s in service on the Channel Front gave the RAF a pretty hard time. On 23 July 1941, two Circuses were mounted for actual losses of 15 Spitfires and a single Hurricane shot down - the "Richthofen" claimed no less than fourteen Spitfires during Circus No. 59 (from 13:14 to 13:30) and fourteen more (plus a Hurricane ) during Circus N ° 60 (from 20:55 to 20:20)! JG 26 filed nine claims. 20 September 1941 was another bad day for the RAF with three Circuses over France - JG 2 claimed 15 Spitfires (7 actual losses) while their training Staffel 4./JFS 5 claimed 11..! On 27 September, two groups of eleven Blenheims were sent to Amiens and Mazingarbe (Circus 103). The RAF lost twelve Spitfires ( from Nos. 72, 129, 308, 403, 603, 609, 611, 615 and 616 Squadrons). With the F-2 in service the RAF over France sustained an almost constant round of blood-letting..

" Das Deutsche Volk muss ein Volk von Fliegern werden" - German case endings for readers ( a quick grammar)

Are you like me and really cringe when people write grammatically incorrect words like  "staffels" or "gruppes"? Or when reading the 'Introduction' to Crandall's 'Jagdwaffe' book you come across "expertens" - just how many errors can you get in one German word ?  ( ..at least three here!) Do you groan inwardly when you read English writers writing about Luftwaffe subjects and still treating us to abominations such as 'Geschwaderen' or 'Geschwaders' or other similar 'non-grammatical' forms! Patrick G. Eriksson does it all the way through his 'Alarmstart!' series. Eriksson even atttempts a "Wilden Sau" ('wilds boar' ?!) Osprey author Doug Dildy is another who appears to believe that the plural form of Jagdgeschwader is 'Jagdgeschwaderen'...

The plural form of Geschwader is ..Geschwader - there is no 's' or 'en' or anything else in the plural form, in fact the letter 's' is only very occasionally a plural in German. Most usual plural forms being 'e' or 'en' or just 'n' among others.  To repeat, as just seen, some German nouns have NO plural form. 'Flieger' or 'Jagdflieger' in similar fashion also have no nominative PLURAL form - some case endings do get modified usually according to which PREPOSITION precedes the noun. For more on that see the table below. All nouns are written with a capital letter in German, eg the German for 'ace' is 'Experte' which becomes 'Experten' in the plural. The letter 'n' is the plural form here..

Now go and look at the text in your average Osprey title - even though John Weal (for example) speaks German I reckon his correctors and editors don't. They may however - and this is something that was put to me just recently - be attempting to avoid utilising too many German words in their text - by 'anglicising' them! I don't buy that - a work on German history will inevitably have to feature some German language terms. Besides, surely the reader would like to know that the writer is 'familiar' with the German language. At the very least the writer who can demonstrate this has done more than simply regurgitate secondary sources and will more than probably be able to exploit primary sources, first-person accounts and so on...

A fighter (or Jagd) Geschwader was comprised usually of 3 Gruppen written I./ II./ or III./JG51. Each individual Gruppe was comprised of 3 Staffeln, written 1./ 2./ or 3./ Staffel in ascending numerical order. So 7./JG 51 is the 7th Staffel of that Geschwader and was in III. Gruppe ..
Staffel numbers were colour coded of course for ID purposes ....a fourth Staffel per Gruppe was added from mid-late 1944 along with a fourth Gruppe to each Geschwader. The number '13' (or '1') would usually be the a/c flown by the Staffelkapitän while the Gruppenkommandeur tended to use the double chevron as an ID marking. The CO of a Geschwader was a Kommodore. The Gruppe can be identified by the symbol (or lack of it ) aft of the fuselage cross..


Another example;
Abschuss is one kill - " his 150th Abschuss "
Abschüsse is several kills - " he achieved 150 Abschüsse "

Abschuss is on occasion used interchangeably with Luftsieg (or aerial victory; pl. is Luftsiege) but this is not correct.  The word 'Luftsieg' is a 'propaganda' term rather than an official Luftwaffe term. When a fighter pilot had shot down an e/a he would report this using the word 'Abschuss' in order to make sure that his success had been witnessed by other pilots of his unit so that he had the necessary witness to file his claim. The form he had to submit was titled Abschussmeldung, not Luftsiegmeldung. The term Abschuss accurately describes the fact, whereas the term Luftsieg gives it almost a 'touch of glamour'. Note the term Luftsieg does not appear ( or only to a limited extent) in Jochen Prien's JfV series.

Genitive or dative case plural forms ('n' or 'en') do occasionally throw up some 'curiosities' in German. For example;

  Mit 352 bestätigten Abschüssen ist er der erfolgreichste Jagdflieger - "Mit " (with) is one preposition that always takes the dative case in German and the dative plural ending is '..n'  so in this sentence " with 352 confirmed victories.."  you would write Abschüssen in German but since cases do not exist in English I personally see no reason to write these German words 'incorrectly' in English (if you see what I mean..)

another example follows below;

" Das Deutsche Volk muss ein Volk von Fliegern werden" - Note Flieger has no plural in German - it means 'airman' or 'airmen' 'flyer' or 'flyers'. Here though it follows a preposition 'von' which always takes the 'dative' case - dative case plurals end in 'n', hence 'von Fliegern' ( ..lit ..'of flyers'..).

Note below; the 'nominative' and 'accusative' plural of 'der/den Flieger' is 'die Flieger' - only the 'dative' and gentive case endings are modified (Gentive ..des Fliegers, 'of the airman' - singular. Not modified in the plural form)

A few operational or flying terms;

Einsatz is an operational mission - the plural form here is Einsätze, in other words the ä+e

Feindflug (lit. enemy flight) denoted a flight over enemy-held territory or a flight in which the enemy was encountered and combat joined if over German-held territory. Also known as a Frontflug. 

The Frontflugspange was the (operational) 'missions clasp'  awarded to frontline pilots with a certain number of sorties under their belts. Contact with the enemy was termed Feindberührung  - the title of Jules Meimberg's autobiography as it happens.

Luftwaffe profiles (Konrad Bauer, Hans Weik, Wilhem Moritz, Grislawski, Kennel etc )

Bf109 G-6 flown by Hptm Gerd Stamp, Gkr. I./JG 300, summer 1944

 I'm not a big fan of profile artwork nowadays - unless its very well done. For example Mark Styling's Luftwaffe images are especially poor. Once upon a time I did a bit of 'artwork' - some of it was even published, but I quickly gave up since I simply couldn't spare the five hours it took me to create my illustrations. I got fed up with nudging individual pixels around the screen. Of course you can tell that from the quality, but at the time I was happy enough with them. In fact lots of my profiles are still floating around the web, so I thought I'd bring together some of my own artwork - which I've collected from other sites, thanks guys - on my own site. And say what you like about them, I reckon my Karl-Heinz Langer  G-6 of III./JG3 is miles better than Mark Styling's effort! Click on the images for a slightly larger image ..if you dare

FW 190 A-7 'White 9 + ' of Hptm. Alfred Grislawski, 1./J.G.1, January 1944




Hans Weik was Staffelkapitän of 10./JG 3. Attacking B-17s raiding Memmingen on 18 July 1944 he was wounded by return fire while flying Fw 190A-8/R2 (W.Nr. 680 747) "White 7". He flew "White 7" from 27 June to 18 July 1944 returning two of his 36 total victories. His wounds were serious enough to keep Weik from any further front line duties. On 27 July, Oberleutnant Weik was awarded the Ritterkreuz for 36 victories. In April 1945, Weik was transferred to III./ EJG 2 at Lechfeld to train on the Me 262 jet fighter.







Hans Ifland, IV./JG3 April 1944 (reference photo in Prien 'Chronik einer Jagdgruppe')


Karl-Heinz Langer, Staffelkapitän 7./JG3 October 1943. Ignore the model pic(above), the mottle looked absolutely nothing like that !

Walther Dahl's 'blue 13' - the cowl emblem was layered into the picture after scanning it in from a decal sheet printing - yep, even 'real' profile artists take these sort of shortcuts ! Published in Scale Aircraft Modelling, vol 23 issue 1, March 2001



FW 190 A-8 W.Nr 171 789 'Black << + -' of Major Karl Kennel, II./S.G.2, Kitzingen, Germany, 8 May 1945

Julius Meimberg (JG2 ace) and Gerhard Baeker - a German view of the Battle of Britain

In an interview published in the British 'Observer' newspaper in the year 2000 prior to the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, two Luftwaffe pilots who fought over England shoot down what the Germans refer to as the Battle of Britain 'myth'. In a recent thread over on the TOCH forum I was surprised to realise that this 'German' view of the Battle of Britain is not more widely known - probably because it is rather at odds with the accepted view. This piece should be read in conjunction with my earlier blog post on the Battle of Britain here Luftschlacht über England - the significance of the German defeat during the Battle of Britain
I have to say that I don't entirely share the views of the two pilots as related below, that firstly the Luftwaffe wasn't defeated and secondly that the mere presence of the Royal Navy prevented Hitler from proceeding with an invasion. And while Hitler's failure to achieve air supremacy over Britain - which he used as a pretext for postponing invasion - probably didn't alter the outcome of the war, it certainly did eventually allow the Western powers to prevent the entire European mainland from being over-run by the Soviets.


"...Sixty years after the duel in the skies, German veterans in Berlin say that its importance is exaggerated. German fighter pilots, famously seen off during the Battle of Britain, will not be commemorating their dead this year for a simple reason: they believe the British are talking up an 'insignificant' clash in the skies that did not alter the course of the war. Ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of the famous dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts, German pilots are still engaged in fighting talk over the events of 1940 that Winston Churchill declared the victory of 'the few' British pilots on behalf of 'the many' in a battle that saved Britain from becoming part of the German empire.

At 83, Julius Meimberg is typical. He can remember almost every detail of a war in which he flew more than 250 missions as a fighter pilot, including dozens over Britain.

'It's all exaggerated,' he said. 'Churchill succeeded in creating this myth that so few did so much for so many. When you look at how we fought against the Americans later, the Battle of Britain was very little in comparison.'

There will be no official commemoration of the Battle of Britain in Germany, and the few surviving pilots who fought on the German side see no reason to mark the anniversary. Even if they did, Meimberg believes that none of today's generation of Germans would take any notice or express any interest in their wartime adventures.

'Nobody's interested in that here. There's nothing here, they're even getting rid of the memorial rooms for squadrons. You won't see a single swastika there, for example, because a whole period has been wiped out, even though it's part of their history. I think it's a very bad thing to try to undo history,' he said.

Meimberg was a 23-year-old lieutenant in Jagdgeschwader 2 'Richthofen' when he started flying up to four missions a day over Britain. He admits that he seldom thought about his opponents on the British side as people: they were simply targets.

'The people who were inside them [the fighter aircraft] were the same as us, except that they spoke English and we spoke German. We only saw the aircraft. I find that a bit difficult to understand today. We didn't see the people, only the aircraft. We fought aircraft against aircraft. We were fighting for our Fatherland and they for their England. It was like sportsmen - there were good and bad ones,' he said.

Gerhard Baeker was 25 when he flew his first bombing missions over England and he too regards the British preoccupation with the Battle of Britain as disproportionate. Like Meimberg, the former pilot who took part in the bombing of Coventry remembers August and September 1940 as just one incident in a long war.

'For me, the battle lasted from August 1940 until July 1941. What they call the Battle of Britain in England was just August and September.

'But for us it was only starting. England had declared war on us. We didn't want a war with England. We had the Russians at our backs.

'The Hitler-Stalin pact was an unnatural pact. We always hoped that England would give way and recognise that the Russians wanted to effect their world revolution - which was proven to be the case after the war,' he said.

Baeker dismisses as absurd the suggestion that the RAF prevented a German invasion of Britain by depriving the Luftwaffe of air supremacy. He argues that the German armed forces, which had only been fully reconstituted in 1935, could never have secured a bridgehead or defeated the Royal Navy.

Meimberg agrees that the Battle of Britain did not prevent a German invasion, but he claims that, if Germany had attempted to occupy Britain, the operation would have succeeded.

'The Germans could have occupied England afterwards. It was diplomacy that prevented that. It seems to me that the English led the Germans by the nose by showing a willingness to make peace but in reality playing for time. I saw the British at Dunkirk and I know they could not withstand an invasion,' he said.

Meimberg received serious burns and a number of broken bones during his service as a fighter pilot, but he says that the struggle to survive after the war was more difficult than anything he experienced in battle.

Unlike their counterparts in Britain, men like Meimberg and Baeker are at best forgotten and at worst reviled in their own country. A few tiny organisations, such as the German Fighter Pilots' Association, struggle to keep their traditions alive and to take care of veterans who find themselves in difficult circumstances.

But the German public has little time for the defeated soldiers of a war that brought shame and destruction to their nation.

'War is not the continuation of politics by other means, war is the utter failure of politics and politicians. We're described as Hitler's soldiers, but it is a totally false view that we were ideologised,' said Meimberg......"

Fritz Krause NJGr.10 Mosquito victory

7/8 July 1944
Oblt. Fritz E. Krause: 1./NJGr.10 Mosquito W. Kyritz, 65 km. N.W. Berlin: 7.800 m. 01.55 692 Sqn Mosquito MM147

Fritz Krause's action report for 8 July 1944. He was airborne from Berlin Werneuchen at 00:40 hours, flying a radar-equipped Fw 190 A-6.

"...I was flying over Berlin when I saw a twin-engined aircraft caught in the searchlights; it was heading in a westerly direction. I was then at 8,500 metres altitude. I closed in on the aircraft until I was 700 metres above its level, opened the throttle wide and dived. I came in too low and opened fire from approximately 200 metres beneath and astern the enemy at 01:48 and kept firing as I closed in. Almost instantly my first salvo hit the starboard engine which erupted in a burst of sparks before trailing a thick plume of vapour.

As I had over-shot, I had to break off the attack immediately and found myself on the right, alongside the enemy aircraft whose cockpit and external fuel tanks I saw clearly, and so was able to identify it without doubt as a Mosquito.

I fired off recognition signal flares to draw the attention of the flak and the searchlights to my presence. The enemy 'corkscrewed' in a series of desperate evasive manouevres. Because of the thick white 'fog' of vapour I was able to follow him, although he had already left the searchlight zone in a north-westerly direction.

Following the trail, I managed to attack twice more. On my third pass, I saw a further explosion on the right wing and an even stronger rain of sparks. At 2,000 metres he disappeared, turning at a flat gliding angle under my own machine. I did not see the impact on the ground as this was hidden from my angle of view.

On my return flight, passing Lake Koppeln, I was able to estimate the crash-point as lying some 60-70 kilometres northwest of Berlin. When I returned to base a report had already reached them about the crash of a burning enemy aircraft at 01:55 hours at EE-25 to the west of Kuerytz. My own machine was covered in oil from the damaged Mosquito. I was flying 'white 11' which was a 'Porcupine' equipped with the Neptun J radar and a long-range fuel tank for night-hunting against Mosquitos. One of the crew of the Mosquito, Flight Lieutenant E.V. Saunders, DFC, baled out and was taken prisoner. Three days later, at 01:20 hours on 11 July, 1944, I myself had to parachute to safety over Berlin, shot down by the Berlin flak!..."

Focke Wulf Fw 190 Dora 9 in Military Aircraft Monthly

To presumably 'tie in' with the release of the new Eduard Dora kit the latest (May 2010) issue of 'Military Aircraft Monthly' includes a rather poorly done piece on the Fw 190 D-9. Quite why any editor could imagine that he could usefully contribute anything of interest on the 'operational' history of the D-9 (the stated aim of the piece) in only three pages is beyond me, but when combined with Peter Scott's error-strewn artwork then impressions are rather less than positive. Also illustrated in the article are two Ta 152's -although not mentioned in the text- but no D-11s or the usual D-13. Here's an example at random, but frankly I could have picked any of the illustrations ..this is one of several 'unit unknown' (including the Ta 152 !!) Where did the yellow fuselage band come from ?



Here's the reference photo from my collection (ie does not appear in the article) and 'my' caption by way of comparison..

On May 5, 1945, Czech Radio called on the citizens of Prague to rise up against the Nazi occupying force and for five days Czechs took up arms against German troops until the Red Army arrived in the capital on May 9. Elements of JG 300 - attempting to fall back to Prague from southern Germany - were caught up in the fighting during the uprising. This particular Dora was on strength with Stab./JG 300 and photographed in Prague in June 1945. Kommodore Günther Rall's Geschwaderstab had re-equipped with the Dora in late April 1945. It is unlikely that the former JG 52 ace ever flew a combat sortie in a D-9 during his brief tenure of JG 300. Given the shortages of fuel in the last weeks of the war, sorties flown by JG 300 Doras comprised a handful of training circuits and strafing missions against US spearheads pressing into southern Germany. 'Black <4' displays a representative 211xxx series camouflage finish with a solid RLM 83 dark green engine cowling and an over-painted area of RLM 75 on the rear fuselage, with wing upper-surfaces finished in the standard 75/83 Focke Wulf scheme.