Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot

Defending the Reich Against the RAF and the USAAF

Wolfgang Fischer, John Weal

• Editorial: Grub Street Publishing
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781908117984
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Zweiter Weltkrieg

A Nazi Germany fighter pilot gives readers a bird's-eye view from the cockpit of aerial combat against the Allied forces in World War II. Within weeks of war being declared, Wolfgang Fischer had volunteered to join the Luftwaffe and spent nearly five of the succeeding six years of hostilities in uniform. During this time he was given a succession of postings varying from a long-range recce unit; as a decoder in a met office in occupied France; to a bomber squadron; and as a flying instructor, before joining a squadron of the famous Richthofen Geschwader in Italy, from where he was shot down in his FW 190 by Mustangs en route to Normandy. By now a Lieutenant, he survived to fly offensive rocket attacks over Gold Beach on D-Day, only to be shot down again on D+1, and captured and sent first to a hospital in the UK, then into captivity in the USA. He was finally repatriated in April 1946. His description of all these events is entertaining and well-written, ranging from comic to tragic. It is unique in flavor, giving a valuable insight into the undeniably typical lot of those serving in the air arm of the Third Reich. Expertly translated and edited by John Weal, this is a worthy accompaniment to Norbert Hannig's Luftwaffe Fighter Ace published by Grub Street in 2004.

Chapter 1

A CAREFREE CHILDHOOD

Fate, in the guise of my father’s career, decreed that I should be born in Waldthurn, a tiny community in the heart of the Upper Palatinate Forest some seventy-five kilometres north of Regensburg. The date was 30 October 1921. Less than three years had passed since the end of the Great War, and the aftermath of that conflict had brought sweeping changes to this sleepy backwater region of northeastern Bavaria. Its near neighbours, citizens of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, spoke the same language; even the same local dialect. For centuries the two sides, Bavarian and Bohemian, had co-existed as part of the Holy Roman Empire. Now Bohemia found itself incorporated into the newly established state of Czechoslovakia–brought into being by the post-war treaties of Versailles, St. Germain and Trianon–and enclosed behind a rigidly enforced frontier. It was my father’s duties as a customs official on the Czech border that had brought the family to Waldthurn.

But Bavaria had undergone changes too. Following the Great War it lost its status as an independent kingdom. As part of the new German republic it had to forfeit a number of sovereign rights, including control of its own borders, the responsibility for which now passed into the hands of central government. Although a patriotic German, father allowed his Bavarian heart to rule his head and declined the offer to remain in the service of the state. Our brief sojourn in Waldthurn thus came to an abrupt end. Apparently father received an indemnity which, although not exactly generous, enabled him to brave the very bleak economic situation prevailing in Germany at this time and take the plunge into the commercial world. Having studied political economy and business administration in the course of his civil service career, he landed a job as manager of a sawmill in Miesbach, a small town to the southeast of Munich.

Not yet three years old, I have no recollection at all of the family’s move in 1924. But not long afterwards–I must by then have been in my second year at the local primary school–I got my first childish insight into the political turbulence that was already beginning to jeopardize Germany’s fragile young democracy. It transpired that one of father’s colleagues at the sawmill, the man in charge of the company’s books, was apparently siphoning off some of the profits for himself. As soon as father got wind of this he fired the man on the spot. The miscreant turned up at our house the following day accompanied by his brother and, after some heated words had been exchanged, declared himself a communist. Accusing father of being a ‘capitalist lackey’, he demanded his job back, claiming he had the full support of the KPD, or German Communist Party.

This didn’t go down at all well with my father and the proceedings quickly developed into a free-for-all. Unfortunately for the avowed communist, his brother was rather small and slight of stature and this lent something of a comic air to the ensuing brawl. With his left hand father grabbed the weedy sibling by the back of his braces and lifted him clear off his feet. Held face down just above the floor, arms and legs flailing, he could do little more than squeal loudly while father brought matters to a swift conclusion by delivering a series of well-aimed right-handers to his remaining opponent.

Nor should mother’s part in this fracas go unrecorded. Becoming aware of the increasing commotion, and fearing no good would come of it, she had rushed into the bedroom to get the Browning pistol that father had ‘liberated’ from a Tommy officer on the western front. Reappearing moments later, she planted herself heroically behind the struggling trio and began fumbling with the unfamiliar ‘indoors cannon’. By then, thank God, father had the situation well in hand and she was not called upon to use it. Had she done so, she would very likely have drilled holes through all three of them. Having witnessed the entire episode, I later asked father what a communist was. He told me that they were ‘enemies of the state’. Since then I have always had something against communists.

It was not until our next move, which took us to Thansau on the east bank of the River Inn some ten kilometres south of Rosenheim, that the world began to open up for me. The year was 1928, I was nearing the end of my time in primary school, and it was the dawn of what people were optimistically calling the ‘New Age’. But I was not yet old enough to have any idea of what this new age held in store for us. I spent my childhood in what can only be described as one large playground.

Some of my happiest memories revolve around the Inn itself. In those days the river had not yet been harnessed by the series of weirs that have since been constructed to the south of Rosenheim–right by Thansau, in fact. In my time it tumbled freely down from the narrow valleys of the Alps, flowing through Rosenheim and northwards to join the Danube at Passau. There was just one small dam, sufficient to tame it during the high water period when the snows melted in the High Alps. This prevented it from flooding the stretch of broad wooded valley where our house and land was situated. In the summer months its waters, clear, shallow and fast flowing, ran between exposed banks of shingle. But in the late spring, at the height of the snowmelt, it became an angry rushing torrent, the colour of sand. The noise of its passage could be heard from afar. Hemmed in by thick woods on either side, it presented an almost primeval picture far removed from our twentieth century civilization.

When the late spring surge subsided, however, it left behind numerous small pools, which in high summer became as warm as bath water. My friends and I paddled and played about in these for hours. Our imaginations fired by father’s tales of his days in colonial Africa before the war, and of the crocodiles that lurked along the muddy banks of the rivers there, we would splash and thrash about in the pure, silvery fine-grained sand of the Inn fighting ‘river monsters’ of every kind. Every time we returned home after these battles mother would have to put us straight into the bath to wash away the river sand that still covered us from head to foot.

The woods stretched a good 300 metres eastwards from the nearby dam. A fair sized stream ran through the trees and this marked the boundary of our property, which encompassed an area of about 24,000 square metres. When we moved in, much of this was also thickly wooded. And as it was neither cultivated nor forested, it formed what today might be termed one enormous biotope, consisting mainly of alders standing among a near impenetrable carpet of bushes, shrubs and reeds. Raspberries and blackberries also grew in abundance and we became enthusiastic fruit pickers, taking most of our booty home for mother to make into jam. This otherwise undisturbed paradise was home to a myriad of creatures, including hares, squirrels, pine martens, partridges and pheasants. To us children it was a place of enchantment.

There was, however, one drawback to our house being so close to the river: the height of the water table was governed entirely by its state. When the Inn was in spate our cellars could be anything up to one metre deep in water. But we children didn’t look upon this as any kind of disadvantage. Quite the opposite, in fact, for it gave us the chance to ‘sail’ from one cellar room to the other in mother’s large washtub.

When we moved to Thansau father was forty-seven years old and he soon began to devote all his spare time to clearing and cultivating the woodland on our property. Completely unaided he created a large meadow, which he then leased to the Schlossmann family who owned the neighbouring estate. He also laid out an extensive strawberry field and cleared a thirty-metre wide strip of grass along the southern frontage of the house for us to play on. On this plot he then dug–entirely by hand–two swimming pools, each measuring fifteen metres by five metres, and each three metres deep. The existing ground water quickly filled both pools to a depth of one-and-a-half metres and, as this underground water flowed northwards along the line of the Inn at a rate of about one metre a day, the pools did not become brackish but remained naturally free of bacteria and any chemical impurities. The topsoil only went down some thirty centimetres before giving way to the finest Inn sand. This kept the bottom of the pools spotlessly clean, but was immediately swirled up in billowing clouds whenever we splashed about–so after every session in the pool it was back to mother and straight into the bath again for another scrub down!

The felling of the trees was always a special event, although now that I was getting on in years it meant that I had to pull my weight on one end of the large, two-man saw. But the climax every time was the blowing up of the stump. As a front-line soldier of the Great War, father knew a thing or two about high explosives. After he had carefully packed the blast holes with black powder, the shutters on the windows of the house would be closed while we children had to run around the neighbourhood warning people of the impending explosion–sadly, father flatly refused to buy a signal trumpet to relieve us of this task. Then there would be an almighty bang, clouds of smoke and copious amounts of sand would fly into the air and the offending stump, together with its roots, could be effortlessly hauled out of the ground. When tackling the first stumps, those nearest the house, large clods of dirt and muck would sometimes get stuck to the walls and these we would then have laboriously to scrape and wash off.

The sound of father’s activities could, of course, be heard throughout Thansau. If the wind was right, the noise might even reach as far as Rohrdorf, three kilometres away. But people would simply remark ‘Aha, the Hauptmann’s up to his old tricks again!’–father was always referred to as the ‘Hauptmann’, this being the rank he held when he returned home from the war–and that was all the notice that would be taken. One can’t help wondering what the reaction would be today if people went around letting off high explosives in the course of their everyday lives. But then we lived in a different age, although we didn’t perhaps realize at the time just how idyllic everything was.

But it wasn’t all paradise. There was also school to be attended. Our school was in Rohrdorf and boasted all of two rooms; one for classes one-three, and the other for four-eight. The head teacher, Herr Birkner–who was rumoured to be a ‘Sozi’ or Socialist–ruled with a rod of iron. The slightest misdemeanour could result in being caned on the open palm of the hand or being made to kneel in the corner of the classroom for fifteen minutes on a sharp-edged piece of firewood. The wood was there ostensibly to feed the stove, but Herr Birkner had his own peculiar ideas on educational therapy.

In both summer and winter we made the journey to and from school on foot. The trip home could sometimes take as long as two-and-a-half hours, for we often played a favourite game on the way. For a good part of the distance the winding country road–in those days not yet metalled and still little more than a dirt track–ran alongside the single-track railway line to Frasdorf. Having armed ourselves with a plentiful supply of caps for our toy pistols, we would lay these out along the rail over a length of several metres and eagerly await the approach of the train. When the tiny locomotive, known locally as the ‘Frasdorf Billygoat’, ran over the carefully spaced pellets it would sound to all the world like a long burst of machine-gun fire. The crew of the ‘Billygoat’ joined in the fun, the driver and fireman laughing and waving as they rat-tat-tatted past us. But they were not quite so amused when we had no caps and put stones on the rail instead. This practice came to a sudden end when our parents somehow got to hear of it and delivered a few well-deserved clips around our collective ears.

In 1931 I passed the entrance examination for the Rosenheim Classical Grammar School and, although we would continue to live at Thansau for five more years, things were no longer quite so carefree. My new school was a good eight kilometres from home and walking was no longer an option, so my parents bought me a brand new bicycle. It was an ‘Express’ model bearing that company’s distinctive leaping greyhound trademark, as I can still clearly recall. This I used during the summer months. In the winter I was allowed to travel back and forth on the ‘Frasdorf Billygoat’. But the journeys I enjoyed most of all were on those days when father had business in Rosenheim and rode into town on his second-hand 200cc DKW motorbike, known to the family as ‘Schnauferl’, or ‘Wheezer’. Always a practical man, father would bring a towrope with him on these occasions. He would collect me from school, tie the rope securely to the front of my ‘Express’, and tow me home. To the best of my recollection we never had a single mishap.

It was my father who had selected my new school, as he himself had enjoyed a similar classical education when he was a boy. But the fees of thirty Reichsmarks were quite a lot for those days and represented very nearly ten per cent of my parents’ income. And when my sister Radegunde–‘Rada’ to the family–who was two years younger than me, entered the Rosenheim High School for Girls in 1933, another thirty Reichsmarks had to be found for her. But 1933 was also the year that Adolf Hitler came to power and the new regime implemented many of its promised social reforms remarkably quickly. Among the first measures to be introduced was the halving of school fees for a family’s second child and their abolition altogether for all subsequent children.

Another sign of Hitler’s taking office was a sudden huge expansion in the country’s road building programme. This prompted father seriously to consider the idea of getting the family more comfortably motorized by replacing the motorbike with a car. Brochures were obtained and pored over, this make was compared to that, dealers were visited, and some even came out to Thansau to try to persuade father to choose their particular model. In the end, the favourite turned out to be the DKW Reichsklasse costing 1,800 Marks. This just pipped the Opel Olympia, which had been the front-runner up until then.

But Herr Vodermayer, who ran the Opel dealership in Rosenheim, was clearly not a man to give up easily. He arrived at the house to plead his case, but must have got under father’s skin in a big way. The discussion grew more and more heated and ended with my father chasing the terrified dealer out of the house and along the front path calling him all the names under the sun. ‘Arsehole’, he growled furiously as he stomped back indoors. And so our modest but faithful ‘Schnauferl’ continued to serve all our transport needs. Father even allowed me and my school friends to use it–more accurately perhaps, misuse it–to roar around between the fruit trees in the orchard he had planted.

But one of our expeditions, now part of family history, was to prove too much even for the sadly no longer so trusty steed. It was 1933, the summer holidays were looming, and plans were made for a trip to the Saarland to visit Aunt Margarethe and her husband, Uncle Fritz, who had been a fighter pilot in the Great War. Father decided that the journey should be turned into an adventure and that, while mother and Rada were packed off to the Saarland by train, he and I would make our way there on his motorbike. And so early one morning, with me planted firmly on the pillion seat, we cheerfully set off. I must admit to having felt a bit nervous, not without good reason as it transpired, but the weather was fine and promised to remain so.

Our route was to take us from Thansau, via Füssen, to Lake Constance. From there we would follow the Rhine Valley northwards before branching west through the Pfalz to our holiday destination in the Saarland; it was a journey of over 700 kilometres. Father had calculated that it would take us three days to complete the outward journey, and he was allowing two for the return trip. The first minor hiccup occurred outside Füssen where the engine, due perhaps to the combination of a not altogether adequate service and the warmth of the summer sun, overheated and simply died on us. Father didn’t take this too seriously. He wrapped the cylinder in fresh grass, which I then had to replace at regular intervals. This allowed it to cool off while we sat in the welcome shade of a large tree and tucked into our sandwiches.

The ‘repair’ actually worked and we were soon able to continue on our way towards Lake Constance where, if memory serves me right, we stopped for the night. By about noon the next day, with the sun beating down even more fiercely, we had reached the district of Swabia and father was keeping an eye out for a source of drinking water as our supplies were running dangerously low. In one village he parked the machine and me beneath a linden tree and went from house to house to ask for water. But not a door opened. People simply watched us through closed windows. Nobody was prepared to give us a single drop. I could see the sweat pouring down father’s forehead. His face was getting redder and redder, the veins were starting to stand out and I knew exactly what was coming–he was about to fly into one of his legendary rages.

The author’s father poses proudly next to ‘Schnauferl’ ready to set off on the expedition to the Saarland. The author is on the balcony behind (second left).

Striding back into the middle of the village square, father drew himself up to his full height and began, at the top of his voice, to hurl insults at the entire community. A barrage of invective in his broadest Bavarian left the locals in little doubt as to what he thought of them. He was soon in full swing, “…and you can’t even spare us a single glass of water, you lousy Swabian skinflints, hiding there in those manure heaps you call home along with your chickens and pigs. Well, you can keep your filthy pisswater–and while you’re at it, you can kiss my arse sideways!!”

It was at this juncture that several doors opened and four burly figures armed with pitchforks began to advance towards us. “Papa,” I said anxiously, “I really think we ought to leave.” Faced with this new development, father had little option but to agree. He kick-started ‘Schnauferl’. Fortunately the bike’s engine sprang into life immediately and we were able to make our getaway. At the next village we came to we stopped at an inn where we were given a very friendly reception. Our image of Swabia was restored in an instant. Not all its inhabitants were as dour and unwelcoming as those we had first had the misfortune to encounter.

In the evening we arrived at Annweiler, a small town in the Pfalz nestling beneath the Trifels, the ruined fortress where England’s King Richard the Lionheart had been held captive in the twelfth century. Father had a weakness for historical locations and it was here that we stayed overnight. The next morning did not begin very well. Neither of us was unduly surprised when the DKW flatly refused to fire. After trying to kick-start it into life a good fifty times, father–never one to throw money around unnecessarily–next decided that we should attempt to hill-start our recalcitrant steed instead. We must have rolled down one of Annweiler’s steepest streets at least another twenty times, and pushed the machine back up to the top again puffing and sweating as it grew progressively heavier, before father finally admitted defeat.

Luckily there was a garage-cum-workshop nearby. And inside it stood something on four wheels that, even in those faroff days, could only be described as an old crock. I noticed that father was eyeing this heap of junk covetously, no doubt fearing–with some justification–that our troubles with ‘Schnauferl’ were far from over. The dealer was also quick to spot father’s interest, stating that he could be persuaded to part with the thing for the princely sum of 300 Reichsmarks....

Índice

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Carefree Childhood
• Chapter 2: Growing up in the ‘New Age’
• Chapter 3: War is Declared
• Chapter 4: The Start of my Flying Career
• Chapter 5: Training to be a Fighter Pilot
• Chapter 6: Posted to the Front
• Chapter 7: The Normandy Invasion
• Chapter 8: Captivity
• Chapter 9: The War is Over
• Appendix 1 Aircraft Types Flown by the Author
• Appendix 2 Units in which the Author Served
• Appendix 3 Unit Notes and Histories