The Last of the First: Veterans of the Jagdwaffe Tell their Story

Fighter pilots are warriors with a difference. Members of a select and highly trained caste, they wage their war physically removed from the battlefields on the ground and the squalor and horror prevailing there. Their mission is as much about surviving in an environment alien to the human presence as it is about taking the fight to the enemy. When the latter does occur, only in the rarest of cases will they experience the killing of an enemy in the same traumatic way as an infantryman or even a tanker. The elite characteristics of this fraternity are replicated many times over among those individuals who make up their inner circle: those who by common consent have reached the degree of proficiency which makes them deserving of the label "ace". Historians and publicists writing up the air power side of almost any twentieth century conflict have rarely been able to extricate themselves from the "pull" emanating from this group. This may have as much to do with (often deceptive) notions of chivalrous one-on-one combat among the clouds, which tend to be more appealing to our imagination than the realities of total war², as with the fact that in their case the specific impact a single individual has had on the course of a campaign or war can actually be assessed with an accuracy normally not found in other fields of modern war. Looking back on nearly 100 years of organised air warfare, it is not difficult to identify the national subchapter of this elite fraternity which has formed the image of the successful fighter pilot in the popular imagination to a greater degree than any other: while "The Few" of the RAF's Fighter Command are certainly unique insofar as their association with one specific historic event is concerned, a select number of their brothers in arms of the Jagdwaffe – the Luftwaffe's fighter arm – would go on to a place in history buttressed by feats dwarfing those of any other air force before or since. Aided by a unique set of circumstances (on the job training in Spain and Poland; lack of a rotation system; the sheer number of aircraft churned out by the Allies after 1941; as well as – initially – superior tactics), they achieved scores which by far outstripped those of their Allied adversaries.³ A scrupulously thorough system of bookkeeping ensured that most of these claims would stand the test of time remarkably well. Once the war had ended, the survivors were able to carve out for themselves a niche in post-war German society which even the most vociferously anti-Wehrmacht critics had until very recently not attempted to assail.⁴ This was partly due to the collective self-immolation of the Jagdwaffe in attempting to defend German cities from the Allied bombing offensive in the last two years of the war. Just as important, unlike other German veterans (especially U-boat sailors or members of the Waffen SS) they were never compelled by choice or force of circumstance to rally round individuals closely associated with the defunct regime in order to preserve...