Hitler's Jet Plane (23 page)

In the early hours of 4 April 1945, another great formation of enemy bombers was reported approaching. Major Rudolf Sinner, commander of III/JG7 and seven of his pilots prepared for the encounter. Before they took off, the information centre reported enemy fighters at 24,000 feet over Parchim. Immediately after receiving this report, they took off. The first seven jets circled the airfield widely to allow the formation to build while the eighth remained in visual contact and on lookout. The skies were nearly fully overcast, but the cloud layer relatively thin.

Sinner came out of the swathes of mist through a hole at about 1,200 feet and at once saw at a few hundred feet above him four aircraft with lancet-shaped wings. ‘Thunderbolts!’ he cursed, for he had not expected to make contact with the enemy so quickly after receiving information that they were at 24,000 feet. There was no avoiding the clash. At this low height, the Me 262s were still too slow to distance themselves from the threat and make a fresh approach. Surprised by the enemy tactic, to climb and level out into horizontal flight at superior speed would take too long; the only response was to bank towards the enemy fighters in a steep ascent.

At first it appeared that this might have been successful. The Thunderbolts turned away sharply and offered Sinner the opportunity of following in a shallow dive, but scarcely had he begun this manoeuvre than he saw four Mustangs pursuing Schall’s 262. His aircraft was in the same dilemma as he had just been in himself. Without firing off his rockets, which he wanted to keep in reserve for the bombers, he decided to try forcing the Mustangs away with his machine-guns, but immediately he saw above him to his right four more Mustangs about to fall on him in a dive. He succeeded in banking away below them but then came under fire from the rear. He was fenced in and no possibility remained to escape by climbing or diving, and at this height the jet didn’t have the speed to outpace them. Oh shit! was his initial thought. Eight Mustangs had him in a pincer movement from just about every direction, and Sinner had no time to reflect on his position. It was not his failure – the fault lay with the controller who had warned of enemy fighters at 24,000 feet but not of those at 2,400 feet skirting the tops of the low cloud. This should have been evident from radar observation. He was alone with the enemy, but even if the rest of the group had been with him, the enemy were too many. Wherever he looked he saw Mustangs banking, wheeling and turning and he had the sensation that the only matter which remained to be resolved was which American fighter would fire the
coup de grâce
.

Sinner dived for the cloud. His machine was hit by the first burst before he reached it, but luck was with him and he sheltered in the mists. To rid himself of unnecessary weight and reduce the risk of explosion, he attempted to fire his R4M rockets. They failed to ignite. Two Mustangs had managed to cling to his tail. Why didn’t they fire? Feverishly Sinner worked at the weapons panel, trying everything he could to set off the rockets. Nothing worked.

Thick smoke poured through the cockpit. The Mustangs below had opened fire as soon as they spotted the outline of the jet from below the cloud cover. Sinner saw at once that the left wing of his aircraft was aflame, and the fire set alight the cabin. Pointless to go on with it. Watching the enemy fighters close to his tail, he put his machine through a last evasive manoeuvre, threw off the cockpit canopy and jumped. His speed was 700 kph. He saw the tailplane pass him at a safe distance, but noticed straightaway that his parachute was damaged. The straps and some of the shroud lines entangled his right leg, and the pack was tugging and pulling from all directions.

‘I’m done for,’ he decided, convinced that the parachute canopy had separated from the harness and that he would fall head first into the depths with his undeveloped bundle. He was low and had not long to wait to see whether his assumption was correct. More by instinct than design he found the rip cord, jerked it – and the miracle happened. He was very close to the ground when the canopy deployed, a number of shroud lines dragged violently at his leg and revolved his body once or twice, but in the turbulence of the moment he hardly felt the braking jolt as the parachute blossomed.

Seconds later he landed – attached to the parachute by a thigh and his left arm – in a freshly ploughed field. At once he tried to unfasten the harness quick-release catch to prevent himself being dragged over the ground. The catch was jammed, and the canopy, bulging in the breeze, pulled him across the furrowed moist earth until it caught in a barbed wire fence. Two Mustangs, apparently the aircraft which had pursued him earlier, now made a low level machine-gun attack on the brightly coloured parachute. Shoulders hunched, Sinner crouched low for cover along a furrow. He heard the sharp tack-tack-tack of the machine-guns but they missed. Poor shooting, he told himself gleefully. As the two enemy fighters climbed away, Sinner at last manage to free the quick-release catch, got free of the canopy and shrouds flapping from the barbed wire and ran 30 metres to where the furrows were deeper. Being dragged by the parachute through the damp earth had given him an effective camouflage, and he felt fairly safe.

They decided on a fresh attack. The enemy fighters – two P-51s from 339 Fighter Group – had executed a wide circle, dived to the treetops of a nearby wood from where the two fat points between the delicate paintwork of their wings came directly for him . . . and the flak battery on the perimeter of the nearby Redlin airfield came alive at last to what the American aircraft were up to. Tracers hissed through the air, close to the attacking fighters which, despite the danger, lingered long enough to fire a few parting salvoes towards the flapping parachute silk. Their aim was too high. Clumps of earth and grass spurted up beyond the material, and then the fighters disappeared below the horizon at low level ducking under the cannonade of flak.

‘Damned fuel,’ Sinner murmured as he arose from his furrow, having only now noticed that he was in pain from burns. It was ten minutes before two operators from a radar station found him and drove the casualty to Jagdgruppe 10 at Redlin. He had serious burns to both hands and his face, as well as other injuries. He was not released from hospital until after hostilities had terminated. Oberleutnant Schall was shot down by the four fighters pursuing him, but landed by parachute. Six days later his luck ran out when, landing at Parchim after a mission, he hit a bomb crater and his Me 262 exploded. Nine of JG7’s thirty aircraft were lost on this date.

In late 1944, General der Flieger Adolf Galland and many other top fighter pilots were in direct conflict with the Luftwaffe High Command. Their anger was directed mainly at Reichsmarschall Goering who had identified the fighter arm as the cause of all his problems. When he relieved Galland of his post as fighter chief, the confrontation erupted into what is frequently called a ‘mutiny’. The revolt involved demands for Galland to be reinstated, and at this point, Christmas 1944, Hitler intervened, asking Galland to form a unit of small squadron strength which would demonstrate the superiority of the Me 262 as a fighter. Thus Jagdverband 44 came into existence under Galland’s command in early January 1945.

Of the veteran pilots of JV44 Galland wrote:

Nearly all of them had been on operations since the first day of the war. Hardly a single one had not been wounded at least once. Among the better known, there was not one who besides the highest awards for valour did not also carry a permanent reminder of battle. The Knight’s Cross was almost an insignia of the uniform of our unit, so to speak. Now, after a long period of technical and numerical inferiority they wanted to experience again the feeling of superiority as aviators. For that purpose they were risking their lives once more...

Among ‘the better known’ besides Galland were the banished Oberst Lützow, the despised Mäcki Steinhoff, and the walking wounded: Barkhorn, Bob, Fährmann, Hohagen, Krupinski, Schnell, Wübke and others. Heinz Bär was among them. Operating from Lechfeld, mostly alone, he had been very successful with the Me 262, and finished the war with sixteen victories, one of the two most successful jet pilots. He had been commodore of JG Udet and eventually commanded JV44 from 26 April 1945 once Galland stepped down through injury. Twelve years later, on 28 April 1957, Bär lost his life when he crashed the harmless little
Zaunkönig
aircraft on a demonstration flight. As well as the known aces there were inexperienced pilots, practically novices, whom nobody would have thought to draft to the new unit had they not put their names forward voluntarily.

Jagdverband 44 came into being at Brandenburg-Briest on 10 January 1945. Preparations, flying-in of aircraft, re-training pilots, setting up the technical apparatus took two months. No sooner were they operational than the unit transferred on 31 March to Munich-Riem for the last murderous month of the Second World War.

Munich-Riem airbase became the target of endless strafing and bombing attacks by enemy aircraft. Perhaps they knew the quality of pilots who were going to operate from there. ‘Two General-leutnants, two Obersts, one Oberstleutnant, three Majors, five in the rank of Hauptmann, eight Leutnants and about the same total of NCOs,’ Galland wrote. Never before had there been a unit of squadron-size with so many fighter aces flying combat missions.

Munich-Riem went through a devastating experience of fire. The aerodrome was soon sown with bomb craters, scarcely an hour went by without Allied fighters arriving to vent their spleen on any target which took their fancy, weather permitting. When he took off in an Me 262, no pilot knew whether the runway would still be there when he got back. Yet none of the available reports ooze despair. Men jumped into slit trenches or holes in the ground when the bombs rained down, pilots together with ground crew and radar operators. Aircraft were towed away from the danger-spots during the alarm or raid and were then towed back once the all-clear sounded. They hammered day and night on repair work in the improvised hangar. Ground staff achieved the impossible for pilots who fought as though the war had just begun.

Unteroffizier Eduard Schallmoser was a small and doughty farmer’s son from the Allgäu. One of the few attached to JV44 whom one could never call ‘a veteran’ or ‘an expert’. On 4 March 1945 Schallmoser returned from a mission, reported a victory. It was noticed on checking his ammunition belts that he had not fired a single round. Hohagen asked for an explanation. ‘I rammed him,’ he confessed, more modest than proud. He had not fired his weapons because it had slipped his mind to release the safety catch. Even Galland had been guilty of this error in the heat of battle.

On 20 April 1945 Schallmoser flew as Galland’s wingman against a formation of B-26s; Hohagen and his wingman made up the swarm of four. They attacked. Galland fired his rockets, knocked down two Marauders. The other aircraft fired and registered hits. Schallmoser roared past Galland, guns spitting fire, kept going and rammed a Marauder. Naturally he was reported missing, when the other three landed at Munich-Riem. Concern grew. The hoped-for telephone call never arrived. Another fine guy gone under the grinding wheels of death. A few hours later the telephone rang in the orderly’s office. Schallmoser was calling from Kempten where his family lived. They sent a car for him. A little later he arrived, parachute over his arm like a raincoat. He had been so close to his parents’ farm that he decided to drop in for coffee, he said shamefacedly.

Others were not so lucky, among them the best, such as Lützow, whom they never found.

13

Kurt Welter – The Most Successful of the Me 262 Aces?

F
or decades since the war, Heinz Bär with fifteen or sixteen victories was considered the leading German jet-fighter ace. Recent analyses however have thrown up another contender with perhaps a better claim – Kurt Welter. His name appears in only a few books, and then with little more than a fleeting description. In Toliver and Constable’s comprehensive work
Das waren die deutschen Jagdflieger-Asse
[These were the German Fighter Aces] Welter is credited with fifty-one victories (thirty-six at night) in the listings but no mention is made of him at all under the heading ‘Jet-fighter Aces’. In Cajus Bekker’s book
Angriffshöhe 4000
[Attack-height 4,000m] one finds on page 462 the brief reference: ‘and (in the night-fighter arm) 10/NJG11, Oberleutnant Welter, held a place of honour by being the only night-fighter unit to be equipped with jet aircraft.’ At page 472 in the same book the Personal Register observes: ‘Oberltn. Kurt Welter, JG300, NJG11, more than fifty air-victories, fate unknown.’ In volume 1,
Jagdflieger
, of Ernst Obermaier’s pictorial work
Die Ritterkreuzträger der Luftwaffe 1939 – 1945
[Knight’s Cross Holders of the Luftwaffe 1939 – 1945], Kurt Welter is listed with brief details and a photograph under the Oak Leaves holders.

Welter seems to have outlived all his family and had no close friends. The author Ernst Obermaier obtained possession of his wartime military identification book and Welter’s career was pieced together by former Oberst Heiner Wittmer, chief of I Jagdkorps, Berlin-Treuenbrietzen. At the time when this present book was first published not all details were known, but already a picture was beginning to emerge of Welter from the available files and witness statements that here was one of the most extraordinary fighter aces of the Second World War.