idea emphatically. He insisted that even modern warfare could find a place for chivalry. Such a lonely romantic would find little in common with the hard-eyed ambitious men who were jockeying for power in the huge Air Ministry building in Berlin.
Ernst Udet’s critics pointed out that he smoked too much, drank too much, and had the disconcerting habit of scribbling acerbic caricatures of his friends and colleagues. Yet Udet’s love of flying gave him an advantage in the matter of assessing new aircraft designs. He liked to describe himself as the Luftwaffe’s chief test pilot, and when he got a chance to see the Bf 109 in flight he was magnanimous enough to change his mind about Messerschmitt’s new fighter.
Initially there had been four fighters from which to choose. The Arado was eliminated because it had a fixed undercarriage, and so was the Focke-Wulf prototype (which had a parasol wing supported by struts). Its wheels retracted into the fuselage, and this complicated mechanism was never satisfactory. This left the Heinkel He 112 as the only rival for the Bf 109. German engine development, or rather the lack of it, forced both manufacturers to use a Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine in the prototype.
At first it seemed certain that Heinkel would get the contract. His fighter was based upon the beautiful He 70. It was strongly made, with a top speed only marginally less than its rival. The structure was rather complex, but its wing loading (that is, the weight per square foot of wing area) was calculated to appeal to the biplane protagonists, and so was its open cockpit.
Messerschmitt’s fighter was radically new. Its wing loading was so high that it needed ‘gadgets’ such as slots, and the wings were incredibly thin compared to the Heinkel’s. But once in the air the Messerschmitt was supreme: rolling, diving and excelling in all the tests that the Air Ministry specified. And although the aerodynamics were advanced, the slab-sided, square-tipped wings and very narrow but otherwise orthodox fuselage would give no production problems. It would be superior in cost, in man-hours and in materials.
Heinkel’s readiness to compromise with the aerodynamics of the biplane had resulted in a prototype that was heavy and unresponsive to the controls. Heinkel took his sluggish prototype and changed it, not once but many times, until eventually it was comparable to the Bf 109, but Udet took Professor Heinkel aside and told him that, now the Bf 109 was in full-scale production, there was no place in his building programme for the He 112 fighter. Stick to bombers, he told Heinkel.
The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was Udet’s most important contribution to the Luftwaffe. His decision came at a time when the unconventional Udet was at the height of his influence. Hitler described him as the world’s greatest pilot. Sourly Milch added, ‘But he also saw him as one of our greatest technical experts, and here he was very mistaken.’ But Milch was not yet ready to get into conflict with one of Hitler’s favourites and Udet became a member of Milch’s group of influential cronies who dined regularly at Horcher’s famous restaurant in Berlin.
Neither did Udet have much to fear from Göring. As elected chairman of the Richthofen Veterans Association, Udet had expelled Göring, the unit’s last commander. Udet accused Göring of falsifying his First World War record and victory claims and said he could prove it. Milch said that Göring admitted it was true, and was frightened of Udet.
By now Milch had few friends. Heartily disliked by Göring, he found little support from the Luftwaffe General Staff. In spite of this, the irrepressible Milch, working like a beaver, consolidated his authority, and in certain areas increased it. When the Spanish Civil War started and Franco asked for Hitler’s aid, Milch instantly recognised it as a chance to increase his power. He took charge of the intervention.
The Spanish Civil War
By early 1937 Milch had a small experimental air force unit operating in Spain. One of its first missions had been the air-transporting of 10,000 fully equipped Moorish infantry from Tetuan, in Spanish Morocco, to Seville. They used Junkers Ju 52/3m aircraft, and the movement went almost without a hitch. In some respects it was as significant as any of the Condor Legion’s combat actions.
The Condor Legion’s commander was Sperrle, who later became an Air Fleet commander in the Battle of Britain. His Chief of Staff was Wolfram von Richthofen, a dive-bombing and close-support specialist. (He was a cousin of the First World War ace.) The Luftwaffe’s first taste of combat was a terrible disappointment for Göring, Milch and the High Command. The Junkers Ju 52/3m proved unsuitable for bombing, and most bombing turned out to be far less accurate than had been hoped. The Heinkel He 51 biplane fighters were inferior to the I-16 fighters (supplied to the other side by the USSR) in speed, climb, manoeuvrability and armament. Reluctant to believe this, the German flyers often misidentified them as ‘Curtiss fighters’. But as German skill improved and newer German aircraft arrived, things got better: Berlin’s apprehension turned into equally wrong complacency. When Dornier Do 17 and Heinkel He 111 bombers proved faster than enemy fighters the Schnellbomber concept seemed vindicated. Rashly the men in Berlin concluded that bombers would never require fighter escort.
The Junkers Ju 87 dive bomber also exceeded expectations, and its small bomb-load was more than compensated for by the fast turn-around time at its bases: some of the units completed half-a-dozen missions per day. And von Richthofen’s close-support techniques proved decisive in some actions, even though the war’s front line was notoriously difficult to see. There was a shortage of aircraft radio but the airmen relied on signals spread out on the ground. They did little to improve air-to-air or air-to-ground radio. This, too, was to prove a grave error.
The Messerschmitt Bf 109s arrived to take over the fighter combat tasks. Heinkel He 51 biplanes were already adapted to carrying 10-kg high-explosive bombs and improvised petrol bombs. This flat-trajectory bombing in support of infantry attacks became a specialised technique of German (and Allied) light-bomber squadrons. It was one of the few new methods to evolve in the Spanish fighting.
The Luftwaffe’s first building programme had begun in January 1934; it went to war in September 1939. By 1937 there was clearly little time left for redesigning the Luftwaffe’s aircraft. These aircraft types that fought in Spain – Bf 109s, He 111s, Ju 87s, Ju 52s – remained the basis of the Luftwaffe’s strength right up until the end of the Second World War.
Milch sent Hugo Sperrle’s Condor Legion to Spain to assess the aircraft already in production. With this in mind, many different aircraft types were sent there, including even float-planes. The flying personnel were rotated after six months to provide combat experience for as many crews as possible. All ranks were encouraged to send reports to a specially constituted department of the Air Ministry.
Just as men from von Seeckt’s Defence Ministry provided the Luftwaffe with its staff and its Air Fleet commanders, and Lipetsk (the secret training school in Russia) provided its field commanders, so now did Spain provide combat specialists. Men such as Adolf Galland and Werner Mölders came back from leading a fighter Staffel in Spain to revolutionise the formations and tactics of the fighter arm.
Adolf ‘Dolfo’ Galland was an outstanding personality of this period. Born in 1912, of Huguenot ancestry, Galland, like so many other Luftwaffe aces, was attracted to the sport of gliding while still a teenager. Accepted by the Air Transport School at Brunswick, Galland was soon selected for the secret Luftwaffe. At 22 years old he was an instructor at the famous Schleissheim Fighter Pilot School. Galland went to fight in Spain but, flying a Heinkel He 51 biplane, deliberately avoided combat with the far superior Russian- and American-made enemy monoplanes.
The poor performance of the He 51s caused them to be relegated to the infantry support role. Galland pioneered these experiments and produced a considerable body of written material about the use of aircraft in support of ground forces. This fitted very well with the dive-bombing theories of Udet, which were by now enthusiastically received
