said. ‘Until tomorrow.’ And then he had driven back to Monte Erice. Steinhoff had barely slept, the general’s words ringing in his ears: ‘Get in close.’ ‘Don’t fire too soon.’ ‘Lead them in head-on close formation.’ Steinhoff knew one had to have nerves of steel to pull off these frontal attacks. He was not feeling confident, and in any case, he had already been a front-line fighter pilot for three long years – over France, during the Battle of Britain, over the Eastern Front and then in those difficult final days in Tunisia when suddenly it had become clear that the Luftwaffe was in deep and chronic decline and the Allies, with their shiny Spitfires and Lightnings, their Marauders and Flying Fortresses, had dramatically and decisively begun to wield the upper hand.
Steinhoff was fed up with fighting, fed up with the war, fed up with not having enough of anything. And he was utterly exhausted. The intensity, the constant fear, and now, here on Sicily, the blistering, energy-sapping heat.
Early that day, his III. Gruppe had arrived from their base in Sardinia, and then so too had III. Gruppe Jagdgeschwader 53, the Pik As, or Ace of Spades. This was all part of Galland’s plan to show any Allied bomber formations that dared to fly over a heavy response by a mass of fighter aircraft; but with some eighty Messerschmitts now parked up around the airfield complex here at Trapani, Steinhoff was only thinking of the catastrophe that might unfold if they were heavily attacked by Allied bombers here.
The hours passed and the heat grew. Steinhoff wondered how many hours he had spent in a deckchair since the war had begun. ‘A day seems very long when it is spent in waiting,’ he noted, ‘with nothing to occupy one’s imagination except the war in the air.’1 He wondered whether he would be able to lead this huge formation of fighters into the bombers successfully; it was no easy matter manoeuvring en masse because the distances on the inside of a turn were shorter than those on the outside. Leading a Staffel of, say, nine, was reasonably straightforward, but eighty … Then those other thoughts kept creeping into his mind – thoughts impossible to keep out: the raking fire of the Flying Fortresses’ .50-calibre machine guns, the bailing out, the descent, the vainly hoping someone would spot the rubber dinghy on that vast dark Mediterranean Sea.
Then Oberst Günther ‘Franzl’ Lützow arrived, the new Inspector South for the Luftwaffe. An old friend of Steinhoff’s, he had been the Luftwaffe’s second pilot to amass a staggering one hundred aerial victories. Steinhoff hadn’t seen him since the Eastern Front the previous summer.
‘I want to be here for your first big defensive battle!’2 called Lützow as he clambered out of his car. Steinhoff led him over to dispersal and to the mass of pilots sitting waiting under the shade of the olive trees. All this talk of big aerial battles was making Steinhoff feel increasingly on edge.
‘Today’s your big chance,’ Lützow told the pilots.3 ‘You must keep close together when you attack and dismiss from your mind any thought of mixing it with the Spitfires. The Fortresses are like a fleet of battleships and you can only get in among them if you break through their defensive fire in a compact phalanx.’
‘For God’s sake, Franzl,’ Steinhoff snapped, ‘spare me that awful patter!4 For days now, advice and instructions have been raining down on our heads from on high. The General keeps dangling the gallant pilots of the Reich Air Defence as a shining example before our eyes.’ It was, continued Steinhoff, enough to make all his men start to feel inferior. The reality was that, for some time now, the older veterans had been gradually, one by one, falling by the wayside, while the new boys being sent to him were short of hours and had had almost no tactical training – and, such were the fuel shortages, there was little opportunity to lick them into shape. ‘You people don’t know this horrible theatre yet,’ he continued. ‘It’s mostly water and in the long run it gets us all. They’ll wear us down by keeping us grounded and destroying our parks and workshops.’ He was now in full flow. ‘You don’t, by any chance, do you, believe in the Teutonic superhero who, after a bombing raid, rises from his slit trench, shakes the dust from his feet and ascends on steely pinions into the icy heavens, there to wreak havoc among the Flying Fortresses?’
For a long moment, Lützow stared at him, as though suddenly he had accepted there was no longer any point keeping up the charade. Then he said: ‘Yes, but how’s it all going to end here?’5
That was the question Steinhoff had been asking himself. It was what all the old-timers had been wondering. They’d lost Tunisia. It wasn’t going well in the east. In western Germany, the Ruhr was being systematically bombed by the RAF each night and by the Americans each day. The Allies were getting stronger, while they were growing weaker. How was it going to end?
The discussion was suddenly silenced by anti-aircraft fire, followed by a deep rumble from the east, behind Monte Erice, getting louder with every moment. The pilots jumped up and ran for it. Steinhoff heard the whistle of bombs falling even as he fled towards the nearest slit-trench, then leaped for it, landing on the back of someone who had got there first. A carpet of bombs exploded in rapid succession, each one closer, the ground shaking, the noise immense. Steinhoff glanced across at Lützow, dust covering his head and at the back of his throat and in his lungs. Runnels of sweat pouring down his face marked lines through the dust on his skin. Steinhoff pressed his face to the ground as a bomb crashed horribly close, almost bursting eardrums, covering them in a swathe of grit and filling their lungs once more with choking smoke and dust.
And then the bombs stopped falling and the roar of aero-engines faded away. Slowly, unsteadily, they got to their feet and paused for a moment, legs dangling over the edge of the trench in case a second wave appeared. Ammunition from a burning plane was popping somewhere not far away. As they eventually got to their feet, Steinhoff saw splinters of glass; a little way away two ground crew, hands on hips, stood watching the burning wreckage of an Me109.
At the group hut, it turned out the phone line had been cut; soon afterwards a Kübelwagen appeared with a message from Galland asking Steinhoff to call immediately from one of the Staffel dispersal huts. Steinhoff hurried over to 1. Staffel, where the medical officer was tending a row of wounded ground crew. There, at least, the line was still working.
Galland apologized for the lack of warning. ‘We didn’t know the Marauders were on their way,’ he said. ‘They were so close to sea level that our direction finders didn’t pick them up.’ He told Steinhoff to be ready to scramble; radio traffic suggested bombers in Tunisia were starting to form up. It looked as though a big raid was on its way.
A little while later, and with the line from the group hut repaired, Galland rang again to say they were tracking an enemy raid that seemed to be heading for Naples. The fighters would be scrambled to catch them on the return leg. They most likely had an hour to wait.
But Galland was back on the line sooner than that. ‘Take off straight away, Steinhoff,’ he said. ‘The bombers have turned south and attacked the port of Messina. You must hurry if you’re going to catch them.’
Steinhoff put down the receiver and shouted ‘Scramble!’ at the operations clerk. Pilots ran to their machines, grabbing parachutes left on the wings, clambering up on to the wing root and hoisting themselves into the cockpit. A quick check, a signal to the ground crew, engine turning and bursting into life, then taxi out of the blast pen. Steinhoff checked his magnetos. The smell of oil, gasoline, metal and rubber, and a cockpit already hot as an oven. He glanced around, although the collar of his lifejacket restricted movement and his oxygen mask swung to and fro. Dust was being whipped up by the prop blast, making it hard to see, but with aircraft drawing up either side of him he opened the throttle and was off, rumbling forward, controlling the huge torque with opposite rudder. A routine performed hundreds of times; and then he was free of the ground and climbing high into the blue.
‘Odysseus One to Eagle,’ he said over the R/T – the radio – making contact with the ground controller below at Monte
