THE STAR OF AFRICA
LUFTWAFFE ACES
The Luftwaffe’s expert pilots tested their opponents to their limits in fierce dogfights and interception sorties, claiming thousands of aerial victories
D uring the Second World War, the Luftwaffe counted history’s highest-scoring pilot aces, or Experten, among its ranks. Prior to the outbreak of the war, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forbidden from having an air force, which forced the Nazis to improvise by training their pilots abroad and concealing their build-up of military planes and personnel under a commercial guise. This pretence ceased in 1935 when the existence of the Luftwaffe was officially recognised – the secretive training programmes meant it began with many experienced aviators. This included veterans of the Condor Legion – Hitler’s expeditionary force sent to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) – but soon many young pilots, brought up through the ranks of the Hitler Youth, were making their name in aerial combat.
Many pilots honed their skills in dogfights over Britain, France and North Africa, though the Eastern Front saw by far the most aerial victories of the war, meaning confirmed aircraft destroyed or incapacitated. In the East, Soviet planes and pilots were often outmatched by their opponents, even during the dying months of the war as the Red Army advanced towards Berlin. Though many of the Luftwaffe’s pilot aces would not see the end of the war, many others would go on to serve in democratic West Germany’s resurrected air force, instructing future generations of aviators.
Eventually, men like Marseille and his close friends Werner Schröer and Hans-Arnold ‘Fifi’ Stahlschmidt would help to intermittently turn the tide for the Axis in North Africa. Yet, although he scored the first North African kill for the 3 Staffel of JG 27 against a Hawker Hurricane, Marseille initially struggled to adapt to the challenging operational conditions. In addition, his continuing rebellious streak occasionally bordered on the fatuous. Hauptmann Gerhard Homuth immediately disliked Marseille and once grounded him from a mission. Neumann described his protégé’s retaliation…
“Marseille, being a hot-headed sort, took off and then he strafed the ground close to Homuth’s tent, and he was very lucky not to have been court-martialled for that stupid stunt. Homuth continued to have problems with Marseille. He wrote a report stating that he was ‘undisciplined in the air, as well as on the ground, and displayed nothing resembling proper airmanship in combat’.”
However, Marseille did become more disciplined where it truly mattered: going in for the kill. He swapped alcohol for milk in the belief it would improve his eyesight and squinted up into the desert
