Word: galland
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Free chase over southeast England," read the Luftwaffe's daily briefing order after France fell in 1940. Three times daily the German fighters scrambled after the British Hurricanes. Says Galland: "We simply went straight for them, with wide-open throttle and eyes bulging out of our sockets...
House Without a Roof. Galland guesses that the Nazi higher-ups, lacking both stomach and plans for invasion, fatuously hoped that the airmen's bold onslaughts would cow the British into seeking peace. But when they didn't, the mighty Luftwaffe, terror of Warsaw and Rotterdam, was shown up as too weak for decisive warfare, equipped with fighters lacking in range and Stukas too short on speed and bomb load to destroy Britain's plane factories. The irony of the matter, says Galland, was that the Allies, not Germany, learned from the Luftwaffe's failure...
Luftwaffe must now change over to defense against the West." Two months earlier Galland had visited Augsburg and flown the revolutionary new ME 262 jet fighter. He flashed word to Goring that the new plane, with its 500 m.p.h. speed, could end air attacks on the German heartland. Hitler, in what many Western airmen would now call one of the critical decisions of World War II, refused to permit emergency development of the plane because "the Luftwaffe had disappointed him too often in the past with promises" of new developments. Later, piling blunder on blunder, Hitler ordered the new fighter...
Brasshat Without Brass. In 1944 the fading Goring relieved his fighter chief. In 1945, Galland wangled command of an elite ME 262 outfit known, because of the pack of aces he collected for it, as the "Squadron of Experts." The big picture thereupon dissolved to the gun-sight view. With the oldtime exhilaration, ex-Brasshat Galland blew up two U.S. Marauders. Then "a hail of fire enveloped me. A Mustang had caught me napping. A sharp rap hit my right knee. The instrument panel . . . was shattered. The right engine was also hit. Its metal covering worked loose . . . and was partly...
...Galland landed, and wound up in a Munich hospital. Having begun the war as a flight lieutenant and squadron commander, he was mustered out a lieutenant general and squadron commander. Werner Molders with his 100 kills, Hans Joachim Marseille with his 158, Walther Novotny with his 250, had fallen but he had survived, the first and the last. Now completing a five-year contract as adviser...