THE FIRST AND THE LAST: THE RISE & FALL OF THE GERMAN FIGHTER FORCES, 1938-1945 (368 pp.]—Adolf Galland—Holf ($4.95).
War memoirs fall generally into two classes—front-line yarns and headquarters stories. This book, written by one of those fast-rising, baby air generals people joked about in World War II, combines in one man's memoirs both the passion of combat and the perspective of command. Germany's Adolf Galland was made general of the Luftwaffe's fighter arm at 29, after shooting down 94 Allied planes on the Western front. Some of his air-battle stories read almost as fast as the Messerschmitts he flew, and his staff-battle accounts give the clearest picture yet of how the Germans lost their war in the air.
"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 to produce great masses of four-engine bombers and long-range fighters. Called to command in Berlin, Goring's young adviser saw the Luftwaffe outnumbered, outgunned and outperformed as Hitler's war spread in all directions. As soon as the Americans introduced long-range fighters to escort their bombers, Galland warned Goring that Germany would be "a house without a roof."
After the great fire raids on Hamburg in 1943, even Göring declared that "the
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 rigged as a "blitz bomber" against the expected Western invasion. Technically incapable of the task, it never dropped a bomb on the Normandy beachhead.