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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 carried away. Now the left engine was hit too. I could hardly hold her in the air."
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 to
Perón's Air Ministry in Buenos Aires, General Galland, at 42, has been suggested by friends as being just the man to help put the new West German air force into service. But Bonn says it has no use for Galland, an enthusiastic Nazi in his day.