Brian believes that the bravest group of flyers in the history of aviation were the aircrew of the German Luftwaffe in the last year of WWII, May 1944-May 1945 … and says there is a subtle difference between ‘esprit de corps’ and the modern term ‘peer group pressure’…
Brian Lecomber
25 September 2024
Back in 2013 Brian Lecomber wrote his last column for FLYER. He passed away in September 2015, leaving the world poorer for his absence, but richer for the memories and writing he left behind. Brian spent many years on the circuit as a very accomplished member of the Rothmans aerobatic team, and of his own Firebird Aerobatic team.
In addition to his novels, Brian wrote about motoring and, of course, aviation. We’re reformatting his previous FLYER columns, this appeared in FLYER in April 2013.
Who were the bravest group of pilots in the world? At any time, in any place, in the whole five score years and ten
of aviation?
Of course the candidates are legion and far more than legion. A man could cite the very early pioneers of flight. Or the flyers of WWI with their desperately short lifespans over the Western Front.
Or the record-setters of the ‘tween-war years. Or the RAF pilots of the Battle of Britain.
Or the night and day Allied bomber crews of WWII, with their own horrible attrition-rates. Or the chopper pilots in Vietnam. Or the… or the…
No – our world aloft has never been short of raw courage, both by individuals and en masse. So who were the very bravest?
Of course I do not know. And anyone who purports to know runs the risk of being labelled an armchair academic with no personal blood-and-guts and strap-bruised experience. Well, I am not an academic. But I do have strap-bruised experience. And I do have an opinion. I do not for one moment expect to foist it upon others – but I do have an opinion.
A maybe heretical opinion. If it offends – well, so be it.
I believe the bravest group of flyers in the history of aviation were the aircrew of the German Luftwaffe in the last year of WWII – May 1944 to May 1945.
I also feel that, despite the vast majority of us not having been a gleam in our parents’ – or indeed grandparents’ – eyes at that time, we can all still learn from them. I’ll come back to that.
Some may say that the Japanese Air Services of the same era were even braver – and that may be right. Certainly they faced a similar degree of problems as the Luftwaffe (although mostly more maritime of content) and attempted to solve at least some of them with the most desperate expedient of all – kamikaze (suicide) attacks.
I confess I don’t have the faintest insight into the Japanese mindset of that period. Any group of aviators (whether volunteers or not – a subject of historical argument even to this day) who will sacrifice some 4,000 – four thousand – pilots and aircraft in suicide missions is so far removed from our Western thinking that comparison is not possible.
And how any nation could define this mass suicide as ‘Divine Wind’ (the literal interpretation of kamikaze) and then go on to name their most dedicated kamikaze aircraft (nothing short of a manned bomb) the Ohka is utterly beyond my comprehension – the word Ohka meaning, of all things, Cherry Blossom. You figure the thought process out. It is beyond me.
Whether it was beyond the Luftwaffe in the last year of WWII – well, again I’ll come back to it.
What is certain is that the life of a Luftwaffe pilot in that fateful last year was very much less than divine or blossomy. If you are a raw pilot just out of flying school with maybe 150 flying hours – about half that of the new boys of the Allied forces – your prospect is at best dismal, and at worst… well, a lot more than dismal. Young Kurt may have achieved his lifetime’s ambition by being posted to a fighter Staffel, but having arrived he will quickly encounter certain realities…
The first is the terrible paucity of fuel. Allied commanders, most aware that fuel is the lifeblood of any pugnacious endeavour, have placed German oil refineries very, very high on their ‘most wanted’ bombing list. With a considerable degree of success.
In April 1944 the Reich produced 175,000 tons of fuel. In June the total was down to 55,000 tons.
Young Kurt will not know these figures. But he will see the fuel bowsers driving out of the aerodrome daily on the dreary round of visiting all the fuel depots within reach and pleading out 5,000 litres here, 2,000 litres there…
So no Staffel familiarisation for Kurt. The first time he leaves the ground he will be in action.
If, that is, he can find a serviceable aircraft to fly. Which, in 1944 and ’45, very much depends on the German railways.
In theory, in 1944, Germany will have produced 40,000 new aeroplanes. But the lack of fuel being what it is, they are not normally flown to their operational bases, but partially dismantled and loaded onto trains. Which the Allied forces then bomb, machine-gun and rocket until the German rail system virtually collapses. With the aircraft and spares on board.
The effect of this is vast. For example, something like 1,400 Messerschmitt 262s – the world’s first operational jet fighter – will be manufactured, but the Luftwaffe can at best only ever muster about 200 to actually fly.
The rest are stuck on the railways or awaiting new motors – a most frequent occurrence since the early German jet engines have a life-span of between three and 12 flying hours. And of course the replacement engines are also stuck on the railways…
What Kurt does know is that the only thing there is no shortage of whatsoever is enemy aircraft.
The heady blitzkrieg days of 1940 are now very, very long gone. In 1940 the Luftwaffe dropped 37,000 tons of bombs on England. In 1944 the RAF and the USAAF will drop 650,000 tons of bombs on Germany…
Which of course requires a very great number of bombers to deliver them. Plus a very great number of fighters to protect the bombers. Kurt and his kameraden are vastly outnumbered, the incoming hordes frequently exceeding 1,500 aircraft in a single day directed at various targets.
And he is soon told within the Staffel that the performance of the escorting fighters – Mustangs, P47 Thunderbolts and the latest versions of Spitfire – is superior to that of his now ageing Me 109. Not wildly superior, but superior enough. And he will learn that the B17, in particular, bristles with guns like an
irascible porcupine…
So he feel his heels drumming on the footwells of his Me 109 as he taxies out for his first mission. He cannot – could not possibly – express his stark fear of doing what all the rest of his Staffel takes as normal.
And so within 30 minutes this raw 150-hour pilot is at 30,000ft, utterly bewildered by the pace of real combat as he tries in vain to attack a B17 and at the same time evade the attentions of what seem like a hundred Mustangs.
To Kurt’s own astonishment he survives this day. And he survives the next day and the next day and eventually an improbable number of months. He fights. And he fights. And he fights.
His hands now shaking – supposedly unknown to others because he keeps them in his pockets as, by coincidence, do most of his fellow pilots in the Staffel – he can derive a crumb of cold comfort in not having been sent to the Russian Front, where if rumour is correct pilots just like him are being tasked to fly night dive-bombing sorties in a variety of open-cockpit former training aircraft, or tank-busting in the hopelessly outclassed Ju 87 Stuka.
Kurt is vaguely aware of the Japanese kamikaze attacks – but that is half a world away. Except that it comes a step closer when Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring calls for suicide volunteers to destroy the vital bridge over the Rhine at Remagen.
And then calls for further volunteers for a new fighter wing called Wehrwolf, flying Messerschmitts stripped-down to increase performance and as a result effectively defenceless, with the objective of carrying out ram-attacks on the bomber-streams. This is claimed not to be completely suicidal. The Luftwaffe aircrew are informed that 50% of the pilots will bail out successfully just before, during, or just after the impact. The other 50%, of course…
Volunteers do, in fact, come forward, and just one Wehrwolf attack is actually mounted. The loss-rate is, oddly enough, pretty much the predicted 50%.
However, the B17s do not suffer accordingly, due to the effectiveness of the fighter escort and the walls of fire emanating from the bombers. Some go down, certainly. But the main result for Kurt and his kameraden is an increasing feeling of despair. A loss-rate of 50% is acceptable?
Yet they fight on. And they fight on…
It may be called ‘esprit de corps’.
Nowadays esprit de corps is frequently described by psychologists sitting in their chairs as ‘peer group pressure’. Which for some reason sounds to me an utterly banal term to apply to the Luftwaffe of 1944-45.
In our civilian world today we have been lucky. We have never been called up en masse to serve. We have been a fortunate generation. Or two generations.
Perhaps, in fact, too lucky. Perhaps we have grown flabby in our minds as a result.
In the military, of course, esprit de corps is a most important ingredient in the mix of determination, efficiency and teamwork. Wise commanders monitor the spirit of their units as closely, if not more so, as they oversee the state of equipment, spares, training and weaponry. Like Nelson two centuries ago, they know that the spirit of a group is in fact the most important weapon they have.
In our civilian world we must draw a distinction between esprit and that pat phrase peer group pressure. Positive esprit inspires pilots to persevere in, for example, aerobatic competition – which is good for pilotage everywhere, because the skills eventually filter down. Well… maybe, anyway.
Peer group pressure is a different force entirely, and much more malignant. Many times at the end of an airshow I have watched private aircraft departing into bad weather they were ill-equipped to cope with.
Peer group pressure, equalling, ‘If they’re all going, we’ll go too. They’re no better than me…’
On one occasion, after we’d started up, I remember seeing a Rallye take off as part of the departing stream. I distinctly saw two children in the back seats as it passed me.
I pressed the transmit button. “Firebird, taxi.”
“Firebird Team, destination?”
“Firebird, just taxying to the north side for parking. We’re not going anywhere.”
Later I met that controller in the bar. He had tears in his eyes. He said, “Look, I can’t stop them going. Legally, I can’t stop them. I felt like yelling, ‘If the Firebird Team aren’t going, then what the hell are you doing?’ But I can’t say that.”
The kids died with their mum and dad when the Rallye hit a South Downs hill.
Yes. There is a difference between ‘esprit de corps’ and ‘peer group pressure’.
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