Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (36 page)

Like all great fighter pilots, Marseille knew his own aircraft intimately and understood exactly how to use its strengths to full advantage. Attacking out of the sun, from above if possible, and taking your enemy by surprise were all principles that hadn’t changed since World War I. In this the Bf 109 was always its most lethal; to dive, fire at close range, and zoom away was to use it as its best. In the hands of experienced Luftwaffe pilots it could, and did, exact horrible tolls on Allied fighters.

One of the countertactics employed by Commonwealth pilots was a defensive circle—precisely like covered wagons circling against Indian attacks. In this move, also called a Lufbery, each plane in the circle was supposed to be protected because no enemy could get behind an aircraft without flying into the guns of another. Designed as a bomber defense, it was supremely ludicrous for anything else. One of the tremendous advantages of being a fighter pilot is an offensive mentality—that’s why you’re a fighter pilot. If your mind-set is to “circle the wagons” and go on the defense, you’ve thrown that advantage away.

And it absolutely did not work against Hans Marseille. He would roll over and dive, inverted, from above. Picking a target, he’d bore straight behind it, open fire at close range, then pull up into a chandelle (a climbing turn) away from the circle. As he never slowed down, he was never in one place long enough for the enemy fighters to shoot back. His marksmanship being what it was, he nearly always killed on each pass. Marseille was so accurate that he consistently brought planes down with a burst of fifteen 7.62 mm rounds and two from the cannon. After pulling up and away, he’d pick another victim, roll over again, and repeat the process; he often shot down multiple aircraft per mission. Sometimes he’d slash through a formation rather than zoom back up, and this worked fine before the P-40 came along.

In mid-October over Bir Sheferzan, southwest of Tobruk, he found a gaggle of South African P-40s. However, as he dove, two Australians from No. 3 Squadron attacked from overhead, following him down. Well aware that a Tomahawk could catch a 109 in a dive and chew it up with machine guns, he did something truly astounding: he chopped the power, dropped his flaps, and nearly stalled. Caught completely by surprise, and now traveling 200 mph faster than the 109, the two Aussies overshot before they could shoot.

Marseille retracted the flaps, pulled the stick into his lap, and firewalled the throttle. The Emil’s nose staggered up, and Jochen opened fire as the P-40 flashed by overhead. As it spun away out of control, the other Tomahawk tried to zoom to safety, but the German fighter pirouetted on its tail, pulled 100 yards of lead, and opened fire again. The first P-40 made a forced landing; the second one managed to return to base but was a total write-off due to battle damage. A kill is a kill, though, and these were numbers twenty-four and twenty-five.

It shouldn’t have worked. It should’ve made
him
an excellent target and gotten him killed. But it didn’t. Marseille’s fellow pilots were astounded. A “magnificent madman,” one of them would say, but with the respect of someone watching a gifted man work his magic. Physically, this was tremendously punishing, as all air combat is. To the extent that g-forces were understood, people knew that too many would cause a blackout and almost certain death; how to counter the effects had not been worked out. Marseille had a self-imposed fitness routine of push-ups and sit-ups, and certainly his excellent physical condition made a difference, giving him the stamina needed to endure constant combat. Another of his friends said, “I can only attribute his great ability to recover to all the alcohol he drank. Thinning the blood probably allowed for a more fluid and flowing vascular condition.”

But even the strongest wear out, and a few days after his twenty-fifth victory he was sent back to Germany for a rest and transition to the new Bf 109F. A major redesign, the “Friedrich” version was the pinnacle of the aircraft’s evolution. The outboard cannons were removed, eliminating weight and permitting a redesigned wing. Semi-elliptical, the new wing was lighter, with less drag; thanks to its better leading-edge slats, the F model 109 could turn tighter than its predecessors. More power from the Daimler-Benz 1,159-horsepower engine also enabled the Friedrich to climb and turn quicker. All the armament was concentrated in the nose, which simplified feed mechanisms and reduced jamming. The cowling-mounted 7.62 mm guns remained, and a single
Motorkanone
was added, which fired through the propeller hub.

On November 18, while Jochen was still in Germany, the British launched Operation Crusader. Under abysmal conditions caused by a particularly nasty desert storm, the British Eighth Army began a buffalo-horned assault. A time-honored tactic, the idea was to attack in force with the center while two prongs flanked the enemy. While this was going on, the Tobruk garrison would break out in the German rear and cut their supply lines. Though initially successful, the British underestimated Rommel’s genius for mobile, combined-arms warfare. Rapid, heavily concentrated armored counterattacks supported by the Luftwaffe threw the Allied plan into confusion.

By the time Marseille returned in early December, the fighting along the coast road was heavy and Rommel was forced to pull back from Tobruk. During an escort mission on the fifth he downed a South African Hurricane, though eighteen out of forty Stukas were lost. Two days later JG 27 relocated to Tmimi as the British pressed toward Tobruk and pushed Rommel to Gazala. Jochen shot down his twenty-ninth aircraft two days later but no one felt much like celebrating. It was December 7, 1941, and 8,700 miles to the east the U.S. Pacific Fleet was being attacked at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “Once we heard that America had been attacked and had declared war, everyone knew it was over. We may have been able to hold Europe,” Bernhard Woldenga, the
Geschwaderkommodore
said, “but winning a total victory was out of the question.”

Withdrawing west to the Gazala Line, Rommel hoped to hold there. Anchoring the Italians along the coast, the Afrikakorps then deployed southwest into the desert. JG 27 and the other Luftwaffe units bombed and strafed in a target-rich environment. On December 14, Hermann Forster bailed out during a dogfight against a flight of Tomahawks. Hanging in his parachute, he was strafed and killed by another P-40.
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Enraged, some Germans wanted to respond in kind, but they were told that under no circumstances were helpless men to be killed. Hauptmann Eduard Neumann, Marseille’s outstanding
Gruppenkommandeur
, was emphatic that the rules of war would not be violated by the men under his command regardless of what the enemy did. Luftwaffe pilots had a very high opinion of their British and Commonwealth foes as flyers and as men. Though not necessarily chivalrous, they believed, as most fighter pilots did (and still do), that those who fight in the sky are different from the others and should be treated as such. Woldenga agreed: “This is not Russia, it is not a war with animals.”

Other than marksmanship and fearlessness, humanity was a defining characteristic of Hans Marseille. Like Hans-Ekkehard Bob, he showed a real compassion for the men he shot down, as well as their families. He personally took at least one wounded flyer to a field hospital and filled out another’s Geneva Conventions card. On several occasions, and against orders, he dropped notes over Allied airfields concerning captured pilots. It was said that he brought some humanity back into the struggle in ways that had not been seen since the Great War. Marseille even escorted a damaged Hurricane back across the lines to a forced landing rather than simply shooting him out of the sky. He was still awarded a victory but saw no reason to kill the man. Such honest gallantry was definitely at odds with the popular image of murderous Nazi thugs. Marseille was none of that and steadfastly refused to ever join the National Socialist Party.

Mid-December also saw the British 4th Armored Division try to flank the Germans in the desert south of Tobruk. If they could get around behind the Afrikakorps, then it would be cut off and very likely defeated. With eight operational tanks remaining, Rommel made a fighting retreat due west back to Ajedabia on the Gulf of Sirte. Encamped in defensive positions here, he could rest over the winter and replenish his battered forces. Christmas Day found JG 27 scattered about the Marble Arch area and Hans Marseille leaving the next morning for Athens. Suffering from gastroenteritis, dysentery, jaundice, and malaria, he once again weighed a mere 110 pounds. Jochen would finish 1941 with thirty-six kills, just a few short of the forty victories now required to be awarded the Knight’s Cross.

While he was gone, Rommel was reinforced with more tanks and men. Several merchant ships had slipped past the Royal Navy to dock in Tripoli and even into Benghazi before it fell. Nearly fifty tanks made it ashore, followed in January by a hundred more—including some of the new Mark IV panzers. Intelligence and reconnaissance showed a very thin Allied line. Numerous reports of British vehicular breakdowns and severe issues with the 1,000-mile supply line all pointed to an ideal time to counterattack. Rommel did just that. On January 21 his reinforced panzers smashed through and charged north for Benghazi. He captured this, plus large Allied stockpiles of fuel and trucks, by the end of the month.

By February 3 he’d gotten all the way back to Tmimi but was stopped the next day at the Gazala Line. Stretching southward from the coast, this was a 50-mile line of fortified positions connected by minefields. Rommel had a plan to break through, but he needed his logistics to catch up, and he needed the Luftwaffe. Reconnaissance and tactical air support would be key to breaking through and resuming his drive into Egypt.

Hans Marseille returned to Libya two days later and was back in the air on February 8. After escorting a reconnaissance flight, he was coming in to land at about 0815 when five Hurricanes swept in over Matruba to attack the field. Slapping up the gear and flaps, he jammed the throttle forward and began to fight. What a sight . . . the Bf 109 a few feet off the ground and gaining speed fast as the Hurricanes dropped down, guns firing, to kill him. With tracers flashing past, he kicked the rudder back and forth, skidding the fighter sideways, and racked the 109 up into a spine-cracking left turn.

Unable to hit him and not willing to slow down over an enemy airfield, the first Hurricane overshot. The other four came streaking down the runway heading northwest as Marseille rolled out above them heading southeast. Two thousand feet of altitude isn’t much for a dogfight, but everyone watching—and it was the entire fighter wing—saw him roll inverted and slice back to the north after the British fighters. All five Hurricanes cranked up in hard turns to head back over the field, then escape to the south. In an astounding feat of marksmanship—he was at low altitude with a high deflection angle—Jochen opened fire. Across the airfield, the farthest Hurricane burned and pancaked into the desert next to the runway. Without pausing, Marseille kicked the rudder, flicked the stick, and opened fire on a second fighter, which also crashed. Wheeling around, he fired again and hit a third aircraft as three more 109’s showed up. The remaining Hurricanes raced south, one of them trailing smoke, toward their lines. And it was over, at least with that enemy on that mission.

But his conflict with his squadron commander was reaching new heights. Despite Marseille’s skill in doing the only thing that really mattered at the time, his commander continued hounding him over haircuts, uniforms, and military bearing, in the middle of a war. Earlier in February, the normally good-natured pilot heard that he’d been passed over for promotion. A few weeks before, his sister had been murdered in Vienna, and this, plus the strain of eighteen months of combat, pushed him over the edge, albeit temporarily. Climbing into a plane, he took off, arced around the airfield, and proceeded to strafe the ground beside his commander’s tent. Of course the man grounded him and insisted on a court-martial. Under peacetime circumstances he would’ve been quite correct to preserve order and discipline—but that wasn’t the case here. I also don’t believe that Marseille was trying to kill him; if he’d wanted the man dead, then he would have been dead. No, it was a warning and a reminder that men with weapons and the skill to use them will only be pushed so far. Marseille was saved again by Eduard Neumann, who knew he was too valuable a fighter pilot to waste.

Now, on February 8, Marseille had claimed his fortieth victim, and even saved his squadron commander’s life in the process. This didn’t ease the man’s anger with Marseille, and he grounded him again after a thorough tongue-lashing. Jochen walked out of the tent, then sat down and talked with the Hurricane pilot who’d crashed on the field that morning. He got his name, Flight Sergeant Hargreaves, and unit location, then calmly took off alone to deliver a mercy message to the man’s squadron. When he got back, his commander was speechless with rage, but Neumann intervened once again. He had a long, quiet talk with Marseille, who listened because he respected the man.

A few weeks later, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring landed at Matruba, and on February 24, 1942, Hans-Joachim Marseille received his nation’s highest honor for bravery—the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. He flew one more mission that month, shooting down a pair of P-40’s, then was sent back to Germany for medical treatment—dysentery again.

During March Rommel had been building up across from the Gazala Line. By mid-April, as JG 27 celebrated a year in the desert, he had about 550 tanks with 80,000 men on hand. This would have to suffice, since a great German summer offensive was under way in Russia.
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Far away in the Pacific, the carrier USS
Hornet
turned into the wind to launch the Doolittle raid, and Hans Marseille was getting engaged in Berlin.

Rommel planned to launch Operation Venezia in late May with the aim of flanking the Gazala Line, taking Tobruk, and heading to Cairo. The line was anchored 50 miles south at the old Turkish fortress of Bir Hakeim, and it was here that Rommel’s punch would hit the hardest. The Italian Ariete Division would assault the fortress while the 15th and 21st Panzers swung around Bir Hakeim to strike behind the line. Rommel knew that the British 1st and 7th Armored Divisions were held in reserve, and he anticipated a huge tank battle east of the Gazala emplacements. His ace in the hole was the 90th Light Afrika Division, which he would personally lead; the division would swing even farther around Bir Hakeim, avoid the tank battle, and head far into the British rear.