Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (44 page)

German navy men lived in a world of
military commands in which orders to
sacrifice their lives and battle “fanatically” played a particularly central role. And the rhetoric used by the navy leadership definitely had an effect on ordinary sailors. In conversations among navy POWs, concepts of discipline,
pride, and honor occur much more frequently than in the chatter between army soldiers:

When sailors talked about their own ships, there was a noticeable change in their perspective. They fought tooth and nail until their equipment no longer functioned, and under no circumstances did they want their own vessels to fall into enemy hands. Sailors also took great care to destroy top secret material. Yet none of them would have thought of voluntarily going down with their ships to avoid being captured by the enemy. And whether a ship went down with flags flying was chiefly a concern of official, stylized propaganda. Once a sailor’s ship had been sunk, he had done his duty, and he would try to save his own life, whether or not the flag was still flying. As in the army, there were limits to the willingness of German navy men to sacrifice their own lives. The fact that so many vessels were lost with all hands
on deck had more to do with the nature of naval warfare than with the selflessness demanded by the German
navy leadership. Even if a crew succeeded in getting off board, rescues were relatively rare. For instance, in 1944, the crew of a
Canadian amphibious plane, the
Sunderland,
reported that it had sunk a German
U-boat off the west coast of Ireland and that the crew were swimming around in the water. Someone took a photo of fifty-seven German sailors, and then the plane circled a few times and headed back to its home base. None of the submarine crew survived.
U-625 was one of 543 German ships that went lost together with its entire crew.
Dönitz used such horrendous losses to argue for the special
morale maintained by submarine crews.
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But in their own words, one finds little evidence of the fanaticism and contempt for death Dönitz praised in his speeches. German sailors followed orders and tried to be brave. But more than anything they wanted to survive.

The radicalization of the German
political and
military leadership did not have the same sort of effect on the Luftwaffe as it did on the army and the navy. In the face of dissipating morale in 1944–45, pilots were ordered to redouble their intensity in battle. This was especially the case with
fighter pilots, whom
Göring increasingly accused of cowardice.
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In fall 1943, the idea of using kamikaze pilots was first broached. Luftwaffe doctor
Theo Benzinger and glider pilot
Heinrich Lange formulated it in a memorandum: “The military situation justifies and demands that naval targets be fought with extreme means like manned
missiles whose pilot voluntarily
sacrifices his life.” The authors knew that this would represent “a form of warfare that is fully new in Europe.” But the benefits of conventional attacks were disproportionate to the number of pilots getting
shot down. If airmen were going to lose their lives anyway, the authors reasoned, why not take the greatest number of the enemy with them?
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In September 1943, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the second most important leader in the Luftwaffe, discussed this suggestion with his subordinate officers. Plans were hatched to crash planes loaded with
explosives into enemy warships or fighters packed with
ammunition into enemy bomber formations. But
Milch had scruples about sending pilots on “
suicide missions.” It would be better, he reasoned, if pilots dove toward enemy targets and then ejected with
parachutes before impact. But the general view of the Luftwaffe leadership was that kamikaze missions were unnecessary, and suggestions like
Benzinger and
Lange’s were never put into practice.

Hanna Reitsch, the well-known female test pilot, was friends with Benzinger and Lange and took the opportunity while visiting Hitler’s Berghof residence to tell the Führer about their idea. But Hitler was having none of it and personally intervened in July 1944 to prevent thirty-nine pilots from crashing their Fw 190 fighter bombers into an Allied armada in the
Baie de la Seine.

In fall 1943, when it was again proposed to crash special “suicide aircraft” into enemy ships, Luftwaffe fighter officer
Hans-Günther von Kornatzki formulated the idea of an airborne “storm attack.” In his vision, fearless fighter pilots would bring down Allied planes by simply
ramming them in the air. Over the course of the war, this had happened on a number of occasions—either by accident or after a conscious decision on the part of pilots. There was a decent chance for the pilot to
survive by ejecting with a parachute. The task was to coordinate such chance events. The commanding general in charge of fighter pilots,
Adolf Galland, was open to the idea of a
“storm attack” but didn’t think much of the hair-raising spectacle of pilots purposely ramming enemy planes. In May 1944, when the first “storm fighters” were initiated into this new type of mission, they had to swear that they would attack the enemy from extremely short range and, if they failed to
shoot him down, physically ram his aircraft. Three such units were formed in the course of 1944, each one containing around fifty specially modified Fw 190s. Yet despite the fact that the oath taken by the pilots emphasized their willingness to ram enemies, it rarely happened in practice. If the planes were able to get that close to the enemy, they could usually shoot him down using artillery. Still, on occasion, German pilots did ram Allied bombers. About half of them lost their lives.

The surveillance protocols show that Luftwaffe pilots did not consider ramming sorties suicide missions, but as an especially clever way of adapting aerial warfare, which was becoming ever more extreme.
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Any means were legitimate if they increased the number of enemy
kills.
Luftwaffe POWs didn’t even show any particular outrage at rumors of a new ordinance stipulating that any airmen returning home without an enemy kill or at least damage to their aircraft would be court-martialed.
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Colonel
Hajo Hermann felt that, since conventional fighter planes were too few in number to stop the Allied daytime bombardments
of Germany, the defense of the Reich needed to be radicalized. In fall 1944, he came up with the perfidious idea of having one or two thousand young pilots ram their fighters into an American bomber squadron. The shock that the
U.S. Air Force would feel from this “massive blow,” Hermann felt, would buy Nazi Germany some breathing room. Experienced pilots, who would be needed later in the war, would be exempt from the mission.

When Luftwaffe general and former ace pilot
Adolf Galland learned of the plan, he asked Hermann whether he was going to be part of the mission, to which Hermann replied in the negative. After that Galland saw no point in discussing the idea any further. “He’s second on my list of criminals,” Galland later remarked as a POW.
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In January 1945, though, Galland succeeded in getting an audience with Hitler. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjunct subsequently had let it be known that the Führer had the highest respect for men who were willing to volunteer for such ramming missions. No soldier would be ordered to take part, but it was felt there would be enough volunteers. By the end of the month,
Göring had signed off on a call for young pilots to volunteer for a mission that, at the cost of one’s own life, might turn the tide in the war. Two thousand young men allegedly stepped forward. Three hundred of them were selected and informed that the plan was for them to crash into American bombers en masse. Many were surprised. They had expected to be going after bigger targets like aircraft carriers or battleships and found their lives too valuable to be sacrificed to destroy a single
B-17 Flying Fortress. Those responsible for training them explained that this wasn’t a suicide mission per se. Pilots would be allowed to eject from their planes once they had rammed their targets. On April 7, 1945, 183 pilots purposely crashed their aircraft into an American bomber unit over
Magdeburg. The Wehrmacht reported four days later that the pilots’ “fearless
willingness for self-sacrifice” had destroyed more than 60 enemy aircraft. In reality the number was 23. Of the 183 German aircraft that had taken off, 133 had been shot down, and 77 pilots lost their lives.

What is particularly interesting is that suggestions to commence “self-sacrificial missions” did not come from the highest levels of
German
political and
military leadership, who otherwise never tired of demanding that soldiers fight until death. While hundreds of thousands of ground troops fell because of Hitler’s command to hold out whatever the costs, the Führer could not bring himself to order the Luftwaffe to approve a suicide mission for dozens of pilots. And the
ramming sortie of April 7 wasn’t a kamikaze mission in the narrow sense, since pilots could escape by
parachute. Sixty percent of those involved did in fact survive. This was a much higher quotient than applied to submarine crews on the most risky missions.

Another variation of “self-sacrificial missions” was tried out in April 1945. On January 31 of that year, the Red Army had crossed the Oder and established itself on that
river’s western banks. The German army had tried but failed to destroy the bridgeheads. The Luftwaffe was told to use any means to achieve this end in order to disrupt the
Soviet
advance on Berlin. On March 5, the idea was put forward of destroying the bridges over the Oder with a self-sacrificial mission, but first the Luftwaffe tried to accomplish this aim by conventional means. After that, too, failed, the German air force resorted to suicide sorties. Some of the former volunteers were recalled, and others stepped forward of their own free will. On April 17, one day after Soviet troops launched their major assault on Berlin, the first pilots crashed their planes into the bridges over the Oder. From a military standpoint, though, the mission was completely senseless since pontoon bridges could be repaired very quickly.

All in all, Hitler’s ideas of military sacrifice were astonishingly contradictory. He demanded that soldiers fight down to the final bullet and the last man. His orders forbade any retreats or premature surrenders, promoting fanaticism as the key to ultimate victory. Yet even as he thundered that “every bunker, every block of houses in every city and every German village must become a fortress before which either the enemy bled to death or the occupants perished in hand-to-hand combat,”
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he also accepted that survivors did exist. In the case of the failed defense of the German stronghold of
Metz, he even commissioned a special armband in recognition of those who had taken part. He would have no doubt approved if the veterans of Metz had shot themselves with their final bullets. But he did not enforce his stand-and-die demands, although hundreds
of thousands of soldiers who had followed to the letter his commands to hold out had lost their lives.
Hitler was indifferent to the number of dead. He considered massive casualties to be part of the
destiny of the
German people, locked in a struggle for total victory or total defeat. Nonetheless, he shied away from explicitly ordering suicide commandos, just as he didn’t demand poison gas be used as the final stage of a total war.