Monday, Dec. 01, 1941
Nine Are Not Enough
They laid his body in state in the Air Ministry's great hall and flanked it with an honor guard. Adolf Hitler renamed Luftwaffe Squadron 3 the Udet Squadron and ordered a state funeral. Reich Marshal Hermann Wilhelm Goering delivered the eulogy, then waddled after the flag-draped gun carriage on the mile-long march through silent, crowded streets to the cemetery. They buried him near the grave of Baron Manfred von Richthofen.
Thus Nazi Germany last week paid last honors to Ernst Udet, World War I ace, once best of the international aerobats, exponent of parachute troops and glider warfare. He had developed the dive-bombing tactics of the deadly Stuka after observation of U.S. Navy planes ten years ago. Adolf Hitler gave him sole credit for Luftwaffe efficiency, "which has made it the best air arm in the world."
He was known as the Ace With Nine Lives, and he knew flying in all its phases --from production and planning to fighting and stunting. In a profession steeped in superstition his luck was legendary, and he was his own most faithful believer. When only 16 he launched a glider from a hill near Munich, crashed ingloriously in a cabbage patch. To gaping villagers, he cracked that the vicinity's "magnetic attraction" made flying impossible. Like Hermann Goering, he flew with Richthofen's Flying Circus, and his bag of 62 planes was second only to the Baron's 80. In a duel with the French ace Georges Guyne-mer, his machine gun jammed and left him helpless. The Frenchman spotted his predicament and left him unharmed.
Once, between wars, he was forced down in the African desert and rescued by a British R.A.F. captain. Once he landed his plane on an iceberg in Greenland and was lost for four days alone on the ice. On his two trips to the U.S., for the National Air Races in 1931 and 1933, he chilled crowds by picking up handkerchiefs with a hook on his wing tip. He dived a type of plane he had never flown before under the 135-foot clearance of New York's Hell Gate Bridge. But he distrusted speedy skyscraper elevators, preferred stairs.
A plane he was demonstrating for Charles Lindbergh, during the latter's visit to Germany in 1936, fell apart in the air. Udet parachuted to safety. In an Alpine circuit race he fouled his propeller in a 30,000-volt trolley wire. The plane lost its tail and Udet got a scratch on the arm.
Last week an official announcement said that Colonel General Ernst Udet, Quartermaster of the German Air Force, was killed "yesterday" (Nov. 17) while testing "a new type of firearm." The same day the Berlin radio attributed his death to an "airplane accident on Monday, the eleventh," said he died en route to a hospital. Reports from Vichy said he was a suicide. Many a U.S. airman and war veteran could recall Ernst Udet as a stumpy, laughing, likeable little man with a thirst for beer and information, a man of many questions who carefully avoided questioners. The last photograph of him alive, as approved by the censor, showed a bald, grim, tight-lipped man looking considerably older than his 45 years.
Shortly after his return from Ernst Udet's funeral, Colonel Werner Molders, No. 1 Nazi ace of World War II,and an undetailed number of passengers crashed to death in a transport plane near Breslau. Twenty-eight-year-old Werner Molders had a record of 115 planes to his credit (including twelve which he shot down while a member of the Condor Legion in Spain). Adolf Hitler once more ordered a state funeral, once more gave the name of a dead airman to his squadron.
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