Memories of the Luftwaffe

THE FIRST AND THE LAST: THE RISE & FALL OF THE GERMAN FIGHTER FORCES, 1938-1945 (368 pp.]--Adolf Galland--Holf ($4.95).

War memoirs fall generally into two classes--front-line yarns and headquarters stories. This book, written by one of those fast-rising, baby air generals people joked about in World War II, combines in one man's memoirs both the passion of combat and the perspective of command. Germany's Adolf Galland was made general of the Luftwaffe's fighter arm at 29, after shooting down 94 Allied planes on the Western front. Some of his air-battle stories read almost as fast as the Messerschmitts he flew, and his staff-battle accounts give the clearest picture yet of how the Germans lost their war in the air.

"Free chase over southeast England," read the Luftwaffe's daily briefing order after France fell in 1940. Three times daily the German fighters scrambled after the British Hurricanes. Says Galland: "We simply went straight for them, with wide-open throttle and eyes bulging out of our sockets."

House Without a Roof. Galland guesses that the Nazi higher-ups, lacking both stomach and plans for invasion, fatuously hoped that the airmen's bold onslaughts would cow the British into seeking peace. But when they didn't, the mighty Luftwaffe, terror of Warsaw and Rotterdam, was shown up as too weak for decisive warfare, equipped with fighters lacking in range and Stukas too short on speed and bomb load to destroy Britain's plane factories. The irony of the matter, says Galland, was that the Allies, not Germany, learned from the Luftwaffe's failure to produce great masses of four-engine bombers and long-range fighters. Called to command in Berlin, Goring's young adviser saw the Luftwaffe outnumbered, outgunned and outperformed as Hitler's war spread in all directions. As soon as the Americans introduced long-range fighters to escort their bombers, Galland warned Goring that Germany would be "a house without a roof."

After the great fire raids on Hamburg in 1943, even Goering declared that "the

Luftwaffe must now change over to defense against the West." Two months earlier Galland had visited Augsburg and flown the revolutionary new ME 262 jet fighter. He flashed word to Goring that the new plane, with its 500 m.p.h. speed, could end air attacks on the German heartland. Hitler, in what many Western airmen would now call one of the critical decisions of World War II, refused to permit emergency development of the plane because "the Luftwaffe had disappointed him too often in the past with promises" of new developments. Later, piling blunder on blunder, Hitler ordered the new fighter rigged as a "blitz bomber" against the expected Western invasion. Technically incapable of the task, it never dropped a bomb on the Normandy beachhead.

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

Peron'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.

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