The Few

If anyone could build an air force quickly, surely it would be the Germans. Even after "the few" of the R.A.F. rose to blast the myth of Nazi Luftwaffe invincibility in World War II, Hermann Goering's "tigers" continued to command respect as fighting airmen, and Hitler's scientists set a hot pace in plane and rocket development.

Two years ago NATO commanders rubbed their hands at the promising prospect opened by the Paris treaties allowing Germany to rearm. Bonn promised NATO the manpower for 1,326 planes in 20 wings by 1960. But last week, two years after the go-ahead on rearmament, 18 months after pilot training began, the new Luftwaffe was still on the ground. The "few" were now Germans. The German Air Force (or "jaff," as the Americans pronounce it) boasts only 50 trained jet pilots, half of them base-bound as instructors, the rest aloft in a lone F-84 fighter squadron. A spare-parts shortage has grounded 23 of G.A.F.'s 140 planes. The U.S., which had taken Thunderjets out of mothballs for the Germans, tucked them back.

Admitting he could not hit the 1960 target date, G.A.F. Chief Josef Kammhuber, 60, a wartime night-fighter pilot, predicted, with a confident look into the wild blue yonder: "They will certainly be ready by 1962." That depended, however, on the war-thinned younger generation, about whom a former Luftwaffe ace complains: "When we were young, we were speed-crazy. Now the boys tell me, 'Jets are too fast. We don't want one foot in the grave.' " Old Luftwaffe pilots, now in their late 30s or early 40s, prove slower to train than their opposite U.S. numbers, report U.S. instructors at Fuerstenfeldbruck. Banned from the air for ten years, baffled by the jet age complexities, bridling at homework and "NATO English," and afflicted by the general Ohne mich ("Count me out") psychology which infects German soldiery, the tigers of 1940 have not yet recovered their bite.

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