Customer Reviews

The Luftwaffe Fighter Force: The View from the Cockpit

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The book was written (or dictated) by Galland (and his co-authors) in 1945 when they were PoWs as part of their interrogation. This is, quite literally, the first draft of the Luftwaffe fighter force's history. On one hand, none of the many authors had documents (except logbooks) to refer back to. But their memories were fresh and, just being captured, they did not really have an interest in pushing a particular agenda except as it kept them from being tried for war crimes (one of the minor co-authors got 15 years).

Galland is the main voice here, and he is always interesting. I met him, and he exuded charisma, leadership and the fighter pilots' disrespect for authority not legitimized by demonstrated capabilities. You get a lot of that in his writings. I also found interesting Heinz Bar's descriptions of what a fighter mission would have been like at different stages of the war. Hitschhold writes several chapters on air-ground operations and tactics, especially in the latter war period. This is an area not well covered in English-language sources. Readers of Rudel's STUKA PILOT might want to see how that corresponds to the situation as his boss saw it, without the ideological filters.

If you are seriously interested in the Luftwaffe, you should buy this book. If you enjoyed Galland's classic THE FIRST AND THE LAST or the recent biography of Galland, you should buy this book. Because it was written by fighter pilots (as PoWs) for other fighter pilots (doing the interrogation), it assumes a fair degree of technical knowledge, so it is not for the neophyte. The translation, while understandable, is not polished. I suspect the authors, being true fighter pilots, did most of their talking with their hands.

This book is a dry statement of fact by the Luftwaffe officers interviewed by the British and US military in 1945-6. In that respect it is very similar to George Patton's "War As I Knew It." This is just an overview of organization and how that evolved during the war. It covers who was in charge of what, how many of this was in how many of that, and what could have been done in line with traditional Galland. Attention: This is not a view from the cockpit! This is a view from Berlin.