Adolf Galland: The General of Fighters
Military historians, almost by definition, spend their professional lives examining minutiae and details. It is tragically easy to overlook, then, a simple fact about warfare that we should NEVER forget: war is evil, ugly, and represents the worst passions of mankind. As an historian who tends to concentrate on the conflict of 1939-1945 commonly known as World War II, I remind myself as often as I can that this war, beyond any others, was one of the worst events in the history of the human race. It was a war so unimaginably horrible that even now, fifty-five years later, we are unable to count the dead to the closest 10 million.
For all that, the history of WWII presents us with isolated cases of heroism, gallantry and even chivalry that are as least as important to record for posterity as the untold millions of stories of suffering. One such case is that of Lt. Gen. Adolf Galland, the German Luftwaffe's General of Fighters.
Unlike much of the German Reichswehr, entire branches of which were correctly branded criminal organizations, most of the Luftwaffe fighter wing engendered the respect and admiration of their Allied opponents. A major reason for this was the leader of the fighter corps, General Galland. Specifically against the wishes of his Nazi superiors, Galland went to great lengths to keep his corner of the war as civilized as possible. He forbade his pilots to fire upon parachuting enemies. When his squadron JG26 captured the famous RAF pilot Douglas Bader, who happened to be a double amputee, Galland arranged for an RAF flight to safely overfly France and airdrop a spare set of artificial legs. After the war, Bader and other Allied pilots were to become lifelong close friends of Adolf Galland.
It was also after the war that many other Galland stories came to light. Against the backdrop of a terrible war, many of them are downright amusing.
*During his Luftwaffe pilot training, in the mid-1930s, Galland was showing off in an L101 trainer with his considerable skill at loops and Immelmanns. On one misjudged pass, he flew the little plane straight into the ground. His face was hurled into the instrument panel, and his left eye was lacerated. As he recovered, he feared that his flying days were over. Somehow, he convinced some fellow officers to steal the flight surgeon's eye chart, which he memorized. Despite lingering vision problems from his injury, he passed the eye test and was back in the cockpit within the year.
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