Conversations with a Stuka Pilot

[No601_Prangster]

I mentioned this in another post and I thought it was worth posting the section on Stalingrad. Conversations with a Stuka Pilot was the title of a 1978 conference at the National War College featuring Paul-Werner Hozzel Brig. General (Ret.)/ German Air Force. Hozzel was commander of the Immelmann Stuka wing at Stalingrad.

 

You can read the full article here including some interesting details on tactics: http://www.allworldwars.com/Conversations-with-a-Stuka-Pilot-Paul-Werner-Hozzel.html

 

(Paul-Werner Hozzel) The Eighth Air Corps had meanwhile transferred its units to the region between the Don and the Volga. Geschwader Immelmann took off from an airfield 40 kilometers away from Stalingrad. Our operational readiness had been reduced to 60 percent. The logistical man was haunted with many problems caused by the increased activities by partisan groups in the territories occupied by our army and through which our lines of communication passed. We heard of railroad tracks being torn up by explosives day after day, and of the troublesome repairs. We also learned that transport columns could no longer move along without being protected by strong convoys. Meanwhile, the partisans had organized themselves in the deep forests. They were under the command of active officers of the Red Army who were landed by plane or at night jumped by parachute. By the middle of October, the weather had become noticeably cooler, yet it was dry and not really cold. In spite of the obstructions of our supply routes, our logistics support was on the whole satisfactorily maintained. The units of both the Sixth Army and the Eighth Air Corps were supplies with all they needed, though they could no longer draw on plentiful resources. In order to support the army in its strategic struggle for the final occupation of the city, reconnaissance planes had prepared an aerial mosaic which each pilot had in front of him in his cockpit when flying sorties against targets in Stalingrad. Likewise, each aviation officer in the spearheads of the divisions had that aerial mosaic map with him. A system of coordinates plotted on the mosaic enabled the aviation officer to indicate to the commander of the approaching Stuka unit by radio phone exactly every target and to direct him to it. Throughout the battle for the city this kind of cooperation was excellent. As I said before, a distance of only 40 kilometers separated us from Stalingrad. This meant that we needed for each sortie a chock-to-chock time of not more than 45 minutes, which included taxiing to the start, takeoff, approach flight, the climb to an altitude of 4,000 meters, target pickup, dive bombing attack, low level flight departure, landing, taxiing to the apron. Each turnaround—a new loading, a short technical overhaul, checkout-took us another 15 minutes. We were consistently able to fly with each plane about eight sorties from sunrise to sunset. On some days we managed to fly a total of about 800 sorties, as I already mentioned. This was a great feat of our crews bringing effective aid to our army units in their hard struggle against an enemy gaining in strength all the time. Every minute of the day we kept the enemy on the go with Stuka combat fighter plane attacks, continuously harassing him from the air. With our dive bombers, we had first started attacks by diving on the Russians from high altitudes with our sirens hooting incessantly, thinking this would shatter their nerves. Soon, however, we stopped these tactics when we realized that Russian ears were indifferent to those acoustic irritations. Obviously, their nerve structure was much stronger than that of Western people. Here again, I should say a few words about Soviet air defense. For the protection of his troops in Stalingrad, the enemy had a massive antiaircraft arrangement on both banks of the Volga River; also in the city sections occupied by him. They fired at us with all calibers at their disposal, inflicting heavy causalities on us. Most dangerous to us were their medium 20-mm and their larger 40-mm antiaircraft, which at times caught us in dives at altitudes between 800 and 500 meters. Even their heavy antiaircraft guns fired quite accurately to altitudes of 4,000 to 5,000 meters. It is a fact that the Geschwader in its sorties on the Eastern Front, particularly over Stalingrad, suffered its most severe losses by antiaircraft fire and hardly by Soviet fighter planes. Various of our pilots and their backseaters actually succeeded in shooting down Soviet fighters in the attack. We should not forget that Jagdgeschwader Udet and close air support Geschwader 190, also employed as fighter units, had full air supremacy in the Stalingrad area after having decimated Russian fighters and interceptors. Apart from the Russian antiaircraft guns, we had to deal with another, invisible, though just as dangerous, enemy of our deep diving Stukas. I refer to the trajectories of the artillery projectiles thrown at us from both sides, and which we crossed while pulling out of our dives and on departing. It sometimes could not be determined whether it was an antiaircraft or an artillery projectile that had torn up a JU-87 in the air.

 

The month of October 1942 passed week by week without the Sixth Army being able to break Soviet resistance in the center of Stalingrad. To make things worse, the fighting power of the enemy, while being far from slackening, was getting stronger and stronger from day to day. I will here report of a sortie we flew with about 120 JU-87s against a special target in the center of Stalingrad, It was the ruins of a giant production plant in the basement of which the Russians had so firmly entrenched themselves that there was no getting at them from the ground. The only chance to drive them out of their underground position appeared to be a mass Stuka attack. The plant extended from west to east for a length of about 1,000 meters and a width of 50 meters. In the north, the west, and the south, it was closed in by our infantry, but it was open to the east which was enemy territory. The stiffened resistance of the Soviet combat force stuck like a painful thorn in the side of the German divisions operating there. They could steadily be given logistic support from the east. Generaloberst von Richtofen, the commander of the air force in that area, made us understand that our Geschwader had to do precision bombing so as to avoid danger to our troops entrenched close to the target area. He wanted to watch our sorties, judge the accuracy of our pilots, from his commandpost at the western outskirts of the city. This was indeed a very delicate order. We could not risk making a dive bombing attack from 4,000 meters altitude because of the wide area of dispersion. We had to fly a slant range attack, releasing the bombs directly over the roofs. We had to push the bombs into the target like loaves of bread into an oven, with one plane succeeding the other. We loaded each plane with one 500-kilo bomb with a tank-busting head and delayed action fuse for piercing the roofs. Each plane also carried two 250-kilo bombs under the wings, so each carried a load of 1,000 kilos. Each pilot was fully briefed in accordance with the aerial mosaic mentioned and informed about the sequence of the attack. It was planned to drop the bombs in rapid succession so as to wear down the enemy by endless detonations. The order of the attack was accurately fixed. The Geschwader assembled at altitudes between 1,000 and 2,000 meters in a holding area west of Stalingrad outside the antiair range without fighter escort. From there the individual Staffeln started their slant range approach in the sequence ordered. The Staffskette, having signaled the attack, started first and dived on its target, dropping its bomb from a very low altitude. Then, pulling our planes around, we left the antiair range in low level flight, gaining altitude west of the city so as to observe the attacks of the planes following us. As on a string of pearls, one plane followed the others within an interval of a few seconds, throwing the bombs on the oblong target area divided up among us. Not one single bomb missed its target. This brought our crews high praises by the infantry in the target area. But what was the result of the whole operation? It was next to nothing. When the division resumed its attacks in order to test the effects of the bombing raid, it unexpectedly met with fierce counterattacks as though nothing had happened; as if the Geschwader had dropped toy torpedoes instead of bombs.

 

I want to end with a few words about Stalingrad. At that time, before the final closing in of the Sixth Army, the German Supreme Command still seemed to be quite optimistic. In view of the Soviet supply columns reaching Stalingrad from the north and the east, week after week, some of us were seized with a feeling of depression. On the one had, the Sixth Army seemed to be quite intact. On the other hand, why did the Sixth Army not take the remaining third section in the center of the city? Somehow, its strength seemed to weaken, though this was only natural after all the experience of the last four months. Reinforcements of tanks, fuel, and ammunition had slowed down. The reasons for this were obstructions caused by partisans, as already mentioned. With the allied Italian and Romanian units protecting the flanks, would the army be in a position to withstand the Russian counter- offensive now obviously in the offing? Those familiar with the situation had their doubts because two allied armies were not backed up by an adequate number of armed forces. To make things worse, winter was near at hand. So came the end. Today we know the prescience of imminent disaster would come true, even surpass all expectations. I do not want to repeat the reports on the German debate in that battle deciding the outcome of the war. The Geschwader Immelmann flew out the mass of its ground crews from the pocket by transporting them in the wings and rear cockpits of the planes. As many as about 700 men were ordered to be left behind. They were integrated into the Luftwaffe Field Battalion Immelmann. We never heard of them again. In the ensuing fights for the relief of the Sixth Army, our Geschwader lost a number of battle tested Staffelkapitanen and many a brave crew who had distinguished themselves in hundreds of sorties. Most of them were killed in action in low level flights over enemy territory, in bad weather, by camouflaged Russian antiaircraft batteries. We have already discussed those topics, so I end my presentation with this. Thank you.

Edited September 18, 2014 by No601_Prangster