WAR

an American ace who flew in British and American squadrons, George A.
Vaughn, Jr., recounts an episode from the 'thirties. He was in Great Britain
selling Link Trainers to the RAF. He heard that the Chief of the Technical Office
of the new German Luftwaffe was interested in Link Trainers, and, since the
General in question was a friend of his, Vaughn naturally decided to stop by
Berlin on the way home and take an order for a few more.
In Berlin under the new regime flags were everywhere, soldiers were everywhere,
pictures of the new Leader were everywhere. At the Air Ministry ramrod
soldiers slammed to attenion and the air was filled with the sound of clicking heels.
The officious guards would never have let Vaughn in if he had not been a friend of
the Chief of the Technical Office (whom he had met at the old Cleveland Air
Races). Finally, the doors were thrown open, the visiting American was led down
polished corridors and the guards withdrew.
There sat the Chief of the Technical Office sprawled in his chair, tunic
unbuttoned, feet on his desk, bored to death, the perfect picture of that most
miserable duck out of water, the aviator behind a desk. This was Udet.
Between the wars Ernst Udet was a well-known explorer, big-game hunter,
Udet
and stunt pilot;
during the early part of the Second World War he was one of the
heads of the German Luftwaffe, a position for which he was selected partly because
of his fame, partly because he was an excellent pilot, and partly because he was an
easy-going chump. He was the scapegoat who eventually got the blame for the
failure of the Luftwaffe after Hermann Goering's disastrous blunders. The
machinations of Goering and Secretary Milch so distracted Udet that in June 1941
he committed suicide.
It was a contemptible end for Germany's second most successful fighter
pilot of 1914-1918.
Udet first served in 1914 as a volunteer motorcycle dispatch rider at the age
of 18. He was discharged from that service at the end of 1914, and immediately
applied for admission to the Air Reserve—aeroplanes had interested him since his
childhood. When his application was rejected on the grounds that he was too young,
he took a civilian flying course at the Otto Flying School in Munich. His father paid
for the lessons—2000 marks down and the refinishing of Herr Otto's bathroom.
On passing out of the school, Udet succeeded in wrangling admission to the
Air Reserve and in the summer of 1915 he was posted to the aerodrome at
Griesheimer Sand as an instructor. At this point he was an adequate pilot but not
a brilliant one. That he was made an instructor almost as soon as he learned to fly
himself is less an indication of his flying ability than of the informal methods of
training that still existed at the beginning of the second decade of flight. The
American Ace, Reed McKinley Chambers, for example, became an instructor
with a total of 22 hours of flying time in his logbook.
The first squadron in which Udet flew operationally was Fliegerabteilung 206
at Heiligenkreuz in the shadow of the Vosges Mountains. The equipment was
Aviatik B machines and the work was principally
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artillery-spotting.