The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

through ninety degrees, the fighter on the outside pulled up and turned
above the one nearest to him. The others followed in sequence, so that at
the end of the manoeuvre the formation was the same but a mirror image of
the order of aircraft before the turn had begun.
When the Spanish Civil War ended in March 1939 and the Condor
Legion returned home, the lessons learned were put to immediate effect.
Hajo Herrmann was not alone in being given time to prepare a full report of
his experiences, which he then presented to the Chief of Staff of the
Luftwaffe in Berlin. Training was made more realistic and practices such as
the Schwarm and cross-over turn became normal procedure.
Another of the Spaniards – as the Condor veterans were known – who had
written reports on his experience in Spain had been Hauptmann Dolfo
Galland. It was largely because of what he had written that he had been
pulled out of JG 52 and plunged back into the world of a biplane ground
support Lehrgeschwader in order to bring the unit up to strength and then to
lead it during the Polish campaign.
Dolfo Galland had been born in Westerholt, Westphalia, in March 1912,
the second of four sons, whose father was land manager of the large,
sprawling estate of Graf von Westerholt. Brought up as a strict Catholic
despite the family’s Huguenot origins, Dolfo had always preferred sport and
the outdoor life to academia, although he had considerable practical skills,
throwing his energy into making radio sets and model aircraft. At fifteen, he
made his first glider with some school friends, and by the time he was
nineteen had passed all three levels of his glider pilot’s licence. Having
matriculated from school, he joined the commercial flying school, run
largely by the national airline, Deutsche Lufthansa, where he qualified as a
pilot before being asked to enter the still illegal Luftwaffe. That had been in
early 1933, but two years later, after he had joined the fighter unit JG 2, his
career was nearly finished when he suffered a horrific accident flying a new
Focke-Wulf 44 Stieglitz. Recovering too late from a spin, his aircraft sliced
into the ground. He was already in a coma when he was pulled out of the
wreckage, and with multiple skull fractures it looked like he might never
recover.
But recover he did, although there was little he could do about the
serious damage to the cornea of his left eye. At his medical, he was
declared unfit for flying, but fortunately for him his commanding officer at