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

his parents on 15 May, ‘however, I have not yet managed to get any
Frenchies in front of my guns.’ The next day he wrote again. ‘Still no
contact with the enemy.’ Nor was there the day after that. Then orders
arrived sending them into France. ‘Now everybody is full of hope again,’ he
noted.
They finally reached Charleville the next day, but with no ground
support or supplies Ulrich and some of the other pilots had decided to
explore the town. Ulrich had been stunned by how empty the place was –
the entire population seemed to have gone. Virtually everywhere they
looked, notices had been pasted with ‘Nicht Plünderen’ and warning that
any pillagers would be shot. When Ulrich’s friend Kühle picked up and
began looking at a pair of shoes, he began to feel a little uneasy. Then a
guard came over and told them the rule applied to officers too. Apparently
two privates had stolen some shoes, and were caught, summarily courtmartialled
and then executed.
By the afternoon, their groundcrew had caught up and the Gruppe were
ordered on their first mission to the Channel coast. The pilots were all
briefed beforehand, and warned that the British pilots and their aircraft were
not to be underestimated. The weather was poor and visibility bad, and by
the time they reached the coast, they had just fifteen minutes before they
needed to turn back.
Even so, as they approached Dunkirk, the visibility improved and there
ahead of them they saw the mass of smoke drifting up from the port. Ulrich
could see Spitfires and Hurricanes attacking Stukas. ‘It was immediately
clear,’ he noted, ‘that we were up against very tenacious opposition.’
Ulrich was twenty-one, from Stuttgart, the son of a teacher. His had
been a happy enough childhood, but the family had never had much money.
Then, early in the summer of 1936, his school had been visited by officers
from the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. Both did good sales pitches, but
Ulrich had been electrified by the possibility that a poor boy like himself
could learn to fly. Immediately applying to join, to his great thrill he was
asked to then attend the selection centre in Berlin, where he would undergo
three days of tests. Confident he had done well enough in the examinations
in speech and debate, he was less sure about the physical tests – kidney
problems a few years earlier had excused him from sports and he knew he
was not as fit as he might have been. Nonetheless, after two and a half days,
ten names were read out, and his was one of them. He was in.