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

now re-designated I/JG 52 – was involved in a large training exercise
commanded by General Hugo Sperrle. The fighters were to ‘protect’
Stuttgart from an ‘attack’ by bombers. Each fighter was now equipped with
a radio, and Ulrich and his communications unit were, with their radio units
set up by the control tower, to direct the Gruppe to attack the bombers.
Helping him were the Luftnachrichten, the German Observer Corps, of
which there were some 1,200 people. It was a big responsibility for a young
twenty-year-old pilot but his theories and persistence seemed to have paid
off. The observers provided him with early warning of the arrival of the
bombers, and he and his comms unit were able to then direct the fighters on
to them.
Ulrich was feeling very pleased with himself when he attended the mass
debrief afterwards, but this quickly turned to disappointment. No-one
mentioned the communications and ground controlling at all. Eventually, he
plucked up the courage to ask General Sperrle what he had thought, but
Dolfo Galland cut in. ‘Good, Steinhilper,’ he said, ‘you have reminded me.
You were talking too much. You were just bothering us all of the time. As
I’ve always told you, it would be best to throw out all of these damned
radios! We don’t need them.’
Humiliated and deflated, Ulrich realized that for the time being he had
taken his communications crusade as far as it could go. Dolfo Galland had
moved on soon after, but there was still little enthusiasm to improve
matters. And this attitude was not unique to JG 52, but across the board. A
junior officer was not going to change the outlook of the entire fighter force
let alone the Luftwaffe as a whole. By the end of the French campaign,
ground-to-air control remained virtually non-existent. Ulrich had heard
about ‘Freya’ and ‘Würzburg’, but his tentative investigations got him
nowhere. Debate had also begun over how many Staffeln should operate on
the same frequency. Usual practice was for an entire Gruppe to use one
frequency, but even this number could cause confusion, because no matter
how often it was drummed into pilots to keep radio discipline, as soon as
they found themselves in an action, the airwaves were swamped and all that
could be heard was a high-pitched whistling.
Tentative debate there might have been, but there were certainly no
dramatic changes about to take place. If and when the Luftwaffe launched
its assault on Britain, it would be doing so with only very limited radio co-