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

flown his first missions over England. On 11 August, he had flown four in
one day, and had helped shoot down a Blenheim over the Channel,
something that prompted mixed feelings of elation and guilt at having
caused the deaths of other human beings. On the other hand, the Blenheim
had looked as though it was about to attack a Heinkel 59 seaplane that was
searching for downed airmen. Ulrich was not alone in thinking that British
attacks on these unarmed rescue planes were nothing short of murder.
However, Dowding had made it clear via an official communiqué that he
did not consider that military aircraft rescuing downed airmen could
legitimately be marked with a red cross. ‘They were engaged in rescuing
combatants and taking them back to fight again,’ he wrote, ‘and they were
also in a position, if granted immunity, to make valuable reconnaissance
reports.’ Pilots were often inured to the gory and violent realities of war;
most will say they were always attacking the machine not the pilot. Disgust
at shooting at rescue planes is therefore perhaps understandable. At the
same time, notions of chivalry were somewhat misplaced. This was war:
hard and brutal. Britain could not afford to observe noble niceties when she
was fighting for her life. Ulrich, Hans, Siegfried Bethke and others may
have been fundamentally decent, upstanding young men, but Hitler, Göring
and the Nazi elite were not.
Ulrich flew several times again the following day, 12 August. The
fighters were helping with the final prelude to Adlertag, trying to draw out
the British fighters and providing cover for a series of attacks on ‘DeTe
devices’, those tall latticed masts which stood defiantly all along the coast
on the other side of the Channel. As General Martini had realized, so long
as these peculiar-looking masts were still operating, the Luftwaffe would
never achieve any surprise.
Leading the attacks on the RDF Chain was Hauptmann Walter
Rubensdörffer, commander of Erprobungsgruppe (‘Experimental Group’)
210. Swiss by birth, the thirty-year-old Walter was a Spanish veteran and
former Stuka pilot. However, he was also something of a pioneer and had
spent several weeks at the Luftwaffe experimental centre at Rechlin on the
Baltic, trialling the Me 110 Zerstörer and Me 109 as precision bombers. Out
of these trials, Erpro 210 had been formed, a force of twenty-eight handpicked,
highly skilled pilots. Brought into Luftflotte 2, their results during
the Kanalkampf had been encouraging. Having been a sceptic, Kesselring
had come to regard Erpro 210 as one of his most elite units.