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

there was the loss of your colleagues.’ It was precisely this cumulative
effect that was now beginning to seriously take hold of the Luftwaffe pilots
especially. The new boys arriving were green and under-trained, but the
experienced ones were being flown into the ground. This was because
commanders like Kesselring and Sperrle had no choice but to keep them
flying. It was true that there was little proper understanding of combat
fatigue, and this did not help the pilots’ cause, but the main reason for
pushing the pilots so hard was that the Luftwaffe had been given the task of
destroying the RAF, a job that required a force far larger than was currently
available. The increasingly desperate shortage of new and repaired aircraft
made the situation progressively worse because no sprog would be given an
aircraft above a more experienced pilot. So the older hands had to fly on
and on and on, every day, without let-up. Only bad weather would spare
them from combat sorties, and even then, if the weathermen thought the
skies might be clear over England, they might still be sent over. These
missions would be called Mülleinsatz – a ‘rubbish action’. ‘We used the
phrase to refer to actions that were not only unreasonable,’ recorded the
9/JG 52 diarist, ‘but also pointless because the weather was so bad.’
‘We began to feel the fatigue and the tiredness that comes with living
under constant threat,’ noted Ulrich Steinhilper. Adrenalin would keep them
going during combat. ‘We would feel the relief of returning to base, but
would then have to cope with the emotions of having lost friends and
colleagues, knowing also that within minutes we would have to do it all
again.’
It was the relentlessness that was so difficult to deal with – the lack of
time off, and the lack of any real release of tension. It was true that the
German pilots did not have quite the same anxiety of waiting to be
scrambled, but this was small consolation. There was the exhaustion of
combat flying married to an anxiety on every sortie of not having enough
fuel to get home. ‘We only had ten minutes to fight,’ says Julius Neumann,
‘and then we had to go back.’ It was all too easy to misjudge that narrow
window. Many a pilot flew back with his fuel gauge on empty, every
passing second wracked with tension that he might not make it. Plenty did
not.