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

turned to Kesselring and snarled, ‘And you will take over Luftflotte 2 –
because there’s no-one else.’
When Kesselring did take over in January, he was pleasantly surprised
to find Luftflotte 2 in an advanced state of preparation already, yet the new
commander recognized there was still much to do. Strenuous weeks from
February to May were spent with staff conferences, plan revisions and
operation rehearsals both on the ground and in the air. The thorny issue for
Kesselring was the timing and co-ordination of the airborne forces to be
used, of whom he had no real experience, with the bombers. Thus
Kesselring had been understandably nervous that morning of 10 May. ‘I
breathed a sigh of relief,’ he noted, ‘when the first favourable reports came
in.’
The aim of the airborne operations – the planning of which had greatly
interested the Führer – was to catch the enemy off guard and to secure
airfields and key defences in Holland and Belgium. To reach the drop
zones, rather a large number of slow, poorly protected Junkers 52 transport
planes and even more vulnerable gliders had to fly over much of Holland
and Belgium and it was the task of fighters to escort them and give them as
much protection as possible.
Amongst those accompanying the airdrops were the Messerschmitt 109s
of the three fighter groups of JG 27. The second group were supporting
paratroopers of the 7th Fliegerdivision in the Rotterdam area. Flying from
Wesel in the Rhine Valley, the II Gruppe first flew over Holland covering
one of the later waves of paratroopers. One of the pilots in the 6th Staffel,
and flying his first combat mission, was Julius Neumann. Blond and goodlooking,
the 21-year-old Julius was the second of five children from
Harzgerrode in the Harz Mountains. The son of a lawyer who had fought in
the First World War, Julius was part of a close and happy middle-class
family. His ambition, however, had originally been to join the army. In
April 1936, he had joined the labour corps, the Arbeitsdienst, as an officer
cadet attached to the 51st Infantry Regiment. After a year he was sent to the
officers’ school in Munich, but eighteen months later was transferred to join
the Luftwaffe instead. ‘Göring needed pilots,’ he says. ‘You had to be
physically and mentally fit and intelligent enough.’ Out of 600 at the
officers’ school, half were sent to flight school, and one of them was Julius.
‘At the beginning of your time in the army, you had to sign a contract,’ he
adds, ‘and wherever you were needed, you had to go.’ Unusually for a