The Luftwaffe over Sicily: a squadron leader’s diary (In Swedish). "Messerschmitts over Sicily: Diary of a Luftwaffe Fighter Commander" (Stackpole Military History Series Paperback)
By Johannes Steinhoff

I bought this book because my father was on an escort aircraft carrier in Operation Torch that landed Allied troops in North Africa, and he also took part in Operation Avalanche where the Allies landed at Salerno. His service in the Mediterranean spanned the period of this diary. The aircraft on his carrier could have been the aircraft that attacked Steinhoff’s squadron, first in North Africa in Tripoli where the Germans were driven out to Sicily, and also when the Germans were in Sicily. It would be interesting to hear the account of a German after the many British books I had read.

I was also on an Outward Bound trip to climb Mount Etna in the 1950s and know the landscape, Catania and Toarmina which then had not changed since the war.

The German original, or perhaps the English translation has been translated to Swedish which detracts little as Swedish is a Germanic language and little has been lost in translation.

In June 1943 Steinhoff was stationed at a small airstrip at Trapani after the squadron hastily fled from Tripoli. The Messerschmitt 109 fighters were intact, but they had left most of their spares and some of their mechanics behind. They had taken one mechanic crammed into the back of the aircraft by removing the plate behind the pilot. I was two years old at this time, and as we had pilots billeted on us knew them as surrogate fathers.

A fighter pilot has to be determined, skilled and an egotist, pathologically entirely directed towards shooting down his opponent. His personality is that of the twelve-year-old, especially with regard to avoiding the realization that he may be killed as well as kill. He is a narcissistic predator. This type of person is often a pain in the neck, but are the only type that survive as pilots although they are incompetent in social situations. Steinhoff seems to have been no exception. Even though he writes well and honestly he fails to mention a girlfriend and he appears to have no interest in women. These often only serve as a mother figure. The kill is his only interest.
Hermann Goering, the arch narcissist is Steinhoff’s chief and his role model, at least until Goering turns nasty when the war turns against the Luftwaffe.

There is a photograph of Steinhoff on the inside cover taken after he had been shot down and burned in a jet Messerschmitt. Here Steinhoff looks more like a slightly comical clerk than a fighter pilot due to his facial reconstruction. Photos before the accident show a man that looks like a German foreman on a building site with the gleam in his eye of a man who has never faced failure.
He had a great many kills to his name after campaigns in France, Britain, Poland and Russia against vastly inferior planes and pilots. In Sicily however, the Allies had an enormous number of four-engined Boeing 24 flying fortresses to bomb Sicily and a great many fighters to cover them, usually Lightnings and Spitfires.

He initially seems vaguely confused by the change in the fortunes of the Luftwaffe, but carries on as before. Much has not changed. If he needs a new machine one arrives, if new parts are needed they arrive, if he needs more fuel that arrives. The main shortage is of experienced pilots. Newly-trained ones seldom last more than one or two missions. The population of Greater Germany of fifty million supplied thousands of seventeen-year-olds who could be thrown into the war effort.
Hitler’s strategy was of slave labour for the factories, mines and forests. His ally to the North, Sweden supplied weapons-quality iron ore, minerals, arms, explosives, timber, furs and a host of other materials as well as a protected testing ground for prototypes. His strategy of confiscating the property of Germany’s half a million Jews enable him to buy these goods from his northern ally. For a few years Stockholm became the centre of the diamond trade, Germans selling stolen Jewish diamonds through Swedes to the rest of the world.
The oil wells in Rumania continued to supply the oil required.

About 800,000 German men became of military age each year. It is this supply that became the bottleneck to Germany’s conduct of the war by the time of the Sicily campaign. In 1943 there were twice this number of casualties, mainly on the Eastern Front. Hitler chose to have German women primarily as mothers of the master race and initially did not encourage them to join the forces as was the case in Britain.

The protagonist and main character is Steinhoff. This usually causes a reader willy-nilly to side with them. However, it was easy for me to remember that Steinhoff was fighting for the Fuehrer as he frequently mentioned him. I myself grew up in the shadow of families devastated by the Germans so that I could not forget them.

I had not been aware of the dominance of allied air power in 1943, but this appears to have been overwhelming. The moral of Steinhoff’s squadron slowly crumbles. Senior German officers began to blame pilots for defeats and accused them of showing too little will-power. This is in marked contrast to the attitude of senior British officers when the going seemed hopeless.
Finally Steinhoff is forced to retreat with his squadron to Italy.

Perhaps the main difference between this German airman and British airmen was their behaviour when things went against them.

Steinhoff spent three years recovering from burns after a crash in 1945. He would have gone through the denazification process that all Germans went through after the war. This process was to see if the German was a Nazi or had been a Nazi and if so to educate him in democratic values.
He writes a section at the end when he joins the West German Air Force. Here his writing is formal and stilted and uninteresting official jargon.

This is an interesting account of a part of the war where my father’s contribution on an aircraft carrier might directly have caused Steinhoff’s crash and his flight from Sicily.