Conquerors of the Skies (Part 1)
In this first instalment of #AllAndSundry, Dr Victoria Taylor considers how the Entente's haphazard disarmament of German aviation after the Great War created a vacuum for its fateful rearmament
Albatros D.Vs of Jagdstaffel (Jasta) 12 lined up at Roucourt (Douai) airfield, August-September 1917. [©IWM/Wikimedia Commons]
On a crisp winter’s day in February 1920, Air Commodore Edward Masterman was being shepherded around Berlin a little too eagerly for his liking. Major Georg von Tschudi - the Kommandeur of the Fliegerersatz-Abteilung 7 (‘Replacement Detachment 7’) during the First World War – gabbled excitedly in Masterman’s ear as he took his British guest around the famous German Aero Club at Johannistal.
Tschudi had recently visited Masterman in a meeting ‘concerned with the development of civil aviation in Germany’[i], as the Air Commodore outlined to Brigadier-General Percy Groves in a letter from 5 February 1920. Von Tschudi insisted that Masterman should reciprocate his visit in Berlin and meet August Euler, the famous aircraft manufacturer and aviation pioneer, on 8 February 1920.
Masterman hesitantly accepted the invite, though he remained vigilant regarding the potential resurgence of German military aviation under the auspices of civil aviation. When he was introduced to Euler during the trip to the Aero Club, the latter must have sensed Masterman’s reticence, for Euler swiftly assured him that he ‘wished to see the terms of the peace treaty loyally carried out and the field left clear for bona fide civil aviation as soon as possible.’[ii]
German civil aviation, as both men knew, was entirely off the table as long as the threat of military aviation persisted. Marshal Ferdinand Foch – the French Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies – had unequivocally stated that ‘the manufacture of civil material may not recommence before the destruction of the military material.’[iii]
Masterman surveyed the German sheds and aerodromes for gliding clubs with a suspicious eye, noting that they could ‘readily be converted again for military use.’[iv] The canny Euler pondered the Air Commodore’s point for a moment; then, with a unfurling smile, he replied that the value of the sheds to other nations for international air traffic could ‘outweigh any considerations of their reconversion to military uses.’[v]
This was a prospect that Masterman admitted ‘might be worth considering’; that he also ‘expressed no objection’ when Euler asked to meet ‘the leading members of other nationalities on [his] Commission’[vi] was a further reflection of how the possibility of using German aviation to achieve British ends was beginning to manifest by the early 1920s.
Indeed, during the immediate years following Versailles, the Allied Powers soon recognised that they could not enforce the disarmament of German aviation indefinitely. In a memorandum on Anglo-German Relations from January 1922, it was determined that ‘the development of British civil aviation in Western Europe is largely dependent on the goodwill of France and Germany, especially the latter.’[vii]
The British were also keen to avoid creating an ‘expensive, irksome and even dangerous system of inspection’[viii] regarding the dismantling of German aviation in order to preserve any remaining goodwill between the two nations. Policing German aviation had proven to be a splenetic endeavour: in the early 1920s, the Entente’ discovery that the Reichswehr (‘German Armed Forces’) and several aircraft manufacturers had concealed aviation material led to a further six-month ban on the German construction of civil aircraft.[ix]
Otto Göppert, an Auswärtiges Amt (‘German Foreign Office’) official, complained in a letter from 14 December 1920 to the Inter-Allied Aviation Commission of Control that ‘an entire branch of industry of great importance from the point of view of intellectual culture [has been] destroyed, and the economic power of Germany is further weakened.’[x] As the future Luftwaffe bomber pilot Werner Baumbach noted, even when ‘the Entente finally allowed the construction of aircraft again from 3 May 1922, it also set performance and size restrictions, which were monitored by the Inter-Allied Aviation Commission.’[xi]
The challenge this provoked, as Baumbach outlines, was that the ‘German engine industry was unable to gain experience with heavy aircraft engines because sports and commercial aircraft continued to be subject to engine power restrictions.’[xii] In Baumbach’s words, it proved to be especially humiliating as ‘the German engineers had to rely on specialist literature from abroad or on visits to foreign factories in order to gain an overview of developments in other countries.’[xiii]
Failing to cooperate with the Germans in the air, however, had proven to have both economic and reputational costs for the British. That same year, the negotiations between the German and Czechoslovakian governments over an extension of the London-Cologne service to Prague fell through after Germany demanded that the Allied 'Nine Rules’ – which governed airpower restrictions and identification of aircraft as either ‘military’ or ‘civilian’ – should be modified.[xiv]
The British had expressed great dismay at the London-Cologne-Prague deal failing to materialise, as the Czechoslovakian government had previously agreed to ‘give a considerable subsidy to a British Company for the operation of this route.’[xv] Recognising that stifling the Germans would strangle their own aeronautical development, the ‘Nine Rules’ were thus eventually altered by the Allies in 1925.
During the Stresemann era, the Allies initially encouraged German cooperation by periodically reviewing the post-war restrictions on its aviation; negotiating and signing the Locarno Treaties in 1925 especially drove this need for international negotiation and compromise. Through these seven agreements, Germany formally accepted its western borders with France and Belgium; agreed to the permanent demilitarisation of the Rhineland; and pledged to work towards being admitted into the League of Nations.
In return, German commercial airlines began to stretch across the globe from 1925 onwards - ranging from Albania and Argentina, to Austria and the Soviet Union.[xvi] Many of the German personnel who flew, constructed, directed, and maintained such aircraft in this period had served in the Luftstreitkräfte during the First World War. They now seized the opportunity to keep German aviation alive by any means necessary: flying in commercial airlines; participating in glider competitions; conducting research in aeronautics; and lobbying for the further easing of Allied restrictions on German aviation.
Before these heavier aircraft and more powerful engines were permitted, however, the nation had attempted to keep German flight alive with the dawn of the ‘glider craze’ in the early 1920s. In the face of continued technological restrictions, the rallying patriotic cry in Germany became: ‘if we can’t fly with motors, we will fly without them!’[xvii] The privately-owned gliding and powered flight clubs of the Deutscher Luftfahrt-Verband (DLV) and the Sportflug G.m.b.H, established in 1924, offered practical flight instruction in the summer and scientific lectures in the winter.
These were often provided by ex-airmen of the First World War, with the more promising students being sent to the Technische Hochschulen (‘technical universities’) in order to undertake a more rigorous 80- or 100-hour course in the theory and science of aviation.[xviii] The Sportflug, which quickly absorbed nine of the main flying training schools in Germany, endeavoured to provide widespread glider training.
In a stark demonstration of how naïve British intelligence could be about the interwar policing of German aviation, one report noted that the Sportflug had been ‘limited by financial considerations and respect for Allied opinion’[xix]; little did it know, however, that the flight and gliding Vereine (‘clubs’) which demonstrated the most potential were secretly being funded by the military Reichswehr.
Other aspirant gliders and engineers found their way into civil aviation via university, joining the Akademische Fliegergruppen (‘University Flying Groups) where possible.[xx] Hauptmann Hermann Steiner, who had been attached to a bomber squadron of the Supreme Army Command during the First World War, recalled how he now applied to study aeronautical engineering:
We looked funny enough, young ex-soldiers and former flyers that filled the universities of Germany…we had no goal but to study as fast and as much as we could in order to make something of ourselves. And all that time we had a dream. It was a dream of flying again.[xxi]
Their education also had important long-term implications because, as Anette Schröder writes, ‘the men who studied the technical subjects before and after 1933 in particular were professionally active as engineers or architects not only in the thirties, but also during the Second World War.’[xxii]
In addition, the students’ lecturers, doctors and professors at different universities worked with the Ring der Flieger (‘Ring of Flyers’) and the Leiter des Referats für Waffen und Gerät der Inspektion des Reichsheeres (‘Head of the Unit for Weapons & Equipment Inspection of the Army’) to share their aeronautical research and experiences with the Truppenamt (‘Troop Office’).[xxiii]
Equally crucial to the promotion of civil flight in this period was the Ring Deutscher Flieger (the ‘Ring of German Aviators’), an organisation founded by Luftstreitkräfte veterans and sponsored by wealthy benefactors who were often ex-pilots or observers themselves.[xxiv] The Deutscher Luftrat (‘German Air Council’), which was formed in 1924, contained representatives from both the Reichsverkehrsministerium (‘Reich Ministry of Transport’) and Reichswehrministerium (‘Ministry of Defence’).[xxv]
As a British air intelligence report from January 1926 detailed, ‘the inclusion of Government officials amongst [the Luftrat’s] membership reveals the interest with which the State undoubtedly regards the activities now centralised in this organisation.’[xxvi] Yet, as a British intelligence memorandum stated that same year, ‘a glance at a map will show that without flying over German territory, European air routes must remain strictly limited.’[xxvii]
Thus, in May of that year, the Allies had agreed to relinquish all restrictions on the design, testing, and manufacture of German civil aircraft as part of the Paris Agreement; then, in September 1926, the Germans achieved their goal of finally being admitted to the League of Nations.[xxviii] Had the Allied Powers gotten wind of just how seriously Weimar politicians were stealthy restoring German military aviation behind their back, however, it is doubtful that their admittance to the League of Nations would have occurred.
Before the ink had barely dried on Versailles, strong voices within the Reichwehr refused to accept that the Luftstreitkräfte was gone for good. Upon being forced to sign a disbandment order for the country’s military air force in 1920, General Hans von Seeckt - who was credited as the Reichswehr’s creator - had defiantly asserted that ‘we do not abandon hope of one day seeing the Flying Corps come to life again. The arm is not dead – its spirit lives!’[xxix]
As the Luftwaffe airman-turned-historian Hanfried Schliephake once wrote, ‘many of the airmen in the service derived consolation and hope’[xxx] from Seeckt’s bold statement. True to his word, Seeckt had quickly inserted secret aviation agencies within the Heeresleitung during the early interwar period. General der Flieger Wilhelm Wimmer recalled how Seeckt ‘used all of his influence and authority to protect his group of flyers against attacks all the way up to cabinet level.’[xxxi]
Seeckt thus quietly drafted 180 Luftstreitkräfte veterans into the 4,000-strong Reichswehr officer corps with the future potential of German airpower in mind.[xxxii] He was assisted by his right-hand man, Helmuth Wilberg, who had pioneered the use of dedicated ground attack groups of fighter-observation planes during the First World War.[xxxiii]
Wilberg envisioned that a German air force of the future should be an independent air arm consisting of 1,800 aircraft and 10,000 men: emancipated from solely undertaking army duties, but nevertheless able to offer vital tactical support to the German ground forces. He envisioned an assortment of fighters, observer aircraft, and heavy bombers within this independent air arm, a premise which received Seeckt’s firm backing in a memorandum of 1923.[xxxiv]
Nevertheless, the Reichswehr could only afford to allocate 5.62 million Reichsmarks annually to aircraft development and procurement.[xxxv] This was despite the fact that, as Max Hankte and Mark Spoerer have pointed out, Versailles’ restriction of the military to 115,000 men ‘relieved the German central budget considerably.’[xxxvi]
Government agencies and ministries thus proved crucial in furthering providing German aviation with the necessary funding to expand within - and beyond - Weimar Germany.
According to Wilhelm ‘Helm’ Speidel, a former Deutsches Heer (‘German Army’) veteran of the First World War who later became a General der Flieger in the Luftwaffe, the government budget allocated 5 million Reichsmarks per annum for ‘various aviation armament projects in Germany, such as initial aviation training and repetition exercises at German civil aviation schools’[xxxvii] by 1933.
In addition to the practical skills that gliding bestowed a young pilot, gliding was intended to offer them a sense of belonging at a time of great political uncertainty and alienation. More simply, in Cordts’ words, ‘Fliegen versprach Freiheit’ – ‘flying promised freedom.’[xxxviii] As the future Luftwaffe fighter ace Generalleutnant Adolf Galland said of joining the Gelsenkirchen Luftsportverein (‘Air Sport Association’) whilst a student in 1931:
‘75% were artisans, workers or employees, most of them unemployed. They came together for the one great goal to which they sacrificed all their time, strength, and money. And that goal was: fly!’[xxxix]
Gliding was a vital gateway for many future Luftwaffe personnel, as was rubbing shoulders with illustrious Luftstreitkräfte heroes from the Great War. The future Luftwaffe fighter ace Hans-Ekkehard Bob directly attributed both to later pursuing a career in aviation:
My first contact with aviation came in 1927. At that time, I was able to experience my first acrobatic flights with a former World War I pilot and later advertising pilot at Circus Busch in a Raab Katzenstein biplane. This serious experience must have motivated me to join the newly founded German Luftwaffe after graduating from university in 1936. I had already had my first flying experiences with gliders since 1934, so my decision to become a pilot was clear.[xl]
The future Stuka pilot Helmut Mahlke recalled a flood of pride as he progressed in his early flying career, noting that ‘we were more than a little proud of the fact that we could (already!) fly. At weekends, whenever a group of us strutted along the promenade at Warnemünde in our smart blue jackets sporting the DVS flying school badge in our lapels, we were convinced that everyone saw us as “conquerors of the skies”. We felt all-powerful – not in any arrogant way – but simply as young men full of the joys of living.’[xli] He added, too, that part of the appeal was because:
The aura of flying was shrouded in such secrecy that the ordinary man in the street looked upon a pilot as some sort of heroic adventurer. But flying was not as dangerous as most people thought. Nor had it been for a long time. Our generation had, to a large extent, assimilated the collective lessons learnt at such high cost by our predecessors, the 'Old Eagles' of the Great War.[xlii]
Many ‘Old Eagles’, however, were still learning new tricks. Speidel notes that some government money was being pumped into ‘the maintenance and operation of illegal squadrons, which were made available for military exercises, and finally for other training projects, such as courses, training trips, etc.’[xliii] In addition, 3 million Reichsmarks ‘were diverted to the aeronautical department of the Army Weapons Office’ for ‘the implementation of technical projects in Germany and Russia (research, development, testing, procurement).’[xliv]
This annual expenditure clearly demonstrates, then, how successive German governments invested considerable wealth into aeronautical rearmament long before the Nazi seizure of power. What Versailles had sought to extinguish, men like Seeckt, Wilberg, and their networks of politicians, engineers, glider clubs, and veterans had quietly kept alive. The sheds and aerodromes that Masterman once eyed with suspicion had thus become the seedbeds of a reborn air force that would later conquer far more than Germany’s skies alone; its spirit had lived on, but at what cost?
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References
[i] AVIA 2/61. International Committee for Air Navigation. Question as to whether German representatives shall attend meetings, 1920. Aeronautical Inter-Allied Commission of Control, Military Technical Academy, Berlin. 5th February 1920. To Brig-Gen. P.R.C. Groves, C.M.G., R.A.F., D/Chief of Air Section, British Delegation, 15, rue de Bassano, Paris.’ The National Archives, Kew.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] FO 893/10. General - Conference of Ambassadors, Paris. Minutes of Proceedings. December 27, 1920 - April 20, 1921, Nos. 99 - 116, Vol. X. The National Archives, Kew.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] AVIA 2/288. Investigation (Code 1/3): Accidents to British aircraft abroad and foreign aircraft in Britain: correspondence with German authorities regarding procedure for investigation of, 1927. The National Archives, Kew.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Meredith, Phoenix - A Complete History of the Luftwaffe, 110.
[x] FO 893/10. General - Conference of Ambassadors, Paris. Minutes of Proceedings. December 27, 1920 - April 20, 1921, Nos. 99 - 116, Vol. X. Auswärtiges Amt, Peace Section, No. F. 13.002. 142.001 Berlin, December 14, 1920. The National Archives, Kew.
[xi] W. Baumbach, Zu Spät? Aufstieg und Untergang der deutschen Luftwaffe. 1949. (Stuttgart: Motorbuch, 1978), 21.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] AVIA 2/288. ‘Memorandum on Anglo- German Relations’, 1927. The National Archives, Kew.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 103.
[xviii] AIR 10/1324. Air Intelligence Report, No. 10. January, 1926. Notes on German Aviation. The National Archives, Kew.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Meredith, Phoenix – A Complete History of the Luftwaffe, 16.
[xxi] Steiner, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, loc. 374.
[xxii] A. Schröder, Vom Nationalismus zum Nationalsozialismus: Die Studenten der Technischen Hochschule Hannover von 1925 bis 1938 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2003), 15.
[xxiii] Cordts, Junge Adler, 20.
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] AIR 10/1324. Air Intelligence Report, No. 10. January, 1926. Notes on German Aviation.
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] Ibid.
[xxviii] Meredith, Phoenix – A Complete History of the Luftwaffe, 138.
[xxix] H. Schliephake, The Birth of the Luftwaffe (London: Ian Allen, 1971), 12.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii] See P. Kaplan, Fighter Aces of the Luftwaffe in World War II (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2007), vii; R. L. Blanco, The Luftwaffe in World War II: The Rise and Decline of the German Air Force (New York: Julian Messner, 1987), 3; E. L. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe (Lincoln, N.E.; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 6. Both Kaplan and Blanco openly attribute the formation of the interwar ‘Schwarze Luftwaffe’ to Seeckt; Homze acknowledges his inclusion of 180 WWI flying veterans into the Officer Corps of the Reichswehr in the 1920s.
[xxxiii] Meredith, Phoenix – A Complete History of the Luftwaffe, 52.
[xxxiv] Ibid.
[xxxv] M. Hankte & M. Spoerer, ‘The imposed gift of Versailles: the fiscal effects of restricting the size of Germany’s armed forces, 1924-9’, Economic History Review, 63, 4 (2010), 849 – 864.
[xxxvi] Meredith, Phoenix – A Complete History of the Luftwaffe, 116.
[xxxvii] H. Speidel, ‘Reichswehr und Rote Armee’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1. Jahrg., 1. H. (January 1953), 9 - 45; 23. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30196159 [Accessed 13/05/2021]
[xxxviii] Ibid.
[xxxix] Cordts, Junge Adler, 57.
[xl] 91/1/1. H. E. Bob, ‘Abhandlung’, Private Papers of Major H-E Bob. Imperial War Museum, London.
[xli] H. Mahlke, Memoirs of a Stuka Pilot. Translated from German by John Weal. (London: Frontline, 2019), 13.
[xlii] Ibid.
[xliii] Speidel, ‘Reichswehr und Rote Armee’, 9 - 45; 23.
[xliv] Ibid.
I’ve long been baffled that the Entente powers didn’t seem to grasp that Germany was quietly rebuilding their air arm. And welcome Victoria to Substack.