LUFTWAFFE "NEWS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 81, 10 January 1941, Page 2

LUFTWAFFE "NEWS"

Tales Of Rescued German Airmen

‘Te most interesting souvenirs of the war are the souvenirs that crawl out of the wreckage of German bombers and float down on the ends of parachutes. What these German airmen say provides the best horselaughs of the war. They don’t mind being taken prisoner because, first, they confess to a healthy respect for our fighters and secondly, because they have the quaint conviction that they will be home soon (Germany, by that time, having won the war). Their information about the way the war is going is fantastic. They believe quite honestly that German troops are already on British soil. Their first question is to ask where the German lines are situated. One of them, in fact, said that while the barrage over Central London was intense, it was nothing compared to the barrage which the German anti-aircraft guns were putting up as a protective barrage against British fighters on London’s outskirts. A few of them are undisguisedly terrified of capture because they have been told that the English will take a terrible vengeance on them for the bombing of London. Poor wretches! They regard even a kindness with horrified suspicion, Two stories illustrate the kind of punishment which the R.A.F. prefers. Under examination, a German airman claimed that he had bombed London ten times and wished that he’d survived to bomb the city thirty times more, Asked for an explanation of his bitterness, he replied that he wanted to bomb London in revenge for the devastation which the R.A.F. had caused in Germany. Lack of Feeling Two enemy airmen were picked up ‘from a raft in the English Channel by an R,A.F. launch. One, badly wounded, died as soon as he was brought aboard. ‘His companion was not even interested ‘in his fate. An R.A.F. officer remon‘strated with him for his lack of fellow‘feeling. "Why should I worry?" replied the airman, "I’ve never seen the man in my life before." The explanation may be this: Germany, in order to conceal her air losses from her own air force, is swopping airmen from station to station so that no one man can estimate the true picture of events. The system has another advantage. If the airmen don’t know each other they don’t trust each other. If they don’t trust each other, they don’t talk. It is not without significance that one aircraft has been shot down with a Nazi Storm Trooper as passenger. It doesn’t seem to make the Luftwaffe any more efficient. "Is it Dover?" Recently a bomber was shot down at Harwich which is on the East Coast. The navigator, the only member of the

crew to survive the crash, begged the answer to one question. " Where am I? Is it Dover?" The naval ratings who captured him explained that it wasn’t Dover, it was a town in the North of Scotland. The airman was bemused but satisfied. Perhaps, in part, the indiscriminate bombing is not so much indiscriminate as hopelessly inefficient. Already in Britain? Presumably, the impression prevalent among the German airmen that the German armies are already in Britain,

that Britain is starving, and that the war is almost won, is a part of a deliberate policy of falsification. If so, the Germans are repeating the same mistake in this war that one of their most prominent leaders condemned in the last war. After discussing the dangers of underestimating the enemy, this authority said that the result of this policy in the last war was that when the Germans actually met the enemy in the flesh, they found him totally different from what they had been told. "Subsequently the policy took its revenge in a most terrible manner; for the German soldier, under the direct impression of the enemy’s powers of resistance, now felt that he had been deceived by the fabricators of his information up to that moment, and, instead of strengthening his fighting keenness, it did the opposite. The men broke down under it. The British soldier never felt that the information he got from home was untrue, but this, alas! was so much the case with the German that he ended by rejecting all that came from that quarter as pure swindle." This was written by Hitler himself,