Why Göring Knew The War Was Over When He Saw One US Fighter

On May 10th, 1945, 3 days after Germany formally surrendered, officers of the United States 7th Army took over a requisition school building in the ruined city of Augsburg. The building was called the Ritter Schule. Someone had forgotten to wipe the previous week’s arithmetic from one of the blackboards. A plain wooden table had been moved into the classroom and two wooden chairs had been placed across from it.

The table was for the prisoner. The prisoner who arrived that afternoon was escorted by an American guard detail and walked in without handcuffs. He was heavy, a shade under 6 ft tall, something over 260 lb. He wore a plain grayish wool uniform from which every badge of rank had been torn except the field marshal’s epaulets on his shoulders.

On the third finger of his right hand, there was a single silver ring. His eyes were blue. His face was unexpectedly ruddy, the face of a man who had lived well in a country that had not. He stopped in front of the table and he waited. The American general on the other side of the table was Carl Spaatz. He commanded every American strategic bomber in Europe.

He had been for the previous 18 months the single officer most responsible for the destruction of the German Air Force. With him were eight other men. Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg of the Ninth Air Force, Brigadier General Edward Curtis, Spaatz’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Paul Bartkus, Alexander de Seversky, a Russian-born aviation writer, a special consultant to the United States Secretary of War, a Seventh Army interpreter, and in the back of the room taking notes by hand on a pad in his lap, a historian named Bruce Hopper. Hopper was the man who

would write down the description we still have of the prisoner. He wrote that the uniform was grayish wool. He wrote that the ring was silver and on the right hand. He wrote that the prisoner’s eyes were blue and that his face was ruddy and not unpleasant. He wrote that the thighs were big and that the boots were tan.

His transcript of that 2-hour conversation went to the Spaatz papers at the Library of Congress in Washington and it sat there essentially unread for more than 60 years. The prisoner was Hermann Göring. The day before he had been brought in by men of the United States 36th Infantry Division. Two days before that, he had still been, on paper, the second most powerful man in Germany.

On the afternoon of May 10th, he was about to answer questions from a general he had never met about a war he had just lost. And in the middle of that long interrogation, somewhere between the questions about jet aircraft and the questions about radar, he was going to say something that has been repeated in American aviation books ever since.

He was going to tell Spaatz that the American victory in the air had come down to one airplane, a single-engine fighter, and that the moment he had seen that fighter flying escort over the city of Berlin, he had known the war was lost. He could have named the thousand bomber raids. He could have named Hamburg or Dresden or the Ruhr.

He could have named Stalingrad. He named a single-engine fighter. Consider who was saying it. Göring had been a fighter pilot in the First World War, good enough to win the Pour le Mérite, good enough to take over Jagdgeschwader 1, the squadron Manfred von Richthofen had made famous in the last summer of the war.

Between the wars, he had been one of the men who rebuilt a secret German military aviation out of nothing. In 1940, Hitler had created a rank for him alone, Reichsmarschall, specifically so that no other uniformed officer in Germany could ever outrank him. He had commanded the largest air force in Europe at its moment of greatest strength and he was telling an American general that the war had come down to one airplane.

To understand that, you have to go back 6 years before the interrogation to an industrial plant on the northern edge of Berlin called Rheinmetall Borsig, where on the 9th of September, 1939, a younger Göring, not yet the bloated caricature of 1945, but already heavy enough that ordinary Germans were calling him Fat Hermann, stood in front of the assembled armaments workers and made a promise.

He said the Ruhr industrial zone, the great arc of coal and steel that powered the Reich, would never be reached by enemy bombers. And he said that if one enemy bomber ever did reach the Ruhr, then his name was not Hermann Göring. They could call him Meyer. Meyer was a common German surname. Göring’s point was that the workers should stake his identity on his promise and that if the promise failed, they could strip him of his name.

It is the kind of thing a confident man says early in a war that is going well. Within 3 years, the air raid sirens in Berlin had acquired a new popular nickname. Berliners, with the bleak humor of people who had been lied to, called them Meyer’s hunting horns. On the same day Göring was promising the armaments workers that no bombers would reach the Ruhr, 7,000 km away in Inglewood, California, a man was rolling out of a hangar a silver airframe that would eventually, with a British engine in its nose, prove his promise wrong. The

doctrine the world’s air forces had inherited from the 1920s and 30s was not identical from country to country, but the core of it was the same everywhere. A bomber properly armed and flying in formation could get through. The Italian General Giulio Douhet had argued in 1921 that civilian populations would crack under sustained air attack and that the bomber was the decisive weapon of future wars.

The British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard believed a version of this. The American General Billy Mitchell believed a more aggressive version of it. But the Americans at the Army Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama developed something more specific. It was not Douhet’s theory of terror bombing. It was a theory of precision strikes against the nodes of a modern industrial economy.

A handful of carefully chosen ball bearing factories, a short list of synthetic oil plants. Hit the right dozen targets, the theory said, and the enemy economy seized up like an engine without oil. The machine that would carry the theory was the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. Its designers called it a fortress because they believed it was one.

Bristling with machine guns, flying in a tight defensive formation, the B-17 was supposed to protect itself against any fighter the enemy could send up. Its field of fire, calculated in training at Maxwell, was supposed to form an interlocking shield no single-engine fighter could survive. The men who wrote this doctrine were not fools.

They had reasons to believe what they believed. They would spend the first 2 years of the American bombing campaign discovering that they had been wrong. When American bombers arrived in England in early 1942 and began flying missions over occupied France and the low countries, the theory appeared to hold. Losses were bearable. The Luftwaffe was distracted, but as the targets moved deeper into Germany proper, the equation changed.

The American short-range fighters, the P-47 Thunderbolt most of all, could escort bombers to the border of the Reich and no further. The Germans learned to wait. Their fighter controllers watched on radar as the escorts turned for home. Then the interceptors fell on the unprotected bombers, staying with them across Germany and back across occupied Europe.

For the bomber crews themselves, what this meant in practice was a new kind of mathematics of survival. A crew that arrived at an English airfield in the spring of 1943, full of the training they had received in Nebraska or Texas or Arizona, was told that a tour of duty consisted of 25 combat missions. On paper, that was an achievable number.

In practice, through the worst months of 1943, the statistical probability that any individual crew would complete 25 missions was somewhere around one in three. Men flew knowing this. They flew with the knowledge that the average heavy bomber crew that climbed into a B-17 in the summer of 1943 did not live to see Christmas.

In January of that year, at the Casablanca Conference, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had formally committed the combined Allied bomber forces to a campaign whose objective was the progressive destruction of the German military, industrial, and economic system. The airmen who flew that campaign discovered, in the hard arithmetic of loss reports, that they were the variable being subtracted.

On August 17th of 1943, the Eighth Air Force launched the boldest operation it had yet attempted. 376 B-17s in two streams, one bound for the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg, the other for the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt, the single industrial complex that supplied nearly half of the rolling bearings in the German war economy.

The escorting fighters turned back at the edge of Germany. 60 Fortresses did not come home. The loss rate was so bad that the American command could not repeat the mission for 2 months. Two months later they tried again. On October 14th of 1943, 291 B-17s flew to Schweinfurt a second time without long-range escort because there was no long-range escort to send.

60 more bombers were shot down by German fighters and flak. 17 more were so badly damaged they were scrapped after landing. More than 600 American airmen were killed, captured, or wounded in a single afternoon. The American press called it Black Thursday. General Ira Eaker, commanding the Eighth Air Force, wrote afterward that for the time being, the American daylight bombing campaign over Germany had simply collapsed.

Deep penetration raids were suspended. The crews who had survived spoke in the language of condemned men. In Berlin, Göring read the intelligence reports and convinced himself that the American daylight experiment was finished. The self-defending bomber was a failure. The Luftwaffe had won the battle for the skies over the Reich. What he did not know was that the airplane that would overturn every one of those assumptions was already in production on two continents and was about to arrive in England in strength.

The man who had designed that airplane had been born in the Rhineland-Palatinate on the 30th of December, 1899, in a small town called Hornbach in a region more famous for its vineyards than for anything industrial. His name was Edgar Schmued. His father, Heinrich, was an Austrian-born dentist. His mother came from Stuttgart.

The family eventually moved to Landsberg and der Warthe, east of Berlin, where Schmued grew up watching the first fragile airplanes of the pre-war years pass overhead and decided, at the age of eight, that he was going to spend his life building them. He never went to university. Germany in those years did not require a degree for engineers, and Schmued’s family could not have afforded one in any case.

He finished the local trade school, apprenticed in a small engine factory, and read every technical manual he could find at night. By his late 20s, he had patented several engine components of his own design. Economic conditions in Weimar Germany were hopeless for a young technical man. In 1925, following his two older brothers, Schmued emigrated to Brazil and took a job with General Aviation, the air branch of General Motors in São Paulo.

Six years later, General Motors sponsored him for a United States visa. He arrived in 1931 at a moment when the Great Depression had effectively closed American immigration to all but those with firm employment sponsorship in hand. Schmued had the sponsorship. By the middle of the 1930s, he was at North American Aviation in Los Angeles working as a preliminary design engineer.

He was quiet. He wore the same kind of plain gray suit every day. He worked late every night of the week. He had a card taped to his drafting table that said, “Any fool can criticize a design, but it takes a real engineer to create one.” His colleagues, who eventually numbered several thousand, used to joke that the only reliable way to know when Ed Schmued had gone home was that his drafting lamp had finally gone dark.

In the spring of 1940, the British Purchasing Commission, headed by a man named Sir Henry Self, approached North American Aviation with a practical proposition. Britain was desperate for any fighter she could buy. The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was on the shelf. Would North American agree to build P-40s under license? North American’s president, James Howard Kindleberger, known everywhere as Dutch, called Schmued into his office and asked him the question.

Schmued, by his own account to his later biographer, Ray Wagner, had been waiting for the question for years. He told Kindleberger that North American should not waste its time building an obsolete airplane. He said he could design a better one from scratch and he could do it fast. Kindleberger went back to the British.

The British, represented by the Ministry of Aircraft Production, Sir Wilfrid Freeman, gave North American a formal contract on the 29th of May, 1940, for 320 aircraft. The contract was explicit about the timeline. North American had 120 days to produce a prototype. 117 days later, on the 9th of September, 1940, the prototype rolled out of the Inglewood hangar.

The Allison engine had not yet arrived, so the airplane was photographed that day with dummy exhaust stacks. On the 26th of October, freelance test pilot Vance Breese flew it for the first time at Mines Field next to the Los Angeles Airport. The Royal Air Force, which had named it the Mustang Mark I, took delivery of the first production aircraft in the autumn of 1941.

The airframe was exceptional. Schmued and his team had incorporated the newest theoretical refinement in American aerodynamics, a laminar flow wing profile derived from research at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. They had tucked the engine radiator into a belly scoop that, thanks to the so-called Meredith effect, first described by a British engineer at Farnborough 5 years earlier, recovered some of its own cooling drag.

The result was an airplane that was clean in a way very few single-engine fighters had ever been, and it was not good enough. The Allison V-1710 engine the American government had required North American to fit was a single-stage, single-speed supercharged design. At altitudes below 15,000 ft, it was competitive.

Above 20,000 ft, it gasped. A fighter that could not perform above 20,000 ft in the air war of 1942 was useful only for low-level reconnaissance and ground attack, which was exactly what the Royal Air Force, with genuine regret, used the Mustang Mark I to do. For almost 2 years, one of the best fighter airframes ever designed sat in the wrong role.

The man who saw the problem and did something about it was a test pilot named Ronald Ward Harker. He had been born at Tynemouth, in the northeast of England, in 1909. By 1942, he was the senior service liaison test pilot for the engine firm Rolls-Royce, which meant that when the Royal Air Force wanted an aircraft evaluated on behalf of its engine suppliers, Harker was the man who flew it.

On the 30th of April, 1942, the commanding officer of the Air Fighting Development Unit at Duxford, Wing Commander Ian Campbell Ord, invited Harker to try out a Mustang Mark I. Harker took the aircraft up for 30 minutes. The next day, at Rolls-Royce’s flight test establishment at Hucknall Aerodrome, 7 miles north of Nottingham, he sat down and wrote a memorandum dated the 1st of May, 1942.

It is one of the quietly decisive documents of the entire air war. He praised the Mustang’s handling. He praised its speed at low altitude. He praised its range. Then he pointed out that the problem was the engine. Fitted with a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61, the two-stage, two-speed supercharged engine that was at that moment being installed in the new Spitfire Mark IX, the Mustang airframe would become, he estimated, the most formidable fighter in the world.

The calculation Harker had done in his head was confirmed on paper by a Polish aerodynamicist at Hucknall named Witold Chalier, who had come to Rolls-Royce after escaping Poland in 1939. Chalier’s figures predicted that a Merlin Mustang would reach 441 mph in level flight at 25,600 ft.

The British Air Ministry, jealous of every Merlin engine being built and committed to Spitfires and Lancasters, was not enthusiastic. Harker and his colleagues went around them, reaching Wilfrid Freeman at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, who had championed other, apparently unconventional, projects before. Freeman authorized the trial.

Five Mustang airframes were set aside for conversion at Hucknall. The first to fly, serial number AL975, took off on the 13th of October, 1942, with Rolls-Royce’s chief test pilot, Captain Ronald Thomas Shepherd, at the controls. The engine installed was a Merlin 65, a variant closer to the one used in the latest Spitfires.

A second conversion, serial number AM208, would reach 433 mph at 22,000 ft. AL975 itself was tested to an absolute ceiling of 40,600 ft. At almost the same moment, North American’s engineers in California, having arrived at the same conclusion by the same arithmetic, fitted Merlin 65 engines shipped from England into two American Mustang airframes.

The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit had, in 1940, signed a licensing agreement to produce the Merlin under license in the United States on a scale the British themselves could not match. The first American Merlin Mustang, redesignated XP-51B, flew at Inglewood on the 30th of November, 1942, with North American test pilot Robert Chilton in the cockpit.

By August of 1942, before either prototype had flown, the United States Army Air Forces, staking everything on the arithmetic, had placed an order for 400 production P-51Bs. By the middle of 1943, the Merlin Mustang was rolling off two North American production lines, one at Inglewood and one at a new plant in Dallas.

By the end of 1943, the first operational squadrons were arriving in England. Hold that sequence in your mind for a moment, because it is the hidden fact at the center of this story. The best fighter of the Second World War was designed by a German-born immigrant in California, powered by an engine designed at Derby, refined at a small airfield in the English Midlands by an Englishman and a Polish refugee, and produced in factories on two continents, in two nations, by workers on opposite sides of the Atlantic who never met one another.

Nothing in the Axis war effort was built that way. Germany licensed its best engines, the Daimler-Benz DB 601 and 605, to Italian and Japanese firms, but those were one-way transfers to junior partners, often plagued by manufacturing problems. What the Americans and the British had done was something different.

They had pooled their best They had shared their best classified designs. They had moved engineers and drawings back and forth across the ocean in wartime convoys, risking submarines, because both sides trusted that what came back would be worth the risk. The Mustang was what trust between two nations looked like when it was rendered in aluminum.

If you’re finding this investigation worth your time, a like on this video helps these longer, carefully sourced stories reach the other people who care about the details. It is a small thing, but it matters more than I can say. On the 1st of December, 1943, the 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51Bs from an airfield in England, made its first combat sweep over Belgium.

The group was formerly part of the Ninth Air Force, a tactical command, but it had been co-opted almost immediately by the Eighth for long-range escort work. On the 5th of December, the 354th flew its first bomber escort mission to Amiens. On the 13th of December, it flew to Kiel, 480 mi into Germany.

It was the first time an American single-engine fighter had escorted bombers that deep into the Reich, and it marked the moment when the arithmetic of the air war began quietly to invert. The group’s commander on that deep escort mission, acting as lead, was a lieutenant colonel on loan from the Fourth Fighter Group, a pilot named Donald Blakeslee.

Blakeslee was a hard-driving American from Fairport Ohio, who had flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force’s Eagle Squadrons before transferring to the American air arm when the United States entered the war. He had more hours in a Spitfire than almost any American pilot alive. He had been watching the Mustang for months.

In February of 1944, he convinced the Eighth Air Force command to let his own unit, the Fourth Fighter Group at Debden, transition to P-51Bs. The conversion was done with minimal training. Blakeslee told his pilots, in words that became famous in the Fourth, that they could learn to fly the Mustang on the way to the target. He was almost literally serious.

On the 4th of March, 1944, the Fourth Fighter Group flew to Berlin. A full-scale raid had been attempted on the 3rd of March, but had been recalled in bad weather. On the 4th, a reduced force reached the German capital for the first time. On the 6th, the Eighth Air Force launched what remains one of the largest single-day air battles in history.

730 heavy bombers, escorted by roughly 800 American fighters, including a full weight of Merlin Mustangs, flew in daylight to Berlin. The Germans scrambled every interceptor they had. The bombers took heavy losses. 69 heavy bombers did not return. The fighter escorts fought all the way in and all the way out.

And when the surviving Americans went home, a fact of military geography had been changed permanently. The city of Berlin was no longer beyond the range of American escort fighters. It never would be again. Inside the Luftwaffe, the man whose job it was to understand what had just happened was General Adolf Galland.

Galland was 31 years old, a fighter pilot who had flown in Spain with the Condor Legion before the war had even officially begun, and who had commanded the German day fighter arm since the death of his friend Werner Mölders in 1941. His relationship with Göring went back to the Battle of Britain, and it had never been comfortable.

There was a moment from that battle that captured the texture of it. In the late summer of 1940, with the Luftwaffe losing the air war over southern England and morale in the fighter wings beginning to crack, Göring had flown to the Channel Coast to berate his fighter commanders for what he considered their failures of aggression.

He had asked each of them, with a kind of paternal sarcasm, what they needed to turn the battle around. When he came to Galland, whose squadrons were being chewed up daily by the Supermarine Spitfire, Galland looked him in the face and told him he would like, if Göring had any to spare, a unit of Spitfires for his own men.

Göring turned on his heel and walked off without answering. Galland, in his memoir, wrote that the answer had been meant as a compliment to the quality of the British aircraft. Göring had not taken it that way. From that moment on, the two men worked together, but the trust between them never rebuilt itself.

So, when Galland warned Göring, almost a year before the March 1944 Berlin raid, that if the Americans ever succeeded in putting a long-range escort fighter over the German heartland, Germany would become, in his own private phrase, a house without a roof. Göring dismissed the warning with the reflex of a man who had learned to tune out his best subordinate.

The official position of the Luftwaffe, handed down through the autumn and winter of 1943 and into the first weeks of 1944, had been that no American single-engine fighter could possibly reach Berlin. After the 6th of March, that position was no longer sustainable. The American tactical change that came with the Mustang was the work of another man with a famous name.

In January of 1944, James Doolittle, whose name the American public still associated with his audacious April 1942 bomber raid on Tokyo, had taken command of the Eighth Air Force. The doctrine he inherited tied the fighter escorts to the bomber stream. The fighters flew close to the formations, protecting them, turning for home when their fuel ran low.

Doolittle looked at the loss reports, looked at the new Merlin Mustangs rolling into his fighter groups, and made a decision that was deeply unpopular with his own bomber crews. He ordered the fighters off the leash. The Mustangs were to sweep ahead of the bombers and hunt. They were to attack German interceptors on the way in, roam freely on the way home, and strafe Luftwaffe airfields whenever a target of opportunity presented itself.

The bombers, he understood, were not really the weapon. The bombers were the bait to bring the Luftwaffe up. The Mustangs were the weapon. Between the 20th and the 25th of February, 1944, the Eighth Air Force and the 15th, operating from Italy, threw the new doctrine at the German aircraft industry in a 6-day operation that became known as Big Week.

3,000 heavy bomber sorties against aircraft factories across southern and central Germany. The Americans lost 137 bombers and 28 fighters. The Luftwaffe, according to the authoritative account by the historians Donald Caldwell and Richard Müller, lost close to 100 day fighter pilots killed in that one week, roughly 17% of its available force.

It was the pilots, not the aircraft, that were the fatal loss. Under Albert Speer’s emergency production measures, the German aircraft industry actually reached its highest fighter output of the entire war in the autumn of 1944. Airplanes could be built. Experienced pilots could not. A Luftwaffe pilot facing American Mustangs over Germany in the spring of 1944 had received less fuel and fewer training hours than his adversary, who had often logged 3 to 500 hours before seeing combat.

Caldwell and Müller record that in the month of March, 1944, the Luftwaffe wrote off close to 22% of its available day fighter pilots. In April, roughly another 20%. In May, peak attrition reached 25%. By the summer of 1944, the fighter arm Galland had spent his entire career building was no longer a strategic force. It was still there on paper.

The factories were still producing, but the experienced men who could coordinate attacks against defended bomber formations were dying faster than the training system could replace them. D-Day, the Normandy invasion on the 6th of June, 1944, took place under a sky that was effectively uncontested. A Luftwaffe that had terrorized Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 and London in the autumn of that year had, less than 4 years later, been pushed back to the ground.

There is an obvious question here that is worth pausing on. The Germans were not fools. Göring had flown in combat in the First World War. He had commanded fighter pilots. He understood what range meant. Why then had the Luftwaffe never produced its own version of the Mustang? Why was there no long-range, high-altitude, single-engine escort fighter in the German inventory that could have accompanied German bombers to London in 1940 and kept up the pressure on the Royal Air Force when it mattered most? The answer is the other half of this story,

and it is the part Göring himself was least willing to say out loud. The Luftwaffe had been built around the assumption of a short war. Every piece of its planning, from engine range to fuel reserves to pilot training pipelines, assumed that the decisive campaigns would be finished in weeks, or at the longest in a few months.

The bomber arm had been designed for operational bombing in support of the army, not for strategic campaigns against distant industrial heartlands. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters that escorted German bombers to London in the summer of 1940 had, from airfields in northern France, roughly 15 minutes of combat endurance over England before they had to turn back.

The Luftwaffe had no answer to that range problem in 1940. It had no answer to it 4 years later, either. There was a second reason, and it was worse. From 1940 onward, Hitler had involved himself more and more personally in the detailed design and deployment of aircraft that no head of state should have been dictating. His infamous May 1944 insistence that the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter in history, be developed as a high-speed bomber, rather than as an interceptor, was only one factor in the Me 262’s

catastrophic delay. The engines had their own problems. The Jumo 004 turbojet was chronically unreliable at first, plagued by metallurgical shortages for its turbine blades. Fuel for any aircraft was getting desperately scarce by late 1944, but Hitler’s interference with a proven fighter concept remained the emblem of everything that was going wrong in the German command system.

Officers who had once been trusted to make their own technical judgments now ran every decision through Hitler’s headquarters. And the men who pushed back publicly tended to see their careers end abruptly. Galland, who had pleaded for mass production of jet fighters as interceptors through 1943 and 1944, was relieved of his command as General of the Fighter Arm in January of 1945 for the offense of having been persistently right while his superiors had been persistently wrong.

That same month, in what became known inside the Luftwaffe as the fighter pilots’ revolt, a group of senior German fighter aces confronted Göring directly about the conduct of the air war. Göring placed Galland under a form of informal house arrest. It was the closest the professional officers of the Luftwaffe ever came to open mutiny against the men commanding them.

And while all of this was happening inside Germany, something else was happening outside it that Göring would never quite understand. The Mustang was not a wonder weapon. The engine inside it was a British design from the early 1930s, refined year by year by patient engineers at Derby and Hucknall. The airframe was an American design drawn by an immigrant from the Rhineland who had been quietly improving his craft for 20 years.

The drop tanks under the wings, which extended the fighter’s range another five or six hundred miles, were not a new invention. Germans had invented drop tanks before the war. They had simply stopped fitting them to their fighters because they had not expected to need them. The Mustang’s advantage was not in any one component.

It was in the fact that nothing about it was secret. An open scientific culture. Two governments that trusted each other enough to exchange classified engine designs. A production system that could build 15,000 copies of a fighter when Germany could struggle to field 3,000 of any comparable design. A training pipeline that put hundreds of flying hours behind every pilot who reached combat.

The Mustang was the shape of a society that had organized itself to fight a long war and had been prepared to lose friends in order to win it. Germany had organized itself for a short war. It had lost both. If your father or your grandfather flew in any squadron of the Eighth Air Force, or in any escort group, or in any bomber crew that depended on fighter cover over Germany in 1944, I would be honored to read their story in the comments below.

What unit? What airfield? What aircraft? Those specific personal details are the actual record of what happened. They belong to the people who carry them, and they deserve to be preserved. Back in the Rittersschule in Augsburg, on the afternoon of May 10th, 1945, Carl Spaatz opened the interrogation with a broad question about why the Luftwaffe had failed.

Göring, for 2 hours, answered questions that ranged across almost every major theater of the air war. He blamed Hitler for the diversion of the Luftwaffe to the Eastern Front. He regretted, in a phrase he repeated twice, his beautiful bomber fleet wasted over Stalingrad. He credited American radar. He acknowledged that the jet fighters had come too late.

And somewhere in that conversation, in response to a question about why the daylight bombing of Germany had succeeded, he delivered the line that has been quoted in American aviation history ever since. The reason for the failure of the Luftwaffe, he told Spaatz, was the American success in producing a long-range escort fighter that allowed the bombers to penetrate deep into German territory with constant and strong fighter cover.

Without that escort, he said, the American air offensive would never have succeeded. A shorter version of the same observation, reduced to its emotional core, circulated afterward in American aviation circles. The day he saw Mustangs over Berlin, Göring had reportedly said, was the day he knew the war was over.

The quote has been rewritten and retold in dozens of slightly different forms, which is what happens to any line that survives by being repeated. But the shape of it is consistent across every source that heard him say it. He did not point at an army. He did not point at the Russian winter. He did not point at the economy or the bombings of his cities or at the generals who had failed him.

He pointed at one airplane. Göring was taken from Augsburg to Nuremberg, where he was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity and found guilty on all counts. On the night of the 15th of October, 1946, a few hours before his scheduled execution, he took a cyanide capsule in his cell. He was 53 years old.

The transcript of the Augsburg interrogation, with Bruce Hopper’s careful observations about the grayish wool uniform and the big thighs and the tan boots, went into the Spaatz papers and stayed there for more than half a century before historians rediscovered it. The line about the Mustangs over Berlin, however, had already escaped.

It was part of the oral history of the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force and the aviation press. Every American Mustang pilot who lived to drink in a bar after the war had heard some version of it. He saw us over Berlin, the airmen told one another, and he knew. Edgar Schmued stayed at North American Aviation for more than a decade after the war.

He designed the F-86 Sabre, the fighter that would dominate the skies over Korea against Soviet-built MiGs. He designed the F-100 Super Sabre, the first American fighter to exceed the speed of sound in level flight. In 1952, he left North American for Northrop, where he served as Vice President of Engineering.

He retired from Northrop in October of 1957 and continued to work as a consultant almost until his death. He was asked once by an aviation journalist whether he had felt any complicated emotions about designing a weapon that had been used against the country of his birth. He answered quietly that he had been designing a weapon against a particular German government, not against a people.

He had left Germany in 1925 for his own reasons. He had become an American. The men he designed the airplane for were his people now. That was all he had to say about it. He died on the 1st of June, 1985, at his home in Oceanside, California, at the age of 85. Ronald Harker lived until 1999. For the rest of his life, at air shows and aviation conferences and dinners, he was introduced the same way, as the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.

He disliked the title. He thought it overstated what he had done. He had only, he used to say, written a memorandum. Rolls-Royce had built the engine. North American had built the airplane. The British and American governments had had to be persuaded. All he had done was fly the Mustang for 30 minutes and point out what was already obvious if anyone had bothered to look.

It was a generous account. Almost every honest history of the Merlin Mustang suggests that without Harker’s memorandum, the engine would never have been installed, and the airplane would never have become what it became. Donald Blakeslee, the American who had talked the Fourth Fighter Group onto Mustangs and led them to Berlin, lived a long life.

He had flown in three wars, collected an astonishing number of combat hours, and never sought publicity for any of it. He died in Miami, Florida, on the 3rd of September, 2008, 8 days before his 91st birthday. He was buried quietly. Adolf Galland, the German general whose warning about a house without a roof had been dismissed by the man it was meant to save, spent the last 40 years of his life on friendly terms with many of the American and British pilots he had once tried to shoot down.

He wrote a memoir titled in English The First and the Last, which became one of the most influential pieces of German aviation writing of the postwar era. He died in 1996 in Oberwinter on the Rhine, aged 83. And in Berlin, which had been rebuilt twice, once out of the rubble the Mustangs had helped create and once again after the end of the Cold War, the old popular nickname for the air raid sirens had long since passed out of common use.

It survived only in memoirs and in the cheerfully bitter jokes of the oldest generation, Meier’s hunting horns. Hermann had kept his other name in the end and carried it to Nuremberg, but the old joke outlived him, which was the part he would have minded most. The story of the Mustang is often told as a tale of American industrial genius, and part of it is that.

But that is only part of it. The airplane that flew over Berlin on the 6th of March, 1944, and that Göring pointed at across a wooden table in Augsburg 14 months later, was not built by one country. It was built by a German immigrant in California, by a British engine firm in the English Midlands, by a Polish refugee with a slide rule, by a Detroit automobile company that had never built an aircraft engine before the war, and by Texas factory workers who had never seen the English airfields where their work would eventually land. It was built, in the

end, by the kind of society that trusted strangers enough to hand them its best designs, and that believed in the patience of long wars. Germany had not built that kind of society. For 12 years, it had built the opposite. A closed and suspicious and vertical country where every decision of consequence ran through one man’s headquarters, and every engineer who disagreed with him learned to keep quiet.

When Göring pointed at the Mustang, he was pointing, without quite knowing it, at the difference. If this investigation gave you something to think about, you can hit that like button below. It helps these carefully sourced stories find the viewers who care about the real history, not the flattering version, and not the dismissive version, but the version that actually happened with the names and the dates and the inconvenient details intact.

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