The Third Reich's Luftwaffe began World War II with significant advantages over other European air forces, playing a critical role in the German war machine's swift, powerful advance. By war's end, however, the Luftwaffe had been decimated by combat losses and crippled by poor decisions at the highest levels of military decision-making, and it proved unable to challenge Allied air superiority despite a last-minute upsurge in German aircraft production.
When Erich Hartmann joined the Luftwaffe, it was a highly advanced, confident, and powerful weapon of war, and Hartmann was perhaps in the “sweet spot” of the Luftwaffe’s training program. He was surrounded by an organization and men with real combat experience, including in Spain, Poland, France and the first brutal 15 months on the Russian front, and all of that helped shape him into the fighter ace that he was to become. He went on to fly 1,404 combat missions and engage in aerial combat on 825 occasions. He crash-landed 16 times, but, never, as he liked to point out in post-war interviews, due to enemy action. As he put it, “I never became another pilot’s victory.”
Over the course of the war, Hartmann was credited with shooting down 352 enemy aircraft, 345 of which were Russian and seven being American, making him the most successful combat fighter of all time. In fact, the number is so incredible that it has inevitably come under intense criticism and scrutiny over the years, with some suggesting outright that the figure is falsified, while others have pointed to the unique combat circumstances of the Russian front and suggested that aerial combat there was somehow easier.
Either way, Hartmann was in continuous combat for 32 months of the most brutal conflict in history and came out of it almost entirely unscathed, perhaps his most remarkable feat of all.
