Erich Hartmann: The Life and Legacy of the Luftwaffe’s Top Fighter Ace during World War II

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.

Given its unique strengths and distinctive weaknesses by the personal quirks of the men who developed it, the Luftwaffe initially overwhelmed the more conservative, outdated military aviation of other countries. Its leaders embraced such concepts as the dive-bomber, which proved both utterly devastating and extremely useful for supporting the sweeping, powerful movements of Blitzkrieg, while other martial establishments rejected dive-bombers as impractical or even impossible.

The Luftwaffe also produced a remarkable number of aces, whose exploits overshadowed the finest pilots of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and few people personified the advancements and abilities of the Luftwaffe like Erich Hartmann, the most successful ace in the history of warfare. His records are made all the more remarkable by the fact that he came late to the Second World War. It had already been underway for more than three years when, on October 14, 1942, at the furthest extremity of Germany’s advance into Russia, he strapped himself into the cockpit of his Messerschmitt 109 for his first combat mission. Born in April 1922, he was still just 20, but he was certainly prepared and ready. He had been flying gliders since his early teens - including as a glider instructor with the Hitler Youth - and he received a pilot’s license for powered aircraft in 1937.

When he 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, and one that can be attributed to training, equipment, commitment, the ability to learn quickly, instincts, comradeship, and, of course, plenty of luck.