Quotes About Luftwaffe

It was also the Luftwaffe that would be the first to face the terrifying industrial might of the United States.

According to Goering and the Luftwaffe High Command, they were supposed to be the fighter elite.

Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.

Göring summoned Willy Messerschmitt for a meeting and took him to task for aiding Hess. The Luftwaffe chief asked Messerschmitt how he could possibly have let an individual as obviously insane as Hess have an airplane. To which Messerschmitt offered an arch rejoinder: "How am I supposed to believe that a lunatic can hold such a high office in the Third Reich?" Laughing, Göring said, "You are incorrigible, Messerschmitt!

The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe.

Together, Mertins and Cummings were a formidable arms-dealing force. In 1965 they worked together to sell seventy-four US-made F-86 fighter planes to Venezuela, fifty-four of which were surplus German stock and a further twenty procured from active Luftwaffe service.24 It was a hugely profitable deal.

The first involved the sale of ninety F-86 aircraft to Pakistan, once again raised from surplus German stock. At the time Pakistan was a no-sale zone, embargoed by NATO because of its simmering conflict with India. The required subterfuge was undertaken with the help of the Shah of Iran, who allowed the planes to be delivered to Tehran by Luftwaffe officers and then flown to Pakistan by Iranian pilots dressed up as Pakistani officers.

If British planes appear, we duck. If American planes come over, everyone ducks. And if the Luftwaffe appears, nobody ducks.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

I was born in Norwich, which I still regard as the most beautiful city in the world, despite the attempts by the Luftwaffe to destroy it in the Second World War.

This was enacted on the 27th, with the appointment of 'Onkel' Theo Osterkamp as 'Jagdfliegerführer 2', in charge of the fighter forces of Airfleet 2, most of which arrived at the Pas-de-Calais in the last week of July, and Werner Junck as his opposite number at Airfleet 3. Acronyms being de rigueur in the Luftwaffe, Osterkamp was actually known as 'Jafü 2'.

In equipment, Allied superiority was stifling. In guns it was 2½ to 1, in tanks 20 to 1. The Allies had some 14,000 planes, against which the Germans could pit only 573 serviceable aircraft. The entire Luftwaffe was down to 4,507 planes, and none of those in Germany and the Eastern Front could be spared for the west.

We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.

What business do the British have, poking their noses in?' exclaimed Hitler. 'They ought to be looking after their Jews in Palestine!' He told Bürger the British were just playing for time to rearm. If Britain interfered when 'Green' began, then the Luftwaffe would deal with her.

I've spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It's also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains - and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture.

The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill's people into bowing to Hitler's will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.

In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: "collateral damage" in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe's deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.

of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS.