Ancient history

Jabo in the Mediterranean

Feldwebel (Warrant Officer) Adolf Dilg was a pilot in III./ZG 2 in 1942, and his group was the first in the Luftwaffe to be fully equipped with Fw 190A-4 fighter-bombers. Adolf Dilg recounts here his experiences as a fighter-bomber pilot in France and North Africa.
Wounded shortly before the capitulation of the Axis forces in Tunisia, he resumed combat, where he was withdrawn due to the handicap caused by his injured arm. He then became a test pilot with Focke-Wulf and he ferried many Fw 190s out of the factory to the units based on the front lines.
Translated from the book Focke-Wulf at War by Alfred Price, published by Ian Allan Ltd., Shepperton, Surrey, Great Britain.


In August 1942, III./ZG 2 (Zerstôrergeschwader, or Destroyer Squadron), where I served as a pilot, was transferred to Parndorf, near Vienna, to undergo conversion to Fw 190A-4. We were the first Jabo Gruppe (Fighter-Bomber Group) to be fully equipped with this type of aircraft.
We found the Fw 190 to be a huge step up from the Messerschmitt Bf 109E on board which we were fighting in Russia. It was better suited to the fighter-bomber role in all respects:faster, more maneuverable, more robust, easier to maintain in the field, and more stable when maneuvering on the ground, especially when loaded with bombs.
The conversion to this new type lasted about a month, until, in September, we moved to Cognac near Bordeaux, in order to carry out special training devoted to the assault of naval units. It had seemed obvious for some time that the allies were gathering forces for amphibious operations, and our unit was one of those the Luftwaffe assigned to anti-invasion missions. An old French destroyer was stranded in the mouth of the Gironde, it served us as a target, on which we practiced attacks at low altitude or in a dive and during which we dropped practice bombs filled with cement from 250 or 500 kg. Another of our practical exercises was penetrating the lines of barrage balloons around Bordeaux, which we found exciting.
In October the most experienced pilots of the Gruppe were sent to the Merville aerodrome, near Lille, and I was one of them. There we joined the Jabo Staffeln of JG 2 and JG 26 to take part in a large-scale attack on Canterbury, in retaliation for the bombardments carried out by the R.A.F. on German cities. At the end of this action, the entire Gruppe was transferred to Camiso in Sicily.

soon evident that Jabo operations would be far riskier than they had been in Russia.
We lost our Gruppe Kommandeur, Hauptmann Wilhelm Hachfeld, on December 2; his nickname was "Bomben Willi" because of his success as an assault pilot. He perished in one of those stupid accidents, far from any enemy, which cost the life of more than one ace. He had just started his takeoff, prior to an attack, when he collided with a Messerschmitt Bf 109, coming from another aerodrome, which had just landed and had come to rest on the runway. Hachfeld's Focke-Wulf made a wooden horse and caught fire:the pilot perished before the rescue team could pull him out of the blaze. We had followed with horror, from the crew room, the unfolding of the drama we were witnessing, powerless.

The allies soon came to bombard our airfield, although they did little damage initially. Our interceptors, the Messerschmitt Bf 109s of I and II./JG 53 and the Fw 190s of II./JG 2 halted most of the early attacks. During one of the assaults on Sidi Ahmed on 4 December, No. 18 Squadron of the R.A.F. lost the 11 Bisley bombers that were launched to attack.
We constantly maintained our attacks on ships in the vicinity of Bône as well as artillery positions, depots and vehicles nearby from the forehead; we also bombed the airfields of Thelepte, Tebessa and Kairouan. Towards the end of December, our Gruppe was redesignated III./SKG 10 (Schnellkampfgeschwader, or fast bombardment squadron). This change did not bring any modification in our missions:they continued exactly as before.

Most of our attacks were direct, but sometimes we had to attack two or three different objectives in one sortie. We were on Sitzbereitschaft (immediate availability) in our plane, which was still armed, awaiting a last-minute decision on the ultimate objective of the mission. This happened if we had to synchronize one of our attacks with another carried out by the army or if an enemy offensive was launched and we had to support our troops.
The German and Italian forces in Tunisia were gradually hemmed in by the branches of the Allied pincer from east and west.

In the air, we were overrun by far superior enemy aircraft, and our losses mounted disastrously. During my time in North Africa, there was no shortage of planes, fuel or bombs, but we received very few pilots to replace those lost in combat. New pilots joining the unit were often fresh out of school and completely inexperienced, which is why many of them went missing soon after joining the unit. Too often, alas, a young pilot arrived from Sicily in the late afternoon and was killed in action after two or three days. Things went from bad to worse, to the point that we had no more officers in the Gruppe and the missions were carried out by a Feldwebel. The fighter-bomber ace, Oberleutnant Fritz Schroeder, joined us in January to take command of the Gruppe, but by then the situation had developed to the point that there was little that individuals could do to alter the course of the war. events.

There was no doubt that the end was near for the German and Italian forces in Africa, although I could not see it personally. On January 24, 1943, I was part of a covering patrol of a naval convoy bringing supplies from Italy. We had just been relieved and were returning to base when suddenly I saw tracers pass alongside my craft, there was a series of snapping impacts, my Focke-Wulf vibrated and caught fire. We had been topped by American Lightnings emerging from the sun. I inverted the plane, jettisoned the canopy and parachuted. During my descent, the shock resulting from the attack disappeared to make way for a violent pain that I felt in the left forearm. I glanced at it and saw blood dripping profusely from the shreds of my flight suit. A shell had passed through my arm, breaking the bone. By the time I hit the water, I was deprived of the use of my arm. I managed, with difficulty, to inflate my lifejacket, but my dinghy was recalcitrant to any attempt to inflate it using only one hand. I spent a few hours in the water. enduring immense pain, until, by chance. an Italian destroyer appeared. The flares I fired attracted the attention of his crew, who picked me up. The ship took me back to Tunisia, from where I was evacuated to Italy a few days later along with other wounded.

The wound I had in my arm was so serious that the military doctors first intended to amputate it at the elbow. I was again lucky, because the medical personnel of the Luftwaffe had heard about it and I was transferred to one of their hospitals, where the conditions were much better. This is where the surgeons succeeded in grafting bone tissue taken from one of my legs onto the arm bone. I recovered so well from my injury that I was declared fit to fly again in October 1943.

I returned to III./SKG 10, which was then reforming in Graz, Austria, following the severe losses it had suffered in the Mediterranean during the spring and summer. Very quickly, after I returned to operations, it became clear that while the Luftwaffe surgeons had done an excellent job, my repaired arm was not strong enough to withstand the stresses of combat flight, and my career as Jabo remained as a result. there...


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