SOLDAT: ‘THE SPOOK OF ST TROND’
In this issue, Dr Graham Goodlad profiles Germany’s top-scoring night fighter ace of the Second World War.
The most successful of all the Luftwaffe night fighter ‘aces’ was Heinz Wolfgang-schnaufer. He survived the war with an astonishing 121 victories but died following a road traffic accident in France during 1950. Dr Graham Goodlad charts the career of the leading Nachtjagd ‘experte’.
With a confirmed total of 121 kills, Heinz Schnaufer shot down the highest number of Allied aircraft by night during the Second World War. Most were fourengine machines: Halifax, Stirling and Lancaster bombers, with a smaller number of Whitleys and Wellingtons in
the early stages of his career. This was a record not only for the Luftwaffe but for any air force in the conflict. His was a remarkable story.
Heinz-wolfgang Schnaufer was born in Württemberg, southern Germany, on 16 February 1922 into a prosperous family of wine merchants. His education in one of the Napolas, elite boarding schools established by the Nazi Party, instilled qualities of discipline and leadership prized by the regime. It was there, in his teens, that he gained his first experience of flying gliders and decided to make military aviation his career.
Contemporaries were in no doubt that, like many young men of his age and background, Schnaufer believed unquestioningly in the creation of a ‘Greater Germany’. He supported the nationalist ethos of Nazism, but allegedly without necessarily embracing its pathological racism. Later, after he had joined the Luftwaffe, his fellow airmen could not recall him taking part in any political discussions. The task in hand, that of flying in defence of the fatherland, was apparently all that mattered to him.
COVER OF DARKNESS
Relatively little is known of Schnaufer’s training or why he volunteered to fly as a night fighter pilot. Leutnant Fritz Rumpelhardt, who served as his radio operator, believed that Schnaufer saw the role as offering a professional challenge with a greater chance of success than in day-time combat. His prospects of survival, he believed, would also be enhanced under cover of darkness.
The pair were first teamed together in July 1941, after meeting at the Zerstorerschüle (or destroyer school) at Wunstorf, near Hanover. Here, Schnaufer gained his first experience of the aircraft he would fly exclusively on operations for the remainder of the conflict, the Messerschmitt Bf 110. Its limitations as a heavy day fighter and bomber escort already abundantly demonstrated, the type came into its own as Germany’s most widely used night fighter of the war.
Schnaufer never used any other type operationally but flew a Junkers 88 on one occasion although seems to have been unimpressed. Late in the war he made one unofficial flight in the twin-engine Dornier 335, Germany’s fastest piston-engine machine. He was enthusiastic about the so-called ‘Arrow’, with its unusual ‘push-pull’ configuration, but it was never produced in sufficient numbers to take part in combat.
CHANNEL DASH
Schnaufer’s remarkable operational career was compressed into barely three years. Aged 17 at the outbreak of hostilities, he did not complete his fighter training until the autumn of 1941. His first operational experience came in February 1942, three months after he was posted to Nachtjagd ge sch wader 1. He piloted one of some 300 aircraft providing air cover for the capital ships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in the celebrated ‘Channel Dash’ following their break-out from Brest.
The beginning of Schnaufer’s night fighting career coincided with the onset of a new and more intense phase of the RAF bombing campaign against Germany. Based for much of the time at Sainttrond, Belgium, Schnaufer found himself at the centre of the Reich’s defences against large-scale RAF night raids.
Schnaufer secured his first victory on 2 June, shooting down a Halifax near
Louvain. Whilst attacking another aircraft on the same night, he suffered his only combat injury. He was shot in the leg by return gunfire, making it back to his airfield despite the aircraft’s port engine temporarily shutting down and suffering a total loss of rudder control. The incident hospitalised Schnaufer for two weeks. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of a remarkable run which, by October 1944, had already brought the award of the Knight’s Cross and Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.
Shortly afterwards, he was appointed to command Nachtjagd ge sch wader 4 at the remarkably young age of 22. By now, night fighter units had been forced to abandon their airfields in Belgium and the Netherlands as the Allies advanced on the Reich, with Schnaufer’s unit moving to Germany.
BEST RUN OF ‘KILLS’
At the beginning of 1945, Schnaufer was offered the post of inspector of the night fighter force but declined because he wanted to continue in a combat role. He achieved his best run of ‘kills’ on 21 February 1945, shooting down no fewer than nine Lancasters in 24 hours: two in the early morning and another seven that evening. He claimed his last victories in March, taking his total to 121.
How, then, did Schnaufer gain his almost legendary status as the so-called ‘Spook of Saint-trond’, as RAF bomber crews knew him? As so often in war, chance played a part. Schnaufer’s two closest rivals for the title of greatest night fighter ace were both killed in 1944: Prince Heinrich Zu Sayn-wittgenstein and Helmut Lent had previously exceeded Schnaufer’s running total but died after claiming 83 and 110 kills respectively.
Schnaufer, a skilled pilot and a gifted leader, was capable of rapidly assessing situations and reacting accordingly, but could be abrupt and arrogant and yet had a capacity for getting the best from his team. From September 1943, he and his radio operator had been joined by a third man, air gunner Oberfeldwebel Wilhelm Gänsler. The three had a natural cohesion, enjoying an unusually informal professional relationship compared to other Luftwaffe crews.
A task demanding considerable skill, night fighter crews had to locate the bomber stream by interpreting a mass of incoming information from the ground, then insert themselves amongst the bombers to find and select a target. Schnaufer aimed to be first into the air, and before the intruders were overhead, with Rumpelhardt only switching on his Lichtenstein radar when in the bomber stream to limit the chances of being detected.
Landing was no less dangerous, especially after the RAF introduced Mosquitos which looked out for the navigation lights of German aircraft as they descended. Schnaufer got around this by sideslipping as he came in to land, touching down as quickly as possible and then extinguishing his lights once he was taxying.
ROLLER-COASTER COURSE
Two critical advances helped Schnaufer add to his roster of kills. His first sorties were flown with the aid of the Himmelbett system of groundcontrolled radar interception. From August 1942, however, the Messerschmitt Bf 110 was equipped with airborne Lichtenstein radar (see page 39) In late 1943, this was superseded by the improved SN-2 version which was less vulnerable to radar-jamming by the RAF.
The introduction of SN-2 occurred at roughly the same time as the arrival of Schräge Musik cannon (see page 33). Interviewed after the war, Rumpelhardt gave Schnaufer credit for helping bring forward this innovation. He described how, after a target had been picked up on radar, Schnaufer would fly underneath, often getting within 30 metres of his victim before opening fire into the
bomber’s wing. If the intruder became aware of his presence, its pilot would ‘corkscrew’ in a bid to shake the fighter off. Schnaufer would fly the same rollercoaster course, allowing him to remain in the ‘dead area’ under the wing that was not covered by the bomber’s gunners.
A short burst of fire would usually produce rapid results, whilst incidentally giving the bomber crew a chance of baling out.
Schnaufer, then, waged his defensive battle with skill and bravery, but on behalf of a regime which was slow to invest resources in night fighting, and against an adversary rapidly gaining in strength. He carried on regardless, even though in November 1944, shortly before he took up command of NJG 4, he privately told fellow officers the war was lost.
UNTIMELY END
When fighting in the west ended in May 1945, Schnaufer was briefly held and interrogated by British forces. On release, he returned to Germany to restore the fortunes of the family business, which had suffered heavily during the war. After the firm recovered, he considered a career in peacetime aviation, but this did not work out.
It was on a wine-buying trip to France, in July 1950, that he met his death following a road traffic accident. At an intersection south of Bordeaux, his car was in collision with a lorry carrying empty gas cylinders. One of these is believed to have struck Schnaufer on the head, knocking him unconscious. He died of his injuries in Saint-andré Hôpital two days later, on 15 July, aged 28. It was an unexpected and untimely end for one who had nightly risked his life in the skies over wartime Europe.
A biography of Schnaufer by the late Peter Hinchliffe, Schnaufer: Ace of Diamonds (Tempus, 1999), was based on the author’s extensive research. Nonetheless, there remain major gaps in our knowledge of him as a person. This was largely because of his premature death, just five years after the end of the war. Unlike some of his peers, Schnaufer did not live to write his memoirs, nor did he give interviews to a post-war generation seeking first-hand recollections of the conflict.