The summer heat over the Pas-de-Calais was heavy with the smell of aviation fuel and cordite when Hermann Göring came to ask his top fighter commanders what they needed to finish off the RAF. The Reichsmarschall moved among the men who had spent the past months trading their Messerschmitts against the Spitfires and Hurricanes over Southeast England, and he put the question directly. One of them answered with a single request: a squadron of Spitfires. The remark ended the meeting.
Göring, whose temper was as famous as his uniform, left furious. The pilot who said it was Adolf Galland, and the insult was not aimed at the RAF. It was aimed at Göring’s own leadership. Galland had spent the summer proving that the British fighters were at least the equal of the German ones in the hands of men who knew how to use them, and he was not about to pretend otherwise.
The feud that began in that meeting would consume the next five years of his life. Adolf Galland was born on March 19th, 1912, in Westerholt, a coal-mining town in Westphalia. His family had no connection to the air, but the skies over the industrial north drew him early. As a teenager he took up gliding, and by 1932 he was enrolled at the Lufthansa commercial flight school.
Further training at an aerobatic school in Würzburg earned him a full pilot’s license at a time when the Treaty of Versailles still officially forbade Germany from maintaining a military air force. The prohibition mattered little to a generation of young Germans who learned to fly in civilian clothes. His first combat came in Spain. In 1937, Galland flew approximately 187 ground attack sorties with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, piloting the Heinkel He 51 biplane in support of Franco’s Nationalist forces.
The He 51 was obsolete, but the campaign taught him close air support from the cockpit of a machine that could not outrun anything the Republicans sent against it. He encountered no aerial combat against opposing fighters, yet he returned to Germany with detailed tactical observations on how ground attack should be conducted. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, Galland was back in a ground attack role, flying the Henschel Hs 123, a biplane that looked like a relic but proved rugged and effective. He was good at the job, and that was the problem.
He spent the following months lobbying his superiors persistently for a transfer to single-seat fighters, arguing that his skills were wasted on close support. By early 1940, the posting came through. He joined Jagdgeschwader 27 for the campaign in France, climbed into the cockpit of a Messerschmitt Bf 109, and recorded his first aerial victories that May. The Battle of Britain made him a national figure.
Flying with his fighter wing from the Pas-de-Calais, Galland accumulated 57 confirmed kills between July and October 1940, engaging RAF formations over Southeast England. His approach was systematic where some of his contemporaries relied on instinct. He flew at the edge of the Bf 109’s fuel range rather than break off early, pushing his fuel consumption to the limit to stay over the combat zone as long as possible. Between sorties he analyzed British formation tactics, and after each engagement he held careful debriefs, dissecting what had worked and what had not.
In September 1940 he received the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, among the first Luftwaffe pilots to hold that decoration. His photograph appeared on recruitment posters across Germany. He had carried a personal emblem with him since Spain, a cigar-smoking Mickey Mouse wielding a hatchet, painted beneath his cockpit. He had also had his oxygen mask modified to include a holder for a lit cigar, so that he could smoke at altitude.
The image of Galland climbing out of his cockpit with a cigar clamped between his teeth became as familiar to the German public as his victory score. His relationship with Göring deteriorated as the battle ground on. Göring, facing Hitler’s demands for results, accused his pilots of failing to protect the bombers and questioned their courage. Galland refused to accept the characterization.
When Göring asked his pilots whether they considered shooting at enemy pilots descending in parachutes, Galland told him he would consider it murder and would do everything in his power to disobey such an order. The answer was not what the Reichsmarschall wanted to hear. The exchange most associated with his name came that August. Göring visited the Pas-de-Calais and asked his commanders what they needed to defeat the RAF.
Galland reportedly answered with a single request: a squadron of Spitfires. The remark was intended to illustrate how capable the British fighters were, and Göring reportedly left the meeting furious. The story spread quickly through the officer corps and became one of the most repeated anecdotes of the air war. It also cemented the personal animosity between the two men.
In November 1941, Galland was appointed General der Jagdflieger, commander of the entire Luftwaffe fighter arm. The position gave him responsibility for the training and operational doctrine of every fighter pilot Germany had. A year later, in November 1942, his promotion to Generalmajor made him the youngest general in the history of the German military. He was about to discover that his most dangerous opponents were not flying for the RAF.
As General der Jagdflieger, Galland assumed formal responsibility for pilot training, procurement, and fighter doctrine across the entire Luftwaffe. He never stopped flying. Standing orders prohibited senior commanders from combat missions, but Galland flew regardless. The rules that applied to administrators did not, in his view, apply to him.
By the end of the war, his personal victory total reached 104 confirmed kills, all of them on the Western Front. He held Germany’s most senior fighter command and remained one of its most active combat pilots at the same time, a contradiction that his superiors tolerated because he was too valuable to ground. His tenure brought sustained conflict with Göring. Following heavy bomber losses over England in 1941 and 1942, Göring publicly accused the fighter pilots of cowardice and deliberate failure to protect the bombers.
Galland refused the characterization. In formal briefings, he argued that the Bf 109’s operational range made close escort physically impossible over certain distances and that insisting on it produced preventable casualties. His position was technically sound. The argument resolved nothing except producing lasting personal animosity between the two men.
But the biggest fight of his career had nothing to do with the RAF. It was about a single aircraft: the Me 262. Germany’s first jet had flown under its own power on July 18th, 1942. By late 1943, Galland had test flown a prototype and reported to Göring and Hitler that it outclassed anything the Allies possessed.
He urged its immediate deployment as a high-speed interceptor against Allied bomber formations striking German industry. Hitler refused, insisting Germany needed an offensive weapon ahead of the anticipated Allied landing in France. He directed the Me 262 to be produced primarily as a fast bomber. Galland argued this surrendered the aircraft’s most decisive advantage, but his objections carried no weight against the Führer’s insistence.
The jet entered limited bomber service in 1944, delaying fighter deployment by critical months. By autumn 1944, several senior fighter commanders shared Galland’s frustration. Germany’s air defenses were deteriorating sharply. Allied bombers were reaching German cities in daylight, and Göring continued assigning blame to individual pilots rather than reconsidering strategy.
In November 1944, Galland joined a group of decorated officers in submitting a formal written memorandum to Göring criticizing the management of the air war. The document, later referred to informally as the mutiny of the aces, was pointed and direct in its assessment of Luftwaffe leadership failures. Göring summoned the signatories and threatened court-martial proceedings. No formal charges followed, but the consequences were immediate.
In January 1945, Galland was relieved of his command as General der Jagdflieger. He was offered a choice between retirement and a front-line posting at the head of a new Me 262 unit. What he did next was not what Göring had expected. Göring handed him what was meant to be a punishment.
Galland took it as an opportunity. Within weeks, he was assembling Jagdverband 44, JV 44, a unit of Me 262 jets based initially at Brandenburg-Briest before relocating to Munich. The posting was designed to remove him from the political landscape. He treated it as a combat assignment.
JV 44 attracted the most experienced, sidelined pilots in the Luftwaffe. Galland recruited from men who had signed the November 1944 memorandum or otherwise fallen out with high command. Johannes Steinhoff, Günther Lützow, Gerhard Barkhorn, and Walter Krupinski were among those who joined, carrying hundreds of aerial victories between them. Officers referred to the unit informally as the squadron of experts.
Most of them had been removed from senior positions for the same reasons Galland had been. JV 44 flew its first operations in March 1945. Conditions were difficult from the start. Allied air forces attacked German airfields continuously.
Fuel supplies were erratic, and the Me 262 required careful handling. Its Jumo 004 turbojet engines were prone to flame out if the throttle was advanced too sharply, and the aircraft’s longer acceleration phase left it exposed during takeoff and landing. Allied fighter pilots adapted quickly, positioning above German jet fields to attack the Me 262s on final approach when they fell to their lowest speed, a tactic documented in US Eighth Air Force reports from the period. Despite these pressures, the unit achieved results.
Operating from Munich-Riem, JV 44 targeted American bomber formations over Bavaria using R4M rockets in high-speed passes against B-26 Marauders before Allied escorts could respond. The R4M was a simple weapon, an unguided rocket that could be fired in salvos, and the Me 262’s speed made it possible to close on a bomber formation, fire, and break away before the escorting fighters could intervene. Surviving records credit the unit with approximately 47 aerial victories during its operational period. The Me 262 was faster than anything the Allies could put in the air, but by April 1945, Germany was running out of fuel, airfields, and time.
Galland continued to fly throughout, leading missions and adding to his personal victory total as the situation on the ground collapsed around the unit. On April 26th, 1945, his Me 262 was hit in combat over Munich and he was wounded. He was shot down by a P-47 Thunderbolt and crash-landed at Munich-Riem with a wounded knee. American troops were within days of the airfield.
He discharged himself from hospital and made his way to Tegernsee. On May 1st, Galland drafted a note to General Eisenhower requesting a separate surrender for JV 44. Two aides flew across the lines in a Fieseler Storch and returned with instructions. The remaining Me 262s were blown up on the ground before American troops arrived.
JV 44 disbanded within days as Allied forces closed in on Munich. The war was, for all practical purposes, over. He would not stay in Germany for long. Galland surrendered to American forces near Salzburg in May 1945.
The officers who processed him knew exactly who he was. Within days, British and American interrogators were competing for access to the man who had commanded Germany’s fighter arm and then its most advanced jet unit. He spent the following months being questioned on Me 262 tactics, propulsion systems, and the decisions that had shaped the air war. He was released on April 28th, 1947 and returned to a Germany that had no official interest in celebrating him.
He found work as a forester on an estate in northern Germany, a quiet job for a man who had spent the previous years at the center of the air war. His first assignment back in aviation came shortly after: lecturing on fighter tactics for the RAF, the same force he had spent four years trying to destroy. That changed in the summer of 1948 when Kurt Tank, the designer of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, contacted him with a proposal. Juan Perón’s government in Argentina was recruiting German aviation experts to build an indigenous combat aircraft industry, and Tank wanted Galland on his team.
In mid-October 1948, Galland sailed from Genoa, arriving in Buenos Aires the following month. He served as a consultant to the Argentine Air Force, the Fuerza Aérea Argentina, advising on jet aviation development and pilot training. He remained until 1955, when political upheaval following Perón’s removal from power ended the arrangement and brought him back to West Germany. While still in Argentina, he published his memoir, Die Adler und die Löwen, translated into English as The First and the Last.
It appeared in 1953 and became a best-seller in 14 languages, selling 3 million copies worldwide. Its operational detail was authoritative and widely praised by the RAF and USAAF as a frank account of the air war. Back in Germany, he was approached by a commissioner for Chancellor Adenauer about joining the new Bundeswehr. The proposal came to nothing when France blocked the wider European defense framework it depended on.
Instead, in 1957, Galland opened his own aviation consultancy in Bonn and continued to fly at air shows. In 1969, he served as a technical advisor on the film Battle of Britain, working alongside his former adversary, Robert Stanford Tuck. He appeared on screen the following year in the British documentary series The World at War. He died on February 9th, 1966 in Remagen-Oberwinter, aged 83.
Still flying until late in life, still arguing about the air war, and still impossible to ignore.
