Marseille…what a strange name for a German. Early on, American pilots in North Africa lost almost twice as many planes to crashes and accidents as they did to combat. When they did, the Luftwaffe easily continued to maintain near-total air superiority. Marseille died little more than a month before U.S. Army Air Forces units, it would at least initially have been a horrible mismatch, with the Luftwaffe running roughshod over the Yanks. Marseille may have flown once or twice against American pilots attached to a British squadron, and possibly even shot down one. ” Marseille’s record against Hurricanes, Super marine Spitfires and Curtiss P-40s flown by British, Australian and South African pilots, first during the Battle of Britain and then in the North African desert campaign, was nevertheless unrivaled. Not that his arrival was auspicious within days he was shot down by a Hawker Hurricane flown by an elderly Free French pilot. An area with a distinct lack of women helped Marseille keep his mind on his work. However, in his book Aces of the Reich, Luftwaffe historian Mike Spick writes, “…in April 1941…the Gruppe deployed to Libya. He was the highest-scoring Luftwaffe pilot on the Western Front, and to this day many Germans insist that despite his often having to force-land or bail out as the result of incidental battle damage, he was never beaten by an Allied pilot in a one-on-one dogfight. Hans-Joachim Marseille’s victories were entirely against capable Western pilots, for the most part flying airplanes reasonably matched against his Messerschmitt Me-109E, F and ultimately G. But the victims of Luftwaffe pilots such as 352-victory Erich Hartmann were largely Soviet farmboys flying outmatched Yaks and clumsy Ilyushin bombers on the Eastern Front, easy meat for Germans who’d been flying since the Spanish Civil War aboard far better airplanes. Yes, there were German pilots who racked up higher scores, though no Allied aviator came within a country kilometer of Marseille’s 158 kills. Only 18 months elapsed from first boy-pilot shoot-down to his own death as a weary, prematurely aged warrior. Jochen, as he was less formally known, shot down 26 airplanes while he was 21 and a further 132 at age 22. It is impossible to imagine that someone so young, and who looked even younger, could be arguably the finest stick-and-rudder fighter pilot the world will ever know. And then they probably would reject the ID as fake. Had Hans-Joachim Marseille lived and fought today rather than in 1941 and ’42, there’s not a saloon in the country that would serve him a Bud Lite without carding this scrawny, baby-faced boy. Hans-Joachim Marseille: The Star Pilot of Africa in World War II Close
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