A 2010 lengthy interview with then 92 year-old Dr. Hienz Migeod, former Luftwaffe pilot, broken down on youtube into numerous pieces.

An unrepentant Nazi, of the sort it would have been a joy to shoot down back then, Migeod was shot down and captured by the Brits in '42 while providing close air support to Rommel in North Africa. Obviously tough, smart and dedicated back then, and still lucid at 92, Migeod gives a glimpse of the sort of men many of our parent's and grandparent's generation had to face.

"We did an offensive on France, it was not an invasion..."

He pales in comparison to Hans Ulrich Rudel. These guys were tougher than the back wall of a shooting gallery. Good interview and proof positive we need to keep the Germans busy, lest they get that wanderlust again

I can't open up the You Tube stuff and get it to run-problems with my computer. My dad frequently told me the German weapon he feared the most was the Stuka, and he faced them many times. He said the dive sirens they used were very scary to the guys, and he had many nightmares about the Stukas diving on his positions. Dad was infantry, and his unit was badly mauled at Kasserine Pass by Rommel's tanks and from overhead by the ever present Stukas. They shot one down near Dad one time-no idea who hit it. He said you could have walked across the AA fire they put up at those bombers. When the schidt died down, dad went to the wreck and salvaged a tail light beacon and a piece of tubular aluminum off the frame which he fashioned into a crude ring. We still own these two momentos to this day.

30 years ago I went to German jump school with the 263rd falshirmjager Bn, and at the time there was a reunion at the nco club attended by WWII German paras. Old as those men were you could still see the toughness in their eyes and they were for the most part still fit and in shape.
Being a combat vet myself we had something in common, but I knew without a doubt they had been through tougher times than I ever had.

The Luftwaffe had excellent pilots early on but were sacrificed by the arrogance of Goering and Hitler's tactical stupidity which eventually became their demise and turned the tide in Europe.You almost have to feel sorry for these old Nazi warriors who flew so many more missions than their allied counterparts to no avail.

Thanks for the vid BW.

I fear even the modern day Germans have pussed out to a large degree.

Gay activists hurl feces at German parents protesting pro-gay school curriculum: report
BY THADDEUS BAKLINSKI
Fri Mar 28, 2014 12:27 EST


GERMANY, March 28, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) � As parents in Germany have protested a new pro-homosexual �sexual diversity� curriculum in their schools, homosexual activists have attacked them by hurling feces and destroying their property, according to the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, which documents anti-Christian incidents in Europe.

Rudel? Migeod knew the man back when he was an "insufficient pilot" who couldn't fly in close formation. Rejected by Migeod's own unit, Rudel was assigned to ferry planes to the Russian Front, where another commander gave him one more chance.....



Hey, tho' I had other things needing doing, I must have listened to this guy talk for two hours last night

Well he must have caught up in a hurry. Without question, Rudel was "THE" quintessential Stuka Driver with the biggest set of brass balls this side of General Galland. Hell, they even made a one of a kind special decoration for him.

Wasn't he contacted during A-10 development for input?

The SBD drivers were pretty good too, and a much better plane.

Could have been like Richtofen, who had several crashes and nearly washed out of Flight School.

Already mentioned here, but a good read is STUKA PILOT, by Hans Rudel

http://www.amazon.com/Operational-F...eywords=stuka+pilot+by+hans+ulrich+rudel

Though not a Dive-bomber Pilot, but another one that nearly washed out that became very proficient.

Robert Stanford Tuck.

That Nazi is another pathetic looser.

All they can do is prove over and over that they don't even know how to win a war.

Your Nazi's.

What outfit was your dad in? My old 500 partner (who passed last year) was with the 34th. He and two others (Signal Corps) burned their jeep and walked out of Kasserine.

Tim Allen in an old stand-up said the Germans got their wanderlust because their food was chit. Said they were standing on the border of France and said, "Hey, what are they coking over there?". I thought that one was pretty funny.

You pop out of your hole every time Germany or Nazis are mentioned. It's like you are obsessed with them.
Isn't it time for you to go out to dinner somewhere?

a huge percentage of those Stuka JU87 pilots were killed in action. Not enough of 'em though. I hate Nazis.

I agree with you Sam. The pilot in those YouTube clips is an evil bastard.

I like this quote/paraphrase:

"The planes came out of the sun, and we could see their roundels. We called them "peacock eyes". They were Spitfires [more likely Hurricanes, at that point in the war,]. And we were over our target, and the Spitfires joined in our dive, and they were shooting on us. We went into a deep dive, and our commander gave a stiff order over the wireless, 'Down as deep as we can!'... and we had our diving brake, which limited our airspeed to 550 km/h,and the poor Spitfires had no diving brake, and they couldn't pull their planes out of the dive, and four Spitfires went into the ground."

I always wondered how these slow lumbering Stukas survived air attacks from superior fighters...

A lot of those German fighter pilots were fearless. I was told about that back in the 70's by an old guy who's no longer with us. Once upon a time he was a young kid less than two years out of high school who just happened to be a ball turret gunner on a B-17. He was also from a German-American family; and the thing I recall the best was his tale of shooting at German aircraft and suddenly thinking that he might be shooting at someone related to him.

I have to call BS on that one, gently...

Having spent 15 years in heavily ethnically German Wisconsin, I've had opportunity to sample traditional German cuisine, and it is excellent.

Nonetheless, my own cooking is heavily influenced by Julia Childs, which is of course French... but I must give my German friends the courtesy of saying their food is not chit, although not up to the standards of La Belle France...

Anybody read "Memoirs of a Stuka Pilot", by Helmit Mahlke? Any good?

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/memoirs-of-a-stuka-pilot-helmut-mahlke/1115277415?ean=9781473822375

Must be why the Brits invaded 3/4 of the world before the Krauts ever thought about it.

I never had a bad meal in Germany. English food is abysmal in contrast.

Agreed, his arrogance and contempt still shine through, and the respect in his voice is evident when he mentions listening to broadcasts by Joseph Goebbels on a secret radio while in a Canadian POW camp.

A brave evil bastard though and a good pilot, and by his own account he spared Red Cross-marked ships on two separate occasions even when they were suspected of carrying munitions. Might have been karma in play when his own life was spared by the "Britisher" fighter pilot who allowed him to make that final dead-stick landing in the desert.

Birdwatcher

I was going to post earlier that this thread would draw your sorry worthless carcass out but I didn't see the purpose in detracting from the thread then you sorry ass loser.

A real oldie, but always funny.....

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organized and run by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the cooks British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized and run by the Italians.

Birdwatcher

A lot of truth in stereotypes.

I note in the opening discussion where he mentions the help the French gave him and his wounded gunner after being shot down. All this while the Germans are invading france.

Tipsy cooks unite!

I grew up loving 'The French Chef' from an early age. Like 4 or so. Seriously. My mom was a religious watcher. Probably two important influences/reasons I grew up enjoying cooking and loving trying to make anything.

It was kind of sad watching her in the waning years of her career and life, in the late Jacques Pepin/JC show days, I thought. Ha. My mom used to feign wave and cheerily say, 'hullo, Julia old gal!' when we'd drive by her house off of Fresh Pond Pkwy in Cambridge. JC lived there for 40 years.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming: Stuka: Love or Hate Them Flyin' Nazi Fellers? You make the call.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel embarked on a state visit to France last week.

The Immigration Officer at the French border asked her: "Occupation?"

She replied: "No, just visiting this time."

John

Agree completely, but at least it qualifies as "food", English cooking on the other hand should be placed in the "feed" category....

Why?

All I know for sure is he served under Patton, but I don't know his unit number. He was assigned to a machine gun squad guarding a choke point on the pass somewhere. His squad was overrun by tanks and he barely got out. He scooped a a bazooka from his dead bazookaman and said he got very lucky in that it was loaded and actually worked. They'd had a lot of trouble getting killing hits with the rounds they had on the German tanks. He said the tank was so close when he shot it that the concussion of the round going off knocked him over in the hole he was in. He hit the track and stopped the tank long enough to take cover. I will see if I can find out what unit he was assigned to.

You can tell a lot about a guy by what he assumes the motives of others to be. He assumes the French "peasants" acted out of fear, because the German Army was coming. Maybe, but I was getting a sense of people reacting to the tragedy of a young man dying, that still before dying was to become general.

I figure in a just world this guy's still-evident smirking contempt for the Poles oughtta have cost him at least a few teeth at some point in the years since.

More'n anything though, while he sneers at his Brit and Canadian captors he doesn't reflect upon the fact of what would have happened to him if he had been in the custody of the Germans during that time.

They can't all have been that bad though; the close ties that developed between German POW's in England and the surrounding communities are well known, and my saintly Irish grandma on my dad's side was reportedly revered by her charges when she looked after German POW's at Camp Shanks, NJ.

Worth reflecting too that my mom, who was actually bombed out of her home as a child by the Germans in WWII, has nothing but good things to say about Rommel. At the time he was respected by the British public as a gentleman and worthy adversary. Of course, the fact that he ultimately lost in North Africa doubtless has a lot to do with this benevolence on the part of the Brits.

Birdwatcher

Those french peasants helped that pilot get back to his own army so he could go on killing Allied soldiers.

WW2 was a continuation of WW1.

WW2 occurred because the French wouldn't leave well enough alone.

http://www.authentichistory.com/1930-1939/4-roadtowar/1-germany/

As the loser, Germany was forced to pay for the war. In 1921 these "reparations" were set at 269 billion Marks, or roughly 32 billion dollars--a staggering sum. Some economists argued against such a big bill, and predicted that it would take Germany until 1988 to pay it. Later that year the sum was reduced to 226 billion Marks, still considered an astronomical amount by many observers. Reparations came in a variety of forms, including coal, steel, intellectual property (eg. the trademark for Aspirin) and agricultural products. In 1923 Germany defaulted on its ability to deliver further amounts of coal and steel. In response, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr River valley inside the western border of Germany, the center of the German coal and steel industries.

How about another brave pilot. (Et al.)



And some more.



L.W.

I don't know about all that, Mike. My family had the [bleep] bombed out of them as well, during the 'Blitz' during WWII. Wee Muther references them being known as 'filthy bloody Huns'. Of course, since I have family who fought them in WWI and were gassed by the Germans, well, there wasn't really any love for them to begin with. Both my Scottish G-grandfathers fought the Germans in the Great War. I never heard it personally, but Wee Muther tells of one of them describing the Germans lobbing mustard gas across the lines at the Scottish/Brit troops, and in a twist of fate, having the wind pick up and blow hard 180 degrees. The Germans ended up wiping out large numbers of *themselves* with the gas. Apparently, the faces and expressions on those killed in gas attacks is something very much not pretty. But then not much in war is, one would think...

Soldiers are basically soldiers.

The main difference being what kind of bullshit their respective governments have filled their heads with.

Steven Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers, stated in his book that after everything had calmed down in the European theater of WW2, the Americans looked around at everybody involved, and concluded that they had more in common with the Germans than anybody else.

Basically, he said that the Germans and the Americans were the only two combatants involved in the war who wiped their asses with toilet paper.

Ass-wipes for sure.

THIS

Well the Brits were in there as well. These United States are made up of mostly Germans (about 17%) but more importantly, it was a perfect storm of a blend of the Brits and their attributes, but mostly, the nation was based on the Protestant Work Ethic. Combined with lots of other Europeans who came here TO WORK AT ANY cost and you have the miracle that is (or was) the United States...

The gist I get is that of their opponents the Germans most respected the Brits and certain of their Commonwealth allies as fighting men, and found the Americans reluctant to take casualties. But then, we had the USAF so we didn't HAVE to take casualties.

Perhaps hindsight was 20/20 back then too, this was the very opening days of the shooting war.

Seems about time to recycle this classic too......

Well, you'll have to make allowances for the fact that until age 13, other than my dad virtually every adult age 35 or over that I knew, encountered, was related to, or was taught by was a working class Brit of the WWII generation. And my dad had been in the middle of things on Okinawa with the 6th Marines.

In my own family we were at Gallipoli and Beersheba in the first go-round, and on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Second, plus my Grandad, whom I saw almost every day growing up, had been a fireman during the Blitz.

I dunno, best way I can explain it is we don't hold grudges I guess, Irish Catholics all and we don't even hate the Brits

...and to the best of my recollection, twenty to thirty years after the fact in England, The Desert Fox was still highly regarded by the British public as a worthy and principled opponent.

YMMV,
Birdwatcher

Maybe they weren't really French. Maybe they were Alsatians.


Never mind, I see he was in Belgium.