#fighter general

Adolf Galland (left) with support crew and fellow pilots.

Adolf Galland was one of Germany's greatest fighter pilots and then its youngest general, a cigar-smoking, hard-charging ace who shot down over a hundred aircraft, ran the whole German fighter force, and ended the war leading a squadron of the world's first jet fighters into hopeless battle. He was also famous for his blunt honesty, which repeatedly got him into trouble at the top.

Galland made his name in the Battle of Britain, flying Messerschmitts against the RAF over southern England, and he racked up victory after victory, becoming one of the celebrated aces of that campaign with over 100 kills to his name. He was dashing and popular, known for the cigars he smoked even in the cockpit and for a certain chivalry, and there is a famous story that when Göring asked what he needed to win the Battle of Britain, Galland shot back that he would like a squadron of Spitfires, a jab at his own leadership that became legend.

Promoted young to General of the Fighter Arm, he spent the middle of the war directing Germany's fighter defense against the growing Allied bombing, and increasingly clashing with Göring and the high command, who blamed the pilots for failures that were really failures of strategy and production. Galland kept telling his superiors the truth about how badly the war in the air was going, and it eventually cost him his command.

At the very end, out of favor but still wanting to fight, he was allowed to form a special unit, Jagdverband 44, made up of some of the best surviving German pilots, flying the Me 262, the revolutionary jet fighter, far faster than anything the Allies had. Leading it, Galland took the jets up against the overwhelming Allied bomber streams in the last weeks of the war, and added more kills flying the 262, until he was wounded in combat in the final days.

He survived, was one of the relatively few senior figures who had openly told the leadership unwelcome truths, and after the war he was respected even by his former enemies, becoming friends with some of the British aces he had once fought. He wrote a famous memoir, The First and the Last, and lived a long life. A cigar-smoking fighter ace who shot down over a hundred planes, ran the fighter force, and flew jets into battle at the bitter end.