The attrition of pilots and skilled aircrews was perhaps the most
important factor in the destruction of the Luftrvaffe as an effective fighting force.
The rise in the attrition rate for pilots resulted in a steady reduction in the skills and
experience of those flying German aircraft . While the losses among the fighter
pilots may have been somewhat heavier than for other
categories, they undoubtedly reflected what was happening throughout the force
structure . The increasing attrition of pilots forced the Germans to curtail training programs to fill empty combat cockpits . As a result, new pilots with less skill than
their predecessors were lost at a faster rate. The increasing losses, in turn, forced
the training establishments to produce pilots even more rapidly. Once they had
begun this vicious cycle, the Germans found no escape . One of the surest indicators
of the declining skill of German pilots after the 1940 air battles was the rising level
of noncombat losses. By the first half of 1943,
they had reached the point where the fighter force suffered as many losses due to
noncombat causes as it did to the efforts of its opponents . Thereafter, the percentage
of noncombat losses began to drop. The probable cause of this was due less to an
awakening on the part of the Luftwaffe to the need for better flying safety than to the
probability that Allied flyers, in their overwhelming numbers, were shooting down
German pilots before they could crash their aircraft .
By the beginning of 1942, the Germans had lost the equivalent of two entire air
forces . The result was that the Germans had to curtail their training programs to
meet the demands of the front for new pilots . By January 1942, of the pilots
available for duty in the fighter force, only 60 percent were fully operational, while
the number in the bomber force was down to 47 percent. For the
remainder of the war, the percentage of fully operational fighter and bomber pilots
available, with few exceptions, remained below, and at many times substantially
below, the 70 percent level. Further exacerbating this situation was the fact that the
Germans were forced to lower their standards for a fully operational pilot as the war
continued . There was, one must note, no decisive moment in this decline in
expertise. Rather as Winston Churchill has suggested in another context, the
Luftwaffe had entered the descent from 1940 "incontinently, fecklessly. . . . It is a
fine broad stairway at the beginning but after a bit the carpet ends . A little further
on, there are only flagstones ; and a little further on, these break beneath your
feet . The graph for the number of training hours for new pilots clearly reflected
such a course. In the period through the late summer of 1942,
German pilots were receiving at least as many training hours as their opponents in
the RAF. By 1943, that statistic had begun a gradual shift against the Germans until
the last half of the year when Luftwaffe pilots were receiving barely one-half of the
training hours given to enemy pilots . In terms of flying training in operational
aircraft, the disparity had become even more pronounced: one-third of the RAF
total and one-fifth of the American total . But those Luftwaffe pilots who had
survived the attrition of the first air battles of the war had little difficulty defeating
new Allied pilots no matter how many training hours the latter had flown. In fact,
the ratio of kills-to-sorties climbed as those Luftwaffe pilots who survived built up
experience. However, few German pilots survived the attrition
of the first war years, and thus the Luftwaffe became, in fact, two distinct forces: the
few great aces-the Hartmans, Galands, and Waldmans-and the great mass of
pilots who faced great difficulty in landing their aircraft, much less surviving
combat.