According to a very interesting thesis by Dr. Ernst Stilla, unfortunately mainly in German and never published as a book, the Luftwaffe made a very serious error in how it selected and promoted leaders. THe incentives were for individual effort, not collective effort or mentoring new pilots.
I had parts of it translated and used them in a working paper, which compared flight discipline of different AFs during and after WW2. Here is an excerpt. More on this subject in my paper, on which comments are very welcome.
The Luftwaffe Fighting For Air Supremacy
Excerpts from:
Ernst Stilla,
Die Luftwaffe im Kampf um die Luftherrschaft: Entscheidende Einflussgrößen bei der Niederlage der Luftwaffe im Abwehrkampf im Westen und über Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Faktoren "Luftrüstung", "Forschung und Entwicklung" und "Human Ressourcen".
PhD thesis, Rheinische Friedrichs-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 2005
Translation by Carola Betzold December 2012
ETH Zurich, Centre for Comparative and International Studies
IFW, Haldeneggsteig 4, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
+41 44 632 4858,
betzoldc@ethz.ch
Edits Prof. Roger Bohn, UC San Diego,
Rbohn@ucsd.edu
version: December 11, 2012
Tentative translation of thesis title:
The Air Force in the battle for air supremacy: Major influences in the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the defensive battle in West Germany in the Second World War, with particular emphasis on the factors of "air defense", "research and development" and "human resources".
pages 243ff
g) Flight discipline and team spirit
.....
In the end however, the decisive [harmful] element of the army's promotion policy, with regard to its direct effects on fighter units, proved to be two factors that started with the Spain mission: focusing on the individual's kills – highly relevant for propaganda purposes – and accentuating the fighter pilot as a fierce individual, in line with how he was perceived as "knight of the skies" by both the Air Force and civilian society. "As their number of kills soared, so did their officer career. Within only a few months, they had advanced to the level of squadron commodores, with the corresponding promotions. He who did not kill could not assert himself as unit leader for long. (…) The front units were exclusively led by "aces", whose main focus and ambition consisted, and had to consist, in leading the squadron's kill list, and in the squadron's kills, in turn, being ahead of those of other fighter squadrons."1391
The results of such a staffing policy were twofold. On the one hand, this focus on kill numbers largely marginalized planning, logistic, or pedagogical abilities or even experiences and natural authority as promotion criterions. This meant that [the army] promoted officers who were not up to the leadership tasks, neither in terms of character nor in terms of intellect, and who were unable, as described above, to clean the disciplinary conditions, rather worsening them.1392
Furthermore, serious operational difficulties emerged. When a fighter group attacked [American] bombers, they rarely achieved any kills on their first pass. The enemy's concentrated defensive firing prevented precise target approaches, and the armor of the heavy American bombers was too strong to be destroyed with a few short bursts. Hence, the first attacks aimed only at dispersing the bomber formations that protected each other, so as to neutralize [the enemy's] exponentiating defensive forces. When, as a result of evasive maneuvers or declining aircraft performance due to initial damage, a unit broke into single aircrafts or tiny groups of two to three bombers, it was much easier to fight them. The Air Force consequently distinguished between "shooting out" and actually "shooting down". "Shooting out", that is, damaging an enemy bomber and its leaving the formation as a result, was of crucial importance for how the general situation in an air battle developed, since it allowed to disperse and thus to destroy the unit.1393
The "team players", however, were at this point in time no longer in a position to assert such claims, since preference of the "aces" had led to the "team players" stagnating at lower ranks.1394 Furthermore, Göring, in consultation with Galland, had until 1943 campaigned for replacing such "unproductive", older fighter pilots and transferring them to battle pilot units and reconnaissance units, and thus focused attention on "shooting down" instead of "shooting out".1395
These problems were acknowledged over the course of 1943 and rhetoric changed accordingly;1396 similarly, a point system was introduced which rewarded shooting out accordingly. However, such partial solutions could obviously still not solve the fundamental problem. "Serious commodores (…) have identified [picking over the bones] as the basic problem of our failures," noted Galland in the fall of 1943.1398
Because promotions were based on shooting down and shooting out, respectively, and not the number of missions, or in the case of leading officers on their tactical decisions, some had a narrow view of the total [situation]. Squadron and group leaders, who actually should have been supposed to keep the unit together, to lead them to the correct attack position and to gather them after a first wave [of attacks] and start a new attack, ended up being assessed according to the point system, just like their subordinates. The tactical leadership was often neglected because of the "kill pressure" that accordingly also applied to the unit leader: "This not only led to the captains, commanders and even commodores being evaluated like section leaders or flight leaders in the best of cases; it also resulted in most of them behaving as such in the air."1399
Integration of young pilots into the unit and preparing them for the front suffered from this, too. A large part of the unit leaders remained focused on their own success and neglected to support young pilots. Because serious pressure from higher levels was lacking, integration of young pilots continued to rely on the individual character disposition of the respective unit leader.1400
Targeted promotion of leadership capacities only begun in the Air Force at a stage where the number of experienced fighter pilots was rapidly decreasing and taking individual personalities out for 3- to 4-week unit leader courses left gaps that were hard to fill and which in turn led to further heavy losses: all reform efforts were too late.1401
(the 4 digit numbers are footnotes).