Not that altitude mattered much any more. The main threat in the west was the Ami carriers and their blue-painted hordes. They'd come in and raise hell, slipping away before they could be taught a lesson. Somebody in their command knew his stuff though. Their aircraft always stayed low right down on the deck, flying down valleys and through towns. That forced the German pilots to come down after them. That was the catch. Schumann had been told that an American carrier pilot had a thousand hours of flight training before arriving in the fleet. His new pilots had ten or twenty. They were young, too young to know how outclassed they were. At 21 Schumann was one of the oldest pilots in the group and a five-year veteran. The kids flying the Ta-152s and He-162s were younger than he'd been when he'd joined JG-26.
Forced into high-speed, low-altitude dogfights, as many of the kids were being killed in crashes as were being shot down. The loss rate in the He-162 units was especially bad. The aircraft had only 30 minutes of fuel and it wasn't the easiest of aircraft to fly. But the big shots in Berlin had decided to give it to the Hitler Youth, training the boys for a few hours on gliders before throwing them into the Salamander to fly or die as luck would have it. A lot of the kids never made it much beyond the airfield perimeter, losing control and spinning in. Not that the Amis didn't shoot down their share. When they came, it was in their hundreds. No matter how well a pilot did in fighting one, there were always four or five more to kill him. Quantity had a quality all of its own, that was for sure. And the Amis weren't short on quality any more either.
It was fuel that was doing them, Schumann knew that. Fuel. Germany was desperately short of it. They didn't have enough fuel to train they didn't have enough fuel to fly. They had to keep piston-engined aircraft in service because the refineries couldn't produce enough kerosene to allow a complete switch to jets. Even so, there were few reserves; the amount of fuel the Army was burning in Russia was seeing to that. They had no choice though. The front was so long, the Army had to use mobility to hold the line. The Russians and the Americans never seemed to run out of tanks and guns or fuel. It was lucky the factories in Germany could keep up with the losses in Russia. Speer had been a genius; he'd taken an industrial shambles full of small inefficient units and turned it into a mass production empire. If it hadn't been for that, the country would have gone down long before. But, as long as the battle lines were kept away, German factories could produce undisturbed.
Mentally Schumann blessed Field Marshall Goering. Old Fatty had foreseen that strategic bombers would be useless and refused to waste resources on them. He'd stuck to his guns even when others screamed for a long range bomber to hit Russian factories behind the Urals. Not one kilogram of aluminum, not one Reichsmark had been wasted on heavies. Instead he'd placed the resources where they belonged, in fighters and attack aircraft. The fighters had guarded the skies over the Reich, the attackers had helped to prevent Russian and American breakthroughs on the Eastern Front. The Americans hadn't learned then; they'd sent the lumbering B-29s to attack Germany - and seen them shot out of the sky. They appeared only rarely now, mostly under heavy escort. Schumann didn't know what the Amis had done with the thousands of B-29s they'd built. Probably, they were waiting on Pacific Islands in case the Japanese got off their rear ends and decided to fight. He'd even heard the Amis had experimented with six-engined and ten-engined bombers. Well, if that's what they wanted to waste money on, let them. It was fighters that counted, only fighters.
But there still weren't enough of them. The casualty rate was so high that production was barely keeping pace with the losses. There were units in Russia still flying the decrepit Me-109K or the even-older short-nosed FW-190A. Most of the older piston-engined heavy fighters had gone at last. The Zerstorer units had the Me-262 and that weird Dornier with engines at each end. But so much capacity was being wasted on experiments. The designers just couldn't be persuaded to stop fooling around with weird concepts and focus their attention on fixing the aircraft in service. The He-162 was still unstable yet there were twin-engined prototypes, swept wing prototypes, delta wing prototypes every type of prototype except for the ones needed to make the service version work. Herr Doktor Heinkel needed a boot to the head that was for certain. And so did almost every other aircraft designer in Germany. Didn't they know there was a war on?
Some had got the message though. The Henschel people had produced a neat little jet-engined dive-bomber. Carried a 500 kilogram bomb and had four cannons for strafing. Looked a bit like the Heinkel fighter but the Henschel team had got a design together, wrung the bugs out then
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stopped playing and built it in numbers. It had replaced most of the older ground attack aircraft now and would have replaced the rest save for that damned kerosene shortage. It wasn't so shabby as a fighter either. After it had dropped its bombs it could hold its own with the Thunderbolts the American Air Force still used for ground attack. There were reports from Russia now of a new American ground attack aircraft, the Thunderjet. That was something to worry about the next time he found himself on the Eastern Front. Who knew? By the time he got into that hell-hole again, he might have a fighter he could rely on. Perhaps one of the new Messerschmitt fighters with the swept wings. His Fledermaus had taken him through the 900 kph barrier, perhaps the new Messerschmitt would take him above 1,000 kph. Now that would be something. But the Messerschmitt fighters were stuck in the factory with no suitable engines and having endless design changes made while they waited. Willi Messerschmitt, now there was another one who needed a boot to the head.
It was good that this was an old base, one that had been taken over from the French back in the heady days of 1940. The buildings were solid and established. The base had grown a lot since then of course, most recently the runways had been lengthened to take the jets. But their mess was still old and comfortable. As he went though the door, Hilda behind the bar started to draw his beer. Any good barmaid knew what her regulars wanted before they asked.
There was a picture of Hitler over the bar, an old one showing him in good health. The big question that nobody dared ask was who was going to succeed him when he died. It was a scarcely-whispered secret that Hitler was virtually at death's door now. There had been a series of strokes, some unidentified diseases and what was rumored to be the effects of drug addiction. Goering had once been the designated successor but he was supposed to be in equally bad shape. Doenitz had also once been a contender but he and the entire Navy were in political and military disgrace. One of the generals perhaps? That guy Rommel had made a name for himself in Russia. Or, Himmler perhaps. He had the political power and his own private Army.
Schumann checked himself; even thinking such things was dangerous. But, the mess was virtually empty anyway, except for their political officer sitting in one corner. A big and dangerous “except” of course. Political officers, something the Reich had copied from the communists although nobody dared say so. This one was typical of the breed, a marvelously useless thing. Nobody could accuse it of being human. Just sat there listening to conversations and making reports to his party superiors. And making dull speeches to the pilots before they did the fighting and he went off to hide in a shelter somewhere. Another candidate for a boot to the head. It was time, more than time.