Bubi

"Keep an open mind and always look for the good in people. You may be surprised at what you find."

-Erich "Bubi" Hartmann

Walking home last night from class, past groups of mostly NYU undergrads shuffling to the social gathering of the evening on a brisk night, it occurred to me how strange their lives are to me, and how very strange my life in my 20s would have been to them.

I found myself thinking of "straight lines and little hooks", of "never turning on a merged plot", of all those lessons in the art of killing and surviving in aerial combat that every fighter pilot knows, but are part of an alien landscape to someone entering adulthood in this milieu.

Then, for some odd reason, I find myself thinking of Bubi Hartmann.

Never heard of him? You should have.

Bubi Hartmann was the greatest fighter ace of all time, racking up an astonishing 352 victories in the Second World War flying Bf-109s in the Luftwaffe, mostly on the eastern front.

Hartmann was certainly a gifted pilot, but the Germans had a lot of those. When he reached his 100th victory in 1943, he was the 54th Luftwaffe pilot to do so. America's leading ace, Richard Bong, scored 40 kills. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, had 80.

So how did Hartmann do it? I mean, at one point he shot down 14 Soviet aircraft in three days. His last kill was on the last day of the war, and he surrendered to the Americans the next day.

Well, for one thing he was lucky enough to be assigned to Jg 52, a fighter squadron full of very experienced pilots who taught him how to survive. By that time, in 1942, they'd learned to avoid those swirling dogfights that make for good cinema, but leave one vulnerable to an unseen threat that might slip in behind you and blast you into the ether before you knew what happened.

Hartmann almost never hung around a fight. He's swoop in from above, take the quick shot from dangerously close range (he had fourteen forced landings due to debris from aircraft he'd shot down damaging his Bf-109), then disappear before anyone knew what had happened. He never pressed a bad attack position, choosing to slip away instead and wait for a better opportunity. He was patient, and lethal.

And he never lost a wingman, which in my world was always the mark of a good fighter pilot and flight lead.

It helped that he was on the Eastern Front. Soviet training for new fighter pilots was awful, and their equipment inadequate in fundamental ways--Hartmann commented on the fact that Soviet fighter pilots often drew gunsights on their windscreens in grease pencil because the planes were delivered without one. He did, however, shoot down two American P-51s late in the war when the two fronts drew close enough together that threats were coming from both directions. So one can't just ascribe his phenomenal success to a poor adversary.

And when you think about it, his number of victories was nothing short of phenomenal.

Hartmann flew over a thousand combat missions from the time he arrived at his first operational squadron until the end of the war, a span of less than three years. If you run the numbers, he flew a combat mission almost every day, although in fact there were stretches when he flew several a day. He shot down a little over120 aircraft a year, ten a month, a kill every three days. No one ever got even close to that (the next guy in line, also a German, scored 301 kills, still a jaw-dropping number).

Amazingly, Hartmann survived the war, survived being turned over to the Soviets and held in a prison camp for ten years as a war criminal (the Soviets had some hard feelings over his success), then returned to West Germany and held leadership positions in the Luftwaffe until he retired in 1970 over his criticism of West Germany's purchase of the F-104 Starfighter, otherwise known among Luftwaffe pilots as the "flying coffin". Turned out he was right about that, and later it came to light that Lockheed bribed officials to purchase the plane. Hartmann reached the ripe old age of 71 before he died of natural causes, an unlikely end after all those years of combat and flying fighters.

Why did I find myself thinking of Bubi Hartmann last night? Again, the utter foreignness of my life compared to these NYU kids struck me. Hartmann was twenty when he showed up for his first combat assignment. I was twenty-six. And our job was to kill people, and to try to keep the guys on either side of us from getting killed. It's a very weird and formative way to spend one's youth.

I was up at five this morning, texted P once I was confident I wouldn't wake her up, then skimmed the papers with some relief in seeing DJT chickened out again, and we've lost the Iran war. Of course, he'll frame it as a victory, and his moron fanbase will parrot that, but when one looks at the state of affairs before the war started, and where we find ourselves this morning, we've suffered the greatest strategic defeat since Vietnam, maybe worse than that one because of the damage to a system of alliances it took decades to build. I'm not rooting against our country, but have to admit I'm okay with setbacks that may lead to the end of the MAGA nightmare, and relieved no more of our guys and gals are flying into harm's way.