Airpower and Russian Partisan Warfare

By General Der Flieger a. D. Karl Drum

Airpower and Russian Partisan Warfare, written by General der Flieger a. D. Karl Drum and first published in 1962, is one of a series of historical studies written by, or based on information supplied by, former key officers of the German Air Force for the United States Air Force Historical Division.

The overall purpose of the series is threefold: 1) To provide the United States Air Force with a comprehensive and, insofar as possible, authoritative history of a major air force which suffered defeat in World War II; 2) to provide a history of that air force as prepared by many of its principal and responsible leaders; 3) to provide a firsthand account of that air force’s unique combat in a major war with the forces of the Soviet Union. This series of studies therefore covers in large part virtually all phases of the Luftwaffe’s operations and organization, from its camouflaged origin in the Reichswehr, during the period of secret German rearmament following World War I, through its participation in the Spanish Civil War and its massive operations and final defeat in World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eschenburg Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787206021

General Der Flieger a. D. Karl Drum

GENERAL DER FLIEGER A. D. KARL DRUM (31 July 1893 - 2 April 1968) entered military service with the German Army in 1913, and in 1916 he was assigned to the Air Force where he served first as an observer and later as leader of an aerial mapping group. Between the two World Wars, General Drum received General Staff training and held a number of technical and special advisory positions, the last of which was that of Chief of the Inspectorate for Air Reconnaissance Forces and Operations with the German Air Ministry. At the beginning of World War II, General Drum was Chief of Staff to the Luftwaffe General with Commander-in-Chief, Army. During 1941-42 he was Chief, Air Support Command, Army Group South (Russia). After this assignment and until the end of the war, General Drum held a series of Luftwaffe administrative positions in Holland, Greece, Belgium and Northern France, and, finally, in Western France where he was Commanding General and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe Administrative Command, Western France. He passed away in Meersburg, Germany in 1968.

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Eschenburg Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

USAF HISTORICAL STUDIES: NO. 177

THE GERMAN AIR FORCE IN WORLD WAR II

Airpower and Russian Partisan Warfare

By

General der Flieger a. D. Karl Drum

Edited by Dr. Littleton B. Atkinson of the USAF Historical Division of Research Studies Institute,

Air University, United States Air Force

Brig.-Gen. Noel F. Parrish, USAF

Director, Research Studies Institute

Dr. Albert F. Simpson,

Air Force Historian

With an Introduction by Telford Taylor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES 4

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 11

FOREWORD 12

PREFACE 15

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 17

Chapter I — PARTISAN UNITS-A SURVEY 18

Formation and Composition 18

Missions, Combat Methods, Command Functions 19

Principal Partisan Areas 21

Chapter II — LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS OF PARTISAN UNITS 32

Food and Clothing 32

Weapons and Ammunition 33

Signal Equipment 34

Motor Vehicles 34

Medical Supplies 34

Personnel 35

Chapter III — AIRLIFT SUPPLY — THE AIRLIFT SUPPLY SYSTEM 36

Origin of Organized Operations 36

Units Employed and Aircraft Types 36

The Techniques of Support Flights 37

AIRLIFT SUPPLY OPERATIONS 39

Army Group Center 39

Army Group North 44

Russian Primitivity and Brutality 45

Chapter IV — GERMAN COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST AIRLIFT OPERATIONS 46

By Army and Counterintelligence Agencies 46

By Luftwaffe Agencies 47

Chapter V — CONCLUSIONS 53

BIBLIOGRAPHY 56

Books: 56

Periodicals: 56

Other Sources: 56

APPENDIX NO. 1 — ILLUSTRATIONS 58

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 64

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

The publication of this series of official historical studies is at once a most significant contribution to our knowledge of the Second World War and a landmark in the development of commercial publishing.

So much is published nowadays—far beyond the capacity of any individual even to screen—and so much is printed that ought never to see the light of day, that one tends to forget the considerable amount of writing well worth reading which rarely or never gets published at all. These volumes are an excellent example. Military monographs by foreign officers whose names are unknown to the public are not attractive items to most commercial publishing houses. But sometimes, as in the present case, they are unique sources of information which should be available in public if not in private libraries. Less often, and again as in the case of these volumes, they are surprisingly well written, and in many parts fascinating to the general reader as well as to the historian or military specialist.

The foreword of the Air Force Historical Division describes the inception and purposes of its German Air Force Historical Project and the circumstances under which these studies were written. Together with others to be published or made available for research in the future, the fruits of the Project are an analytic survey, at once comprehensive and intensive, of the Luftwaffe’s structure and operations.

Not the least remarkable feature of the series is its authorship. With the single exception of Dr. Richard Suchenwirth—a one-time Austrian Army Officer and more recently a historian and educator in Munich—they are all former Luftwaffe generals, of low to middling seniority, who were intimately and responsibly involved with the events and problems of which they write. All seven were born within the decade 1891–1901, and thus in their forties or early fifties during most of the war years. Lieutenant-colonels or colonels when the war began, they filled a wide variety of staff and administrative assignments. Only two (Deichmann and Drum) attained three-star rank (General der Flieger), and only one (Deichmann) was ever given a major field command.

In military parlance, accordingly, they are all staff rather than command types, and for present purposes that is a good thing. Staff officers are responsible for the smooth functioning of the military machine; they must anticipate and provide for contingencies, and are expected to possess good powers of analysis and imagination. They spend much time drafting orders, which requires the ability to write with clarity and brevity. All these qualities are reflected in their product; our seven generals must have been good staff officers.

Banned by the Treaty of Versailles, the German air arm was condemned to a clandestine and embryonic life until 1933, and the Luftwaffe’s existence was not publicly acknowledged until 1935. Hermann Göring and his colleagues in its command thus had only six years prior to the war in which to assemble and organize an officer corps. Its younger members—those who were lieutenants and captains when the war came—were recruited and trained during those years (1933–39), but the upper reaches of the corps had to be manned in other ways.

The need for experienced staff officers was especially acute, and this was met largely by transferring army (and a few navy) officers to the newly established air arm. Thus it is not surprising to find that all but one (Morzik) of our generals were professional soldiers who made their careers in the Reichsheer of the Weimar Republic, and received general staff training at the time Adolf Hitler was coming to power. So far as possible, the officers to be transferred were selected from those who had served in the air arm during the First World War, as had Deichmann and Drum.

Morzik alone represents the other principal type of senior Luftwaffe officer. He was not of the officer class; he had been a non-commissioned officer in the air arm during the First World War. Between the wars he led an adventurous and varied life as a commercial pilot, a successful competitor in aviation contests, a Junkers test pilot, and a flying instructor. Like his more famous superiors—Udet, Loerzer, von Greim, and Göring himself—Morzik was a freelance knight of the air, and one of a considerable company commissioned from civil life in the 1933–35 period.

These generals are writing about events of which they were a part, in the course of a war in which Germany was catastrophically, and the Luftwaffe even ignominiously, defeated. What they have written is certainly not objective in the sense that it is detached; they see with the eyes and speak the language of the air arm, and readily find explanations for their own failures in the mistakes of the Army leadership—often with good reason, to be sure. But their work is objective in the sense that it is dispassionate. Their studies bespeak a deep curiosity about their conduct of the war and the causes of their defeat, and they have, on the whole, endeavored to put the record straight by the lines they are able to perceive.

There is, however,