Hajo Herrmann

From The Air Combat Wiki

One of the Luftwaffe's most innovative air tacticians.

Hajo Herrmann was born on 1 August 1913 in Kiel, Germany. From 1933 to 1935, he served as an infantry officer, in 1935 he was commissioned in the newly formed Luftwaffe. In 1936 he volunteered to the Legion Condor in order to fight communism in Spain. Initially he flew transport missions in a Ju 52 between Spain and Marocco, later he flew also bomber missions in the Ju 52, among others against the small Basque town of Guernica where 1 500 of its 7 000 inhabitants perished in the attack. Back in Germany, he joined KG 4 and wrote several well received tactical reports about his 50 missions in the Spanish civil war. At that time KG 4 was flying Ju 86s, by 1939 these had been replaced with He 111s.

During the Polish campaign Herrmann flew 18 He 111 bombing missions against Polish airfields, rail yards, railway lines, troops and Warsaw. In late September he received the Iron Cross Second Class and his unit was relocated to the western front. During the invasion of Denmark and Norway, Herrmann's unit supported the landing of German troops at Kristiansand and bombed barracks in Oslo. During a landing at Oslo-Fornebu, he crashed his He 111.

By May 1940 KG 4 had been reequipped with Ju 88s and the unit flew anti-shipping missions near Ostend, Calais, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Cherbourg and Brest. At Dunkirk Herrmann sank a 10 000-ton freighter. Some days later, also at Dunkirk, he was forced by Hurricanes to ditch his Ju 88 near the beach but the crew could reach German lines. In June KG 4 was tasked with industrial targets in England like refineries in Thameshaven, the nitrogen factories in Billingham and the Vickers-Armstrong works in Newcastle-on-Tyne, in July and August, mining missions followed. Starting in September, KG flew bombing missions against London, Hermann, by now a squadron leader, had participated in 21 of these when he crashed during takeoff due to a blown tire, Hermann was injured until November. In the previous month he received the Knight's Cross. Upon his recovery, he resumed mission against England, now in KG 30. When Herrmann had no opportunity to attack his assigned targets, he dropped his bombs over London.

In February of 1941 KG 30 went to Sicily, where it flew bombing missions against Malta and Greece. In one such attack, Herrmann dropped a single bomb on an ammunition ship. The resulting explosion of almost nuclear proportions sank 11 ships and made the Greek port of Piraeus unusable for many months. In early 1942 Herrmann became Commander of III./KG 30, attacking arctic convoys from Norway, including the infamous attacks on PQ-17. July of 1942 saw him assigned to the general staff in Germany, where he became a close confidant of Hermann Göring. During his career as a bomber pilot Hermann had flown 320 operations and sunk 12 ships totalling 70,000 tons.

In his staff role Herrmann now created the night-fighter formation JG 300, nicknamed 'Wilde Sau' (wild sow). Raised as a response to the growing threat of Bomber Command's night raids on the Reich in mid 1943, Herrman's theory was for experienced night flying pilots and ex-instructors to be equipped with single-engined day fighters and visually 'free-hunt' the bombers by the light of the fires below, searchlights and with the aid of special flare-carrying Ju 88's following the bomber streams. In August 1943 Herrmann received the Oak Leaves for his achievements with the Wilde Sau tactics, although the high wasteage of both pilots and aircraft due to a high accident rate curtailed extensive use during the winter of 43/44. During 1944 better airborne intercept radar became available which made Wild Sow tactics obsolete. By 1944 Herrmann was Inspector General of night fighters. He flew also over 50 night fighter missions and claimed nine RAF bombers destroyed. That year he received the Swords to his Knight's Cross.

In early 1945 Herrmann was one of the leading exponents of the tactical deployment of the so-called Rammjäger (ram fighters). A special unit, 'Sonderkommando Elbe', was formed from volunteers, often aged 18 to 20, who were to be trained to be simply competent enough to control specially lightened and unarmoured Bf 109 G fighters and charged with downing allied bombers by deliberately ramming the tail or control surfaces with the propellers of their aircraft, and thereafter (hopefully) baling out. Herrmann's intention was to gather a large number of these fighters for a one-off attack on the USAAF bomber streams, hopefully causing enough losses to curtail the bombing offensive for a few months. Fuel shortages prevented the large numbers necessary and only one such attack was flown, on 7 April 45. About 150 ram fighters took part, these were escorted by Me 262s of JG 7 and I/KG(J) 54. Between Uelzen and Celle, at an altitude of just under 36 000 ft, the German suicide planes hurled themselves - with marching music on their radios - at the leading units of a US bomber formation. According to German sources, 51 US planes were destroyed (23 bombers by ram fighters and 28 by jets) for 131 German losses. American reports on the other hand say that only eight bombers were lost and that the Germans lost 100 ram fighters, 59 of them shot down by P-51s. What is certain is that only 15 ram fighters returned from this mission, 77 German pilots were killed, the rest managed to bail out in time.

Herrmann was also a strong proponent of the Me 262 and managed to allocate relatively substantial numbers of the jet to former bomber groups, their pilots being retrained for intercept missions. He figured that against the US bombers Germany needed 'more lancers and fewer fencers' (with the latter he meant the fighter pilots). In his opinion, former bomber pilots were better suited, stubbornly holding their course, to attack heavyly defended tartgets even when these were airborne. This put him into conflict with Adolf Galland who had his doubts regarding bomber pilots in the intercept role and wanted to allocate the rare jets to his fighter groups. Because of this and the 'Ramjäger' project, which Galland disapproved strongly, Galland and Herrmann became to dislike eachother intensively.

At the end of the war Hermann was captured by the Russians who released him with one of the last batches in 1955. He then studied law and focused his activities on the defense of former Nazis and Neo-Nazis, deniers of the holocaust and political activists of the far-right.