Condor Legion fighters in Spain

Some chronologies state that on 7 May 1937 the Condor Legion’s fighter group was sent to Spain, where it began supporting the Falangists. Both parts of this statement need correcting. The Legion’s fighter group, Jagdgruppe 88 (J/88), had been operating in Spain since November 1936, when the Condor Legion went into action, and its first pilots had arrived as early as the summer of 1936. Nor did it fight for the Falangists: it served the Nationalists of General Francisco Franco, that is, the rebel army and its allies. The Falange was one of the political forces in that camp; on 19 April 1937 Franco merged it with the Carlists into a single state party under his leadership. The date does, however, fall within a period that was genuinely important for German fighter aviation: in the spring of 1937 one of the J/88 squadrons re-equipped with the new Messerschmitt Bf 109 monoplane fighters and brought them into combat over northern Spain. This was the beginning of the career of the aircraft that remained the Luftwaffe’s standard fighter throughout the Second World War.

Biplanes against “Chatos” and “Moscas”

Jagdgruppe 88 initially consisted of four squadrons equipped with Heinkel He 51 biplanes, twelve aircraft in each. In November 1936, over Madrid, it became clear that they stood no chance against the fighters the Soviet Union had supplied to the Republic: I-15 biplanes, which the Spaniards called “Chatos” (“Snub-noses”), and the modern I-16 monoplanes, known as “Moscas” (“Flies”). The He 51s were slower, more lightly armed and less manoeuvrable. The Germans began to use them mainly for attacking ground targets, and for air combat they needed a new aircraft.

At the end of 1936 the first Bf 109 prototypes arrived at Seville by sea, packed in crates. Their combat trials were conducted by an experimental fighter squadron in which, among others, Johannes Trautloft flew. In March 1937 the first production Bf 109 Bs reached Spain. They went to 2nd Squadron of J/88, commanded from March by Oberleutnant Günther Lützow, and its He 51s were handed over to the Nationalist air force. The pilots first had to learn the new machine; the Messerschmitt’s narrow undercarriage meant that the first weeks brought a good many take-off and landing accidents.

Over Biscay

At the end of March 1937 Emilio Mola began his offensive against the Basque Country, and the whole Condor Legion moved north to airfields around Vitoria. From April the Bf 109 squadron also operated from Vitoria. The fighters escorted bombers and patrolled the front, while the He 51 biplanes of the other squadrons attacked Basque columns and positions. According to some accounts, the first air victory scored in a Bf 109 was claimed by Lützow on 6 April 1937, when he shot down an I-15. Other authors regard the fighting at Brunete in July as the occasion of the Messerschmitts’ first kills. On 26 April Bf 109s and Italian Fiats escorted the bombers that bombed Guernica, and He 51s strafed the roads around the town. In May, as the Nationalists closed in on Bilbao, Lützow scored further victories, including on 22 and 28 May.

The Republic had few aircraft in the north, so there was little air fighting. The real test came in the summer. In July 1937 the Republicans attacked at Brunete, west of Madrid, and the Condor Legion was moved to the central front. There the Bf 109s clashed with large forces of Soviet fighters and bombers and helped the Nationalists gain air superiority. From the summer of 1937 further J/88 squadrons re-equipped with the Bf 109, and newer versions of the aircraft arrived in Spain. 3rd Squadron, commanded from July 1937 by Oberleutnant Adolf Galland, went on flying the He 51 for a long time as a ground-attack squadron.

New tactics

The most lasting result of this period proved to be not technology but tactics. At the time the air forces of every country flew in tight three-aircraft formations, a legacy of the First World War. At first 2nd Squadron had too few Bf 109s to form such flights, and in any case a fast monoplane was unsuited to close formation. Lützow and his pilots therefore began to fly in loose pairs, in which the leader attacked while the wingman covered him from behind, and in fours made up of two pairs. Out of this experience grew the formation later known as the “finger-four”. In 1938 it was refined by Oberleutnant Werner Mölders, who took over 3rd Squadron after it re-equipped with the Bf 109 and, with fourteen kills, became the most successful German pilot in Spain. The lessons of Spain were written into German regulations, and the pair and the four became the basic formations of Luftwaffe fighters.

By the end of the civil war J/88 had used a total of about 130 Bf 109s of several versions and a similar number of He 51s. According to various tallies its pilots claimed from over three hundred to about 365 kills. The group lost more aircraft in accidents than in combat. Because the Germans rotated the Legion’s personnel every few months, more than three hundred pilots passed through J/88. Many of them became wing commanders and fighter aces in the Second World War.

On the road to war

Spain gave the Luftwaffe, officially unveiled only in 1935, an advantage that no other Western air force had: a combat-proven fighter and pilots who knew how to use it. In September 1939 Bf 109s dominated the skies over Poland, and in May 1940 over France. In the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 they met an equal opponent in the British Spitfires, and the aircraft’s limited range, which had not mattered in Spain, made it difficult for them to escort the bombers over London. The British, who began the war flying in formations of three, soon adopted the German formation of pairs and fours.

Mölders, Galland, Lützow and other J/88 veterans became leading figures in German fighter aviation. In 1941 Mölders became the first pilot in history to pass one hundred kills and was appointed Inspector of Fighters; after his death in a crash in November that year the post was taken over by Galland. In 1945 Lützow was among the group of officers who came out against Göring, and in April that year he went missing in action. After the war the part played by Condor Legion pilots in the Spanish war was long judged in Germany in purely military terms. Only in 2005 did the Bundeswehr remove Mölders’s name from the name of its fighter wing and barracks.