The Neuhammer disaster

On the morning of 15 August 1939, over the Neuhammer training ground in Lower Silesia – today’s Świętoszów – German Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers, commonly known as Stukas, were to show Luftwaffe generals how precisely they could destroy ground targets. Instead, within a few dozen seconds, thirteen aircraft came out of the clouds one after another and flew straight into the forest and the ground. Every member of their crews, 26 airmen in all, was killed. It was the Luftwaffe’s worst air disaster before the Second World War. Two and a half weeks later the same unit, made up to strength with new aircraft and men, flew off to bomb Poland.

The figures given in the literature agree: 13 aircraft destroyed and 26 killed, that is, two men in each aircraft, a pilot and a gunner-radio operator. The details differ – the exact height of the cloud base, the airfield from which the aircraft took off, the make-up of the group of observers – and these must be treated with caution.

The Stukas and the training ground

The dive bomber was the pet project of Ernst Udet, a First World War fighter ace who had become enthusiastic about it during a stay in the United States and from 1936 headed the technical office of the Air Ministry. An aircraft that attacked its target in an almost vertical dive, released its bomb from low altitude and pulled out just above the ground was more accurate than conventional bombers, and cheap besides. After the death of Walther Wever, the first chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, German air power placed ever greater emphasis on supporting the ground forces, and the Ju 87 became its symbol. The first examples were tested in combat in Spain, with the Condor Legion, in which Wolfram von Richthofen, first as an Oberstleutnant and later as a general, learned how to coordinate air and ground forces. Richthofen, who as a technical official had initially been sceptical of the Ju 87, in time became the Reich’s most important commander of close-support aviation.

The Ju 87 B, the version in service in 1939, had an automatic dive-recovery system. The pilot set the release altitude on a contact altimeter, a light signalled when it had been reached, and once the bomb was released the aircraft began to pull out of the dive by itself, at a load of around six g. The system worked well, provided the pilot could see the target and the ground early enough.

The Neuhammer am Queis training ground lay in the Lower Silesian Wilderness on the Kwisa (Queis), in the forests between Żagań and Bolesławiec. It had been established at the turn of the 20th century for the Prussian army, and after 1933 it was expanded to become one of the largest training grounds in the Reich, where formations tens of thousands strong could exercise. In the summer of 1939, as the Wehrmacht prepared to carry out Case White, Ju 87 units were moved closer to the Polish border, and the exercises in Silesia were to be the last rehearsal before the war.

The display of 15 August

The display was to be flown by I Gruppe of Dive Bomber Wing 76 (I./StG 76), formed in Graz on 1 May 1939 from a former Austrian unit and therefore known as the “Graz Gruppe”. It was commanded by Hauptmann Walter Sigel. The Gruppe had three Staffeln of nine aircraft each and a staff flight. Army and air force officers gathered at the training ground. According to most accounts Richthofen was among them, and some authors also name Generals Hugo Sperrle and Bruno Loerzer. The aircraft took off early in the morning from an airfield which, according to some sources, lay near Cottbus, and were to attack marked targets on the ground with practice bombs.

An hour before the display a weather reconnaissance squadron reported that a layer of cloud covering two-thirds of the sky lay over the target, with its base at about 900 metres and good visibility beneath it. The plan was for the Gruppe to arrive at about 4,000 metres; the Staffeln would then dive one after another, break through the clouds, spot the targets below them, drop their bombs and pull out at a safe height.

In the last hour, however, the weather changed. A morning fog formed over the forests of the training ground and merged with the clouds, and the cloud base dropped, according to German findings, to about 100 metres; English-language accounts also give a figure of 300 feet. The pilots, diving almost vertically at several hundred kilometres an hour, had no idea of this. According to some accounts the officers directing the display on the ground also had no radio contact with the aircraft and could not warn them.

At around 6.00 a.m. Sigel was the first to lead the staff flight down. He broke out of the clouds not at several hundred metres, as he expected, but just above the treetops. He managed to pull his aircraft up, flying along a firebreak in the forest, and immediately ordered the Gruppe by radio to break off the attack. The two pilots following close behind him were too late. Nor did the order save the 2nd Staffel: all nine of its aircraft, already in their dives, ploughed into the ground. Two aircraft of the 3rd Staffel also crashed. Some pilots began to pull out, but their stalled aircraft lost lift and fell. The airmen who had turned back above the clouds saw only columns of smoke rising above the white layer. Twenty-six men were killed.

Inquiry and conclusions

The disaster was investigated by a German military court. Sigel, who as formation leader was responsible for the decision to attack, was acquitted because he had acted on a weather report that turned out to be wrong. In technical terms it was a textbook case of what aviation today calls controlled flight into terrain: serviceable aircraft flown by experienced pilots struck ground their crews could not see. In a steep dive the pilot watched the target, not the altimeter, and the automatic system could not help if the ground emerged from the fog a second before impact.

The Luftwaffe did not change the way it used the Ju 87 as a result, and its faith in the dive bomber did not weaken. For an air force which, according to German returns, had more than 360 Ju 87s ready for action on the eve of the war, the loss of thirteen aircraft was painful but could be made good. I./StG 76 quickly received new aircraft and crews.

What September 1939 brought

At dawn on 1 September 1939 Sigel’s Gruppe, once again numbering almost thirty Ju 87s according to German documents, was one of the first Luftwaffe units to attack Poland. Its target was Wieluń, a town of no military importance. The first bombs fell on a clearly marked hospital. The raid on Wieluń is now regarded as one of the first war crimes of the war, and estimates of the number of civilian victims vary widely. In the following weeks the Stukas, supporting the advance of the ground troops, became a symbol of the German “lightning war”, and the howl of their sirens a terror for Polish soldiers and refugees. In September Richthofen commanded the close-support aviation operating with the 10th Army. The real weakness of the Ju 87 – slow and defenceless against fighters – was exposed only by the Battle of Britain in 1940.

Walter Sigel later fought in France, the Balkans and North Africa, was awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and was killed in Norway in May 1944. During the war the Germans set up the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII E on the Neuhammer training ground, through which Polish, French and later Soviet prisoners passed; at least 50,000 of the last died there of hunger and disease. After 1945 the training ground was taken over by the Red Army, and since 1992 Polish troops have been stationed at Świętoszów, today the 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade.

The Neuhammer disaster was above all an aviation tragedy, but in the history of the road to war it has another significance as well. It shows how close to war Germany was by mid-August 1939: the air force was no longer practising general skills but the specific attacks it was to carry out over Poland a fortnight or so later. The deaths of 26 airmen did not slow these preparations by even a day.