Branch: Luftwaffe
Born: 19 August 1896 in Tüßling, Bavaria,
Germany.
Died: 25 January 1986 in Munich, Germany.
Ranks:
Generalfeldmarschall
Generaloberst
General der Flieger
General der Infanterie
Generalleutnant
Generalmajor
Oberst
Oberstleutnant
Major
Hauptmann
Oberleutnant
Leutnant
F�hnrich
Decorations:
Commands:
Other: Personnel
Articles:
Josef Kammhuber was born on 19 August 1896 and was a Career
Officer in the German Air Force, and is best known as the
first General of the Night Fighters in the Luftwaffe during
World War II. He is credited with setting up the first truly
successful night fighter defence system, the so-called Josef
Kammhuber Line, but a detailed knowledge of the system provided
to the Royal Air Force by British military intelligence allowed
them to render it ineffective. Personal battles between himself
and
Erhard
Milch, director of the Reich Air Ministry, eventually
led to his dismissal in 1943. After the war, he returned to
the military in Germany's Federal defence Force.
Josef Kammhuber was born in Tüßling, Bavaria, the
son of a farmer. When World War I started he was 18 and joined
a Bavarian engineer battalion. He experienced the Battle of
Verdun in 1916, and was promoted to second lieutenant in 1917.
He was allowed to remain in German's tiny post-war army, and
in 1925 was promoted to first lieutenant. Between October
1926 and September 1928, he received Division-level leadership
training and was promoted to captain. This was followed by
pilot training through September 1929, and during 1930 he
was sent to the USSR for secret pilot training. On his return,
he joined the staff of General Walter Wever, chief of staff
of the Luftwaffe. Wever was in the process of attempting to
set up a strategic bomber command this effort, however, died
in June 1936 when Wever was killed in an air crash. Josef
Kammhuber had continued to rise in the ranks, promoted to
major, lieutenant colonel, and then colonel in 1938.
After it became clear that the Royal Air Force was starting
a massive aircraft building program,
Adolf
Hitler decided to match their expansion and proposed a
program worth about 60 billion Reichsmarks (RM). The German
aircraft industry was incapable of matching this sort of request,
due to both construction and material shortages, and the leadership
within the Luftwaffe realised it was impossible. The chiefs
of staff, Jeschonnek, Josef Kammhuber and Stumpff, then put
forth Josef Kammhuber's own plan for about 20 billion RM,
production levels which they felt they could meet.
Erhard
Milch organised a meeting between them and
Hermann
Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, in which
Hermann
Göring said that
Adolf
Hitler's programme should be carried out as planned, confident
that somehow they could meet his quotas.
Josef Kammhuber, realising what was going on, put in a request
in February 1939 for active duty. Promoted to Major General
(the lowest general officer rank), he was assigned as chief-of-staff
of Luftflotte 2, and was in this position at the start of
the war in September. On 11 January 1940, he was cashiered
by
Adolf Hitler
personally because of the Mechelen Incident. He was transferred
to the Western Front where he became Geschwaderkommodore of
KG 51, a tactical bomber unit. During the French campaign
he was shot down and captured, and interned in a French POW
camp at the age of 44. He was released at the end of the Battle
of France in July 1940, and returned to Germany.
Once again an officer of the Luftwaffe's Generalstab, in July
1940 he was placed in command of coordinating flak, searchlight
and radar units. At the time they were all under separate
command and had no single reporting chain, so much of the
experience of the different units was not being shared. The
result was the XII. Fliegerkorps, a new dedicated night-fighting
command. At this time, Josef Kammhuber was promoted to Lieutenant
General.
He organised the night fighting units into a chain known to
the British as the Josef Kammhuber Line, in which a series
of radar stations with overlapping coverage were layer three
deep from Denmark to the middle of France, each covering a
zone about 32 km long (north-south) and 20 km wide (east-west).
Each control centre was known as a Himmelbett (4-poster bed)
zone, consisting of a Freya radar with a range of about 100
km, a number of searchlights spread through the cell, and
one primary and one backup night fighter assigned to the cell.
RAF bombers flying into Germany or France would have to cross
the line at some point, and the radar would direct a searchlight
to illuminate the plane. Once this had happened other manually
controlled searchlights would also pick up the plane, and
the night fighter would be directed to intercept of the now-lit
bomber. However, demands by the burgomasters (Bürgermeister)
in Germany led to the recall of the searchlights to the major
cities.
Later versions of the Himmelbett added two Würzburg radar,
with a range of about 30 km. Unlike the early-warning Freya
radar, Würzburgs were accurate (and complex) tracking
radar One would be locked onto the night fighter as soon as
it entered the cell. After the Freya picked up a target the
second Würzburg would lock onto it, thereby allowing
controllers in the Himmelbett centre to get continual readings
on the positions of both planes, controlling them to a visual
interception. To aid in this, a number of the night fighters
were fitted with a short-range infrared device known as Spanner,
but these proved almost useless in practice.
Another tactic that proved effective was to send their own
planes to England while the raids were taking off or landing.
Radio operators listening to the RAF bomber frequencies were
able to recognize the start of a raid, and the raiding force
of about 30 night fighters would be sent over the RAF airbases
to shoot down the bombers as they took off or landed. By the
beginning of October the night intruder force had claimed
a hundred kills but on 13 October
Adolf
Hitler ordered the force sent to the Mediterranean despite
their success.
British intelligence soon discovered the nature of the Josef
Kammhuber Line and started studying ways to defeat it. At
the time RAF Bomber Command sent in their planes one at a
time in order to force the defences to be spread as far apart
as possible, meaning that any one aircraft would have to deal
with little concentrated flak. However this also meant the
Himmelbett centres were only dealing with perhaps one or two
planes at a time, making their job much easier. At the urging
of R.V. Jones, Bomber Command reorganised their attacks against
a single target at a time, sending all of the bombers in a
single stream, carefully positioned to fly right down the
middle of a cell. Now the Himmelbett centres were facing hundreds
of bombers, countering with only a few planes of their own.
So successful was this tactic that the success rate of the
night fighters dropped almost to zero.
Josef Kammhuber started looking for solutions, and the result
was the two-prong concept of Wilde Sau (Wild Boar) and Zahme
Sau (Tame Boar). In the former, day fighters would be sent
up and look for the bombers from the light of flares dropped
from light bombers, searchlights set to a wide beam or illuminating
lower clouds, or the fires on the ground below. The Wilde
Sau force scored their most notable success during the British
operation against the V. weapon centre
Peenemünde
on 17 August 1943. de Havilland Mosquito bombers had dropped
target marker flares over Berlin and most of the night fighter
force was sent there. When it was realised what was really
happening, most of these aircraft were too far away and too
slow to intercept the raid. The
Focke-Wulf
Fw 190s being flown by the Wilde Sau forces were however
able to reach them, and about 30 planes entered the third
and last wave of the stream and shot down 29 of the 40 Avro
Lancaster bombers lost that raid.
Zahme Sau envisioned freeing the night fighters (now equipped
with radar for the final stages of the interception) from
the Himmelbett cells and allowing them to attack on their
own. This was not all that easy, given the current generation
of radar, but newer systems being developed would greatly
increase the detection range and angles. In this role the
existing cells created as part of the original Josef Kammhuber
Line would be used primarily for early warning and vectoring
the planes to the stream.
At the same time Josef Kammhuber continued to press for a
new dedicated night fighter design, eventually selecting the
Heinkel
He 219 Uhu after seeing it demonstrated in 1942. However
Erhard
Milch had decided to cancel the Uhu, and fighting broke
out between the two. As a result in 1943 Josef Kammhuber was
transferred to Luftflotte 5 in Norway, in command of a handful
of outdated planes. After the reorganisation of the Luftwaffe
in Scandinavia and the dissolution of Luftflotte 5, he became
commanding general of the Luftwaffe in Norway (September-October
1944). In 1945 he was re-appointed to command of the night
fighters, at this point a largely ceremonial position considering
the state of the Third Reich at that time.
After the fall of the Reich in May 1945, Josef Kammhuber was
held by the United States, but he was released in April 1948
without charges being brought against him. He wrote a series
of monographs for the U.S. Department of Defence on the conduct
of the German defences against the RAF and USAAF. These were
later collected into book form (listed under References).
In 1953 he published a definitive work on what he learned
during the war as Problems in the Conduct of a Day and Night
Defensive Air War. He later spent time in Argentina helping
to train the air force under Juan Perón.
Josef Kammhuber returned to Germany and joined the Luftwaffe
while it was re-forming. He was promoted to Inspekteur der
Bundesluftwaffe, serving in that role between 1956 and 1962.
After the 1961 F-84 Thunderstreak incident, when two West
German Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks strayed into East German
airspace and flew to West Berlin, Josef Kammhuber and his
superior, the West German Minister of Defence, Franz-Josef
Strauß, removed Oberstleutnant Siegfried Barth, commander
of the pilots unit, from his command. After protests, three
official investigations and a formal complaint by Barth against
Strauß, the former was reinstated in his position.
Josef Kammhuber died on Jan. 25 1986, at age 89 in Munich,
Germany and is buried there.
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