Upon being shown the Luftwaffe’s extensive files on his fighter group, one captured American air corps captain recalled, “I felt shocked and sickened.
WORLD WAR II WAR TACTICS LISTENING AND SPEAKING LANGUAGE FULL
The interrogator would then smile and say, “You see, we have spies at every base in Britain and we get a full account of everything you do.” The POW would be told that the whole process of interrogation was a mere formality, given the information the Germans already had in their possession. The airman might also be told of the specifics of operations that he had recently flown in. The astonished airman would be told who had been transferred, who had been shot down, and who had recently arrived as a replacement.
And almost every one of them met there a suave, sympathetic Luftwaffe officer or NCO who spoke fluent English, down to the latest slang, and who already seemed to know everything about the new POW.Ī downed fighter pilot would be shown a file book containing the names of his unit members, the location of his home base in England, the combat record of the unit since its arrival in the theater, even the name of the commander’s dog and the unit’s favorite English pub. From 1943 to 1945 more than thirty-five thousand American pilots and aircrew joined them in Luftwaffe prisons.Īlmost all the captured British and American airmen had one thing in common: they spent some time at the Luftwaffe’s Auswertestelle West (Evaluation Center West) at Oberursel, a suburban town near Frankfurt. During the course of the war more than ten thousand RAF fliers from Bomber and Fighter Commands ended up as POWs. But over forty-five thousand Allied servicemen got there first, entering Germany in the hardest way possible: bailing out of a crippled airplane at eighteen thousand feet. The Luftwaffe developed masterful psychological techniques to milk Allied airmen for information.įor the American and British troops who fought their way into Germany in 19 it was one of the toughest and bloodiest campaigns of the war.