Evan Flys
An Interview With Willi Kriessmann
Willi Kriessmann flew with the Luftwaffe from May 16th 1939 until the end of the war and flew almost every plane Germany had. My good friend Burt Newmark introduced me and it was awesome to get to sit and visit with him.
Here's part of the interview:
“Then finally I got my missions. I was transferred in April 1942 to a bombing group for practicing and training. It was then, in September 1942, I was transferred to Eastern Russia. It was there I had my 93 missions. Primarily it was not strategic bombing; it was 90% support of the fighting troops. We were just flying artillery. Only a few missions were really strategic which was unusual for a Heinkel 111 because we had to go down in low attacks, surprise, strafe 30 feet above the ground, and drop timed release bombs. I escaped with very close calls a few times. Sometimes I came home with only 1 engine. I was very lucky. I was shot down by Yaks very close to my last mission. It was in the summer during the battle of Kursk, ‘Operation Citadel.’ My bombardier didn’t release the bombs properly, so we flew out of formation to make another pass, which was when the Yaks came. There were four of them, and they shot up my airplane and left engine. We didn’t want to jump because we were too close to the battlefield, so we belly landed with a burning engine in a wheat field. It was like a cushion, because the wheat was so tall. We were able to jump out, but the people in the tail section got a little burned on the shoulders, however the observer and I were okay. We were hiding in the tall wheat and we heard a tank coming. We thought, ‘Oh, oh.’ But then we saw the black cross and knew it was a German tank. Four days later I flew my last mission.”
“I lost my radio operator at about 16,000 feet on a strategic bombing mission to a rail yard. We were in a Heinkel 111. We had been bombing two or three days in a row on this important target in Russia. The Russians knew it was a very important spot and they had concentrated antiaircraft guns. So at 16,000-18,000 feet high an 8.8cm AA hit my left wing. It didn’t explode there. You could see later on that it had formed a little ridge in the aluminum. It hit the plastic cupola where the radio operator was seated and it exploded there and took his head off. The He 111 took quite a lot of damage.”
“Several times we came home with one engine. One time we flew so low that the light was glaring on the snow and I hit the ground with the propeller. I pulled the plane high up and turned it off and you could see the stumps of the propeller blades.”
“Very early in practice, in June 1942, one of the last practices before I was to go off to Russia, I was approaching an airfield in a three plane formation flight of He 111’s and all of a sudden my left engine turned wild and started to race. We were very low – maybe 200 feet off the ground. It was uncontrollable and we hit the ground. We smashed one engine, I hit my head, my second officer broke his hip, the back crew was badly damaged but nobody was killed.”
“I got some home leave for about three weeks and then I was called back to southern France to the reserve units. I stayed there for about a month and then I went to hospital in Paris and was allowed to stay in Paris for four weeks. I went to college there and got my credits there. The University of Strasbourg had three week college classes held in a movie theater. I got permission to attend and had a room in a hotel. I studied international law. Our professors took us to the French foreign office and looked at the original treaties of Versailles and I got college credit for it.”
“But then I got called back to Russia in November 1943 to the southern part close to the Black Sea near Ukraine. Already before that I was having trouble with my eyes flying at night. I couldn’t differentiate the lights properly so I didn’t fly any missions there. They were flying strictly night missions there but there was a kind of a ferry pilot job. We flew from the southern part of Russia all the way up to Lithuania. I was sent to a clinic in East Prussia where they found out that I had a deficiency in my night vision. So since my squadron was only flying at night I was the ferry pilot and took damaged planes for repair back to eastern Prussia. And that lasted until April 1944 when I was sent to headquarters in Berlin and was interviewed by a colonel who looked at my record and said, ‘Well, you are a seasoned pilot, I’ll send you to the industry.’ So they sent me to Junkers and I flew the Junkers Ju-88’s, the night fighters, from the factory to other factories where they put in armament, radios, and whatever else. Then I practiced and they sent me into airfields to fly the Ju-188, and they sent me to fly the Heinkel He-177, then they sent me to Messerschmitt to fly the Me-110, Me-210, and Me-410. Focke-Wulf Fw-44, Fw-190, the Me-109, Junkers Ju-86, Ju-87, Ju-88, Ju-188, Dornier Do-10, Do-11, Do-17, Do-215 and Do-217.”
“In December, 1944, they called me up to fly the Arado 234, the jet bomber. It was originally a reconnaissance plane but then they switched it over to a bomber. So that’s what I did until the end of the war, ferrying Arado 234’s from the factory to different places where they installed optical equipment, bombing equipment, etc. and I flew the first one on Dec 12, 1944, from Hamburg to Kampfgeschwader 76 and the last on May 1st 1945. Then I had to go back to Berlin in December to ferry planes, and I joined them again in early February.”
“I liked the Arado very much. It was a wonderful plane. I thought it was designed better than the Messerschmitt 262. It was a single seater so we didn’t have time to practice much so we had some ‘dry classes.’ Landing and taking off was very different from a prop plane.”
“The Arado flew at close to 900kmh. Sometimes the whole ferrying flight took no more than 15-20 minutes. The higher up you go, the longer you could fly but an hour to an hour 20 minutes was the utmost you could go but I never had time for pleasure. The pleasure was before the war when we started out flying, when we were chasing farmers and the cows! Once the war started there was no time for that.”
“When I was ferrying, the sky was controlled by the allies. I had rocket assisted take off. One time I took the plane from Grossenheim to Burg and half way through the warning signal come in – ‘Don’t land, we are under attack!’ So I had to look for another field. I went west and I knew an airfield, Hildesheim, which I knew inside and out. I knew it’s a small field and with a jet I had to side slip in there but couldn’t get out so I had to wait two days until the rockets came in so I could take off. They installed the rockets and I was lucky getting rockets that worked because sometime they wouldn’t. At that time we had to reuse them and they had little parachutes so they could be recovered.”
“The Arado had no weapons. I never ran into any allied fighters. We were like sitting ducks taking off and landing in the Arado. We had to accelerate and slow down very slowly because the blades in the engine were very weak. Taking off and landing is when many were shot down. I remember hearing pilots saying that they had Messerschmitts protecting them over the airfield when they were supposed to land in their Arado. The only Arado still in existence, in the Smithsonian, is one I flew.”
“I flew just about everything in the German inventory except for the four engine JU-90, the Focke-Wulf 200 Condor, Messerschmitt 262, Heinkel 162 Volksjager or the Messerschmitt 163 Comet. The Dornier 335, I was supposed to fly – the factory was north of Munich and they sent me there to ferry it but I had my doubts. So I went to the commander office and said I’d never flown one before and I need instructions. He said no way, if you don’t know it, it would take too long, forget it.”
“I got away from the mess in Berlin at the end of the war, too! That was the end of the war for us, because we were captured by a Canadian tank division, and were transferred to the beach of the North Sea. They separated the Austrians to send us back to the Austrian Republic. It took quite a while to do that – about 6 months – so I didn’t get home until September 1945.”
For the rest of the interview, visit my website http://evanflys.com
by Evan Isenstein Brand