Qualla: German Air Force

German Air Force: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RosarioVanTulpe, Public domain. On 9 January 1956, the Federal Republic of Germany did something its founding generation had been forbidden to do for a decade: it stood up an air force. The old Luftwaffe had been disbanded by the Allied Control Commission in August 1946, and any German military aviation was banned outright. But the Cold War rewrote the rules. With NATO uneasy about Soviet armor pouring across the inner German border, the Western allies decided they needed German pilots in the air alongside theirs. The new Luftwaffe was built on a contradiction it has never fully resolved, that it shares a name with the air force that bombed Rotterdam and Coventry but considers itself, organizationally and morally, a separate institution. The Bundeswehr explicitly does not consider itself a successor to the Wehrmacht. The Iron Cross on the new fuselages reached back past 1933 to World War I, deliberately skipping the years no one wanted to claim.

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Image: RosarioVanTulpe | Public domain

German Air Force: Pilots With Difficult Resumes

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. JcPollock assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The new Luftwaffe needed pilots, and the pilots it could get were the ones who had flown for Hitler. Many were sent to the United States for refresher training before returning to upgrade on American hardware. Among them were Erich Hartmann, the most successful fighter ace in his...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. JcPollock assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

German Air Force: The Widow-Maker

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darkone, CC BY-SA 2.5. Of the 916 Lockheed F-104 Starfighters delivered to the Luftwaffe beginning in 1960, 292 crashed. One hundred and sixteen pilots died. The German public coined names for the plane that were not affectionate: Witwenmacher (widow-maker), fliegender Sarg (flying coffin), Erdnagel (l...

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Image: Darkone | CC BY-SA 2.5

German Air Force: MiGs in NATO Colors

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Przemyslaw "Blueshade" Idzkiewicz, CC BY-SA 2.5. When the two Germanys reunified in October 1990, the Luftwaffe inherited the equipment of the East German Luftstreitkrafte, an entirely Soviet-built fleet. Most of it was incompatible with NATO infrastructure and was sold off or handed to new NATO members in Eastern Europe. The e...

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Image: Przemyslaw "Blueshade" Idzkiewicz | CC BY-SA 2.5

German Air Force: Combat for the First Time Since 1945

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stahlkocher, CC BY-SA 3.0. The postwar Luftwaffe went fifty years without firing a shot in anger. That ended in September 1995 over Bosnia, when six Tornado fighter-bombers and eight Tornado ECR jamming aircraft supported NATO's Operation Deliberate Force around Sarajevo. In March 1999 the Luftwaffe flew i...

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Image: Stahlkocher | CC BY-SA 3.0

German Air Force: Buying the Future at the Lower Rhine

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard van der Schaaf, CC BY 2.0. The modern Luftwaffe is in the middle of the largest re-equipment program since the F-104 era. In 2022, Germany committed to buying 35 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning IIs to replace the Tornado in the nuclear-strike role under NATO's nuclear-sharing arrangement, which keeps a sma...

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Image: Gerard van der Schaaf | CC BY 2.0