Qualla: Heinz Struning

Heinz Struning: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. At six in the evening on 24 December 1944 - Christmas Eve - Heinz Struning climbed into his Messerschmitt Bf 110 over Cologne and went hunting Lancasters. Above him in the dark, in a fast wooden Mosquito, an RAF Flight Lieutenant named R.D. Doleman was hunting him. Doleman won. Struning bailed out of his burning aircraft and struck the tail on his way down. His body was found two months later. He was 33, and the war he had given his adult life to was four months from ending. The numbers in his file are 56 victories and 280 missions; the names beneath those numbers are the crews of British bombers - boys mostly, average age 22 - who never came home from the runs over the Reich.

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Heinz Struning: The Path To That Aircraft

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Struning was born in 1912 in Neviges, a town in the Rhine Province that is now part of Velbert. His father was an electrician, his early training pointed him toward the merchant trade, and in March 1935 - eighteen months into Hitler's chancellorship - he joined the Luftwaffe. The...

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Heinz Struning: Night Hunters

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. After the daylight Battle of the Heligoland Bight in 1939 chewed up RAF formations, Bomber Command shifted to operating in darkness. The Luftwaffe responded by building the Kammhuber Line: a chain of control sectors stretching from Denmark to France, each one a Himmelbett (canopy...

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Heinz Struning: Intruder Over England

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. For nearly a year Struning's unit, I./NJG 2 based at Gilze-Rijen in the southern Netherlands, did something different from defensive interception: long-range Fernnachtjagd missions, intruder raids deep into British airspace to catch RAF bombers as they returned to their own airfi...

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Heinz Struning: What He Carried, What He Cost

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. It is possible to write about a night-fighter ace without writing about who he served, but it would not be honest. Struning's victories were not abstractions. Each represented a Lancaster or Halifax or Wellington that fell out of the sky over occupied Europe with men trapped insi...

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Heinz Struning: Gilze-Rijen Today

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Gilze-Rijen Air Base, where Struning's unit flew from for the better part of two years, is still operational - now a Royal Netherlands Air Force station between Tilburg and Breda. Helicopters fly from it now, not Junkers Ju 88s and Heinkel He 219s. The runways and dispersal pans ...

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