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In fall 1943, when it was again proposed to crash special “suicide aircraft” into enemy ships, Luftwaffe fighter officer Hans-Günther von Kornatzki formulated the idea of an airborne “storm attack.” In his vision, fearless fighter pilots would bring down Allied planes by simply ramming them in the air. Over the course of the war, this had happened on a number of occasions—either by accident or after a conscious decision on the part of pilots. There was a decent chance for the pilot to survive by ejecting with a parachute. The task was to coordinate such chance events. The commanding general in charge of fighter pilots, Adolf Galland, was open to the idea of a “storm attack” but didn’t think much of the hair-raising spectacle of pilots purposely ramming enemy planes. In May 1944, when the first “storm fighters” were initiated into this new type of mission, they had to swear that they would attack the enemy from extremely short range and, if they failed to shoot him down, physically ram his aircraft. Three such units were formed in the course of 1944, each one containing around fifty specially modified Fw 190s. Yet despite the fact that the oath taken by the pilots emphasized their willingness to ram enemies, it rarely happened in practice. If the planes were able to get that close to the enemy, they could usually shoot him down using artillery. Still, on occasion, German pilots did ram Allied bombers. About half of them lost their lives.

The surveillance protocols show that Luftwaffe pilots did not consider ramming sorties suicide missions, but as an especially clever way of adapting aerial warfare, which was becoming ever more extreme.⁶⁴² Any means were legitimate if they increased the number of enemy kills. Luftwaffe POWs didn’t even show any particular outrage at rumors of a new ordinance stipulating that any airmen returning home without an enemy kill or at least damage to their aircraft would be court-martialed.⁶⁴³

Colonel Hajo Hermann felt that, since conventional fighter planes were too few in number to stop the Allied daytime bombardments of Germany, the defense of the Reich needed to be radicalized. In fall 1944, he came up with the perfidious idea of having one or two thousand young pilots ram their fighters into an American bomber squadron. The shock that the U.S. Air Force would feel from this “massive blow,” Hermann felt, would buy Nazi Germany some breathing room. Experienced pilots, who would be needed later in the war, would be exempt from the mission.

When Luftwaffe general and former ace pilot Adolf Galland learned of the plan, he asked Hermann whether he was going to be part of the mission, to which Hermann replied in the negative. After that Galland saw no point in discussing the idea any further. “He’s second on my list of criminals,” Galland later remarked as a POW.⁶⁴⁴

In January 1945, though, Galland succeeded in getting an audience with Hitler. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjunct subsequently had let it be known that the Führer had the highest respect for men who were willing to volunteer for such ramming missions. No soldier would be ordered to take part, but it was felt there would be enough volunteers. By the end of the month, Göring had signed off on a call for young pilots to volunteer for a mission that, at the cost of one’s own life, might turn the tide in the war. Two thousand young men allegedly stepped forward. Three hundred of them were selected and informed that the plan was for them to crash into American bombers en masse. Many were surprised. They had expected to be going after bigger targets like aircraft carriers or battleships and found their lives too valuable to be sacrificed to destroy a single B-17 Flying Fortress. Those responsible for training them explained that this wasn’t a suicide mission per se. Pilots would be allowed to eject from their planes once they had rammed their targets. On April 7, 1945, 183 pilots purposely crashed their aircraft into an American bomber unit over Magdeburg. The Wehrmacht reported four days later that the pilots’ “fearless willingness for self-sacrifice” had destroyed more than 60 enemy aircraft. In reality the number was 23. Of the 183 German aircraft that had taken off, 133 had been shot down, and 77 pilots lost their lives.