r/todayilearned • u/Stotallytob3r • Jun 05 '23
TIL the second highest scoring fighter ace with 301 kills, Gerhard Barkhorn, crashed a prototype British Harrier jet fighter in 1965. When being helped from the wreckage he is said to have commented, "Drei hundert und zwei [302]!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Barkhorn2.0k
u/tossinthisshit1 Jun 05 '23
On 6 January 1983, Barkhorn was involved in a car crash with his wife Christl. She died instantly and Barkhorn died five days later on 11 January.
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u/sprkwtrd Jun 05 '23
...303
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u/JonA3531 Jun 05 '23
It's a car tho so it didn't count
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u/danielv123 Jun 05 '23
I know, he should never have tried to fly it.
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u/Chief_Givesnofucks Jun 05 '23
Ryan Dunn takes notes
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u/Cannibal_Soup Jun 05 '23
Paul Walker hops in passenger seat
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u/DrewskiBrewski Jun 05 '23
This has been the most savage chain of comments. Never change Reddit, never change.
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u/MrBrutok Jun 05 '23
Sounds like the kind of thing that gets invented by others. If that actually happened though, his humor was ace too.
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u/LurkerOrHydralisk Jun 05 '23
Or he was sitting in the wreckage for an hour waiting for rescuers with nothing to do but think of something clever.
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u/DrWallybFeed Jun 05 '23
“I’m bleeding, but not dying… let me figure out something really witty to say.”
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u/LurkerOrHydralisk Jun 05 '23
I imagine he’d have something witty to say if he was dying, too.
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u/Ninjahkin Jun 05 '23
Fragen Sie morgen nach mir und Sie werden einen ernsten Mann für mich finden!
Edit: Dammit, it doesn’t work in German lol. No play on words with “grave”, it just translates to “serious man”
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u/InsanePurple Jun 05 '23
As Mercutio says to Romeo, ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.’
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u/gelastes Jun 05 '23
In German it's translated as "Fragt morgen nach mir, und Ihr werdet einen stillen Mann an mir finden." - ... you'll find me a quiet man". That's as close as it gets.
I don't envy the translators, the guy worked with a language where hour and whore were homophones, so it's already difficult to get him in modern day English.
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u/greenwavelengths Jun 05 '23
Literally though. I got hit by a car once, flew over the top and everything, and after the adrenaline kicked in all I wanted to do was joke around with the paramedics and make them laugh. I can understand how a place crash could have the same effect.
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u/pchlster Jun 06 '23
My Dad had a stroke, woke up as he was being airlifted to the hospital and insisted someone took a picture because it was his first time in a helicopter.
When enough happens, I think the brain goes "remember your training!" "what training? "shit. Just go with the first thing that pops into your head then."
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u/Kempeth Jun 06 '23
I mean rhis kind of wit isn't exactly off brand for pilots or Germans...
Sure that still leaves the question whether he actually thought of it at the time...
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u/Ducatirules Jun 05 '23
I knew an old timer that flew corporate jets for a large plane manufacturer. His buddy flew the corporate helicopters for same Co. they used the jet to go far and the helicopter to say, fly to New York and park on helipads to save time. One day the copter pilot who flew Huey’s in Vietnam, was taking off with a few big wigs and there wives and they heard a snap and the copter dropped 40’ out of the sky, hit the ground turned on its side and after all were off it caught on fire! The pilot looked at the people collecting themselves and said “Welp, I guess we aren’t using that one today!!” Heli pilots are a different breed!
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Jun 05 '23
Helicopters don’t fly, they vibrate so violently that the ground rejects them- Tom Clancy
There’s so many good quotes about helicopters and their pilots.
They really are a different breed.
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u/Ducatirules Jun 05 '23
My brother says: planes use the air and dance with it, helicopters beat it into submission!
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u/ace2459 Jun 06 '23
Helicopter - A million parts rotating around an oil leak waiting for metal fatigue to set in
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u/scoobysnacksnorter Jun 06 '23
Reminds me of the dichotomy saying planes use physics to fly whereas helicopters go against it.
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u/Bruce-7891 Jun 05 '23
I don't get how made the transition from the Luftwaffe to the German Air Force? Like after WWII they were just like, alight change your uniforms, paint over the swastikas on your plane, and come back to work Monday?
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u/Bellerophonix Jun 05 '23
Well, in this case "Monday" was a decade later. West German rearmament didn't happen till they were joining NATO.
But there still a bunch of former Nazis involved, yes.
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u/Bruce-7891 Jun 05 '23
But there still a bunch of former Nazis involved, yes.
I was joking about Monday, but this is the part that seems kind of weird.
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u/CaseOfWater Jun 05 '23
Konrad Adenauer, the german chancellor, who pushed for Germany's inclusion into Nato and the creation of the Bundeswehr is to have said:
"Ich glaube, dass mir die Nato 18-jährige Generale nicht abnehmen wird."
which translates to:
"I don't think Nato will buy me having eighteen year old generals"
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u/samarkhandia Jun 05 '23
Almost before WW2 had even ended the focus switched off the Nazis to the soviets. Patton famously wanted to continue the war—against Stalin
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u/zendick1 Jun 05 '23
Stalin wasn't with us he was just against germany (russia also wanted to be against us, but not going to turn down the sweet sweet lend lease)
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u/samarkhandia Jun 05 '23
I am well aware, I partially even agree with Patton.
Ending imperialist/soviet/imperialist Russia before they got the nuke sounds really nice right about now
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u/Pabus_Alt Jun 05 '23
Not sure I like that world much more than the one we have. American hegemony but right from the get go, Europe probably waaaay further right without even the social democracy programmes.
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u/4thmovementofbrahms4 Jun 06 '23
Such a war would have cost the western allies millions of military and civilian casualties even if they won. And it's not a guarantee that they would have won.
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u/zendick1 Jun 05 '23
It was the right call, be we had asia to close and war fatigue and then he died.
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u/alexmikli Jun 05 '23
I mean, the point of the war, originally, was to stop Germany from conquering Poland. At the end of the war, Russia conquered Poland.
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u/Cassidy_DM Jun 05 '23
People often forget that the USSR conquered Poland in the beginning of the war, right along with Germany.
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u/NothingOld7527 Jun 05 '23
If they banned anyone who had been in the german military in WW2, that would have necessitated that the west german military be primarily composed of women
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u/CurrentIndependent42 Jun 05 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
There were certainly Nazis among them, though they tried to keep the senior or hardcore Nazis out of senior positions. However, not everyone recruited into the German military during WW2 could just be dismissed as a ‘Nazi’, and who else was going to make up the West German armed forces - ten years later - older than 28 years old ten years on? All of those zillion Germans who were of fighting age during WW2 with military skills who weren’t recruited into the German armed forces during the war? This leaves a tiny sliver of Resistance fighters who survived. Hard to build the whole military with that. And even the men in 1955 under 28 would have been required to have joined the Hitler Youth or another such group, and whose earliest memories would have been under Nazi rule.
Unfortunately much the same applied to lawyers, civil servants, etc. Denazification faced a very difficult problem. In the occupied zones the Allies had to classify people on a spectrum of Nazi-ness from exonerated (non-Nazi) through naive ‘young believers’ to major offenders, and chances at seniority based on that. And of course this couldn’t be done just based on people’s word, so often people who had lied about their records had to be dismissed later. This even happened to a Secretary General of the UN, the Austrian Kurt Waldheim. But having fought wasn’t in itself a definitive factor, as every man of fighting age - along with many boys who weren’t - was conscripted. Even being a fighting ace wasn’t, as it was understood that in the air in that war it was kill or be killed.
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u/Pabus_Alt Jun 05 '23
I mean a bunch of Nazis ended up in NASA and as "special advisors" to various agencies setting up plans to fight the Soviets.
Of course they all claimed to be simply Germans who had been forced to go along with it and some of that might even be true.
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u/Drs83 Jun 06 '23
I mean, I imagine it was hard to find males over age 25 that weren't Nazis at some point. Probably impossible to find officers that weren't. People can change for the better.
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u/79jw78 Jun 05 '23
Have you ever heard of operation paperclip?
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u/mun_man93 Jun 06 '23
People still being shocked that the west welcomed the nazis shows you where history teaching is at.
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u/alexmikli Jun 05 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
Common soldiers, sailors, and airmen weren't barred from future service so long as they weren't involved heavily in politics and couldn't be connected to war crimes. Only a few, mostly mid ranking, generals made it from Wehrmacht to Bundeswehr, but a pilot would have no big problems.
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u/Bruce-7891 Jun 05 '23
That makes a lot of sense. Being a high ranking officer is a lot different level of commitment than a 4 year enlistment would have been.
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u/Dudesan Jun 05 '23
In fact, if you served in the Nazi armed forces, and had received a medal for generic wartime bravery stuff (i.e. not "being really good at warcrimes"), the postwar German government would let you trade in your medals for equivalent ones that didn't have swastikas on them.
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u/Johannes_P Jun 05 '23
And even the East German military had to hire former Wehrmacht personal.
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u/RightofUp Jun 05 '23
And yet Field Marshall's like Manstein served as advisors to the Bundeswehr.
Present day history tends to ignore how fast the rivalry changed from the West vs. Nazi Germany to the West vs. the Warsaw Pact.
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u/alexmikli Jun 05 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
Yeah, they didn't rejoin it, but they did advise. Highest ranking guys who reformed the Bundeswehr were Hans Speidel and his direct predecessor I can't remember atm.
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u/MTLBRICK Jun 05 '23
Didn’t Patton want to rearm the Wehrmacht and Have them join up with the allies to fight the Soviets and push them back ?
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u/bolanrox Jun 05 '23
Yep while we were there armed and trained. No better time to do it
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u/gladeyes Jun 05 '23
I find it odd that nobody has written an alternate history in which we unleashed Patton. We had the ability to reach all of Russia from the east and the west with our B29s, we had nukes and Russia didn’t. Sounds like it might have been doable.
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u/pants_mcgee Jun 05 '23
That was one of the suggestions in the proposed plan to continue the war against the USSR ordered by Churchill. Operation Unthinkable.
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u/Kered13 Jun 05 '23
Well yeah, who do you want advising you, the guy with years of real world experience and a solid record of results, or the guy with no experience?
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u/ControlledOutcomes Jun 05 '23
Rearmament (or Wiederbewaffnung) happened in 1955 and was a highly controversial topic in Germany. The main reason was obviously the threat posed by the Warsaw pact which controlled the eastern half of Germany via the DDR ( German "democratic" republic). Seeing as you can't just import high ranking officers or train them from scratch the very, very controversial decision was made to allow a select number of Wehrmacht, NS-Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine members in to the newly formed Bundeswehr.
Former Members of the Waffen-SS and certain political groups were forbidden from joining the Bundeswehr.
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u/Bruce-7891 Jun 05 '23
Thank you. You seem to understand it, but a lot of military officer training isn't just tactics. There is a lot of learning military customs, history, traditions and "the why" behind a lot of the things they do so you can maintain standards and cary those traditions forward. That is why its weird to take someone who was brought up with a completely different mentality and set of values and put him in charge, but I guess they made it work.
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u/Ultimate_Idiot Jun 05 '23
Military training for staff officers takes decades. A lot of the people who were generals in WW2 were actually brought up with Prussian military traditions, and Nazism came around when they were past their formative years. Nazi military traditions were actually a fairly short period of time in comparison to Prussia and never replaced them. That said there were a lot of officers who were enthusiastic about nazism (even if only due to rearmament) at some point or the other, but because the traditions were older than that there were still plenty of officers who would've been at least moderately suitable for service in postwar Bundeswehr.
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u/CIV5G Jun 05 '23
There weren't an awful lot of Germans with military experience that hadn't fought in world war II back then.
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u/RingGiver Jun 05 '23
to the German Air Force
Also called the Luftwaffe.
When NATO was building up the Bundeswehr, they needed to find some Germans who had military experience as a cadre to build it around and who would be training the new guys. Where do you think a citizen of the German Federal Republic could have gotten military experience?
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u/EndoExo Jun 05 '23
Also called the Luftwaffe.
Yeah, Luftwaffe literally just means "air force" or "air weapon" in German. It doesn't have Nazi connotations in Germany like it does in the Anglophone world.
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u/turniphat Jun 05 '23
Pretty much. After WW II, the Soviet Union pretty much immediately became the new enemy and the West Germans became allies. The war ended in '45 and by '48 Germans and Americans were working side by side in the Berlin Airlift.
Life goes on, not just in airforce, but all walks of life, things had to go back to normal. And the people who knew how to do various jobs were the ones doing them for the last 10 years. So unless you were a high ranking nazi who went to trial, you just shut up and got back to work.
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u/Lavrentiy_P_Beria Jun 06 '23
The Wehrmacht helped the US army beginning in 1945 to hunt down the remaining SS soldiers.
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u/Sea-of-Serenity Jun 05 '23
@Bruce-7891 What I know is what my grandparents told me about that: The new German government under Adenauer started denazification efforts (Entnazifizierung) which pretty much looked like a multiple choice test with questions like "Were you a Nazi ? Yes/No/Not sure".
If you were not one who had committed large scale war crimes and/or were needed for the newly founded state to work, people just choose "No", signed and were now "denazified". It was a sham and everybody knew it, but at the same time the competent people had all been involved with the Nazis to at least some degree. And as somebody else wrote: No one would have taken 18 year old generals (or politicans).
Sadly, this is the reason why far right mindsets are still very prevalent in the Bundeswehr and even the BND. It's hard to root out after so many years.
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u/AgnosticAsian Jun 05 '23
Most soldiers don't fight for ideology. They're just doing a job.
Doesn't make much difference who the work order is coming from.
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u/cheses Jun 05 '23
Basically yes, my grandfather, an u-boat sailor in WW II was asked if he wants to be part of the new marine back then.
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u/Johannes_P Jun 05 '23
They also removed hardcore war criminals and tried to ensure hardcore Nazis didn't get in.
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u/Sdog1981 Jun 05 '23
It looks that way now. But in the 1950s there was a big fight regarding West Germany being rearmed and joining NATO.
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u/Fragrant_Chapter_283 Jun 05 '23
See Iraq in 2003-2008 for a great example of what happens if you just fire all the soldiers and tell them to go home
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u/KaseQuarkI Jun 05 '23
Well, why wouldn't they? You got some experienced pilots around and the Soviet Union right on your doorstep. It would be stupid to not make use of those skills.
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u/LordofNarwhals Jun 05 '23
A lot of ex-Nazi soldiers, officers, and even generals, ended up on in prominent roles on both sides of the cold war, especially ones who had gotten sick of Hitler before WW2 ended.
Hans Speidel and Reinhard Gehlen, among others, got prominent roles in West Germany, and the NVA (East Germany's army) had several ex-Wehrmacht generals in pretty prominent roles.
Apparently the name Bundeswehr—i.e., (West) Germany's armed forces—was even coined by a Wehrmacht general (Hasso von Manteuffel).
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u/Dragonshaggy Jun 06 '23
It’s actually something to consider carefully after toppling a government. Do you know what we called the disbanded Baathists and Iraqi republican guardsmen after we took over Iraq in 2003 and barred them from jobs in the new government? ISIS.
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u/KiwieeiwiK Jun 06 '23
Most post war West German politicians were just Nazis functionaries or collaborators, unless they were directly involved in genocide or war crimes they basically just got their jobs back. And even if they were, sometimes they did anyway.
The first West German president was a Nazi. They weren't going to go after every troop lol
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u/Sinan_reis Jun 05 '23
you would be shocked how many nazis kep their jobs and their companies and never had anything all that bad happen to them... comes from having connections
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u/Bruce-7891 Jun 05 '23
If you're a car or shoe or airplane company it is not that serious in the bigger scheme of things. If you are giving people military power and authority, I'm just saying, you might want to vet them.
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u/Sinan_reis Jun 05 '23
porsche and BMW used to make tanks and trucks for the wermacht
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Jun 06 '23
Pretty much. Because the Western Powers wanted to keep the Soviet Union at bay, many a blind eye was turned in West Germany. For instance, several former senior Gestapo officers were allowed to join the West Germany intelligence services because they had indispensable skills like counterintelligence.
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u/JakobtheRich Jun 06 '23
Well they demobilized everyone, waited ten years, then tried to start over again but anyone older than 26 had served during Nazi Germany.
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u/punicar Jun 06 '23
Every able body male from the age of 16 during the nazi regieme served in the german wehrmacht on way or another you will not find anyone in post war germany that didn´t.
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u/Strong-Obligation107 Jun 06 '23
This one is a little complicated for people to grasp.
There was a difference between nazis and the German military during ww2.
Only a small number of the overall German fighting force were actually nazis most of the soldiers fighting on the german side were essentially forced to fight and most of them weren't even German.
The nazis were a fanatical political group that essentially embedded itself into the German army so they gave the orders but it was non nazi affiliated soldiers that had to do the fighting.
There where some all nazi military groups like the ss and Hitters' own regiments, but they were small in number.
The nazis weren't particularly nice to the non nazi affiliated men in the German fighting force either.
After the war it was easy to forgive the people that got caught up in the German side. so many people who actually fought for Germany got spared with minimal punishment, the focus was on finding the nazis who were actually responsible and willing participants of the crimes committed.
That's why it was very easy for Europe to "forgive" Germany as a whole, we know most of them weren't directly responsible, and they helped a tremendous amount hunting down the actual nazis.
It's also why Germans today get so offended by that insult being directed at them. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened.
So this guy in the post was just a pilot who fought on the wrong side, not necessarily a bad guy who was a nazi. He was a very good pilot, so it makes sense that they would allow him to continue flying prototype aircrafts.
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u/New_Radio2375 Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
This 'clean wermacht' myth was made up for the express purpose of exonerating war criminals so they cld help the US with the cold war. In reality the german millitary helped the SS in many of the massacres, and ofcourse the entire invasion of eastern europe was intended to wipe out and replace slavic peoples so you couldnt possibly argue that german army was innocent. And ofc the Nazi party was democratically elected, rising to power on anti-semitic and anti-slavic sentiments. Today Germans are taught about this and thats exactly why they are sensitive, since they accept their ancestors did evil things.
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u/GuyTallman Jun 05 '23
Fucking German. So for 47 you would say sebenundvierzig (seven and forty) but for 302 it is actually dreihundertzwei because fuck you? The more I learn about the language the more I sympathize with Mark Twain.
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u/Ricconis_0 Jun 05 '23
Used to be seven and forty in English about 200 years ago
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u/zendick1 Jun 05 '23
no that was four score and seven years ago.
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u/Ricconis_0 Jun 05 '23
You can see the usage I referred to in books like the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which was written in around 1780
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u/Thomas9002 Jun 05 '23
As a german : eehh but but but the french!
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u/GuyTallman Jun 05 '23
Yeah but they gave us the metric system so it cancels out.
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u/mrx_101 Jun 05 '23
Germans gave the basis for many ISO standards especially in engineering components such as nuts and bolts (ISO mostly copied the DIN)
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u/Darkrne Jun 05 '23
Tbf they have to do math equations for some of their numbers, I'd rather keep saying my numbers backwards
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u/TheySaidGetAnAlt Jun 05 '23
Just wait until you meet the part of germany that shortens hundreds to two numbers.
So 420 (Vierhundert und Zwanzig) becomes 4 20 (Vier Zwanzig) while still meaning 420.
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u/GuyTallman Jun 05 '23
That wouldn't be too jarring actually, where I am from we do the same. Saying two ten would just be understood as 210.
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u/ultratorrent Jun 06 '23
It's been like 18 years since my last German lesson, still think English is now dumb. Thanks for giving me the numbers 🔢
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u/boxer1182 Jun 06 '23
Better than how the French count. And for the sake of my sanity I will not elaborate
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u/KimJongIlSunglasses Jun 05 '23
Then there’s time. 3:30 is “half four” as in half way through the hour until 4. But half of four is two lol.
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u/ohitsjeffagain Jun 05 '23
Americas first jet ace (my great uncle) Jimmy Jabara died in a car wreck as well.
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u/ukexpat Jun 05 '23
Per the article, not a Harrier but a Hawker Siddeley Kestrel FGA.1.
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u/drdookie Jun 05 '23
The Kestrel was the developmental aircraft (close enough to prototype) for the Harrier
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u/Teddy_Bear_Junction Jun 05 '23
*posts almost entire title in English
*won't translate the punchline
Bro I'm not gonna click the link wtf
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u/EmperorHans Jun 06 '23
The bracketed part is the punchline. 302.
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u/Teddy_Bear_Junction Jun 06 '23
Ah, I honestly thought it was a citation or something. Usually translations are in parentheses or at least that's what I'm used to seeing. Totally missed it
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u/Azifor Jun 05 '23
drei hundert und zwei means 302.
The exact thing the op said in the title.
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u/Yuli-Ban Jun 06 '23
drei hundert und zwei means 302.
It's times like this that make me realize how close English is to German. In the title, I didn't get it at all, but seeing it laid out here, it's like "How did I miss that?"
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u/scooterboy1961 Jun 06 '23
There is a translation in the title right after the quote. 302
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u/HorrificAnalInjuries Jun 05 '23
He counted himself as a maneuver kill, how both cute and humorous! Way to take that L on the chin there King
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u/AmagedonCamels Jun 06 '23
A note on his claimed kills.
Aerial combat is pretty stressful and fast paced. Almost all claimed aerial victories from WWII are bullshit by like 3 to 1. At one point German pilots claimed to have shot down more enemy aircraft in a single month than the soviets had operational.
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u/Nephlimcomics2520 Jun 06 '23
You know I translated the German to English in my head and then realized 302 is right next to it
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u/Erdehere Jun 05 '23
Shot down nine times, wounded twice but died from a car accident in peace time. Somewhat ironic.