Adolf Joseph Ferdinand Galland had to fly. He grew up in the Westphalia region of Germany in the wake of the Great War, the second of four sons, and from his earliest conscious memory worshipped the aces of aerial combat. One wouldn’t know by Adolf’s adulation that Germany had lost the war because to him, the air aces—including Manfred von Richthofen with an astonishing eighty kills, Ernst Udet with sixty-two, and Erich Löwenhardt with fifty-four—were akin to the knights of the Middle Ages.
But Germany and her ally Austria-Hungary had indeed lost the war. The bones of millions littering the Low Countries served as proof that this had indeed been a great war, and losing it had cost Germany dearly—thirteen percent of her land and all her military might under horrible terms, agreeing to pay staggering sums in war reparations to France and England.
Within a year hyperinflation hit Germany to such an extent that soon war reparations couldn’t be paid, which led French and Belgian troops to invade the industrial Ruhr Valley for the purpose of taking reparations by force. With a worthless currency and occupation by foreign armies to seize goods, Germany’s humiliation was complete.
Beginning in 1924 economic prosperity returned to Europe, even seeping into volatile Germany, which entered a period known as Goldene Zwanziger, the Golden Twenties, when a liberal backlash and new post-war cynicism took hold.
Young Adolf Galland—nicknamed Dolfo—spent life as oblivious to the renaissance of German society as he had been to its economic disintegration. He was at that time a teenager and a terrible student in traditional schooling, but one who excelled at sports. His greatest passion was girls, far and away, but among other passions were target shooting, model airplanes, and fast cars and motorcycles. He combined the latter at age fifteen when he discovered sailplaning. The wealth of his father made this possible.
Sailplaning involved sitting inside a light glider launched to altitude by a catapult. The pilot of the glider needed a keen eye and deft touch to find the lift and, under the right atmospheric conditions, sail unencumbered for dozens of kilometers and a half hour or more per flight. Dolfo didn’t find the lift his first time out and crashed upon launch from the catapult. His second flight went better, and soon he was staying up for two or three minutes and then five.
Before long, Dolfo had earned his pilot’s rating after a one-hour flight in a sailing competition in the Rhön Mountains. A pilot’s rating in Germany signified much more skill than a private pilot’s license in the United States; it meant that Galland could now instruct and perform in air shows. He had become obsessed and spent all his spare time finding the lift in the silent, solitary world high above the earth, becoming one hell of an aviator.
The Great Depression hit Germany full force and the economy crashed, taking all commercial enterprises with it, including passenger aviation. In such an environment, Galland sought to become a pilot for the airlines, the only problem being that so did seemingly every other young man in Germany, so popular had sailplaning become. No one could afford to fly as a passenger, yet everyone sought to become a commercial pilot.
Against all odds—or maybe not since he was handsome, accomplished, and charming—Dolfo Galland landed one of twenty slots at the German airline pilot school in Braunschweig, Germany, which was, in reality, a training facility for military pilots when no such training was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles. Galland saw himself on track to become a commercial pilot, not a military flier; if any of the other students saw the real intentions of the pilot school, no one said anything. As far as they all knew, there were no military fliers—or planes to put them in.
The elite twenty traveled to a remote facility in the Soviet Union where the curriculum proved demanding in all respects. For the first time in his life, Galland found balance between the physical activity he loved and the mental discipline he lacked. By this time, the shadow aviation department within the German War Ministry knew they had a special talent in young Galland and selected him along with four of the original twenty airline pilot trainees to return from the Soviet Union and report to Berlin and the Central Air Line Pilot School. There they learned the truth: These five had been carefully vetted for a course training military pilots—a top-secret operation. Were they interested in becoming the foundation for a new German air force? Galland said an immediate yes and suddenly found himself in league with the idols of his boyhood, the air aces of the Great War.