I was reading the wikipedia article about German ace Erich Hartmann, which details his training. It took him two years of training between the moment he joined the airforce and the moment when he was first assigned to a combat position. And he was already a licensed civilian pilot when he joined.
This seems incredible to me. I can’t imagine that, say, the USA, could afford to spend two years training pilots before they would be able to fly the thousands of aircrafts that were produced. If it had been the case, they would barely have been ready for the very last months of the war.
So, how long typically lasted pilot training during this conflict?
Before WWII, pilots trained for about a year. In 1940, this was reduced to 7 months. From 1942 onward it was increased to one week of preliminary training, then four training periods of 9 weeks each, for a total of about 8 1/2 months.
It should also be noted that U.S. pilots were rotated out after a certain amount of time in combat. German pilots didn’t have this luxury. While the German pilots may have spent more time training, they also served for a much longer time. The longer service time combined with a generally higher level of experience contributed to the higher number of kills among German aces compared to U.S. aces.
Also, prior to 1942, German fighter pilots typically received about 13 months of training. Bomber and reconnaissance pilots received about 20 months of training.
After 1942, training programs were streamlined and shortened. By 1944, German pilots were getting about half of the training time as their British or U.S. counterparts.
Well, that 2 years was probably more than just flight training. Based on what I know of Wehrmacht training, people had to enlist and serve for some period before being selected for officer training, which took time in its own right. In modern-day terms, all officers had to enlist, then go to OCS.
So you probably had some period of basic training, some period of enlisted service, officer schooling, then various sorts of flight schooling (which they may have passed him out of the early stages, considering he was a pilot going in), and then probably some sort of air combat schooling (dogfighting, etc…) .
Just being trained as a pilot probably wasn’t the entire time he mentions.
At times, pilots barely knew how to fly, and were then sent into combat in a completely different airframe in what they had learned. And then this:
“According to the AAF Statistical Digest, in less than four years (December 1941- August 1945), the US Army Air Forces lost 14,903 pilots, aircrew and assorted personnel plus 13,873 airplanes — inside the continental United States. They were the result of 52,651 aircraft accidents (6,039 involving fatalities) in 45 months.”
Which was why they sent a lot of people to learn to fly in Canada, and southern Africa, and in the USA under commercial contract. Plenty of space and sunshine.
Not just inexperienced pilots, and not just in wartime. The Right Stuff starts off with a chapter about Navy test pilots in the 1950s. Those pilots had something like a 25% chance of dying in an accident.
By contrast to American (and other Allied) practice, the Japanese had very rigorous and lengthy training for pilots, washing out a very high percentage of aspiring flyers.
The result was that they experienced a critical shortage of pilots due to losses in action, the remaining experienced pilots were heavily overworked and they eventually had to drastically shorten training (but it was too late to alleviate the pilot shortage).
Everything I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot!) has said that early on (1942-1943) the 25 mission mark was set because that was the 50/50 point- half of the crewmen would make 25 missions, and 25 would not.
Now whether an entire crew makes it through unscathed, that seems much more unlikely than even 25%.
Later in 1944, the USAAF raised the cap to 35 missions, as the aerial opposition by the Luftwaffe had drastically diminished as a result of the 8th AF basically using the heavies as bait to draw up the German fighters and destroy them.
By 1944, the Japanese had lost most of their experienced pilots and their planes were not qualitatively as well as quantitatively inferior the the US counterparts, and add that to the gap in pilot ability then it become a massacre.
Note that at the start of WWII, it was typical to take four years or more to train an American pilot too, as most of them had to be officers. After the start of WWII, officer training and college programs were heavily abbreviated, allowing a cadet to graduate and commission as a Second Lieutenant after only two years of training (this happened to Robin Olds while he was at Westpoint). I don’t recall if they typically did job-specific training while they were in ROTC or the Academies (aside from pilots, you’d have all sorts of other specialities), but I know flying isn’t quite like falling off of a bicycle, it takes a good bit of practice and time to get through the program, as it is a very easy way to get yourself killed quickly if you do something wrong.
It wasn’t just luxury though - veteran US pilots were brought back to train other US pilots, which increased the overall quality of pilots even if it didn’t lead to extremely high kill counts. This combined with other limits on the Luftwaffe meant that the US tended to have a lot of good pilots, while Germany had a few super aces but a lower average skill level overall.