Originally Posted by
kenparry
Yes, that's right. I was told that he demolished one of the Kestrels in a landing accident, from which he escaped intact. On leaving the wreck he was alleged to have said "Three hundred and two".
"What do you mean, Colonel?"
"In World War 2 I shot down three hundred and one allied aircraft. So this makes 302 for me."
He spent most of his war on the Eastern Front, where the pickings were allegedly easy at times.
Yep, he did prang a Kestrel and utter that comment after being helped out of the damaged aircraft.
Yes, all of his 301 victories were achieved on the Eastern Front, but he wasn't that prolific a scorer in the early days of invasion of USSR, when pickings were easy. Although he flew as a junior pilot for a while during the Battle of Britain, he did not score his first victory until July 1941, a month after Barbarossa started. Unlike some of his fellow pilots, he'd only raised his score to 10 by the end of November '41....others had chalked up 7 or 8 times that amount in the same time.
It was more the fact that he flew combat pretty much non-stop up and survived that long, that the slow steady score added up to a lot. He was the first German pilot to fly 1000 combat missions. He managed to survive being shot down 9 times, although not without major injury in May '44.
He was one of the first 6 pilots of the new West German Airforce to be retrained when it was formed in the mid 50's, 3 being trained in the USA by the USAF, and 3 (incl Barkhorn) by the RAF in the UK.
He retired from the airforce in 1976, and died along with his wife of 40 years, as a result of a car crash in Germany in 1983.