Wednesday, October 26, 2022

German Reconnaissance Pilot



Luftwaffe Fernaufklärer (long-distance reconnaissance pilot) with his aircraft in 1940. He is wearing Fliegerkopfhaube (aviator head cover) and Fliegerschutzbrille (aviator goggles). Despite a considerable technological and numerical head start, Germany gradually neglected aerial reconnaissance, at least relative to Britain. The reason, grounded in history and geography, was that Germany had no strategic bombing doctrine and viewed air power as an auxiliary of land armies. Numerous Aufklärungs (up-clearing, i.e. reconnaissance) units were established for marine and ground support purposes, but while this was effective in the tactical sense, the intellectual investment in interpretation, analysis, and strategic estimation lagged. From the German perspective, this was defensible considering that about 90% of the action lay in large land-battles in the East, and an expensive long-range air capability would have been unlikely to effectively change the outcome.

Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_reconnaissance_in_World_War_II
https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/threads/airwar-ww2-the-pilots.54010/page-16

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