Alert in the West: A Luftwaffe Pilot on the Western Front

by Willi Heilmann

Willi Heilmann was an experienced "Jagdflieger" (fighter pilot) who served with the Third Group of the 54th Fighter Wing (III/JG-54) in the West from the Spring of 1944 to the end of the war in May 1945. This is his story, full of hair-raising escapes from fierce dogfights over France and Germany. It shows the bravery, fear, and mounting fatigue of a group of German fighter pilots who did their utmost to try to maintain Germany's hold in the West, only to be gradually pushed back to the frontiers of the Reich and into the heart of Germany.

This book is also a commentary on the Luftwaffe's final attempt to regain air superiority prior to and in the aftermath of the Allied landings in Normandy.

159 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2003

About the author

Willi Heilmann served as a Luftwaffe fighter pilot in the Third Gruppe of the 54th Fighter Wing (III/JG 54) during the Second World War, seeing action on both the Eastern and Western Fronts.

Reviews

[Miles Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had read the book description more carefully when I bought it, because it turns out I have already read ALERT IN THE WEST under another, more melodramatic name: I FOUGHT YOU FROM THE SKIES. Having said that, I had largely forgotten the events depicted, so it was hardly a tedious task to give it a re-read. Indeed, of all German war memoirs I have read, this one probably reads closest to a novel in terms of sheer pace.

Willi Heilmann was a Focke-Wulf 190 pilot assigned to the German Luftwaffe's famous "Green Hearts" fighter wing. From 1944 until the end of WW2 he flew both ground attack and air intercept missions against the British and American air forces in France, and later Germany. His tale is a grim one, for as the narrative opens Germany is already teetering on the brink of disaster, with the Allies landing in France while the Soviets press hard in the East. Every day, Heilmann and his mates take off against overwhelming numbers of enemy aircraft, and suffer appalling losses as they try to carry out their various missions, assigned to them by "parade ground stallions" who do not even know how to fly. As the war goes on, losses mount, friends die, and a sense of numbing futility grips the few survivors. They cannot win, but neither will their sense of duty allow them to surrender or seek ground assignments. Two, three, four times a day they take off under fire to dog-fight or drop bombs on advancing Allied forces. Many missions end with Heilmann swinging from a parachute, watching his aircraft describe a fiery streak into the earth beneath him.

As an emotional memoir this is a very important book, because Heilmann is brutally honest about the way he feels. He's an unrepentant German nationalist, angrily contemptuous of the Nazis and Hitler but equally hateful toward the Allies. He views Germany as the Job of Europe, tasked to suffer. He asks no larger questions about the origins of the war or the morality of service to the Nazi regime. As a kind of breathless sketch of the last year of the Luftwaffe it is also very valuable. Overwhelmed, undermanned, poorly led and badly disorganized, not to mention hopelessly outnumbered, it nevertheless managed to keep up offensive operations until the last days of the war under appallingly bad conditions. Aircraft were plentiful, but pilots were scarce and increasingly badly-trained, leading to terrible losses. A few "experten" carried the load for everyone, and Heilmann was one of them, a first-class combat pilot with many "kills" and very pointed opinions about the quality and character of his British and American opponents. He must have been fantastically courageous to take on those odds day after day with little hope of survival. He certainly had a ferocious sense of duty.

I rated ALERT three stars because I feel it was to some extent a missed opportunity. This book is a memoir in the fullest sense of the word, meaning simply one man's recollection of past events with no obligation to reconcile them with the cold record, and no footnotes to explain some of his more cryptic remarks or references. It is a work of raw emotional honesty that appears to have been written in a white heat of anger and remembrance, with little in the way of subsequent drafts. The translation from German to (British) English is poor, and the book is full of mistakes a sharp-eyed editor would have spotted immediately. What's more, it tells only a fragment of the author's story. Heilmann was a decorated infantry officer before he became a fighter pilot, including some harrowing experiences in Russia (five days playing dead in a pile of corpses while the Russians marched past) but there are only a few tiny references to this, or to his life before the war, and nothing about his life after it.

ALERT is a very readable book, in many ways very much like a novel given his dramatic sense of style, but it is quite slovenly in execution and in my estimation, only a third of the story it could have been. I can recommend it with no reservations, but I also believe it could have been considerably better. A better-executed book, written in the same spirit and with the same passion, is Heinz Knoke's provocative yet absolutely gripping I FLEW FOR THE FUEHRER.

[Batur Avgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it over 20 years ago but I do remember that it was not a special book compared to other memoirs of Luftwaffe pilots. The author Willi Heilmann was a commander of 15th Staffel of JG26 in April 1945. He claimed in his book that he discharged his staffel and sent the crews to return their homes a few days before the war ended. According to JG26 War Diary V.2 of Don Caldwell, however, this was completely a lie. During a mission on 5 April 1945, other pilots of his staffel saw Willi Heilmann landing his apparently undamaged Fw190D-9 at Münster-Handorf airbase which was well known by everybody in the unit that it was under British control. So, he simply deserted. Therefore the author deliberately distracted the history.

[Robert Hepple · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1955, 'Alert in the West' is an account by WW2 Luftwaffe pilot Willi Heilmann of his time with III/JG54 from the spring of 1944 until the end of the war in Europe, much of this as leader of 9 Staffel. The book has, allegedly been previously been published under the title 'I fought You from the Skies', but I cannot verify this. Some reviewers have cast some doubt over some of the historical details, and I am not a bit surprised having read it. I put this down mainly to it having been written by a non-historian with little or no attempt to verify many of the less than accurate reminiscences - nowadays anecdotal evidence is often vetted for mis-remembered details. It is interesting, but suspect at times.

[Singleton Mosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best Luftwaffe personal accounts to be found.