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Defenders of the Reich: The Luftwaffe’s War against America’s Bombers
The story of the Luftwaffe fighter arm's desperate defence of the Third Reich from the growing Allied bomber offensive in World War II.
The Reichsverteidigung (Defence of the Reich) was a do or die campaign that saw the very best fighter pilots in the Luftwaffe attempt to defend German skies from increasingly large formations of RAF and USAAF medium and heavy bombers. Flying both piston-engined and, eventually, the first jet-engined fighters to see operational service, the Jagdflieger employed a wide range of weapons and tactics in an effort to blunt the Allied air offensive across Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe.
Defenders of the Reich focusses on the story of the pilot, his aircraft, his weaponry, his draining, dangerous missions and Luftwaffe tactics against the USAAF and the RAF bombers from the summer of 1942 through to VE Day. They fought until they were all but obliterated as USAAF and RAF fighters decimated their ranks in the air and targeted their airfields in devastating strafing attacks.
leading Luftwaffe historian Robert Forsyth uses German and Allied archival documents coupled with interviews with former Jagdwaffe pilots, to tell the history of this last-ditch aerial campaign from the perspective of the Luftwaffe.
The Reichsverteidigung (Defence of the Reich) was a do or die campaign that saw the very best fighter pilots in the Luftwaffe attempt to defend German skies from increasingly large formations of RAF and USAAF medium and heavy bombers. Flying both piston-engined and, eventually, the first jet-engined fighters to see operational service, the Jagdflieger employed a wide range of weapons and tactics in an effort to blunt the Allied air offensive across Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe.
Defenders of the Reich focusses on the story of the pilot, his aircraft, his weaponry, his draining, dangerous missions and Luftwaffe tactics against the USAAF and the RAF bombers from the summer of 1942 through to VE Day. They fought until they were all but obliterated as USAAF and RAF fighters decimated their ranks in the air and targeted their airfields in devastating strafing attacks.
leading Luftwaffe historian Robert Forsyth uses German and Allied archival documents coupled with interviews with former Jagdwaffe pilots, to tell the history of this last-ditch aerial campaign from the perspective of the Luftwaffe.
- GenresWorld War II
480 pages, Hardcover
First published November 4, 2025
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Robert Forsyth
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 20, 2025
I received an ARC from NetGalley of "Defenders of the Reich: The Luftwaffe’s War against America’s Bombers" by Robert Forsyth in exchange for this review. The Kindle edition is 466 pages in length with 27 chapters as well as Appendices covering single-engined fighter aces with 20 or more Viermot (4-engined bomber) victories and Zerstörer aces with ten or more Viermot victories as well as Sources, Selected Bibliography, Notes and Index.
This book is an excellent one-volume account of the Luftwaffe's fighter arm efforts to defend the Reich from Allied daytime bombing. The book starts off with the first efforts made by the RAF in bombing targets in occupied Europe at the start of the war, including the disastrous Battle of the Heligoland Bight in December 1939.
The following chapters then deal with the involvement of the USAAF early efforts at daytime bombing and each chapter follows the war chronologically until the fall of Nazi Germany. Throughout the book the author covers the German efforts to try and stop these bombing missions and provides details of the development of tactics, training, weapons and new aircraft.
The book is full of first-hand accounts from the German Jagdflieger's who flew against the Allied bomber armadas and their fighter escorts along with accounts from the crews of the B-17's and B-24's who faced the onslaught.
Taking on a four-engined bomber was no easy task:
"When a pilot was executing a head-on attack, it was calculated that, on average, it required 20 hits with 20mm shells from an MG 151/20 to bring down a heavy bomber. As the fighter closed in on its target, the combined approach speed would be approximately 805 km/h ay 183 m per second, and this allowed only a half-second burst from the fighter before it would forced to break away in order to avoid a collision with the bomber."
As the war progressed and the American raids become larger and larger the Luftwaffe had to find new ways of tackling the daylight bombing incursions by the USAAF. One option was the formation of a Sturmstaffel:
"By this time, the Sturmstaffel had received its first complement of Fw 190A-6s that featured the introduction of a lighter wing capable of accommodating increased armament in the form of four MG 151.20 cannon located in the wing roots and the outer panels, thus phasing out the old, slow-firing MG FF cannon. Two fuselage-mounted 7.9mm machine guns were also retained, and the aircraft featured additional protective armour around the cockpit.
These Focke-Wulfs constituted what was probably the first batch of aircraft to be armour-adapted specifically as Sturm (assault) fighters for close-range anti-bomber work. This also involved the fitting of 3 mm armoured glass panels - Panzerscheiben - around the standard glass cockpit side panels and a 50 mm plate of strengthened glass that would protect the pilot from the fire from dead ahead. According to Focke-Wulf reports, some problems were experienced fitting the glass panels to the cockpit due to the angle of curvature of the cockpit's sliding hood, but these were eventually solved. The installation of external 5 mm steel plates to the fuselage panelling around the cockpit area and the nose-cockpit join offered further protection from defensive fire. Additionally, the pilot's seat was fortified by five-millimetre steel plates and a 12 mm head protection panel. All these additions, however, increased the aircraft's weight."
Steadily the forces arrayed against the German fighter-arm was overwhelming with more and more of the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilots falling to the guns of the Allied fighter escorts:
"The levels of attrition among experienced fighter pilots and formation leaders continued to bite during December. On the 4th, one month after replacing the loss of 180-victory Knight's Cross recipient Major Kurt Brandle as Gruppenkommandeur of II./JG 3, Hauptmann Wilhelm Lemke suffered a similar fate when he too fell to P-47s whilst on patrol northwest of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Lemke had flown more than 600 missions, during which he had been credited with 131 victories, including 25 IL-2s in the East and three four-engined bombers in the West."
The Luftwaffe is not only losing its experienced combat leaders but also having issues with training their replacements:
"From October 1942 to June 1944 there was a marked reduction in the total elementary and operational training instruction time. In the periods October 1942 to June 1943 and July 1943 to June 1944, total training hours fell from 185-225 to 165-175, and there were corresponding falls in the time allocated to operational types of aircraft. Gunnery training also suffered. In an effort to overcome this, in 1943 Galland set up six mobile gunnery training staffs equipped with the latest armament, sights and training aids to tour fighter airfields."
The author highlights the high and the lows of both the Luftwaffe fighter arm and the Allied bombing effort during this campaign. The story is well told and engaging throughout and is helped by the numerous accounts from the participants.
The author also brings to light the various weapons and ideas that the Germans came up with to try and destroy allied bombers, some weird and never implemented and others that had a major impact on the fighting and losses suffered by the Allies. These include the extraordinary efforts to make the German fighters more efficient with upgrades to the Focke-Wulf 190, the introduction of the Me 163 Komet and the Me 262 fighter jet along with various weapon systems.
Overall, this is a well-researched and well written book and any reader who enjoys WW2 aviation history will be well served in having a copy of this book in their library.
This book is an excellent one-volume account of the Luftwaffe's fighter arm efforts to defend the Reich from Allied daytime bombing. The book starts off with the first efforts made by the RAF in bombing targets in occupied Europe at the start of the war, including the disastrous Battle of the Heligoland Bight in December 1939.
The following chapters then deal with the involvement of the USAAF early efforts at daytime bombing and each chapter follows the war chronologically until the fall of Nazi Germany. Throughout the book the author covers the German efforts to try and stop these bombing missions and provides details of the development of tactics, training, weapons and new aircraft.
The book is full of first-hand accounts from the German Jagdflieger's who flew against the Allied bomber armadas and their fighter escorts along with accounts from the crews of the B-17's and B-24's who faced the onslaught.
Taking on a four-engined bomber was no easy task:
"When a pilot was executing a head-on attack, it was calculated that, on average, it required 20 hits with 20mm shells from an MG 151/20 to bring down a heavy bomber. As the fighter closed in on its target, the combined approach speed would be approximately 805 km/h ay 183 m per second, and this allowed only a half-second burst from the fighter before it would forced to break away in order to avoid a collision with the bomber."
As the war progressed and the American raids become larger and larger the Luftwaffe had to find new ways of tackling the daylight bombing incursions by the USAAF. One option was the formation of a Sturmstaffel:
"By this time, the Sturmstaffel had received its first complement of Fw 190A-6s that featured the introduction of a lighter wing capable of accommodating increased armament in the form of four MG 151.20 cannon located in the wing roots and the outer panels, thus phasing out the old, slow-firing MG FF cannon. Two fuselage-mounted 7.9mm machine guns were also retained, and the aircraft featured additional protective armour around the cockpit.
These Focke-Wulfs constituted what was probably the first batch of aircraft to be armour-adapted specifically as Sturm (assault) fighters for close-range anti-bomber work. This also involved the fitting of 3 mm armoured glass panels - Panzerscheiben - around the standard glass cockpit side panels and a 50 mm plate of strengthened glass that would protect the pilot from the fire from dead ahead. According to Focke-Wulf reports, some problems were experienced fitting the glass panels to the cockpit due to the angle of curvature of the cockpit's sliding hood, but these were eventually solved. The installation of external 5 mm steel plates to the fuselage panelling around the cockpit area and the nose-cockpit join offered further protection from defensive fire. Additionally, the pilot's seat was fortified by five-millimetre steel plates and a 12 mm head protection panel. All these additions, however, increased the aircraft's weight."
Steadily the forces arrayed against the German fighter-arm was overwhelming with more and more of the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilots falling to the guns of the Allied fighter escorts:
"The levels of attrition among experienced fighter pilots and formation leaders continued to bite during December. On the 4th, one month after replacing the loss of 180-victory Knight's Cross recipient Major Kurt Brandle as Gruppenkommandeur of II./JG 3, Hauptmann Wilhelm Lemke suffered a similar fate when he too fell to P-47s whilst on patrol northwest of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Lemke had flown more than 600 missions, during which he had been credited with 131 victories, including 25 IL-2s in the East and three four-engined bombers in the West."
The Luftwaffe is not only losing its experienced combat leaders but also having issues with training their replacements:
"From October 1942 to June 1944 there was a marked reduction in the total elementary and operational training instruction time. In the periods October 1942 to June 1943 and July 1943 to June 1944, total training hours fell from 185-225 to 165-175, and there were corresponding falls in the time allocated to operational types of aircraft. Gunnery training also suffered. In an effort to overcome this, in 1943 Galland set up six mobile gunnery training staffs equipped with the latest armament, sights and training aids to tour fighter airfields."
The author highlights the high and the lows of both the Luftwaffe fighter arm and the Allied bombing effort during this campaign. The story is well told and engaging throughout and is helped by the numerous accounts from the participants.
The author also brings to light the various weapons and ideas that the Germans came up with to try and destroy allied bombers, some weird and never implemented and others that had a major impact on the fighting and losses suffered by the Allies. These include the extraordinary efforts to make the German fighters more efficient with upgrades to the Focke-Wulf 190, the introduction of the Me 163 Komet and the Me 262 fighter jet along with various weapon systems.
Overall, this is a well-researched and well written book and any reader who enjoys WW2 aviation history will be well served in having a copy of this book in their library.
September 23, 2025
"Defenders of the Reich: The Luftwaffe's War Against America's Bombers," written by Robert Forsyth and being published under the Osprey imprint (and graciously provided to me in the form of an ARC), is in my mind, the finest book on its subject presently available. Both the novice reader and the seasoned historian will find much here to change and shape their understanding of the titanic aerial battles which erupted over the Third Reich and its conquered territories when the Americans hurled their industrial and technological resources at Nazi Germany in company with the British night campaign conducted in parallel with surprisingly little coordination, in my view at least. Forsyth's mastery of his material leaps from every page, and his writing style is accessible and enlightening, never more so than when he puts the reader in the cockpits of German fighters engaging the ubiquitous B-17's and their escorts as these became available. Without neglecting the strategic landscape, Forsyth's concentration on technology and tactical matters is extremely enlightening and reads almost like a good novel. It is important to note that the author is not principally concerned with the RAF's night campaign and focuses tightly if not exclusively on the daytime raids at the heart of America's more strategic campaign to deny the Wehrmacht access to the weapons and fuel needed to carry on in the war. It is the rare author that notes that the Germans were acutely aware of the shadow of the B-29 Superfortress looming on the horizon and had a very good appreciation of how disastrous its arrival in the European Theatre of Operations would have been for the Axis. This awareness colored their attitudes towards the new technology coming online at the end of the war (the so called "wonder weapons"). In a sense, many of the tactical and technological decisions implemented by the Luftwaffe were a direct consequence of their growing understanding of the disparity between their technology and industrial base and that of the Americans. This book belongs in every collection purporting to look at modern scholarship on World War II.
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