Chasing the Enigma of Egon Mayer

Dearest Old Bolds, Friends, and Family,

Right now I’m in Freiburg in southern Germany, at the German military archive. This visit caps off a world tour of archives where I have been gathering information to help piece together the life of the fighter pilot who shot down four B-24’s in 13 minutes on January 7, 1944. Originally, I envisioned Egon Mayer would not play a large role in my first book. But as I looked into the lives and records of all those involved, I realized the story would not, could not, begin with the arrival of the American 389th Bomb Group in England in June 1943.

By then, Egon was most likely the last remaining officer in JG2 who had participated in the Battle of Britain. His long and very successful career, and his life, were nearly over by the time the Americans engaged. Between 1940 and 1943, he had shot down dozens of British planes, mostly Spitfires, defended the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on the Channel Dash, fought in the air over Dieppe, and become the first recorded German to execute the 12 o’clock high attack against American bombers. He was the commander of the Richthofen Fighter Wing, and although he gets occasional mentions here and there, no one has ever really written about him.

But who was he? He didn’t survive the war. Without any first-hand accounts of him, and nearly no surviving Luftwaffe records, I set off to see what I could discover of his military record from the Allied side.

Egon shot down American planes, usually more than one, on 15 separate days during the war. At the American archives this summer, I scanned in the voluminous files of every bomber group that flew each day, and downloaded the Missing Air Crew Report of each bomber and fighter lost on those 15 days. The Germans recorded plane crashes in their territory in Luftgaukommando reports, which we captured at the end of the war and have never returned. Those got scanned in too. If men survived and evaded back to Britain, I got their Escape and Evasion reports.

Preparing the list of days and each group in the air that day took nearly a month. Working six days a week, 12-14 hours per day, scanning the paper files and downloading the digital ones took six full weeks this summer in College Park.

It took over another full month to prepare for the trip to the British archives. Egon Mayer shot down British planes on 42 days during the war.

42.

In total, I needed over 2,000 files of all the fighters and bombers that flew on those days and at those times, which, luckily, had already been mostly digitized by the British archivists. Mercifully, I was able to download them all in three days in Kew at the end of September.

After a weekend in Berlin with friends, I picked up Charley, and we attended the Knight’s Cross meeting, where Charley could spend time with old friends and give an illustrious BBC crew an interview.

We then took our time getting down to Freiburg, splitting the driving segments up over days so that we could enjoy a more leisurely pace than our punishing travel schedule of the last years.

Charley’s health deteriorated a year ago to the point that I thought he would be wheelchair – bound for the rest of his life.  But the frustration and rage at being at the mercy of caregivers, who are not always respectful, compassionate, or kind, has driven him to work towards independence in many of his daily activities.  He relearned how to do everything for himself, and refused to be left behind on this trip. With a few modifications, I’m the very pleased beneficiary of his presence. I am inspired and awed by his example.

Together here in Freiburg, during misty mornings in the vale of dark, low mountains, we have at least found one tiny segment of Luftwaffe records that survived the war – flight logs of Egon’s 7. Staffel (Squadron) for a couple of months while he was its commander, in conjunction with some claims he submitted in the same time frame.  It’s more than many seekers ever find in the ravaged holdings of this forlorn archive.

After our three days here, we will return to the Egon’s birthplace near Lake Constance, on the border to both Switzerland and Austria. There we will travel to the mountain where Egon learned as a teenager to fly a crude glider in 1934.

Will the vista tell me any more about this enigmatic man?

We will let you know.

With love,

Heather