Hans Joachim Marseille the fighter pilot was trouble - but if he was trouble to his Luftwaffe superiors then he was more than trouble to the Allied fighter pilots of the Western Desert. It was here that he found both his mark and his fame. Robin Schäfer tells the extraordinary story of Germany’s rebellious Top Gun of North Africa.
WAR IN THE AIR | SECOND WORLD WAR
I first heard about Hans Joachim Marseille in 1990 when I was just 14 years old. I was visiting my grandmother and had been telling her about another great German pilot, Adolf Galland, whose book I had just read and whom I had been allowed to visit at his house in Königswinter a week before, (it is something I still very much like to talk about!) When I told my grandmother about having met the former General of the Luftwaffe, CO of the feared ‘Abbeville boys’ and the legendary Jagdverband 44, she was rather unimpressed. “He’s the one with the moustache isn’t he?”, thus reducing my idol and personal hero to the mere growth on his upper lip.
She then added: “Marseille is a pilot I remember well, I even had a photograph of him. He was very handsome and looked like a movie star. Back then, all the girls adored him. He was known as the Star of Af…
