GREEN HEARTS First In Combat With The Dora 9

In the fall of 1944 death was a daily companion for German fighter pilots. During that late phase of World War II, III./JG 54 was the first Luftwaffe unit to be supplied with the new Fw 190 D-9 ‘Dora.’ After transition training at Oldenburg in northern Germany, the D-9s were used in base defence missions for me 262 jets of Kommando Nowotny, and later flights against allied fighters and fighter-bomber (Jabo) formations in the western Reichsgebiet.

For the young pilots of III./JG 54 these were months of senseless missions, resulting in heavy casualties, already overshadowed by the inevitable defeat of Germany. Nevertheless, despite only minor successes, the ‘Long-nosed Focke-Wulfs’ earned a legendary reputation against their numerically superior aerial foes – the USAAF and the RAF.

During the last ten years, German author and aviation researcher Axel Urbanke have meticulously accumulated material for this work. He tracked down former pilots of the Gruppe who are still living, as well as the families of pilots killed in action, and interviewed them about the events of that time. He visited locations where dogfights and crashes had taken place, and talked to eyewitnesses, at the same time conducting extensive research in German, American, and English military archives. Finally, Axel Urbanke integrated the results of his research with the actual 500-plus page wartime diary of III./JG 54, in which reports from participants, passages from Luftwaffe documents, excerpts from letters and diaries, and statements of witnesses on the ground vividly recall the events of more than fifty years ago. The points of view of the USAAF and the RAF pilots are also explored, and the reader gets to know the Allied units which fought against the ‘Doras’". their victories and losses, and even the fates of many of the downed pilots and crews from both sides.

" After years of research, Axel Urbanke has accurately portrayed those turbulent and tragic times in a sensitive and personal way. '' - Gerhard Kroll, former pilot of III./ JG 54

'' I found Axel Urbanke's book to be one of the best researched and most complete unit histories that has been my pleasure to read. I can only hope he carries on his efforts to deal with other lesser-known units of the Luftwaffe. '' - David Johnston, translator