Introduction. ASK ANY WORLD WAR II VETERAN OF THE AMERICAN EIGHTH

Introduction

ASK ANY WORLD WAR II VETERAN OF THE AMERICAN EIGHTH

Air Force or the Royal Air Force's Fighter Command about the Abbeville Kids, and he'll tell you stories of Goering's elite yellow-nosed fighter unit, whose ferocious, slashing attacks on the Allied bomber and fighter formations always seemed to come from the most favorable tactical position—either from head-on, or from out of the sun. Their fame was legendary; their complex of bases behind the French coast of the English Channel was to be avoided, if at all possible.

Read the official Allied histories of the air war, and you'll get a different story. The Luftwaffe had had no elite fighter units; therefore, the Abbeville Kids had never existed. Period. What was the truth? As always in war, " truth" was a flexible commodity, to be molded as needed by the propagandists. Generals rarely praise an enemy's exploits " on the record": to do so encourages an excess of respect, or even fear, for the opposition. However, Allied air intelligence, and thus the Allied High Command, kept a watchful eye from 1941 to mid-1944 on one specific German fighter unit, the one they considered to be the best in the Luftwaffe—Jagdgeschwader 26, commonly abbreviated JG 26. JG 26 gained its greatest notoriety in 1942, when its most successful subordinate unit was based at Abbeville in northern France. The nicknames " Abbeville Boys" and " Abbeville Kids" were coined by the opposing Allied aircrews. The German pilots heard the terms from captured airmen and good-naturedly adopted the names for themselves.

It is true that JG 26 was never officially designated by the Luftwaffe as an elite formation. It became one, nevertheless; initially as a result of outstanding leadership, and then as a

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