When such a thing drops on a block of houses it simply vanishes, just falls to pieces. It was the greatest fun.¹¹⁴

HUNTING

A hunt consists of locating, pursuing, felling, and eviscerating game. Hunts come in various forms. The most common ones are the hunt in which a solitary rifle wielder goes after his prey together with a game dog, and the roundup, in which beaters drive the prey into the hunter’s sights. Hunting has a sporting aspect. The hunter has to be skillful and alert, smarter than his prey. He has to know how to hide, how to attack without being spotted, and how to shoot well. But hunting also entails special rules. One hunts only at particular times, for instance, and only shoots at individual animals.

Taken together, all these elements correspond to the demands placed upon a fighter pilot. (Indeed, the German for fighter pilot, Jagdflieger, contains the word for hunt Jagd.) This is why German fighter pilots understood what they did in the context of hunting. It was considered dishonorable, for instance, to fire upon enemy pilots who had ejected from their planes and were parachuting back to ground, even though these men were technically still enemies.¹¹⁶ Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland supposedly once deemed it “unworthy of a huntsman” to bombard groups of American bombers. The hunt is the source of the “fun” of which Luftwaffe POWs constantly spoke. The only other military men who talked about battle in such sporting terms were U-boat crews.

A good example of this trope is a metaphor used by German navy Lieutenant Wolf-Doetrich Danckworth, the only survivor from the German submarine U-224:

For soldiers, it made no difference whether the prey consisted of military or civilian targets. In his diary, an enthusiastic Ernst Jünger described how he finally, after two and a half years of war, succeeded in “felling” his first Englishman with a “precise” shot.¹¹⁸ Soldiers’ anecdotes were less concerned with who was killed and why than with the more spectacular results one had achieved. This, too, is an instance of how soldiers saw battle in terms of sports.

The more prominent or important the target, the greater the triumph, and the more interesting the stories that could be told about the kill: