Hermann Göring had promised the Luftwaffe would complete the destruction of the encircled armies, but aerial operations did not prevent the evacuation of the majority of Allied troops ( which the British named Operation Dynamo ); some 330, 000 French and British were saved.

J. P. Harris states that most Luftwaffe leaders from Goering through the general staff believed as did their counterparts in Britain and the United States that strategic bombing was the chief mission of the air force and that given such a role, the Luftwaffe would win the next war and that:

On 20 March 1939, Ribbentrop summoned the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys to Berlin and informed him that if a Lithuanian plenipotentiary did not arrive at once to negotiate turning over the Memelland to Germany the Luftwaffe would raze Kaunas to the ground.

The Luftwaffe did not apparently have an official policy of terror bombing in which civilians were deliberately targeted, but the effects of the raids on Guernica and Madrid caused many civilian casualties and a wave of protests in the democracies.

One of the many reasons for the failure of the Luftwaffe in 1940 was that it did not have the operational and material means to destroy the British aircraft industry.

As with the late shift to fighter production, the Luftwaffe pilot schools did not give the fighter pilot schools preference soon enough.

Moreover, Luftwaffe leadership from the start poached the training command, which undermined its ability to replace losses, while also planning for " short sharp campaigns ", which did not pertain.

The SS rank system was unique in that it did not copy the terms and ranks used by the Wehrmacht's branches ( Heer (" army "), Luftwaffe (" air force "), and Kriegsmarine (" navy ")), but instead used the ranks established by the post-World War I Freikorps and taken over by the SA.

Towards the end of the war, the Dornier Do 335 Pfeil could have been an ideal twin-engined Zerstörer fighter design for the Luftwaffe due to its center-line-thrust format, which placed its fuselage-mounted twin engines ' propellers on opposing ends of the fuselage, and potentially allowed much better maneuverability, and did allow dramatically higher speeds ( just over 750 km / h or 465 mph ), than any other twin-piston-engined aircraft of its era, but like so many other advanced German aircraft designs that were actually produced by Germany late in the war, the Do 335 never had the chance to be produced in quantity.

The Luftwaffe did not take such a fatalistic view of air warfare, and continued to research accurate night bombing against smaller targets.

The Luftwaffe, finally realising that the British had been deploying countermeasures from the very first day that the system was used operationally completely lost faith in electronic navigation aids ( as the British government had predicted ), and did not deploy any further system against Britain, although by this time Hitler's attention was turning toward Eastern Europe.

He also recognised the innovation of drop tanks to extend the range of aircraft as well as the need for specialised tactics for escorting bomber fleets ; Galland did not subscribe to the prevailing idea in the Luftwaffe ( and RAF ) that the bomber " would always get through " ( alone ).

The Luftwaffe did not match this effort.

This scheme was not put into effect: it was postulated that the Luftwaffe did not have enough planes to effectively deliver the forgeries, and by that time the operation was in the hands of SS foreign intelligence.

The Luftwaffe, however, did not actually use many of the Hortens ' designs until 1942, but gave enthusiastic support to a twin-turbojet-powered fighter / bomber design, designated under wartime protocols as the Horten H. IX.

It is understandable that Dowding did not fight back given the stress he had been under for the best part of a year, first to conserve Fighter Command then to oversee the long battle of attrition against the Luftwaffe.

Luftwaffe aircraft did not often display nose art, but there were exceptions.

Because of the thick clouds and rain over the area the Luftwaffe did not attack the American bomber fleet, as the Germans believed that because of the weather the American bombers would be incapable of attacking their targets.

Although the Luftwaffe could, and did, mount effective attacks on the ever larger formations of Allied heavy bombers, the sheer numbers of B-17s and B-24s attacking enemy targets was overwhelming the German fighter force, which simply could not sustain the losses the Eighth Air Force bombers and fighters were inflicting on it.

These preparations did not prove fruitful in the invasion of Poland, where the Luftwaffe focused on interdiction and dedicated few assets to close air support.

Sympathetic to their plight ( and also aware that Luftwaffe POWs in allied hands could suffer reprisals if he did not intervene ) the German officer organized their transfer from Buchenwald to a legitimate prisoner of war camp i. e. Stalag Luft III in Poland.

Taoiseach Éamon de Valera stated in his wartime speeches that small states should stay out of the conflicts of big powers ; hence Ireland's policy was officially " neutral ", and the country did not publicly declare its support for either side although in practice, while Luftwaffe pilots who crash-landed in Ireland and German sailors were interned, Royal Air Force ( RAF ), Royal Canadian Air Force ( RCAF ), and United States Army Air Forces ( USAAF ) pilots who crashed were usually allowed to cross the border into British territory ( although some Allied personnel were also interned ).

KG 200, unusual for a Geschwader-designated Luftwaffe unit, only consisted of two operational Gruppen ; several others were planned but did not become operational before the end of the war.

Wever's participation in the construction of the Luftwaffe came to an abrupt end on 3 June 1936 when he was killed along with his engineer in a Heinkel He 70 Blitz.

The absence of a strategic bomber force for the Luftwaffe, following General Wever's accidental death in 1936 and the end of the Ural bomber program he fostered before the invasion of Poland, would not be addressed again until the authorization of the Bomber B design competition in July 1939, which sought to replace the medium bomber force with which the Luftwaffe was to begin the war, with more advanced, twin-engined high speed bomber aircraft fitted with pairs of relatively " high-power " engines of 1, 500 kW ( 2, 000 hp ) output levels and upwards each, that would also be able to function as shorter range heavy bombers.

By the end of 1940 the Luftwaffe had suffered heavy losses and needed to regroup.

* Book Review of American Raiders – discusses some of the Luftwaffe secrets captured at the end of the war.

However by the end of the war the Luftwaffe was having similar problems attacking Allied bombers, and developed a number of radio command guided anti-aircraft missiles, none of which saw service.

During the Second World War large flares were placed on the western end of the island in an attempt to mislead Luftwaffe bombers away from the port of Poole.

At the end of the war, the town center was attacked by the German Luftwaffe, in an attempt to delay the Soviet advance.

During the Blitz on Sheffield by the Luftwaffe, the bombers used the dam at the end of Stocksbridge as a turning point for their run back toward Sheffield.

In the end, the Germans failed to attain air superiority, although the RAF had been eating into its reserves during the battle, as had the Luftwaffe.

By the end of the first week in September, the Luftwaffe Field Division and the 356th Infantry Division had been moved to the Adriatic front along with ( from army reserve ) the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division and the armoured reserve of 26th Panzer Division.

* June 28 – At the end of the first week of Operation Barbarossa, the Luftwaffe has destroyed 4, 017 Soviet aircraft in exchange for 150 of its own.

* September 2 – By the end of the day, the Luftwaffe has achieved virtually complete air superiority over Poland.

NATO aircraft fly 200 sorties during the first 24 hours, including the first combat missions flown by the German Luftwaffe since the end of World War II in 1945.

By the end of the war, £ 500, 000 worth of damage had been inflicted on the plant by the Luftwaffe in raids in 1941 and 1942.

The system ceased to apply with the end of German military aviation following the Armistice, and aircraft of the newly reborn Luftwaffe would be designated according to the RLM aircraft designation system although Fokker continued to use a modified form of the system after the war, primarily for C and D class aircraft, while adding or reusing letters for types of aircraft not covered by this system.

* Steinbock-the German Luftwaffe bomber offensive against England from late January through the end of May 1944

There a number of " trophies " taken by the Royal Air Force from the Luftwaffe at the end of World War II in the mess, including an eagle statue and a bust of Hermann Göring.

By late 1943, the Luftwaffe was starting to deploy the greatly improved FuG 220 Lichtenstein SN-2, operating on a longer-wavelength of 90 MHz ( lower end of the US VHF FM broadcast band ) frequency which was far less affected by electronic jamming, but this required the much larger Hirschgeweih ( stag's antlers ) antennas, with only eight dipole elements, looking like a much-enlarged version of what occupied the forward end of each one of the earlier quadruple Matratze masts.

By the end of the war, these buildings housed female auxiliary personnel for the Luftwaffe.

But he cannot end with the Luftwaffe winning: because it didn't.