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Egon Mayer


Egon Mayer

Egon Mayer
Egon Mayer was the first fighter pilot to score 100 victories entirely on the western front, but he is best known as co-developer (with Georg-Peter Eder) of the head-on attack against Allied heavy bombers. To his British and American opponents he was "the man with the white scarf," even though many fighter pilots wore a silk scarf to avoid chafing while craning their necks to spot enemy aircraft. He joined JG 2, the famous Richtofen Geschwader, at the end of 1939. He scored his first victory in the Battle of France, and was shot down four times during the Battle of Britain, once forced to float for an hour in the Channel before being rescued. By July 1941 Mayer had raised his score to 20.
During the summer of 1942 he downed 16 Allied fighters in 21 days, and was promoted to Gruppenkommandeur of III/JG 2. On June 22, 1943 Mayer got the better of USAAF Ace Robert Johnson, damaging the American's Thunderbolt so severely that Johnson barely made it back to England. In mid-1943 Mayer and Eder began experimenting with a more effective method of attacking Allied heavy bombers. They determined that the bombers' defensive armament was weakest in the nose, so a head-on attack afforded Luftwaffe fighter pilots the best chance to kill the flight crew and destroy the bomber with minimum exposure to defensive fire.

Egon Mayer

By the summer of 1943 Mayer, now Kommodore of JG 2, was teaching his pilots the new bomber-attack technique. He also practiced what he preached: on September 16, 1943, Mayer shot down three B-17s in less than 20 minutes. The B-17G, with its two forward-firing .50-caliber machine guns in a chin turret (and in some cases two more "cheek" guns), was introduced to meet the threat of these head-on attacks. Five months later Mayer scored his 100th aerial victory. He had survived many scrapes, including a forced landing in a quarry and a bail-out at just 250 feet, but his luck was soon to run out. While leading an attack on Allied bombers in his Fw 190 over France on March 2, 1944, Mayer was fatally bounced by escorting Thunderbolts.

Lt. Colonel Egon Mayer
(1917-1944)
Final Tally: 102 (including 25 heavy bombers)
Fighter Aircraft Flown: Fw 190
Rank at End of War: Obersleutnant (Lt. Col.), Kommodore JG 2
Medals and Awards: Knight's Cross with oak leaves and swords
Campaign Flown: Battle over Europe