Adolf Galland Quotes


Superior technical achievements — used correctly both strategically and tactically — can beat any quantity numerically many times stronger yet technically inferior.


Context

While this principle is usually true, the irony is that it did not hold for the Germans in WWII. Towards the end of the war, they had developed the first jet planes which in combat were far superior to anything the allies could contest them with. In every battle they shot down many more allied plans than they lost. However they had relatively few as allied bombers had destroyed key factories and already killed most of the German experienced pilots. Also the fuel facilities were crippled. So even though the German jets were technologically superior, they were so outnumbered that they were not strategicappy successful.


Citations

Adolf Galland, 1912–1996, German Air force Commander of Fighters, Quoted in "The First and the Last," 1954

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Related Quotes

This seemingly prosaic quotation is one of the most significant quotations in history. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the telegraph was rapidly developing as a communications technology. One of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was the appreciation of the new technology and the deployment of it to gain an immense strategic advantage which was a major factor in all warfare thereafter. Lincoln placed ALL telegraphy of the North under the control of the military. He then had a telegraph terminal installed in the War Department right next to the White House. He would spend many hours in the Telegraph Room reading dispatches as they were coming in. To the distress of some of his military commanders, the Commander in Chief actually, for the first time in history, received virtually real time intelligence about a battle, and issued orders to the commanders in the field in real time. The quotation is one of the early examples. Ironically, Lincoln had more real time battlefields information in the Civil War than most of our Presidents did until the Vietnam War when digital, radio communications were exploited for the purpose.


An irony is that Timosheko used German Prussian traditional military strategy to successfully defend against the German invasion of Russia.


Later, he felt that the offense had become almost invincible. See {626741}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.


While the President had total faith in American scientists, at the time the state of American physics was not world class in several key areas. Oppenheimer, was for example, the ONLY senior American theoretical physicist at the outbreak of the war, and he had been trained in Germany. What the President did not quite realize was how many of the key scientific positions on the Manhattan Project were foreign refugees who had fled the Nazis in Europe. Many American scientists and engineers did not want to go to Los Alamos where they could not leave for the duration of the war, had to give up their own personal research, and whose relatives who did not accompany them would never know where they were or what they were doing. But there were enough great American scientists who Oppenheimer recruited that combined with the Europeans formed the greatest and most effective concentration of scientific manpower working in history.


Shortly thereafter, Ma Hongkui, and his soldiers ran for their lives and barely escaped to Taiwan as the Communists took over all of the Chinese mainland.


Adolf Galland
Adolf Galland
  • Born: March 19, 1912
  • Died: February 9, 1996
  • Nationality: German
  • Profession: Soldier

Adolf Josef Ferdinand Galland was a German Luftwaffe general and flying ace who served throughout the Second World War in Europe. He flew 705 combat missions, and fought on the Western Front and in the Defence of the Reich. On four occasions, he survived being shot down, and he was credited with 104 aerial victories, all of them against the Western Allies.