Analysing survival rates among Luftwaffe air crew in 'Steinbock' and other operations

[Simon Trew]

A little more on the 'profile' of Steinbock air crew, this time dealing with rank distribution, for those who are interested.

Sample is 350 airmen (130 prisoners + 230 dead).

Gefreiter 28
Obergefreiter 44
Unteroffizier 175
JUNIOR NCOs 247 (70.6%)

Feldwebel 38
Oberfeldwebel 22
Fahnenjunker / Oberfähnrich 3
SENIOR NCOs (including officer candidates) 63 (18%)

Leutnant 30
Oberleutnant 8
Hauptmann 2
JUNIOR OFFICERS 40 (11.4%)

SENIOR NCOs (as defined above) are 'distributed' evenly among the dead and prisoners. They made up 18% of the total air crew figure, 17.7% (23 men) of the prisoners and 18.2% (40 men) of the dead. JUNIOR NCOs were 70.6% of the total, but made up 75.4% of the prisoners (98 men) compared with 67.7% of the dead (149 men). JUNIOR OFFICERS were 11.4% of the total sample, but only 6.9% (9 men) of the prisoners, compared with 14.1% (31 men) of the dead. The sample here might be too small to draw any conclusions, but I find it interesting that officers are 'under-represented' among the prisoners (twice as likely to die as be taken prisoner). A hypothesis might be that officers felt some sort of responsibility to remain with their stricken aircraft until other crew members had evacuated, and were therefore more likely to be killed as the plane fell apart or G-forces took hold?

Question - please forgive my ignorance, but in a stricken aircraft, who had the authority to order crew members to bale out - the pilot or (if one was present and he was senior to the pilot in rank) the officer?

I note that of 61 destroyed aircraft that I looked at (of about 275 destroyed in combat during Steinbock), about half had one officer on board (27 planes) and half were all-NCO crews (31). One plane carried an officer and an officer candidate and two planes (5./KG 30 Ju 88 4D+BN lost 15 May) and 2./KG 66 Ju 188 Z6+EK lost 19 March) carried two officers. I ignored Ju 88 S types and Me 410s as they only had three and two crew respectively; I wanted to focus on bombers with four, five or six crew members. The fact that about half the planes had one officer on board and half were all-NCO crews is of course no surprise if roughly a tenth of all airmen were officers and a 'typical' bomber had a crew of 4 or 5 men (He 177s with six but not a large number of those involved).