When the Allies landed on the mainland in September, Richthofen expected to do better, as he had a dangerous new weapon to use against them. The Germans had developed two models of a guided bomb that could be dropped from twenty thousand feet, miles from the target, and be guided to it by radio-controlled tail surfaces. These were the first true “smart bombs” and the Salerno campaign was their first major test. Because of the Allied air superiority, Richthofen ordered the bombers carrying the guided bombs to attack at night.

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In less than a week, they had badly damaged the cruiser USS Savannah, crippled the cruiser HMS Uganda, and disabled the battleship HMS Warspite, which had been providing gunfire support for Allied units ashore. It was an auspicious beginning for the guided bomb in warfare, but the bombs were difficult to use, and only a handful of aircrews knew how to deploy them.

Richthofen continued to ferret out other ways to inflict maximum damage. One opportunity arose at the port of Bari in southern Italy, where he noted a weakness in Allied air defenses. Through November 1943, Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes kept Bari and its shipping under careful observation. Then, in a raid meticulously planned by Richthofen, a force of 105 Ju 88s—virtually every Luftwaffe bomber in the Italian theater—attacked Bari harbor the night of December 2.

Richthofen’s tactics were superb. Most bombers first flew out to sea and dropped to low altitude to avoid Allied radar observation. Pathfinder bombers dropped aluminum foil strips to jam the Allied air defense radar, while the bombers systematically worked the port over by the light of parachute flares.

The port was crammed with shipping, and the Ju 88s hit an ammunition ship and a tanker. The ship blew up, raining explosives on the other vessels as fire from the tanker’s burning oil spread. Sixteen Allied merchant vessels were destroyed and eight others damaged. The port facilities were knocked out of operation for three weeks. Naval historian Samuel Morison described it as “the most destructive air attack since Pearl Harbor.”

Yet the raid could not be repeated elsewhere; Allied antiaircraft and night fighter defenses at other ports were too strong for the Luftwaffe’s small bomber force. Richthofen next attempted to stop the Allied landings at Anzio in January 1944. But by then the Allies had developed effective countermeasures to the guided bombs and the Luftwaffe attacks were ineffectual. By the spring of 1944, the Luftwaffe in Italy was mainly a defensive fighter force, with most of the air units withdrawn to defend the Reich. Richthofen had little left to command.

Richthofen’s end came quickly, and from an unexpected direction. In late 1944 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After two unsuccessful operations, he was relieved of command in November and sent to the Luftwaffe hospital in Bad Ischl, Austria. He died there as an American prisoner in July 1945 at age forty-nine, a few weeks after General Patton’s Third Army occupied the area.

By then, Richthofen had played no real role in the war for more than a year. But for pioneering—in Spain, Poland, Russia, and Italy—many of the air support doctrines and tactics that became standard in modern warfare; for his numerous contributions to aviation technology; and, primarily, in France in May 1940, for revolutionizing the role of air power in warfare by making the air force an equal partner with the army, he created a legacy that would have a much more lasting influence than that of his far more famous cousin, the Red Baron.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of World War II magazine.

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