Quoted By:
MH: You also flew with Erich Hartmann, who would become the greatest ace of all time with 352 victories. You had a special association with him, didn’t you?
Krupinski: I had just become commanding officer of 7th Staffel of III/JG.52 when in March 1943 I first met Erich Hartmann. He was a child! So young, and that was when I gave him the nickname of ‘Bubi,’ or boy, and it stuck with him for the rest of his life. He remembered me from about six months earlier when I had a memorable crash landing in a burning Me-109 at Maikop. I was shot all up after a sortie against the Soviets, and I was blinded by smoke and slightly wounded. Well, I came in to land and slammed into a pile of bombs that had been placed at the edge of this field, and I scraped right through all of it. [Raymond] Toliver and [Trevor] Constable wrote about it in Erich’s biography, The Blond Knight of Germany.
