On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most important legacy. That was a simple pattern of four aircraft in the sky — a formation still flown by every major air force on Earth today.

Mölders was that rare thing, a brilliant killer who was also a brilliant teacher. And in a Luftwaffe stuffed with swagger, he was known to his men not as an eagle or an ace but as “Vati” — Daddy.

Spain: where the tactics were born

In 1938 Mölders volunteered for the Condor Legion, the German force fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and became its top-scoring ace with 14 victories. But Spain mattered less for his score than for what he worked out there. The rigid three-aircraft “vic” that most air forces flew was a trap: pilots spent more time holding formation than watching the sky.

Mölders tore it up. He built his tactics around the pair — a Rotte, one pilot watching the other’s tail — and joined two pairs into a loose, staggered four called a Schwarm. Seen from below it resembled the fingertips of a spread hand, which is why the English-speaking world came to call it the “finger-four.” Combined with his crossover turn, it was so superior that, eventually, every combatant air force of the war adopted it. It is still standard today.

First to a hundred

Back in Germany, Mölders led Jagdgeschwader 51 through the Battles of France and Britain and into the invasion of the Soviet Union, and his tally climbed relentlessly. When he passed 100 in July 1941 he became the first soldier of any nation awarded the Diamonds to the Knight’s Cross, and was made General der Jagdflieger — Inspector of the Fighter Arm — the youngest man to hold the post.

For all that, he kept a reputation for chivalry that was unusual in any air force. A devout Catholic who quietly clashed with the regime over its treatment of the Church, he insisted that captured Allied airmen be treated correctly, and was known to invite downed enemy pilots to dine with him. His men called him “Vati” because he looked after them like a father.

Taking the measure of the enemy

Mölders was also a meticulous analyst. In August 1940, at the Rechlin test centre, he flew a captured Supermarine Spitfire and Hurricane and wrote a clear-eyed report comparing them to his own Bf 109. He rated the Hurricane inferior, but gave the Spitfire real respect — a professional’s honest verdict on the machine that had just fought his own to a standstill over England.

Killed as a passenger

For a man who survived hundreds of combats, the end was almost cruelly mundane. On 22 November 1941 Mölders was flying not as a pilot but as a passenger, aboard a Heinkel He 111 travelling from the Crimea to attend the funeral of Ernst Udet, the Luftwaffe’s technical chief, who had taken his own life. Landing at Breslau in a thunderstorm, the aircraft crashed. Mölders was killed. He was 28.

Adolf Galland, his friend and rival, succeeded him as General of the Fighters. But the record and the tactics outlived them both. Every time four fighters split into two watchful pairs and cross over each other in the turn, they are flying Werner Mölders’ idea — more than eighty years on.

Sources: Wikipedia; The Aviation Geek Club; Kurfürst (Rechlin trials); World War II Database; Bundesarchiv.