"..There has been very little aerial activity here over the past few days but yesterday everything flared up again. Rarely have I seen so many aircraft in the air. There was just a handful of Me 109s in among anything from  fifty to two hundred of their machines during one sortie. Yesterday Jochen brought seventeen of them down! Seventeen in three sorties in one day! No fighter pilot has ever returned such a score and no one is ever likely to again in a hurry. His performance was truly superhuman. Along with his natural ability he enjoys an almost unbelievable amount of luck. Not that I begrudge him it. Today's fighting was extremely hard. Yet at the same time it furnished the finest example of mutual support and camaraderie that I have experienced in aerial combat. Marseille and I will remember it for a long time.

In our first combat we were up against forty Hurricane and Curtiss fighters. Then twenty Spitfires, orbiting at higher altitude, dove down on us. We were eight Messerschmitts caught up in an incredible whirling tangle of enemy fighters. I was flying for my life but despite the enemy's overwhelming superiority I didn't duck out of the fight ('es wurde.. nicht gekniffen'). I couldn't. The others needed all the help they could manage. I threw my kite around in a series of steeply banked turns until there was spittle all around my mouth and I was on the verge of exhaustion. Every time one enemy fighter was evaded, there was quickly another on my tail. Three or four times I tried to get out of there by diving away but had to pull back up into the mêlée. On one occasion, having flown my Messerschmitt to it limits, I saw a Spitfire closing in for the kill. At the last moment Marseille appeared and shot him off my tail. I dove away and then pulled back up. Above me I saw a Spitfire sitting just fifty meters behind Marseille's 109. I took careful aim and squeezed the firing button. Flames erupted from the Spitfire's engine and he went down ablaze, crashing into the desert. At that instant I took hits as well and dove away. By then there was just Marseille and myself left in the battle.

In terms of aerial combat we had put on an exemplary performance ('eine vorbildliche Leistung'). Both of us claimed three victories. Marseille had already claimed three enemy aircraft shot down that morning. We climbed down from our 109s completely exhausted. Marseille's kite had taken cannon hits, while eleven machine-gun impacts were counted on my machine. We hugged each other in silence, unable to speak. There were no words to describe what we had just done for each other. Without Marseille's timely intervention I would almost certainly have been shot down. He likewise. For both of us, it was an unforgettable moment of comradeship…."