[3] At the start of the war, Lieutenant Karl-Heinz 'Bubi' Schnell was assigned to I. Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 71 (JG 71—71st Fighter Wing),[4] an independent fighter-group.

Indeed, it was only on the day the unit transferred to airfields at Ghent, on 29 September, against the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk, that Schnell got his first victory – an RAF Spitfire.

But as most other fighter units were sent home to rest before the expected battles with the RAF, JG 51 (and I./JG 20) was left on overwatch on the English Channel.

[5] Upon his return, as the battle neared its climax, he quickly set about making up for lost time, doubling his score to eight in the next busy fortnight as well as earning a promotion to Oberleutnant.

Schnell only scored a solitary victory (on 25 October) in the next nine months on the Channel front, until his unit was finally withdrawn to the Reich in May 1941.

It was only a short lay-over though, until transferred to airbases east of Warsaw for the upcoming Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union.

When JG 51's collective total reached 2000 victories on 7 September with the Battle of Smolensk raging (doubling in less than ten weeks), Schnell's personal score had risen to 38.

Over the rest of the year, as the weather worsened, his unit fought in the major encirclement of Kiev and then in the abortive attack on Moscow.

Based at Novodugino, directly west of Moscow, he was straight away into the frantic battles for air superiority over the Rzhev salient.

On 17 January 1943, in a take-off accident, JG 51's Geschwaderkommodore Karl-Gottfried Nordmann's plane collided with that of I./JG 51 Kommandeur Rudolf Busch, killing the latter.

So traumatized was Nordmann by the incident that he refused to fly combat missions again, and Schnell unofficially took over leading the Geschwader in the air.

[17] But barely a fortnight later, he was again transferred, this time to the Mediterranean theatre to take temporary command of II./JG 53 in the absence of regular Kommandeur Gerhard Michalski, and which had just been pulled out from the invasion of Sicily.

In his two-month stay he scored no victories, but supervised the unit's retreat from the toe of Italy, past Naples and Rome, onto Lucca in Tuscany, as the Western Allies prepared to storm ashore onto mainland Europe.

Schnell was finally drawn back to a front-line unit, answering Johannes Steinhoff's call to join Adolf Galland's band of elite 'malcontents' in JV 44.

One of his last duties, on 4 May 1945, was being dispatched by his CO, Heinz Bär, from their final airbase in Salzburg, Austria, to the nearby American forces to get their surrender instructions.