“My, my, my. Well, let me tell you mine.” She took a sip of water and swirled it in her mouth.
“Your what?”
“Flyboy secret, as you called it.”
Al shoveled a final forkful of food into his mouth and shoved his plate way. “Okay. I’m all ears.” He liked talking with this woman.
“I’ve always wanted to fly in combat.”
He shot her a squinty-eyed stare. “Really? Come on. You can’t be—”
“I know. Strange as it seems, it’s a dream I’ve had ever since the war started.”
“You could get killed.”
“I could get killed on a ferry mission.”
“You don’t have people shooting at you on ferry missions.”
“When I was a wing walker, I climbed from one plane to another in midair. Now that’s dangerous.”
Al shook his head. “Some people might call you crazy.”
“They have. But I always knew what I was doing. And so do you guys.” She leaned closer to Al and lowered her voice. “So let me bounce something off you. I heard earlier today that the bomb groups are going to be flying practice missions out over the desert for the next few days. Maybe I could—”
“No,” Al interjected rather sharply, “you didn’t hear that, because it’s classified. And, no, maybe you couldn’t ride along—that’s what you were going to ask, wasn’t it?—even if the rumor you heard was true. You’re non-military and don’t have a security clearance. Let’s remain good friends, Vivian. Don’t broach the subject to me again.”
“I stand chastised, Captain. I apologize.” She lowered her gaze and shifted it away from Al.
“I understand your passion for aviation, Vivian. But putting you in a bomber on even a training mission would get me court-martialed.”
“I won’t bring it up again.”
But from somewhere deep within Al, a tiny voice, like the indistinct grumble of distant thunder, reverberated through his psyche, saying, Yeah, she will.
9
Zell-Mosel, Germany
Mid-July 1943
Egon and Inge fell into each other’s arms, a tight, desperate embrace, outside their home in Zell. Bright sunshine played hide-and-seek with towering cumulus bubbling up over the higher ground north and south of the Mosel, the Eifel, and the Hunsrück.
“My love,” he whispered in Inge’s ear.
“Yes, yes,” she whispered in return. “How long this time?”
“A few days. I have to get back to my base before the end of the month.”
“Do you have to return?”
“Of course. It’s my duty.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I know, but I miss you so much. And so does Christa. It’s so miserable here.”
He held her out at arm’s length. “You’ve lost weight.” Her skirt and blouse, the same ones he recalled from several years ago, hung on her like well-used but fashionable rags. Her face, still beautiful, appeared drawn, approaching gauntness.
She flashed a sad-eyed smile. “I give most of what I get to eat to Christa.”
“You’ve got to take care of yourself, Inge, or you can’t take care of Christa. The rationing, it isn’t enough?”
“Enough to survive on, I suppose.”
“How much?”
“Five pounds of bread each week. A half-pound of meat. A half-pound of lard. But it’s all meaningless when there’s nothing to ration. We stand in line all day merely to get bread. That’s where Christa is now, at the bakery, waiting, waiting, waiting, just for a single loaf.”
“Can you barter for things?”
“This is wine country, not farm country.”
“Yes, it’s hard to subsist on grapes.”
“Last week we dug for potatoes and searched for beechnuts in the forest. We didn’t get much other than filthy and tired.”
Potatoes, it seemed, had become a diet staple for the German people. Beechnuts, Egon knew, could be used to make cooking oil. He realized his wife, his daughter, indeed all Germans, teetered on the brink of famine.
As if to confirm his thought, Inge said, “I can see the day coming when I’ll have to tell Christa that our only meal today will be two slices of bread and an apple.”
Egon expelled a long, slow breath. Frustration and anger.
“Let’s go inside,” he said. They climbed the stone steps to the living room. Inge sat on the sofa. Egon walked to the window and looked out. Blackout curtains flapped in a warm breeze. The town seemed quieter than it used to, not much traffic on the streets, only a handful of people on the sidewalks. But then he remembered virtually all of the young men in the area had been called to duty by the Wehrmacht.
He examined the homes and buildings. There seemed to be minimal damage, only a scattering of pock marks on walls where pieces of shrapnel had hit.
“Not much bombing here?”
“What’s to bomb? The vineyards?”
“It’s been bad in the bigger cities. Thousand-bomber raids, carpet bombing, in Köln and Bremen. Now the enemy is going after Berlin and Hamburg.”
Inge stared at him. “I hadn’t heard. I thought we were winning the war.”
“No.”
“But—”
“You hear what the Reich wants you to hear, not what’s really happening.”
Tears clouded her eyes again. “Oh, Egon, how did we get here?” Her voice cracked as she choked out the question.
He sat beside her, draped his arm over her shoulders, and pulled her close. “It’s not where anybody thought we were going,” he said softly. “After Hitler grabbed Poland, France, Norway, the Low Countries, it all seemed so easy. We—the German people— joined in a victory parade, but it turned out to be a march of lemmings over a cliff.”
She wiped the tears from her eyes and stared at her husband. “How does it all end?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
He wanted to tell her if they were lucky, the country would surrender. But he knew it wouldn’t. Der Führer would never allow it. Besides, as a Luftwaffe officer, he couldn’t say, or even think that. He and his brothers-in-arms would fight until the end. But certainly not for the Reich, and certainly not for Hitler. They would, as Oberstleutnant Gustav Rödel had said, fight for each other, for their families, for their homes.
In truth, he didn’t have an answer for his wife’s question, at least an honest one. The war would continue. At best, the Wehrmacht would protect Germany’s borders. At worst . . .
“It ends when our enemies relent,” he said. But he knew they would relent only after they had brought Germany to its knees.
Christa burst into the room. “Papa!” She dropped a large loaf of brown bread she’d been carrying, her prize from the bakery, and dashed to Egon. She leaped onto the sofa beside him, threw her arms around him, and nestled into his body as if she were a baby bird sheltering in its mother’s feathers.
“Oh, Christa, I’ve missed you so much.” He hugged her with protective fierceness.
“You’re home, you’re home. Can you stay, Vater, can you stay? Until Christmas?”
He stroked her blond hair. “I can stay a few days, my dear, not longer.”
“Oh.” The single word came riddled with disappointment.
“I hear you’ve been helping your Mutter. In the woods. I’m so proud of you, Christa.”
She smiled. “But we got so scared last week.”
Egon shifted his gaze to his wife but addressed his daughter. “Scared?”
“Yes,” Christa answered, “we saw a huge wild boar. It came so close to us. I wanted to run, but Mutter kept me still.”
Egon fixed his gaze on Inge. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You’ve got enough to worry about. Besides, he didn’t bother us.”
“Too bad you didn’t have a gun. You would have had meat for the rest of the year.”
“We’ve enough. Well, not that much, but a little.”
“How so?”
“Christa,” Inge said to her d
aughter, “take the bread into the kitchen, please.”
Christa slid off the sofa, picked up the loaf of bread she’d dropped, and carried it into the kitchen.
Inge slid close to Egon and whispered, “If she mentions that her pet rabbits keep disappearing, just tell her they probably get scared when they hear the bombs going off nearby and run away.”
“Oh.” So, a slice of bread and a forkful or two of potatoes and rabbit. German wartime cuisine . . . on the best of days.
Later, toward evening, Christa laughed and chattered in the kitchen as Inge assisted with her Saturday night bath. A large iron drum filled with water heated over the wood-burning oven served as the tub.
Her bath completed, Christa, wrapped in a thin cotton robe, darted into the living room. In mock surprise, Egon threw his forearm over his eyes. “Oh, my,” he exclaimed, “it suddenly got so much brighter in here.”
Christa laughed politely. An old joke. She hesitated for a moment, then said, her tone almost demure, “Vater, could we dance like we used to when I was little?”
“Of course, my dear.” He stood from where he’d been sitting in an armchair sipping a glass of Zeller Schwarze Katz.
She placed her bare feet on top of his flight boots, he wrapped his left arm around her lower back, held her left hand high in his right, then waltzed her around the living room as he hummed “An der schönen blauen Donau.” “Blue Danube.”
She truly had made the room so much brighter.
Inge walked in, wiping her hands on a towel, and smiled broadly as she saw her husband and daughter dancing. She stepped to the window, closed the exterior shutters, and pulled the interior blackout curtains tightly together.
“But maybe the bombers won’t come tonight,” she said.
But they did.
They’d just fallen asleep when the air raid sirens sounded. An eerie wailing punched through the otherwise quiet darkness. Egon awoke first, Inge an instant later.
“Get Christa,” she said, urgency permeating her voice.
He dashed to Christa’s room, shook his daughter awake. “Come,” he said, “air raid.”
She sat up, rubbing her eyes. He took her hand and helped her from the bed.
They met Inge at the top of the stairs to the street. “This way,” Inge said. She carried light jackets for each of them. “We’ll go to the Schmitts’ cellar. Follow me.”
They scrambled down the steps onto the sidewalk. People from other houses nearby scurried along the walkway toward a larger home two blocks away.
The thrum of large bombers overhead joined the moan of the sirens. Christa stumbled over an upraised stone in the walk and sprawled to the ground. Egon yanked her back up as several people pushed past them.
The whistle of falling bombs cut through the night.
“Hurry,” Egon said. He tugged Christa along, following Inge.
They reached the entrance to the cellar as the first explosions erupted in blinding brightness, red and orange novae blossoming in a nearby intersection. Stones, chunks of concrete, and shards of metal sprayed in all directions.
A piece of shrapnel zinged by Egon’s head and cratered into the side of the Schmitts’ house as he and Christa, on Inge’s heels, ducked into the home’s cellar.
“Jesus,” he yelled, “I almost got killed at home.”
The ground vibrated with earthquake ferocity as explosion after explosion rocked the tiny town. In the cellar, the virtually continuous detonations made conversation impossible. Several candles flickered in the darkness, revealing dozens of oaken wine barrels, racks of empty bottles—that jingled and rattled in counterpoint to the bomb blasts—burlap sacks filled with potatoes, and stacks of empty wicker baskets, tall and conical, used for harvesting grapes. The odors of stale wine, old wood, and damp earth filled the Keller.
After ten or fifteen minutes, the bombing relented. Half a dozen women, mostly elderly, continued to finger their rosary beads and mutter the Pater Noster.
“Why on earth were they bombing us?” Inge asked. “There’s nothing here.”
“Probably after the railroad tracks by the river,” Egon suggested. “It’s the damn Brits and their nighttime bombing. They only missed by half a mile or so. Sometimes the bastards are five or ten miles off. Their navigation systems are shit, never designed for night operations.”
Inge shushed him. “There are children in here,” she whispered. “Watch your language.”
They waited in the cellar for another fifteen minutes, but no more bombs fell. They ventured back into the street. Except for a building in flames near the river, smoldering craters pockmarking the street, and shattered windows here and there, damage appeared minimal.
Egon and Inge returned home, fell into bed, and slept restlessly for the remainder of the night, Christa snoozing between them.
The next few days passed uneventfully with Egon visiting old friends, taking his turn standing in line at the bakery and butcher shops, and answering questions from residents, mostly the women, about why the Luftwaffe wasn’t doing more to stop the bombing.
“Because we’re running out of fuel, aircraft, and pilots,” he wanted to answer, but didn’t. “Because we have a fool for a leader,” he wanted to tell them, but didn’t. “Because we’re outnumbered,” he wanted to explain, but didn’t. Instead he said, “We’re doing our best. Don’t give up hope.” He wondered if he had.
It came time for him to return to Greece.
“I’ll take a bus to Frankfurt in the morning, then catch a flight back to Kalamaki,” he told Inge.
“Why not a train?”
“Too dangerous. The Allies want to cripple our rail and river traffic.”
His words proved prophetic.
That night, the air raid sirens sounded again, and he, Inge, and Christa sheltered in the Schmitts’ cellar once more. But this time the bombs fell farther away. Still, the earth shook, the wine barrels rattled, and dirt and dust tumbled from the cellar’s ceiling.
“They’re going after the double-decker rail bridge in Bullay, I’ll bet,” Egon said. Bullay stood a little over two miles northwest of Zell on the twisty Mosel. Egon could have taken a train from Zell to Bullay to Koblenz, where the Mosel joined the Rhine, but he realized that option had likely just been taken out of play. At least for the time being.
“Glad I planned on the bus,” he whispered to Inge.
In the candlelit semidarkness he could see tears in her eyes.
After they returned home, he and Inge slept in a silent embrace, Christa nestled into Egon’s back, clutching him in an iron grip of an intensity he thought impossible for such a young child.
The next morning at the bus terminal, Christa continued to hug him with animal ferocity. “Please come back, Papa, please, please, please.”
He bent and kissed her, holding her for a long time. He didn’t answer, because he knew his daughter had asked for a promise he couldn’t make.
Inge blinked back tears. Egon knew she understood why he hadn’t answered.
He drew her into his embrace with Christa, and had trouble letting go. How ironic, he thought, that the most intense love seemed to flourish amidst the worst violence.
But it is for that love I continue to fight.
He finally released his wife and daughter, and they him, and he stepped onto the bus. He took a seat next to a window and looked out. His small family stood with downcast countenances in a flood of summer sunshine.
As the bus pulled away, a small, drifting cloud dimmed the brightness. Egon waved, then turned away to stare straight ahead as the shadow of the cloud darkened the road.
10
Benghazi, Libya
Late July 1943
Al lined up Oregon Grinder for its final practice run, with wooden bombs, over the dummy target in the desert. He skimmed low over the sand. The Liberator bucked and shook and rattled in mid-day thermals as he and Sorey fought to keep the craft under control. The B-24s on either side of them, three to the left, two to t
he right, bobbed and jerked in the heat as they roared toward the plat, the mockup, of Target White Two, Ploesti’s Concordia Vega Refinery.
Oregon Grinder sat just off the right wing of Hell’s Wench, Lieutenant Colonel Baker’s aircraft. Three more waves of Liberators followed Baker, the Circus’s commander.
“I got the pole in sight,” Al said into his throat mike. In the distance, looming out of the weaving heat mirages, shiny, shredded petrol tins topping the pole marked the aiming point for the target.
“Got it, too,” Kenny Brightman, the bombardier, responded calmly. From his kneeling position in Oregon Grinder’s nose, he’d use a “ten-cent” converted gunsight, not the sophisticated high-altitude Norden bombsight, to aim the faux weapons. Al knew his experience over Messina would help.
“Dune!” Sorey yelled.
A sand dune materialized in front of Oregon Grinder, appearing like a sudden, unexpected ocean swell. Simultaneously, Al and Sorey yanked back on their control wheels. A brief rasping sound, like the brush of rough sandpaper over metal, mingled with the bellow of the bomber’s four turbocharged engines.
“How we gonna explain scratch marks on our belly?” Sorey shouted.
Al shrugged and leveled the plane out seconds from the marker pole.
“Hey, you guys, we’re a bomber, not a torpedo plane,” Kenny snapped from his position low in the nose. Al had never heard him perturbed before.
“Get ready to toggle,” he said.
The edge of the practice target flashed beneath the Liberator.
“Bombs away,” Kenny called.
Oregon Grinder sprang up, suddenly four thousand pounds lighter, as the wooden bombs plowed into the sandy target.
When Heroes Flew Page 8
