When Heroes Flew

by H W Buzz Bernard

  She wasn’t a frail woman, but the task had been demanding. A sheen of perspiration, despite the chilliness that permeated the bomber, coated her tanned and subtly muscular arms.

  “Take a break, Viv,” Al said as he sank into the pilot’s seat.

  “I’m okay . . . but I’m glad you’re back.” She paused. “Look, I’m sorry about that.” She inclined her head at the dark spot on the floor of the flight deck where she’d involuntarily urinated earlier.

  Al pulled the throat mike off his neck and leaned toward her. “There are guys who’ve come back from their first mission and had to burn their underwear. Understand?”

  “Yeah, but I’m still embarrassed.”

  “Viv, you’re doing as well in that seat as any man I’ve ever flown with. If you were, well, a guy, I wouldn’t hesitate adding you to my crew. God’s honest truth.”

  “Thank you, Pops.” She grinned. “To change the subject, what on earth happened back there, in Ploesti?”

  “I can tell you what but not why. Things started to go south when the bomb groups got separated. I can only speculate that Killer Kane decided he was going to break his planes if he tried to keep up with us and the Liberandos. Remember, most of the Liberators that turned around because of engine failure came from his group.”

  Vivian nodded. “But we continued to push ahead at normal cruise speed, while Kane’s guys reduced power to save their engines and get to the target?”

  “Yep. And the two groups following Kane, the Eight Balls and Sky Scorpions, were forced to throttle back to stay in touch with Kane’s Pyramiders.”

  “And the radio silence order didn’t help, did it?” Vivian said, more a statement than a question.

  “Nope. I guess security overrode tactical execution. But I have a feeling the Germans knew we were coming anyhow. The amount of firepower they unleashed on us sure suggests that.”

  In the distance, the Pindus Mountains appeared, the higher peaks and ridges still capped by billowing stacks of cumulus.

  “Let’s take her up to about ten,” Al said. “That should get us over the mountains safely.”

  Oregon Grinder labored higher into the sky, the engines groaning, the tattered fuselage rattling, and a low frequency whistle—wind whipping through the numerous holes in the bomber’s skin—reverberating through the interior.

  After the plane settled in at its new altitude, Vivian returned to the subject of the screwed-up raid. “Why did the Liberandos turn at the wrong IP?” The key question.

  “No idea,” Al answered. “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “But heads will roll?”

  “Probably, but that’s way above my pay grade.”

  “At least Colonel Baker corrected the bad turn.”

  “And paid for it with his life.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen courage like he showed,” Vivian said. “I used to think it took guts to stroll out on a wing while going eighty miles per hour two hundred feet above the earth, but what Baker and his copilot did today . . .” Further words seemed to fail her. She blinked tears from her eyes.

  Al had to agree. He couldn’t imagine bravery like Colonel Baker and Major Jerstad had displayed. He knew without a doubt he didn’t have cojones like that. “They got us to the target, Viv, not the one we were supposed to hit, but he led us to the enemy. Few men would have even attempted that.”

  Al and Vivian remained silent for a poignant moment. Then Al continued. “Anyhow, that’s how we got there, screaming over Ploesti, then meeting up with that quintet of bombers from the Liberandos late to the party after visiting Bucharest.”

  “Finally going after their assigned target?”

  Al nodded.

  “Then, on top of everything else, here comes Killer Kane, nailing all the IPs and bringing the remainder of the force over Ploesti. Jesus, we had aircraft converging over the city from three different directions.” He shook his head slowly, in amazement and disappointment, as the reality of how much had gone wrong sank in.

  “It’s a wonder we all didn’t kill each other,” someone said over the interphone. Al had forgotten the entire crew could listen to the conversation between him and Vivian.

  “You know,” Al added, “it’s hard to believe, but after leveling our practice target in the desert in two minutes, we spent almost half a goddamned hour over Ploesti.”

  They crested the mountains, then began their descent toward the Albanian coast.

  “Okay, everyone,” Al announced, “we’re going to try to make it to Sicily, get Chippy to a flight surgeon. But the Germans have Messerschmitts in Greece and may have other ideas about where we end up.”

  Like at the bottom of the Ionian Sea.

  21

  Kalamaki, Greece

  August 1, 1943

  Egon’s ten Messerschmitts scuttled across a grassy verge toward the runway. On the ground, especially on uneven turf, Bf 109s appeared ungainly as they taxied, wobbling and hopping like drunks playing hopscotch. The fighter’s awkward appearance came from a pair of long, skinny main landing gear struts, like a stork’s legs, that canted the nose upward while the tail, supported by a single small wheel, seemed to almost scrape the ground. But once in the air, with the gear retracted, a 109 took on the profile of a streamlined killer shark. Egon harbored few doubts it remained one of the best fighters in the world.

  He reached the runway and turned into takeoff position. With the nose pitched upward, Egon, from the cramped, uncomfortable cockpit, could see nothing but sky straight ahead. He had to constantly peer out to his left and right through the armored windscreen to make certain of his track on the ground.

  He revved the engine while he held the brakes on. The roar of the craft’s 1475-horsepower Daimler-Benz motor filled the cockpit. It sounded fit, ready for combat. The plane shook and shimmied, almost as if in anticipation of going to war. He backed off on the throttle and radioed his squadron that takeoff time had come.

  He slipped on his goggles, released the brakes, and shoved the throttle forward. The Messerschmitt surged down the runway. The tail lifted and leveled the plane, then the main landing wheels rose from the runway and Egon roared aloft. He looked back to check his flock. To his satisfaction, he spotted the number two fighter already screaming along the runway. It followed him into the air over Elliniko.

  One by one, the Messerschmitts lifted into the clear Greek sky and fell into a racetrack pattern, waiting for the entire squadron to become airborne. Once formed up, they separated into two five-plane units, one led by Egon, the other by a young Oberleutnant from Hockenheim, near Heidelberg. The kid had gained a bit of air warfare experience on the Eastern Front, and was the only other pilot in the squadron besides Egon who claimed any combat skill at all. None of it, of course, had come against the heavily armed United States Army Air Force airborne battleships such as Liberators or Flying Fortresses.

  Egon knew the conflict between his Messerschmitts and the Liberators would be brief but intense and, as Oberstleutnant Rödel had warned, deadly. Egon remained concerned that his young aviators, despite their enthusiasm and bravado, would find the learning curve of battle steep and bloody.

  They flew toward the island of Kefalonia in two arrowhead-shaped formations. They pressed on to a point ten miles west of the island, climbed to fifteen thousand feet, then began patrolling in elliptical orbits, waiting for the Liberators, waiting for their prey.

  They assumed the B-24s would hug the coast, thus had positioned themselves west of Kefalonia, a coastal island, so they could attack out of the sun, hopefully into an enemy blinded by the late-afternoon brilliance.

  Egon had briefed his men that he and his five planes would initiate the assault, mounting an attack from above on the flanks of the Liberators. The second group of five would hang back and wait for the Americans to become preoccupied—hopefully—with the initial wave of Messerschmitts. Then they would pounce. A simple plan, but sometimes the simplest schemes fostered the best results. The bomber cr
ews had to be exhausted, demoralized, and wounded, not to mention short on ammo and functioning engines. In other words, not up for a running battle with Germany’s best fighter aircraft.

  Over the Ionian Sea southwest of Corfu

  August 1, 1943

  Oregon Grinder labored past the island of Corfu and turned south, following the same track they’d used earlier in the day flying northward. Well ahead of them, Al could make out an ad hoc formation of about a dozen Liberators, many in various states of necrosis, limping toward Benghazi. He longed to join them—safety in numbers—but he knew they still had hundreds of miles to go traversing the Mediterranean Sea, and that Oregon Grinder had no chance of making it that far since her fuel loss continued unabated. Not only that, but with one engine already kaput—curious that a German-derived term applied—they lacked the power to catch up to the planes in front of them anyhow.

  Al planned to limp along to the rear of the loose formation as a distant Tail End Charlie, then peel off and plough west once they reached the latitude of Sicily.

  Below Oregon Grinder, the gentle, ultramarine swells of the Ionian Sea rolled southward beneath an azure sky speckled with ice cream scoops of puffy cumulus. All in all, it seemed a strange, bucolic setting, an ironic counterpoint to the death and destruction that Al sensed lurked nearby. The Germans were not going to allow them free passage home. The battle would continue.

  “Keep a sharp eye, guys,” he said into the interphone. “We’re over bandit waters now.”

  They cruised on for another ten minutes, leveling out at four thousand feet.

  The warning came over the command channel from one of the bombers out in front of Oregon Grinder. “Fighters at three o’clock, straight into the sun.”

  The loose formation of Liberators tightened up.

  From his vantage point well to the rear of the incipient battle, Al spotted the Messerschmitts high and to the right in two groups of five. They didn’t attack immediately, merely cruised parallel to the fleeing bombers.

  “Why aren’t they attacking, Pops?” It sounded like Sergeant McGregor from his top turret position.

  “Don’t know. Maybe they’re sizing up the Liberators, figuring out how to attack.”

  Egon held his fighters out of gun range of the B-24s. He wouldn’t launch the assault until the fuel in the Messerschmitts’ auxiliary tanks had been sucked dry.

  On the thick armored glass of the Bf 109’s windscreen, he had taped a photograph of Inge and Christa. It had been taken at Zell’s annual weinfest just prior to Christa’s fourth birthday, before the war, before death fell from the sky, before hunger ravaged the German people. He lifted his right hand to his lips, kissed his fingertips, then pressed them to the picture. “Liebe Inge, Liebe Christa,” he whispered. “Euch noch einmal werde ich wiedersehen?” Will I ever see you again?

  He studied his foe below. He’d already chosen his target, an old warhorse in the middle of the refugee flight, a Liberator with one prop feathered and trailing smoke from the number-two engine. For the other pilots in his group, he’d selected targets that appeared even more badly wounded—top turrets out of commission, tail guns destroyed, waist positions blasted out—in hopes his young warriors wouldn’t be shot from the sky on their first combat run.

  As always, he refused to put faces on the men inside the opposition aircraft. He viewed them only as part of a war machine trying to kill Germans. They had no backstories, no families, no hopes or dreams. They were the enemy. That was all. That was enough. Prey.

  He raised his arm, signaling his fellow pilots to prepare to attack. He activated the Messerschmitt’s command channel and called out, “Jetzt.” The fighters jettisoned their belly tanks. Egon rolled his plane toward the bombers and dove at full power, targeting their flanks. His young aviators followed, two on either side of him, each aiming for their assigned bomber.

  The shattering bellow of the Bf 109’s engine inundated Egon’s senses as he jammed the throttle full forward and plunged toward his quarry. Halfway down, without looking and using automatic reflexes honed by many battles, he reached for and grasped the switch that armed his weapons—a prop-hub thirty-millimeter cannon, two nose-mounted thirteen-millimeter machine guns, and two underwing twenty-millimeter cannons. The glow of a red light confirmed the success of his action.

  Al, from his distant vantage point to the rear of the planes, watched the battle develop. The Liberator gunners, well trained and many battle experienced, waited until the Messerschmitts were within a thousand yards before opening fire. The gap between the bombers and fighters became thick with fifty-caliber tracers.

  The Luftwaffe pilots replied with machine guns and cannons. What appeared to be the lead Messerschmitt hammered a Liberator with heavy fire, leaving it with two engines in flame and the right vertical stabilizer shot away. The bomber sank toward the sea in a trail of smoke.

  Another Messerschmitt, smoking and shedding parts, screamed directly through the formation of B-24s. The pilot bailed out. The fighter exploded. A parachute blossomed and drifted toward the vast expanse of water below.

  Egon raked his chosen Liberator with machine-gun and cannon fire from tail to nose. The top of one of the vertical stabilizers blew off. Both of the engines on the right wing burst into flame.

  One enemy kill closer to an Iron Cross.

  He snapped the 109 into a vertical climb, the g-forces pinning him against his seat, and glanced back over his shoulder. The bomber, still flying but sinking fast, followed a trajectory toward the sea.

  He watched as another Messerschmitt piloted by a rookie aviator got his nose a bit low and missed a B-24 with his cannon volley. The fighter zoomed beneath the plane and came back into Egon’s view with flames and smoke jetting from its engine. The pilot bailed out. The 109 exploded.

  “Unerfahrenheit,” Egon muttered. Inexperience.

  He swiveled his head in the other direction just in time to see a second fighter plunge steeply into the sea, leaving only a vertical column of smoke in its wake.

  The fucking Thousand-year Reich. It leaves its young men with only thousand-second life spans.

  Egon joined his remaining flock, seven aircraft plus his own, and led them in for a second pass at the flanks of the Liberators.

  Al heard as much as saw the fury of the second attack—the command channel filled with frantic radio calls from the besieged Liberators. “Fighters everywhere.” “We’re burning— going down.” “Too many, too many!” “We’re hit—bailing out.” It seemed unlikely any of the fleeing B-24s would make it home. A profound sense of sadness mixed with anger wrapped itself around him and bore into his soul.

  “Let’s fall back even more and drop lower,” Al said over the interphone. “We can’t help those poor bastards ahead of us, and they can’t help us. Maybe the damned Germans are so focused on them they won’t notice us.” He hated saying it, hated hoping that the assault on other American aircrews might save his own, but it came down to that simple fact of war, that simple fact of survival.

  Oregon Grinder slid lower over the sea surface and reduced its speed to just above stalling.

  “We’re far enough south we can take up a course for Sicily now,” George said over the interphone.

  “Good,” Al said. “That’ll put a little more distance between us and the fighters, too.” A glimmer of hope lit up deep within him. Maybe they had a chance.

  He and Vivian banked the plane toward the right and set it on a westward track.

  “I’m comin’ home, Al Junior, I’m comin’ home,” he said softly.

  Vivian seemed to read his lips and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “You, too, young lady,” he said loudly, “you’re goin’ home, too.”

  He hoped to God he could keep his promise.

  “Keep a sharp lookout,” he announced over the interphone. “The bandits could still spot us, but they gotta be running low on fuel.”

  Egon climbed away from the second engagement. He knew his fighters had to be
nearing the end of their avgas supplies. As he climbed, he radioed commands to his squadron.

  “Don’t form back up. Attack from your current positions. It’ll save fuel and confuse the enemy. Keep an eye on your fuel gauge. Once it hits half-full, break off and head back to Kalamaki.”

  He checked his own gauge. The needle quivered just above the half-full mark. Enough for one final pass. He picked out a Liberator with a smoking engine and launched his attack, aiming for the top of the bomber where the wings joined the fuselage, the B-24’s Achilles’ heel.

  He triggered his weapons. The bomber returned fire, orange and white tracers screaming toward him from the waist and top turret positions. Over the yowl of the Messerschmitt’s engine, a sharp “crack” reverberated through the cockpit. The armored glass on the left side of the cockpit exploded into a prism of spiderwebs. Egon rolled away from his target and climbed.

  Far below, yet another 109 shot a geyser of fire and water into the air as it plunged into the ocean. Several other Messerschmitts scooted eastward, away from the conflict, low on fuel and running for home. The Liberator he’d hit shuddered and began to lose altitude, descending rapidly toward the blue-green Ionian swells.

  Egon checked for battle damage beyond his maimed canopy glass. Miraculously, none. But he knew the time had come—low on fuel and low on ammo—to head for Kalamaki.

  Just as he banked toward home, a call came in on his radio from another 109.

  “Got a straggler down near the sea surface trying to give us the slip. Looks like he’s heading for Sicily. I’m going after him.”

  Egon swept his gaze over the vast expanse of water below him. After several seconds he spotted his fellow Luftwaffe airman and the Liberator off to his right, a couple of miles distant. The Army green bomber, meaning it originally had flown missions out of England, appeared to be struggling. The Messerschmitt pursued it, the pilot setting up his attack from above and to the left of the B-24.