When Heroes Flew

by H W Buzz Bernard

  The irony of the situation struck him. Yes, he’d bring the bomber down, but he’d lose the Messerschmitt, too. He peeked again at the oil pressure gauge. The pressure loss had begun to register. He knew he couldn’t remain airborne much longer. He had to attack immediately, then hope the engine would keep cranking long enough to ditch.

  He had no intention of bailing out. He knew how unreliable German parachute harnesses were. Constructed of hemp, many snapped or tore once the ’chute deployed, and pilots would plunge to their death. Rumor had it that nylon straps were being developed, but that didn’t help now.

  He eased back on the throttle a bit more. He leaned forward and framed the crippled, battle-scarred Liberator in his reflector gunsight. He again marveled at how badly it had been wounded yet continued to stay aloft, aloft but losing altitude. It seemed to bear the gashes and fractures of a thousand battles, not just one.

  He yanked his head back from the gunsight, blinking. The bomber had inexplicably morphed into something else, a swirling, fuzzy memory from many years past—of a huge hog, an old boar, crippled and limping, making its way across a snowy field high in the Hunsrück. Steam jetted from its nostrils as it snorted and glared with malevolence at those who had come to kill it.

  Egon sensed his father’s presence, felt his hand on his shoulder, heard his brittle voice as if issuing from a time-warped echo chamber. The same words he’d heard on the Hunsrück that bleak December day reverberated through the cacophony filling the cockpit. “Don’t shoot him. He’s an old warrior. Let him live. Honor his service and bravery.”

  But Egon had decided on his response. It would be no different now from what it had been fifteen years earlier. “Nein, Papa. He challenged us. I will answer that. I, too, am a warrior.” Am I? Or just a murderer?

  He flicked the unexpected, unwelcome conflict from his thoughts.

  No. I’m a warrior to the end.

  He squeezed his eyes shut briefly to clear his vision, then sighted in once more on the B-24. He intended to walk his cannon fire from tail to nose, from between the bomber’s twin vertical stabilizers forward to the armored glass that cocooned his counterparts.

  He rested his forefinger on the cannon’s firing button on the top of the control column as he drifted the Messerschmitt into position.

  “Take your time,” he cautioned himself.

  Without warning, the benevolent ghosts of years past reached out to him again, like Lorelei, the mythical temptress of the Rhine. Only this time they rode the swirling currents of the air, not those of the river. A siren song mingled with the growling whine of the fighter’s engine and beckoned him back to bucolic times before the inanity of war, before bombs and bullets and hunger and death. It called him back to a life filled with the tinkling laughter of his daughter Christa, the sweet, soft words of his wife Inge, the lazy summer wash of the river on the banks of Mosel Valley.

  Back to a time that would never return.

  Goddamn Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

  He edged closer to the wounded, staggering Liberator, re-sighting his cannon, his finger caressing the firing button.

  “He’s back,” someone growled over the interphone.

  Too soon, Al thought. We don’t have a prayer of ditching before the SOB knocks us out of the sky. There seemed only one option remaining.

  “I’m opening the bomb bay doors,” Al announced. “Time to bail out. We aren’t going to be flying much longer. Even if the bastard doesn’t shoot us down, he’ll put so many shells into us I doubt I’ll have any control left. Jump now. Take Chippy with you. Did somebody check on Rhett?”

  “Got ’em, sir,” a voice answered. “He’s unconscious, but we’ll make sure he goes out with the rest of us.”

  Al looked again at Vivian and flicked his head toward the rear, toward the bomb bay. “Go,” he said. “You’ll die if you stay here. We aren’t going to be able to ditch.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Are you coming?” A palpable tremor coated her words.

  “I’ll put it on autopilot. I’ll follow you.”

  She released her seat harness but didn’t exit her seat.

  “Go,” he ordered again.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “I don’t see you putting the autopilot on.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Viv.”

  “We’re still flying. I’m the copilot.”

  “We aren’t going to be flying much longer.”

  “No one’s shooting at us.”

  “Not yet. We aren’t exactly challenging the guy.”

  A call over the interphone interrupted their back-and-forth. “Stumpy here. Bandit’s coming up on our left. Pretty damn close.”

  Al swiveled to look over his shoulder. The Messerschmitt sat just off Oregon Grinder’s tail. A slight bank to the right would allow the pilot to guide his cannon fire along the side of the bomber from rear to front, taking his time, making certain he destroyed his enemy.

  Al, exhausted and hurting and no longer able to fight, surrendered to his fate . . . and found a strange peace. He studied the fighter as it crept closer and closer. Oil continued to stream along its flank, just above the air intake for the supercharger. An antenna mast and a smaller circular antenna—probably a direction finder—sat on top of the fuselage just to the rear of the cockpit. The rear side of the camouflage-painted fighter displayed a large black German cross. To the rear of the cross, a broad white stripe encircled the fuselage. Al knew the stripe signified the Mediterranean Theater.

  Despite his imminent death, he wondered about the Messerschmitt’s pilot, the man who would be his Grim Reaper. Old? Young? Married? Did he have a son? A daughter? Did he believe in God? Worship Hitler?

  In another time, another place, would they have sat down together somewhere on a Saturday evening and swilled beer and swapped stories about flying and showed each other pictures of their families?

  Al turned to stare straight ahead through the splintered windscreen and await the cannon burst that would seal his fate.

  Vivian remained in her seat.

  Egon drifted the 109 ever closer to the shell-riddled Liberator. He continued to marvel that it remained aloft—so much damage. Like all American bombers, it bore a colorful logo on its nose. He didn’t understand the writing, Oregon Grinder, but allowed a smirk to flit across his face at the image of an organ grinder in a top hat with the word “OREGON”—whatever that meant—printed on it, stuffing a fiendish-looking monkey, a cartoon Adolf Hitler, into a meat grinder.

  “Ich helfe Dir,” Egon muttered. I’ll help you. But knew he wouldn’t.

  He moved the Messerschmitt forward, paralleling the crippled olive-green bomber. He caught a glimpse of a face in the waist gunner’s window. Then someone flashed a middle finger at him. Apparently that was all the Americans had left with which to counterattack.

  He banked the fighter to the right with a quick flick of his control column, then just as quickly snapped it back to level flight. The face in the window ducked. The obscene gesture disappeared.

  Egon maneuvered his fighter into a position just off the Liberator’s left wing tip, placing the Messerschmitt’s right wing tip several feet below and several feet forward of the bomber’s wing. The bomber didn’t alter course. It pushed straight ahead, skimming just beneath the scattered, flat-based cumulus dotting the sky, while at the same time continuing to drop inexorably toward the pristine blue-green swells of the Ionian Sea.

  Egon glanced at the belly of the bomber and did a double take.

  “Mein Gott,” he exclaimed. What looked for all the world like a sunflower dangled from a shredded piece of aluminum near the bomb bay. Had the Americans flown that close to the earth?

  A smidgen of the grudging admiration he held for his enemy reignited deep in his psyche.

  But he extinguished it, and instead took solace in the knowledge that for this American bomber christened Oregon Grinder, the battle had clearly ended.

&n
bsp; Curiously, that opened a new memory, one that again came without warning or invitation: the admonition of his commander, Oberstleutnant Gustav Rödel. “There’s an unwritten law I like to remind all of my pilots of, Hauptmann. Once you have defeated your opponent, shot him from the sky, victory is yours and the engagement is over. You do not fire on men in parachutes, you do not strafe men on the ground or in the water. You maintain your honor as a Luftwaffe officer. Do I make myself clear?”

  Egon fixed his gaze on the ill-fated bomber. So, Oregon Grinder, you are an old warrior, perhaps one my father would revere. But you still fly. Your men have not parachuted, though I have no doubt they have been ordered to. And they are not in the water, nor on the ground. Do I blast you from the sky as my enemy, or pay homage to your warrior spirit?

  The conflict knotted and twisted his soul as though it had been seized by a python.

  24

  Over the Ionian Sea

  August 1, 1943

  Al held his gaze straight ahead, well aware that the German Messerschmitt sat less than sixty feet off his left shoulder. Oregon Grinder continued to quiver and pulsate, its engines seeming to gasp for breath. Al knew he gripped the controls of a brave lady in her final moments.

  He thought about praying, but decided he’d used up all his prayers. Besides, he’d lost confidence in the efficacy of petitions to God. Too many planes had fallen from the sky. Too many good men had died. What happened, happened. It seemed, at least in this war, God had ceded control to man.

  A call over the interphone: “Hey, Pops. What the hell is that bastard doing? Why doesn’t he get it over with?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t. Maybe he’s savoring his kill.”

  “Maybe the SOB is a sadist. Just wants us to suffer as much as possible before he blows us to Kingdom Come.”

  Al didn’t have an answer. He glanced at Vivian and noticed tears draining down her cheeks. Yet she held grimly onto her control wheel, trying, like Al, to keep Oregon Grinder in the air as long as possible.

  Al’s forearms ached from the fierce grip he’d applied to his own control wheel. His left upper arm throbbed without ceasing where he’d apparently taken a piece of shrapnel in his bicep. Blood continued to leak down his arm, eventually splattering onto the cockpit floor where it left a pattern of dark crimson dots. He considered ramming the fighter, but knew he couldn’t move the crippled bomber rapidly enough to surprise the Luftwaffe pilot.

  No longer able to tolerate, or even understand, the specter of an enemy flying in formation with him, Al turned his head to look directly at the German fighter pilot. A young man, his flight goggles lifted, stared back at him through the Messerschmitt’s splintered cockpit glass, a man who had to be no older than himself. Their gazes locked. And held. Neither looked away. Neither smiled nor frowned. Just two kids sizing each other up.

  In the fighter, Egon stared at his opponent. It could have been a guy he went hunting with in the Hunsrück, or swimming with in the Mosel, or had a beer with in a Gasthaus. It could have been his old friend Otto.

  He allowed the Messerschmitt to slip back a bit until he could look directly into the waist gunner’s window of the B-24. A half dozen faces, all of young men about his own age, stared back at him like baby birds craning their necks from a nest. No obscene gestures this time. Merely curious looks. Without smiling, he nodded at them, then drove the fighter forward again.

  Mystified, Al watched the fighter slide back and forth, still running parallel with Oregon Grinder. The Luftwaffe pilot brought the fighter forward again until he could look directly at Al once more.

  This time the German pilot’s face seemed to relax ever so slightly and he gave Al a barely perceptible nod. Al, still attempting to sort through his emotions, didn’t return it. Instead, he continued to study his opponent, trying to decipher what the guy’s end game might be.

  What happened next sent a shock wave through Al, as if someone had attached electrodes to the balls of his feet. The Luftwaffe pilot stared directly at Al, then raised his right hand to his temple in a slow, deliberate military salute.

  He held it there, apparently waiting for a reaction.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Al said.

  “What?” Vivian asked.

  “He’s saluting me, us.”

  “Like last rites?”

  “I don’t think so. That’s not what a salute is for.”

  Vivian leaned forward to look out past Al at the Luftwaffe flyer. “What’s it mean?”

  “It’s a military greeting, a sign of respect.”

  “He’s not going to shoot us down?”

  Al paused before answering. The German had been too measured, too deliberate in his actions for them to mean anything other than he’d decided to call their fight a draw.

  “No, I don’t think he’s going to shoot us down.” Al, his throat tight with emotion, returned the fighter pilot’s salute. They each held their salutes for a moment, then dropped them.

  The Luftwaffe pilot gestured at himself, then pointed down, at the water. Al assumed that meant he intended to ditch, and nodded his understanding. He wondered why the German didn’t bail out, but then he remembered the stories he’d heard about Luftwaffe parachute failures.

  Al pointed at himself, then down, indicating he, too, intended to attempt a water landing. Well, crash landing. The fighter pilot nodded, then peeled away from the bomber to create some space between the two aircraft as they dropped toward the sea.

  Al pressed his throat mike to make sure his crew heard. “The battle is over, gentlemen. Our German ‘friend’ has declared a truce. We’re both going in the drink. Prepare to ditch.”

  Cheers and shouts mingled with the rattle and roar of the wounded bomber as it continued to sink toward the sea.

  “What’s the drill, Viv?” Al asked.

  Another violent shake rippled through Oregon Grinder.

  “No pressure, right?” she responded.

  “Still time to bail out.”

  “Yeah, but nobody took you up on the offer.”

  “It was an order.”

  “Guess you’ve got a rebellious crew.”

  He stared at her.

  “Or maybe a loyal one,” she said.

  He checked the altimeter. They continued to lose altitude. They wobbled along barely a thousand feet above the sea.

  “Not much time left,” he said.

  “Okay, here’s what I understand. Land into the wind like always. Except if the water is too rough, try to put her down parallel to the swells.”

  They both checked the state of the sea below.

  “No whitecaps,” Al said. “Doesn’t look too bad. Just long, low rollers.”

  “Looks like a light wind out of the north,” Vivian said. “So we’ll have to turn to a northerly heading.”

  “Don’t know if we’ve got time to do that before we hit the water.”

  “Let’s try.”

  They eased Oregon Grinder into a long, slow bank.

  “What else?” Al asked.

  “Full flaps. Absolute minimum speed, just above stalling.”

  Al figured that meant about a hundred miles per hour, maybe ninety-five.

  “But don’t let the aircraft pitch up with full flaps,” Vivian continued. “We want to maintain a level attitude, like trying to make a three-point landing on the nose wheel and two main wheels, rather than making a normal touch down with the main gear first.”

  “Roger that,” Al responded. “Why?”

  “If the tail hits the water first, the theory is the drag will cause the nose to pitch down and smack into the water like a torpedo. Don’t want that.”

  “Okay. Let’s leave that maneuver to the Navy flyboys.”

  They’d managed to get Oregon Grinder about halfway through the desired turn. They’d dropped to about five hundred feet above the swells. The two functioning engines began to sputter and miss, presumably on their last few sips of fuel.

  “We aren’t going to
get all the way around to that northerly course,” Al said.

  “Let’s level her out and get this over with then.”

  They leveled the wings and steadied the bomber’s flight.

  Al pressed his throat mike. “Okay, this is it, guys. Ditch, ditch, ditch.”

  Egon held the Messerschmitt about two hundred yards off Oregon Grinder’s left wing and, in tandem with the bomber, sank toward the sea. The needle on the oil pressure gauge dropped steadily. A stream of smoke shot from the engine. In moments it would be on fire. He feathered the prop, let the fighter glide, and jettisoned the canopy.

  He hoped—perhaps fantasized would be a better word—he might get plucked from the water by an Italian warship, but that seemed highly unlikely. With the Allies holding most of Sicily and about to shove Italian and German forces off the island, the Americans and Brits already controlled the seas in this part of the Mediterranean.

  Being taken prisoner by the Allies wouldn’t be the worst fate in the world—propaganda aside, word of mouth had it they treated Luftwaffe pilots humanely—but it would remove him from the fight for his country, something he dearly wanted to continue.

  If nothing else, perhaps he would live to see Inge and Christa again, assuming they survived the damned war.

  He glanced to his right. The bomber skimmed just above the sea, mere feet from the crests of the gentle swells.

  The Messerschmitt, too, sailed barely above the surface, the water now coming up fast. Egon braced for impact. The fighter smacked belly first into the Mediterranean. The nose pitched forward, forcing a cascade of briny ocean into the cockpit. Egon grappled for his safety harness release, found it, snapped it open, yanked the tab on his life preserver inflator, and shot upward through the dark water.

  He popped into a sparkling world of sunlit diamonds reflecting, refracting, shimmering on the undulating surface of the sea. Swell after swell rolled over him, filling his mouth, choking him with warm, salty water. He coughed and spit, struggling for air.