Of Knights and Dogfights

by Ellie Midwood

  “Are you leaving tonight?” Charlotte asked in a miserable voice while he was busy brushing her off.

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  With a feeling of a free-fall inside of her stomach, she raised her gray eyes to his daringly. “Will you think very badly of me if I offer you to rent a room in a hotel tonight? I know that it’s only a seedy sort of place that will let us in since we’re not married—”

  “No.” He interrupted her at once. “I won’t think badly of you, at all. And we’ll rent the best suite, in the best hotel. We’ll just tell them that you’re my fiancée now.”

  Charlotte opened and closed her mouth. Joking? Not joking? It was impossible to guess with him and yet he looked so serious and she so hoped for it to be something more than one of his countless jests.

  “I’m leaving for the front tomorrow, Lotte.” He didn’t look at her but at her hands, which he was holding in his now. “I would very much love to marry you when I come back from the war. Would you wait for me?”

  Instead of replying, she threw herself onto his neck and started covering his face with kisses.

  “No shenanigans on the airbase, von Sielaff!” The same jokester, who had yelled at them to get off the ground, shouted once again.

  “Push off, you miserable Schweinhund!” Willi shouted back, pressing Charlotte close to his chest. “My fiancée has every right to kiss me whenever she wants! I’m leaving for the front tomorrow and there’s a war going on but perhaps that idea is new to you, you damned Luftwaffe paper-pusher!”

  The airbase controller only laughed amicably in response to all the insults. “Congratulations, you two!” And then bellowed at someone inside the post, “Hey, Heini! You owe me twenty Reichsmarks! Von Sielaff is getting married! Yes, the Von Sielaff! I know; I can’t believe it either! Look for yourself. There he is, with the future Frau von Sielaff.”

  Not one, but three young men poured out of the controller’s post, ogling the couple in disbelief. Charlotte waved at them, embarrassed but positively glowing.

  “That makes it two,” she said quietly, hiding her smiling face on Willi’s chest.

  “Two what?”

  “Two of my biggest dreams, you made come true today.”

  The next morning, snow. Huddled together, Charlotte and Mina stood on the empty train platform staring into the white-washed scenery in which the train had dissolved not ten minutes ago. They held hands and looked at each other with brave encouragement they didn’t feel and each knew exactly how the other was suffering.

  Libya-Germany, Spring 1942

  * * *

  Johann let go of Willi’s hand with visible reluctance. To think of it, as soon as one arrived, the second one was given leave at the request of the Propaganda Ministry and who knew if they’d see each other again. The situation on the African Front wasn’t something for the Luftwaffe to be proud of and that’s putting it mildly. Johann hated leaving his Staffel in such dire times but it appeared that Minister Goebbels thought that Johann was more useful to him in front of cameras and in classrooms, brushed, immaculately dressed, and decorated like a Christmas tree. The Staffel, according to Minister Goebbels, would do just fine without him for a few weeks.

  “Congratulations on your appointment as the new Staffel leader.” Johann regarded Willi warmly. The hospital food and care had agreed with him; he’d put at least some meat on his bones even though Willi still weighed hardly more than sixty kilograms, judging by the looks of it.

  Willi rolled his eyes emphatically. “Stop rubbing it in. Technically, it was you who got appointed; I’m merely your substitute while you’re away.”

  After Staffelkapitän Leitner got promoted to the position of a Gruppenkommandeur for I/JG-27, he didn’t hesitate a second before delegating the Staffel to the newly promoted Oberleutnant Brandt. Johann was a natural born leader who led by his example and not by loud words and authority. Every single pilot – the oldest of aces and the youngest of rookies straight out of the flying school – gravitated towards his calm yet confident demeanor. Johann was loved and respected and Leitner couldn’t find a better man for the position.

  “Well, make sure I have someone to report to when I get back from Germany.”

  “I haven’t forgotten how to fly while on leave, you know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “All right, I think it’s time for you to go.” Willi opened the door to the military truck and nearly shoved Johann inside, making the driver break into chuckles. “Here’s your suitcase, Herr Celebrity. Enjoy your vacation while I’ll be busy putting new marks on my rudder.”

  “Do not go near my fighter! Only Riedman is allowed to fly it while I’m away!”

  “And that’s another thing; what did I ever do to you to cause such mistrust?” Willi inquired, still standing on the truck’s high step.

  “You crashed more of our fighters than you downed enemy ones?”

  “All right, that does it.” Willi slammed the door shut with theatrical anger and slapped the truck’s bonnet twice, motioning for the driver to go. “Get him away from here. Leave him stranded in the desert if you wish. I won’t miss him.”

  Laughing, Johann stuck his head out of the window and waved to his best friend, who replied with the same.

  “Please, be careful!”

  With a comically solemn look about him, Willi put his hand to his forehead. Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant.

  Johann turned to face the interminably long road in front of them, missing their banter already.

  He was to report to the Wehrmacht office in Berlin and receive his further orders there. Before doing so he, however, stopped by Mina’s hospital to finally hug his wife. He couldn’t stay with her too long as he was already expected on the other side of the city, so he just held her for several minutes that seemed much too short to him; stroked her hair under her white cap, kissed her wet eyes and whispered all the words that he’d longed to tell her all these impossibly long months.

  “I have to go now but I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’ll wait for me, won’t you?” Overcome with guilt, he pronounced these words. That’s all she’d ever done, since she’d met him – waited.

  “Of course I will. I’ll wait for you as long as needed.” She always put on a brave face for him. “You go and do what you must. I’ll be right here when you come back.”

  I so wish I could give you a normal life, Johann thought, kissing her goodbye; mere minutes after he’d arrived. How little time they had together! But he was married to the Luftwaffe much longer than he was married to her; he was a lucky man that Mina understood it.

  “Someday we will live in our own house and I will be coming home to you every day from work,” Johann promised to her.

  His wife just nodded, smiling brightly in spite of herself.

  “Go, Hans,” she called him by the pet name that only she used with him. “You’ll be late.”

  Seventeen

  Flieger-Hitlerjugend Training Camp. Wengerohr, Germany 1942

  * * *

  “What is the most difficult part about the career of a pilot?”

  Beneath the scrutinizing light of ceiling lamps, Johann sat on the floor of a gymnasium, surrounded by a great swarm of boys in their Luftwaffe-blue Flieger-HJ uniforms, piped in sky blue. Their eager eyes were trained on him and his hands that held two model planes; one enemy one, with wires attached to it in places that signified its blind spots and another – a Luftwaffe fighter, which dived and shot at the first model plane from all possible angles, guided by Johann’s hands. The demonstration was now pretty much over; the crew with the camera that was filming the entire event had already started packing their equipment but instead of rushing to the awaiting car outside, Johann encouraged the boys to ask whatever they wanted.

  “The most difficult part?” Johann repeated with a pensive expression. Not to get killed in your first dogfight, appeared to be the obvious reply. “Not to lose your humanity,” Johann replied instead.

  Blinking a
nd confused, the boys waited for a further explanation, which Johann didn’t quite know how to put into words.

  “I’ll tell you a story. Just a couple of weeks ago, my very good friend Walter Riedman, who flew with me as my wingman, shot down an enemy plane. It was a Spitfire and it made Riedman run after him, let me tell you! The aircraft caught fire but the pilot bailed just in time and we picked him up as this happened over our territory. Our medic checked on the British pilot and found him to be in perfect health, with just a couple of bruises on him. I don’t know how it is on the Eastern Front – I heard it’s quite different there – but as a tradition in the Afrika Korps Luftwaffe has it, we took him into our tent and gave him food and some wine. We always do it with our captives; call it morbid curiosity if you like but we love meeting the ones we shoot down and shaking hands with them. We all started chatting and the British fellow eventually warmed up to us and even asked if there was any chance to let his unit know that he’d survived as he didn’t want to be listed as missing. He had a wife and a new baby at home and didn’t want them to worry about him. And so, Riedman asked for my permission, as his new Staffelkapitän, to fly to the British airbase and drop a note for them that their comrade was alive and uninjured. It actually goes against the new standing orders of Reichsmarschall Göring but… sometimes, there are things in life that are more important than orders.”

  Despite the silent, disapproving glances from the Propaganda Ministry people, Johann was relieved to discover that the boys around him took to the story with much greater enthusiasm than he’d expected. But again, that may have been solely due to these boys expressing such an intense interest in the Luftwaffe and dreaming of their future in the basic flying school. Fifteen-year-old teenagers, for the most part, most of them already sported the coveted three wings of the “C” emblem on their blouse and getting such a badge of honor required a minimum of thirty flights in the Möwe, a high-performance sailplane. They were already in love with the sky and profession and whoever was in love with the sky was a dreamer, a creature quite different from the rest of his kin; a starry-eyed idealist who still believed in something bigger than war and death.

  “I’d do the same,” one of them proclaimed with intense gravity. “The Luftwaffe has always prided itself on its comradeship with other pilots from other countries. It was like that during the Great War; I don’t see why we should break the tradition now.”

  “The RAF has some good pilots, does it not?” another boy asked.

  “Yes, very good ones,” Johann confirmed. “They make us break a sweat.”

  “But the Luftwaffe is still better, right?”

  Johann, with his invariable inward sense of honesty, stumbled upon the reply. Were they better? New Spitfires surpassed their Messerschmitts; the numbers were not on their side at all…

  “I mean, you’re still the highest scoring ace among all,” the same boy clarified, making use of Johann’s silence. “In the whole world.”

  “It’s just…” Johann cleared his throat. It’s just I have to go on multiple sorties daily because we’re severely understaffed. It’s just that while RAF pilots have shifts, days off, and leaves, we can’t afford to have any. It’s just that the new pilots that they send to us get killed almost instantly and I have to shoot even more planes around them to protect them. I fly sorties instead of them to keep them alive for a few more days. It’s just I also have a wife at home and I promised that I’d come back to her and that’s the main reason why I have to keep shooting down planes – because I can’t die. But he couldn’t tell them all that, could he? “It’s just practice, that’s what it is. If you practice enough, you’ll become as good as me and hopefully even better. As I have shown you today on these two models, flying can be very easy if you just follow the rules.”

  He sounded persuasive enough. He almost believed himself.

  Napola School. Berlin, Germany 1942

  * * *

  Harald’s Napola was the last one on Johann’s scheduled visitation list. He still wondered why the Propaganda Ministry included it into his “tour” in the first place; it’s not like the future SS leaders would be interested in what he had to say about his planes. The only thing he was looking forward to – and fearing, for some inexplicable reason – was seeing his little brother.

  Not so little anymore, Johann noted to himself as he observed Harald lecturing a small group of younger boys, towering over them in his starched uniform. A new band around his left bicep, a new braided cord across his chest – Johann fought off a strangely unsettling feeling stirring inside at the mere thought of what Harald was doing to earn such signs of distinction.

  One of the boys made the mistake of turning his head at Johann, who had approached them quietly and now stood behind his brother’s back. He had arrived early on purpose, hoping to spend some time with Harald before his meeting with the Napola students would begin. Listening to the torrent of abuse that his brother was pouring over the poor youngsters made him almost regret that decision of his.

  “Where are your eyes?! Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  The young boy jerked and straightened at once at the sound of Harald’s shout.

  Johann lowered his hand on top of Harald’s shoulder, turning him towards himself a bit too forcefully. An emotion replaced the look of surprise on his brother’s face, an emotion which Johann would never have expected to see there. Shame. The last time Harald gave him this look – the look of a dog caught stealing from the master’s table – was when he was six-years-old. The situation wasn’t that different from what he was witnessing now; coming back from school, Johann discovered a small boy sitting on the footpath near his house and crying. Recognizing one of Harald’s friends in the boy, Johann crouched next to him. What happened? – Vati bought me a new ball for my birthday. Harald took it, to play football with his friends. No, he doesn’t want me playing with them because no one wants me on their team. Because I’m younger than them and can’t run too fast. I’d have given him the ball myself if he’d only let me watch… but he said he didn’t want me near the field.

  With the boy’s hand in his, Johann marched straight to the football field which was not too far from their home. Harald knew at once what was awaiting him. He trotted over to Johann, head low, cheeks – crimson red; not from running.

  “I’m sorry,” were the first words out of his mouth.

  “So, you know what you did was wrong?” Johann stood over him, breathing hard. It wasn’t from anger either, but from the bitter disappointment that his little Harald would do something so outright mean and cruel. “You knew that you were doing something wrong and yet, you still went along with it. Why?”

  Harald shrugged. Because he could, that’s why.

  “You must protect your weak friends, not abuse them,” Johann spoke sternly. “Have I ever done anything to you just because I’m older and stronger?”

  A barely audible no.

  “Have you ever seen me taunt or abuse anyone who’s weaker or younger?”

  A shake of the head, which hung even lower now.

  “Have I not protected you against the bullies who kept throwing rocks at you and your friends on your way from school?”

  Harald nodded; wiped his eyes.

  “Then how come you want to be someone, from whom I’ll have to protect the others? You’re my brother, Harald. I don’t want us to find ourselves on two different sides of the barricade.”

  How fateful these words sounded now in his head! Harald wasn’t crying from shame this time, but the eyes, the eyes were still so darn guilty but at least not indifferent and cold like he’d seen so many times on the faces of the soldiers Harald always looked up to.

  Johann cringed to his brother’s much-too-loud of a salute – Heil Hitler, Herr Oberleutnant! – and watched the boys scatter as soon as Harald dismissed them.

  “Well? There’s no one here now. Do you want to give me a hug or you’re too grown up for it now?” Johann almost kicked himself fo
r his sardonic tone, as soon as the words tore off of his lips.

  Harald pressed himself into his chest stiffly. Johann still noticed the glance he’d thrown over his shoulder prior to doing so.

  “How’s school?”

  “Very good. I just hope I’ll grow tall enough to be accepted into the SS after I graduate.” He glanced up at Johann with uncertainty. No one in their family was tall. Johann himself, who had a few inches on his father, was only five-ten, two inches shy of the coveted six-feet. “I go to the gym every evening, during our free hours though. I hang on the bar every day and I swim almost daily as well. I’m sure I can make it to six-feet, right?”

  Johann watched him with a wistful grin.

  “Besides, I’m the first one in my class. I got my name on the board again this month and they have just promoted me.” Harald beamed. “My instructors also said that if I do a good job and they’re already commending my commanding skills, they’ll soon promote me again, right before the summer break. We’re all going to the field to help the farmers and I’ll be the unit leader there.”

  “Is that what you were doing with those poor fellows? Practicing your commanding skills?” Johann grinned crookedly.

  “No… I mean yes. I mean… They’re new. Our instructors say, we have to be tough on them, or they’ll never learn anything. We need to throw them straight into the action, so to speak. The more we demand, the better they’ll do.”