Silver Wings, Iron Cross

by Tom Young

  “If they keep screwing around,” Adrian said, “a tank’s gonna blow.”

  Before Karl could respond, tiny figures began dropping from underneath the stricken aircraft. One by one, their parachutes opened.

  The radio voice spoke again: “Fireball Able Four going down.”

  “Ball turret,” Karl called, “Maiden’s bailing out. Count the chutes for me, will you?”

  “I got four,” Russo said. “Five, six, seven, eight.”

  Maiden’s right wing now trailed a sheet of flame. Two men remained aboard. Maybe the pilot and copilot were trying to set the autopilot or the trim tabs to steer the stricken plane away from the rest of the formation. But that became pointless as the control surfaces burned up.

  The flaming aircraft began to roll over: She had slowed below the minimum control speed for two engines out, and now she began a smoking death spiral.

  “Get out, Rawlings,” Karl said into his oxygen mask.

  A black speck fell away from the burning B-17, then another. The ninth and tenth parachutes opened just as Crescent City Maiden exploded. An orange smear in the sky threatened to envelop the last two parachutes, but the flames stopped just short of igniting the silk canopies. Debris rained from the cloud of fire. The only piece recognizable as part of an airplane was the left wing. The wing tumbled like an autumn leaf until it struck the ground with a splash of flame.

  “Shake it off, guys,” Karl said on interphone. “Can’t do anything for them now but hit the target.”

  “One minute,” Conrad called.

  The flak bursts intensified until black spots nearly blotted out the atmosphere’s natural blue, as if the sky had contracted a medieval disease. Hellstorm’s wings dipped and rolled, and Karl looked out the window to see a chunk of metal bitten out of the left aileron. But the aircraft held true on course, guided by inputs from Pell, hunched over the Norden down in the nose.

  “Thirty seconds,” Conrad announced.

  The concrete rectangle on the ground loomed close now. The first B-17 in the formation flew over the structure, and a line of steel eggs fell from the bomb bay. When the first one detonated, a blast wave radiated out from the target like a fast-moving ripple. More ripples came in quick succession. Most of the bombs exploded on top of the submarine bunker, and a couple fell beside it. Karl could not assess the damage; he was focused on his instruments and target chart, ready to take over in case of autopilot failure.

  “Ten seconds,” Conrad called.

  Karl wanted to remind Pell of the urgency for an accurate drop. But that would have been pointless—and the regs demanded silence on the interphone during the bomb run except for critical calls. The autopilot corrected course two degrees to the right.

  A smoking concrete mass began sliding under the aircraft’s nose. The Norden’s mechanical computer counted down to bring two tungsten contacts together. The contacts sent an electrical signal through the bombardier’s control panel.

  Behind him, Karl heard the bomb shackles release.

  8

  Dire Thunders

  The heavens’ wrath—booming, whistling, howling wrath—rained down as Wilhelm and his crewmates huddled inside Bunker Valentin. He held his hands over his ears, but the explosions overhead assaulted his eardrums until he could hear little but a tone and a dull roar. The men turned their oil-smeared, bearded faces toward the ceiling—as they had when depth charges detonated over the U-351. The building shuddered. Dust and grit filled the air. The lights swayed and flickered with every blast, and ripples danced across the black water in the U-boat slips.

  As Wilhelm kneeled with his comrades, he remembered stray lines from his literature classes back when he was in gymnasium, before the naval college. Something from Virgil’s Georgics:

  Germany heard a clashing of arms all over the sky; the Alps trembled with uncommon earthquakes . . . Never did lightnings fall in greater quantity from a serene sky, or dire thunders blaze so often.

  Long before the First Reich, did this Roman poet foresee the fall of the Third? Foretold or not, the Reich’s destruction seemed pretty certain now if this many B-17s could fly into Germany.

  So far, at least, the seven meters of concrete held firm—but Wilhelm found it hard to believe any man-made substance could withstand this onslaught. The bombs just kept coming—how many damned Flying Fortresses did the Yanks have, anyway?

  What god did I anger, Wilhelm wondered, that my whole existence always comes back to this? Huddling in the dark, waiting for explosions to stop.

  Some of the U-boat men cursed, but no one panicked; like Wilhelm, they had experienced this before, just not on land. To Wilhelm, once logic surfaced in his mind through the ocean of god-awful noise, this situation actually seemed easier: He might get crushed by falling concrete—but even in the worst case, at least he would not drown.

  The bunker’s two-story-high steel sliding door remained partially open; the men had not managed to close it all the way before the first bombs struck. Through the meter-wide column of daylight, Wilhelm saw the U-351 moored at her pier, helpless and exposed.

  A bomb struck the far end of the pier. Wilhelm saw an eruption of fire. He felt the shock wave force itself through the door opening. His sleeves flapped, and heat singed his face. Smoke poured in through the slot. Men coughed and cowered.

  And the lights went out.

  The bunker fell pitch black except for the wedge of daylight by the doorway, now dimmed by smoke and dust. The U-351 still bobbed beside the pier. The pier itself had suffered a deep gouge in the concrete, but the sub remained intact. Her previous battle damage would still be repaired, and she would still go out on a pointless suicide mission and become her crew’s coffin. For him to order the men back aboard her would amount to murder.

  Despite exhaustion and sleep deprivation, Wilhelm’s thoughts came clear and fast. He realized the darkness and confusion of the air raid gave him his best opportunity to escape. He rose to his feet, bumped and elbowed through his men to reach the far end of the submarine pen—away from the light, toward the door that led to the offices and machine shop.

  Like many U-boat men, Wilhelm kept a flashlight in a pocket of his fatigues. But he chose not to use it yet. In the deep shadows, he felt his way to the door. It opened into a hallway as black as a submarine with total power loss.

  Another salvo of bombs rocked the bunker. Men cried out from somewhere down the hall. Grit shook loose from the ceiling and sprinkled onto Wilhelm’s head and shoulders. Amid explosions, screams, and solid gloom, Wilhelm found his surroundings . . . fitting. To abandon all for which he’d lived and fought felt like a kind of death, a portal through blackness to another phase of existence. If a U-boat bunker under attack by heavy bombers wasn’t purgatory, it would do until the real thing came along. He stepped into the dark hallway and closed the door behind him.

  Behind the intermittent roar of bombs, another set of explosions sounded a steady percussion line. Antiaircraft cannon, Wilhelm realized, pounding away at the Flying Fortresses. It seemed little more than token resistance. The flak batteries might take out an airplane here and there, but the bomber stream came on, relentless as Valkyries.

  Confident he had slipped away from his crewmates unnoticed, Wilhelm dug into his pocket and withdrew his flashlight. When he turned it on, the beam lit shafts of dust suspended in the air by the shocks of bombardment. He had often used this same light to help bring a dying U-boat back to life: fumbling for emergency power, working to regain control before the vessel sank to crush depth. Now the light led him farther from his crew.

  Wilhelm entered the machine shop he’d visited earlier. Among the lathes, drill presses, and tool cabinets, he saw men crowded onto the floor, sitting with their arms around their knees. Some rocked back and forth on their hips. These were the same poor wretches he’d seen ordered out of the truck by the SS guards. The guards now stood over them, wielding flashlights and machine pistols.

  One of the SS men met Wilhelm’s gaze. T
he man’s hatchet face put Wilhelm in mind of a rat. Every gymnasium has a bully who looks like that, Wilhelm thought, and this is their idea of serving the Fatherland. How much courage would this man show in the middle of the Atlantic against a foe that shoots back? We’ll never know, Wilhelm considered, because he’s probably too damned stupid for U-boat service.

  The SS man shouted to make himself heard over the air raid Klaxons and flak guns.

  “Sir,” the guard yelled, “we’ll get these pigs to work on cleanup as soon as the all-clear sounds.”

  Wilhelm made no reply. None of the slave laborers looked at him, but a few stared up at the ceiling. Are they praying for deliverance? And in what form?

  Perhaps they wished for one of those Grand Slam concrete-busters to blow off the roof and take them out of their misery. In their position, Wilhelm would have wanted exactly that. But whatever the Yanks were dropping now seemed insufficient to the task.

  No bombs fell for several seconds, and Wilhelm wondered if the attack had finally ended. He moved out of the machine shop and continued down the corridor, pondering his next move. Get out of the base and as far away as possible, he decided. And I’ll do it quickly while everyone is still dazed.

  He followed his flashlight beam to a steel door at the end of the hallway. From the ensign’s tour earlier, Wilhelm thought he recalled that the door opened to the outside.

  Without warning, the door ripped from its hinges and flew past his head. The air turned to a soup of fire and debris. A vacuum sucked the breath from his lungs. He found himself on his back, struggling to breathe, to understand. Tasted blood in his mouth. Something hurt his eyes. Glare. He realized the glare came from the sun. A bomb had struck just outside the building at a place not reinforced as strongly as the main bunker. The blast had ripped open the door and part of the wall, and Wilhelm lay amid the rubble. Dazed, he found himself unable to move for several minutes.

  Gradually his sense of balance returned. He tried to sit up. Placed the heel of his right hand on the ground. A jolt of pain shot through his arm, as if he’d been electrocuted. Wilhelm fell onto his side and rubbed his left thumb across the back of the injured hand. He found his right thumb dislocated, wrenched from its socket at a grotesque angle. Each breath hurt; some of his ribs were probably broken. Blood dripped from a gash on his left arm. When he coughed, he barely heard the sound. The blast had partially deafened him.

  Wilhelm wanted to check on his crewmates, to let a doctor treat his hand, to bathe, to shave, to sleep. But the Yanks and their endless bombs had, in a way, presented him with a gift: a chance to get away, one that would not last. At such an opportune moment, Wilhelm had learned, a good officer seizes the initiative. In his mind, he set his new course.

  Using his left hand this time, Wilhelm pushed himself to a sitting position. His first priority was to get that thumb back into place if possible. He placed three fingers against the dislocated joint and pushed. That hurt so much, he ground his molars, sucked in air between his teeth.

  And he hadn’t pushed hard enough. The thumb remained out of position.

  Wilhelm had seen a sailor deal with a similar injury while at sea. With no doctor on board, and weeks of patrolling ahead, the man had little choice but to fix it himself. The sailor hooked his thumb around a rung of the U-boat’s tower ladder and yanked hard. He screamed as the pain put him on his knees, but the joint popped back into place. Wilhelm realized he’d need to find a similarly brutal field remedy.

  He placed the heel of his boot on the first joint of his thumb, pinning his right hand to the ground. Placed his left hand around his right wrist. Closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and pulled hard.

  He’d thought he wouldn’t scream like that sailor. And he didn’t. He screamed more like a girl. The agony brought tears to his eyes; he felt he’d torn the thumb off altogether. He rolled onto his back. But when he looked at his hand, the thumb was back in its socket. Still hurting, but back in place.

  Wilhelm took three painful breaths. Forced himself to stand. He braced himself on a chunk of fallen concrete and took an unsteady step. That brought no additional pain; at least his legs weren’t broken. His eyes watered from dust and grit. Wilhelm took out a handkerchief and dabbed at them, blinking. Brushed dirt from his beard. Wiped the cut on his left arm and placed the bloody handkerchief back in his pocket.

  A dead silence took hold. At first, Wilhelm wondered if he’d gone completely deaf, but he heard, faintly, the grinding of rubble under his boots. He listened carefully and realized the flak guns had quieted. So had the air raid Klaxons. Thank God, the bombers had finished their work for today.

  On unsteady feet, Wilhelm entered what had been the area of new construction. Where a new concrete wall had stood, he saw only a crater of mud. Scaffolding and I beams lay in a heap of twisted metal. A toppled crane rested across the burning remains of the truck that had brought in the slave laborers. Black smoke boiled from the wreckage, and it smelled like a torpedoed oil tanker. No sign of life anywhere.

  A chain-link fence, still intact, surrounded the construction zone. Wilhelm picked his way to the fence, hoping to find an opening. Mud sucked at his navy boots. He took two more steps and sank in muck to his knees.

  “Scheisse,” Wilhelm said.

  He began to lift his left foot, heavy with mud, when something about five meters away caught his eye: a filthy puddle, the black-and-white stripes of a prison uniform, a burgundy swirl. A black hand, scorched fingers curled into a claw. Nothing else resembled any part of a human body. Some poor devil caught in the open, or perhaps the remains of the prisoner shot dead by the SS goon before the bombing. In any case, this man’s troubles were over, and he was probably better off than his comrades huddled inside the machine shop.

  Wilhelm had believed he fought a chivalrous war. U-boat crews operated by a code of honor. For example, one never fired on a ship rendering aid. Wilhelm remembered a night when the U-351 made a surface attack on a British freighter. One shot hit her amidships, and one shot sufficed. The freighter’s back broken, flames towered into the darkness while her crew lowered lifeboats from their davits. The stricken ship had sailed with a large convoy, and Captain Brauer wanted to score more victories that night. The torpedo tubes stood loaded and ready, and the convoy’s destroyer escorts crisscrossed the sea in all the wrong places. The U-351 remained unseen, deadly, and poised to strike again.

  Another freighter hove alongside the flaming wreck. An easy shot on a fat target. Brauer seemed about to add another five thousand tons to his kill record. But the men in the lifeboats began rowing across to the freighter. Sailors lowered scramble nets from her railings. Wilhelm heard, quite distinctly, one of those sailors call out in that odd, flat-sounding American English: “Climb aboard, fellas. We’ll get you some dry clothes and hot chow.”

  Captain Brauer doffed his cap and crumpled it in his fist. He wore an expression like he’d just lost a chess game.

  “Close the tubes,” Brauer ordered. “We’ll get her on another night.”

  The mission was to stop Allied supplies, not kill fellow mariners. Of course, some of the mariners on torpedoed ships would die, but those deaths came as a regrettable secondary result. Mercy had its place across the windswept leagues of the Atlantic. That was especially true in the stories Wilhelm had heard about U-boat ace Otto Kretschmer. The legendary Kretschmer had been known to surface among the lifeboats of men he’d just torpedoed, call out in fluent English, and make sure the castaways had food, water, and a course to land.

  But even if the Kriegsmarine fought with honor on the seas, Wilhelm realized, horrors ensued on shore. Horrors in the name of the nation he loved. Almost at first sight, he had despised that hatchet-faced bully in the SS uniform. Now Wilhelm wondered, Are he and I cogs in the same machine?

  Wilhelm slogged through the muck to reach the chain-link fence, where he found drier ground. The effort winded him, and hard breathing made his cracked ribs stab him all the worse. He paused for a mom
ent, hooked his fingers through the fence, and scraped his boots against the links to rid them of mud.

  While he kicked and scraped, he looked out across the river and into the city. The water flowed dark, the color of engine oil, and it looked about as drinkable. Debris bobbed in the current: splintered lumber, bottles and cans, a wad of clothing. No, that wasn’t a wad of clothing; it was a body floating facedown.

  Nothing flew overhead now except a single crow, black as the depths, gliding above the Weser. Pillars of smoke rose in a half-dozen places as if Thor had emerged from the pages of Germanic mythology and thrown down thunderbolts.

  Wilhelm came to a break in the fence. Not a gate, but merely a rip in the chain links, perhaps the result of a chunk of concrete or metal sent flying in the bombardment. The opening wasn’t wide enough for him to step through, so he grasped the torn edge of the fence and pulled. He worked at both sides of the rip, yanking with his good hand while he braced himself with one boot against the fence. Each pull sent blinding pain through his ribs, and twice he had to stop and let the silver dots clear from his eyes. When Wilhelm opened a hole barely big enough to admit his shoulders, he ducked through. A broken link snagged his inner thigh. The sharp wire tore a hole in his fatigues and left a bloody scratch.

  Now, where to go?

  Wilhelm’s maternal grandparents lived in an old section of Bremen. He had last seen his opa and oma just before his first patrol. He had no idea if they remained here or if they’d moved to safer environs in the country. As a deserter, would his presence put them in danger? Perhaps. But given Wilhelm’s spotless record up until now, the Kriegsmarine would probably consider him merely missing—and not conclude he’d deserted—for at least a day or two. They might even think he’d been blown away in the bombing.

  I’ll stay just one night, Wilhelm thought. I haven’t seen them in so long. I’ll tell them only that Valentin was bombed and I survived; that much is true. I’ll get cleaned up, catch up on my sleep, and then I’ll move into the countryside and wait out the war.