Silver Wings, Iron Cross

by Tom Young

  “You couldn’t use an ax if we had one,” Karl said. “Too much noise. The sound of an ax blade chopping into hardwood carries a long way.”

  “Very true.” The Kraut placed a hand to his ribs and looked at Karl. “We must not make unnecessary sound. You would have made a good submariner.”

  The sailor marched into the forest once more, rustled around, came back with two more fairly straight limbs.

  “What can I do to help?” Karl asked.

  “Give me the rope you found in the shed,” the German said. Then he raised his hand to show the parachute cord lanyard attached to his Luger. “And do you have any more of this?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I got more parachute cord. Not enough to make a raft, though.”

  “We will do the best we can. How sharp is your knife?”

  “Not very. But I can fix that.”

  “Very good.”

  With that, the Kraut turned on his heel almost as crisply as a Prussian soldier executing an about-face. Tromped into the woods again.

  Why is he in such a good mood? Karl wondered. Then he thought, No, that guy has probably never been in a good mood in his life. But the sailor is . . . intent. Yeah, that’s the word: intent.

  Karl understood why. Building a raft, heading for water, put the man back in his element. Made him feel a little more in control.

  I’d feel better, too, Karl thought, if I could make an airplane out of tree limbs and fly the hell out of here.

  He went to the knapsack he’d made, pulled open its drawstring, and withdrew what was left of the hemp rope. Gripped one end of the rope and wrapped coils around his elbow and across his hand, looping over and over until he’d coiled all twenty feet. Karl had no idea how sailors normally stored rope, but he wanted to leave it for the Kraut in some semblance of neatness. Otherwise, he figured, I’ll get some remark about how this wouldn’t pass muster in the Sea Cadets.

  Karl placed the hemp next to the German’s pile of logs and branches, and he dug through his pockets for his parachute cord. The cord came out in a tangled mass that put him in mind of a bird’s nest. He set to work untangling it, and when he finished, he spooled it around a stick and left it beside the hemp.

  A few minutes later, the U-boat man returned, dragging two branches as big around as a man’s lower leg. Eyed the hemp and the parachute cord and said, “Gut. Danke.” Marched back into the forest.

  With the toe of his boot, Karl began to kick at rocks hidden underneath fallen leaves. At the edge of the forest, near the open field, he found what he was looking for: a fairly flat stone, big enough to cover his palm. For his purpose, the stone wasn’t as good as real Carborundum, but it would do. He took the rock back to the German’s growing log pile, sat on one of the logs, and took out his knife. Opened the blade and began scraping it across the stone.

  The sun had risen higher by now and Karl could see that the day was dawning clear. Scattered cumulus dotted the sky, and they scudded along fast enough that he could see them moving. He felt only a light breeze through the forest, but the winds aloft must have been clipping along at forty knots or so.

  The U-boat officer came back with an armload of sticks no bigger around than his wrist. He put them down beside his other logs and branches, then stood for a moment surveying his raw materials.

  “So,” Karl said in English, “are we gonna make like Huckleberry Finn?”

  The German looked annoyed for a second, but then his expression changed.

  “Ah,” he said, “now there is an Americanism I recognize. Yes, we will ride the raft like Mark Twain’s character. I read Twain in gymnasium.”

  “No kidding? You must have pretty good schools.”

  Wilhelm shrugged, and his expression changed again. “Well, we did at one time.”

  The sailor started moving his logs and sticks around as if he couldn’t decide how best to begin construction. Finally he laid the four biggest logs, side by side, then paused to untie his pistol lanyard and gain freer use of his hand. He selected a branch that forked into three smaller branches. Leaning over, he placed his heel on the branch and pulled on it with both hands. The branch cracked and broke. The German rubbed at his injured thumb, then broke off more of the branch until nothing remained except a fairly straight pole.

  “I can do that for you,” Karl said.

  “Nein. I can do it myself faster than I can explain what I want. But I would like to borrow your knife in a few minutes.”

  “Sure thing.” Karl turned over the pocketknife and ran his thumb along the blade. “I think it’s getting a little sharper.”

  The earthy smell of the woods, the freshness of the breeze, brought Karl back to his childhood. He might have been playing in the woods with neighborhood boys, gathering limbs and branches to build a fort. Firing over the barricades with toy pistols, imagining themselves on an adventure with Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson in the Wild West.

  Karl had felt the same boyish sense of adventure on his first training flights. But that brand of thrill had gone from his flying long ago. Flying the mail might have been an adventure. Barnstorming in a biplane might have been an adventure. But fighting your way through flak and Messerschmitts to drop bombs on a target was nothing but hell.

  And so is evading capture on the ground, Karl reminded himself. Don’t forget that with the possible exception of this one Kraut, everybody for a hundred miles would like to kill you.

  The sailor continued breaking branches until he’d made eight poles, which he laid crosswise over the logs. They weren’t all straight, and the uneven lengths of the logs and poles gave the emerging raft a snaggletooth appearance. The Kraut took the rope and threaded some of it around the end of a log. Lashed a pole to the log with some complicated sailor’s knot that Karl couldn’t have begun to replicate. The German looked over at Karl and held out his hand. With thumb and forefinger, Karl took his knife by the blade and placed the handle in the sailor’s palm. The U-boat man placed the cutting edge against the rope. Hesitated, moved the blade closer to the knot. Apparently, he wanted to conserve as much rope as possible.

  “Measure twice, cut once,” Karl said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Old saying.”

  Before Karl could explain further, he heard aircraft. Not the steady burr of an approaching bomber formation, but a snarl that rose and fell, rose and fell. From the sound, he guessed he heard two or more lighter aircraft, probably single-engine. Constant power changes; somebody was jockeying a throttle.

  “The Storch again?” the German asked, looking up from his task.

  Karl did not look at the sailor, but gazed upward, scanning through the trees. He dropped his sharpening stone and shaded his eyes. Through the leaves and branches, he saw the flash of a wing as a fighter aircraft banked hard. Another plane followed. Staccato pops accompanied the engine noise.

  Is somebody firing?

  With a glance downward across the fields to make sure no one was watching, Karl moved to the edge of the trees for a better view. For a moment, he saw nothing. Then a Bf-109 shot out of a cloud at damn near three hundred knots. Fairly low, maybe two thousand feet. A few hundred feet above it followed a P-51 Mustang, gaining on the Messerschmitt. The American fighter’s V-12 engine screamed, and its polished aluminum glinted in the sunlight.

  A dogfight.

  A faint smile crossed Karl’s face. “Get him,” he whispered. “Get him.”

  Karl looked around for other planes; fighters worked in pairs at least. He heard more engines, but at the moment he saw only the 109 and the Mustang. The 109 snapped into a hard right turn just as the Mustang fired. The stream of tracers flashed by the German aircraft with no effect.

  The German plane clawed for altitude, turning and climbing in a chandelle. Clearly, the Kraut pilot wanted to shake the Mustang from his six o’clock, get off the defensive, and maneuver for offense.

  The Mustang pilot would have none of it. Following from above, he lowered his nose and turned his altitude adva
ntage into a speed advantage. In the dive, he banked nearly ninety degrees, rolled out of the turn, and pulled up hard. The U-boat man joined Karl at the forest’s edge just as the Mustang lined up behind the 109 and fired again.

  Tracers painted a yellow line straight into the German aircraft. The Mustang seemed to fire lightning rather than .50-caliber ammo.

  Smoke trailed from the 109. The German fighter continued climbing at an ever-steeper angle, slowing as it gained altitude. The Mustang leveled off and turned like a shark circling its kill. When the 109 went nearly vertical, on the edge of a stall, Karl knew its pilot was either dead or incapacitated.

  At the apex of its climb, the German aircraft slowed nearly to a stop and became enveloped in its own smoke. It fell over into a hammerhead stall and began to spin. The 109 traced a spiral of black smoke for a thousand feet. Then it hit the ground and exploded.

  Fire and debris showered the fields. The 109 had impacted less than half a mile away, and Karl could almost smell the smoke.

  Karl looked over at the sailor, who watched grim-faced. By now, the smile had faded from Karl’s lips, too; death, even that of an enemy, gave him no urge to gloat.

  The Mustang had disappeared, though Karl still heard the rasp of engines. And the noise still sounded like more than one aircraft. Maybe the Mustang had vanished behind a cloud and was joining up with his wingman. Karl searched the sky, still shading his eyes with his hand. He wondered what must be going through the Mustang pilot’s mind. Karl’s war seemed technical and industrial, but a dogfight was personal. Almost like a duel: Who could fly and shoot better? Who had a better machine? Who had better eyes? Karl had heard fighter pilots say the first flier to see the other usually won, the living and dead determined before the first shot.

  A throaty grumble rose from somewhere behind and above Karl. He turned and spotted movement between the leaves and branches—two fighters in close formation. Maybe these were the Mustang pilot’s compatriots.

  But when the airplanes crossed over the forest border and scissored away from each other, Karl saw they were 109s.

  One of them pulled up abruptly and banked hard to the right. Why such a sudden climbing turn?

  An instant later, Karl saw why. The Mustang had emerged from behind a lobe of cumulus; the German aviator must have spotted it. The American aircraft flew straight and level, almost at a right angle to the flight path of the approaching 109.

  Turn, Karl thought. Dive, for God’s sake. Get low and fast.

  Where was his wingman? Probably already shot down.

  The Mustang took no evasive action. Maybe the pilot had his eyes inside the cockpit, checking engine instruments for signs of damage to his plane. Maybe, flush with victory, he picked the wrong instant to get complacent. Or maybe he was just tired. But he didn’t seem to see the approaching German aircraft.

  The lead 109 fired as the Mustang crossed in front of him. The Kraut aviator employed the deadly geometry of a deflection shot; the tracers arced ahead of the American plane until they began punching into the engine cowling. The rounds stitched backward along the fuselage. Karl couldn’t tell whether they pierced the canopy and hit the American pilot. He felt sick to his stomach.

  The Mustang shuddered. It rolled to the left and wrote a downward curve in black smoke.

  The burning, smoking aircraft dropped behind a low hill. The earth seemed to absorb the Mustang, as if the plane had penetrated the terrain the same way it would penetrate a cloud. A second later, a billow of flame rose above the hill.

  22

  Fishing Instructions

  Wilhelm felt no justice, no sense of vengeance, when the American fighter aircraft crashed. He saw only another unnecessary loss of life. Without any discussion, he turned back to building the raft, glad for a task to occupy his mind. He took his time with the rope, cord, logs, and branches, knowing he had all day to complete the task. Only at nightfall would he and the American try to carry the raft down to the river.

  While he worked, guns stuttered in the distance, sometimes so far away he thought he just imagined the sound. The smoke and flame of the dogfight remained in his mind. Wilhelm did not indulge in thoughts of peacetime. He did not picture himself going about some boyhood adventure. He would employ the raft in a desperate escape attempt, not a pleasure cruise with the dog Bruno in the Bürgerpark.

  The raft came together as a crude affair, no more worthy of the Sea Cadets than a knot tied by the American pilot. Barely wide enough for two men, it seemed a poor comparison to the raft sailed by Huckleberry Finn. Forks of branches too thick to break by hand jutted at odd angles. Without any sort of planing tool, Wilhelm had to leave in place all the knots and imperfections. He fancied that the earliest mariners, working only with stone tools, might have built such a craft.

  It has come to this, Wilhelm thought. I have gone from a Type VII U-boat to the vessel of a caveman. Somewhere in the depths, he mused, amid the wreckage of ships I torpedoed, Neptune must be snickering at me.

  Wilhelm stood back from the raft and eyed it. He rubbed at his sore thumb joint, which hurt worse now from all the handwork he’d just done. He took out his Luger and retied its lanyard to his wrist.

  “Not bad,” the Yank said, gesturing toward the raft. “Looks like it’ll get us across high and dry.”

  “Hardly a work of great naval architecture,” Wilhelm said, “but it will serve.”

  When midday came, lunch consisted of a few bites of wurst for each man, and that finished the meat from the butcher shop. The small snack only whetted Wilhelm’s appetite. To take his mind off hunger, he stretched out on his back beneath the trees and let himself catch up on badly needed sleep. He dozed for two hours, and he woke to the sound of faint rustling in his left ear.

  He raised himself onto his elbow. Amid the dry leaves, Wilhelm saw the source of the sound: two large black ants locked in combat. The insects tumbled across a curled, dry leaf, their front legs wrapped around one another, antennae twitching furiously. Using their pincers as weapons, the ants bit and struggled, with neither gaining advantage.

  What could they possibly be fighting about? Wilhelm wondered. A crumb we dropped? Territory? Some matter of ant pride, an insult followed by a duel? To them, this forest must seem as vast as the Atlantic, yet they don’t believe there’s room enough for both of them.

  The ant battle reminded Wilhelm of a spider fight on board the Spray. During a stop in Tierra del Fuego, Captain Slocum brought a log onto his sloop. In this log nested a spider, which left its hiding place only to encounter a spider of similar size that had ridden all the way from Boston. The two spiders went at one another immediately, and the Bostonian won. After killing the Fuegian spider, the New England spider pulled its opponent’s legs off, one by one.

  Perhaps God sees our wars as trifling as battles between bugs, Wilhelm thought.

  The ants rolled off the leaf, struggled across the ground, and disappeared under another leaf. Wilhelm did not bother to move the leaf and see the fight’s outcome.

  Near dusk, the aviator took a pouch from among his handfuls of gear. The American opened the pouch and shook out its contents, which included a spool of braided fishing line and a set of small hooks. The Yank reached for his walking stick and sat cross-legged on the ground.

  “What are you doing?” Wilhelm asked.

  “I want to rig up a fishing pole while I still have light to see.”

  “When do you plan on fishing?”

  “When we get to the river, if it looks safe enough.”

  Wilhelm folded his arms and regarded the Yank pilot. “Are you mad?” Wilhelm asked.

  The American looked up with an injured expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You plan on a fishing excursion out in the open, along the riverbank?”

  “Well, yeah. But only if it looks safe.”

  Wilhelm frowned. We are on the run as a deserter and a downed enemy airman, he thought. How would anything ever look safe?

 
“Aren’t you hungry?” the Yank added.

  “Of course, I am hungry.”

  “Well, then, you’re welcome.”

  Still skeptical, Wilhelm watched the pilot tie the fishing line to his walking stick. The Yank unspooled about three meters of line, then cut the line with his folding knife. He examined his fishhooks with what appeared to be a practiced eye. Finally he chose one. They all looked the same to Wilhelm, but the differences seemed to matter to the Yank.

  Though Wilhelm considered himself a good sailor, his love of the water had never extended to fishing. Eventually his skepticism gave way to curiosity.

  “May I see that?” he asked, pointing to the pouch that had contained the line and hooks.

  “Sure.” The Yank tossed the pouch to Wilhelm.

  Inside the pouch, Wilhelm saw lead sinkers, two corks, and three artificial flies. He also found a folded set of instructions. When Wilhelm opened the instructions and read the English wording, it told him little about how to catch fish. The instructions served more as a pep talk:

  FISHING INSTRUCTIONS

  Of all the instructions which can be given to a man, or to a group of men, the most important is this: KEEP YOUR HEAD. You have in this kit, sufficient equipment to keep you alive for an indefinite period. You can use your own good sense and these instructions to keep yourself reasonably comfortable and safe.

  The materials here can be used for fishing in fresh or salt water. Many types of fish will take the lures included here.

  The “fishing instructions” went on to add that eels were edible, but sea snakes were not. The instructions ended with this final note:

  Keep cool—and you’ll come out of your experience a better man. BEST OF LUCK AND REMEMBER THAT COURAGE ALONE HAS WON MANY A BATTLE.

  Is this how Americans usually think? Wilhelm asked himself. To hold such unbridled optimism, to believe every problem has a solution? How very strange to find insight into a national character by reading a scrap of paper inside an airman’s emergency fishing kit. Wilhelm looked up at the Yank. Yes, that’s an American for you, Wilhelm thought. Downed in enemy territory, and he’s merrily rigging up a fishing pole. If the American national character includes the dauntless fighter, Wilhelm decided, it also includes a hint of the affable dunce.