by Adam Makos
* Sir Arthur Harris, the leader of the British Bomber Command, considered the bombing of Hamburg as payback for the German “Blitz” bombing of British cities that had cost the lives of forty thousand Britons. Hitler’s minister of armaments, Albert Speer, would write in his memoirs: “Hamburg had suffered the fate Hitler and Goering conceived for London in 1940.”14 Hitler refused to ever visit Hamburg after it was destroyed.
10
THE BERLIN BEAR
TWO DAYS LATER, AUGUST 1, 1943, REGENSBURG TRAIN STATION
WHEN FRANZ JUMPED from the train, he saw other servicemen greeted by their sweethearts on the platform. But when they cleared out, no one stood waiting for him. He hired a driver to bring him home to Amberg. On the front steps of his home he did a double take when his mother opened the door. Her hair had turned gray, and she seemed to have aged twenty years in the five months since he had last seen her. Franz knew the hardships of wartime life, of losing a son, and the poor quality of rationed food had done this to her. Franz’s father was away, but Franz had expected this. The Army had drafted his father to train horses. Due to fuel shortages the Army needed horses more than ever to pull equipment. Franz thought it ridiculous to call a sixty-four-year-old WWI veteran back into service, but he knew his father had had no say in the matter. Franz’s mother showed him a recent photo of his father, who also looked much older than Franz remembered. His father tried to hide this by cropping his hair high above his ears and trimming his mustache short.
That night, as his mother drank her evening beer, Franz asked her why the Gestapo had come to question him. She said the Gestapo had come to see her, too, because of August’s involvement in the anti-Party movement.* Franz’s mother suspected that his name had been found among old letters and correspondence of other suspects the Gestapo had recently captured. The fact that August was long dead did not matter, as the Gestapo investigated his next of kin.
Franz shook his head in disbelief. He told his mother that August would have told him if he was involved. They shared everything.
“You were flying the world,” Franz’s mother said. “How do you know what he was doing?”
Franz admitted he had found the “With Burning Concern” letters in August’s room but said he was certain the letters had come from someone else.
“What makes you think he was afraid to take a stand, quietly?” Franz’s mother said.
“Because he was Air Force,” Franz said.
“Did he have a choice?” Franz’s mother asked. “Did your father? Did you?”
Franz looked away.
“They made your brother fight,” Franz’s mother said, “but he was master of his own decisions.”
A WEEK LATER, THE TOWN OF WIESBADEN, WESTERN GERMANY
Franz, Willi, and the pilots of Squadron 6 clung to the fence of the Wiesbaden town pool as they watched adults and children laugh, shout, and dive into the cool waters. Franz and his comrades stood with towels around their necks in mismatched bathing trunks. Willi held a basket full of bottled beer. Franz and the others were sweating, but the pool manager shook his head and folded his arms. He said he had nothing against the pilots but could not let them swim because they had brought their bear. He looked at Franz as he said this. Franz held the leash that encircled the neck of a three-hundred-pound black bear named Bobbi.
“We need to take him swimming,” Franz said to the manager. “Look at him in that heavy coat. He’s hotter than us.” Bobbi panted, confirming Franz’s sentiments. Germany was wrapped in a heat wave, the same one that had dried out Hamburg and made it burn from the bombing raids unlike any city before.
“He’ll bite someone,” the manager insisted.
But Franz and the others assured him that Bobbi would not bite because he had been raised by pilots and loved people. Willi explained that Bobbi was a gift from the Berlin Zoo to his squadron.
“How do you know he can swim?” the manager asked.
Franz promised him that Bobbi swam at the zoo. The manager knew the pilots flew from the airfield just two miles east of town, so close it was almost an extension of the town. Wiesbaden had not yet been heavily bombed, and if it stayed that way, he knew it would be thanks to the young pilots before him.
Some children came to the fence to see the bear. Franz let Bobbi walk up to them. The children reeled back in fear. Franz promised them the bear did not bite, “He only licks.” One little boy stuck his fingers through the fence and squealed when Bobbi nuzzled them. Seeing this, the manager laughed, shrugged, and from that day onward the pilots and the Squadron 6 bear were allowed to swim.
The pool water seemed to turn the pilots into kids again. They shouted to their friends before jumping from the diving board. Willi and others talked to girls at the pool’s edge. They all smoked. A few pilots drank beer while floating on their backs in inner tubes. Bobbi swam around as children laughed and paddled away from him. Everyone who encountered Bobbi became a fan.
Franz had met Bobbi when he reported to the squadron. Before Franz arrived, Bobbi lived in a pen at night. But then Franz saw him being bitten by flies, so Franz allowed Bobbi to move into his apartment with him. As squadron commander, Willi authorized this. He wanted Franz to care for the squadron mascot so he could be free to chase girls. Caring for the bear gave Franz something to do while his leave, the thirty-day gift of life from the Air Force, wound downward.
Franz set his beer aside and scampered up the platform to the diving board. From the board he whistled to Bobbi who followed him, gingerly climbing the same steps, paw after paw. Before Bobbi could step onto the board, Franz ran and jumped, pulling his knees into a cannonball. Treading water, Franz looked up and saw Bobbi gallop off the board. In a massive splash, Bobbi landed a foot from Franz’s head.* Willi and the others laughed when they realized Franz had almost been squashed. The pilots, their girls, and the townspeople applauded as Bobbi swam, his nose in the air. The sight made Franz melancholy and put a thought in his mind.
How long can this last?
A WEEK LATER, MID-AUGUST 1943
When Squadron 6 began combat operations, every day at dawn a truck would pick up Franz and his comrades at their apartments in Wiesbaden. During their commute the truck would stop at a deli, where the men bought horse-meat sausages and filled their canteens with coffee. Bobbi always rode to work with them. The trucks carried them past the farm fields that surrounded the airstrip at odd angles, their crops planted in rows of varying colors that from the air appeared to zigzag and camouflage the airfield’s one, long runway. On most mornings the ground was covered by a ghostly mist, a thin ground fog or frost that sparkled in the sun.
Bobbi always jumped from the truck first and ran ahead to the briefing room. Wiesbaden Airfield seemed new and clean. Straight white sidewalks lay between the tower and the squadron buildings. Fresh leafy trees bordered the sidewalks. The hangars were spotless and gently curved around a half moon of concrete where the squadron parked its planes. Even the 109s were factory-fresh G-6 models. Each plane wore the latest camouflage scheme, with wavy, dark green paint on top so the fighters would blend in with Germany’s forests if seen from above. The planes’ bellies were painted white to meld with the clouds if seen from below. Willi had claimed Yellow 1 and Franz had taken Yellow 2. The pilots called the new G-6 “the Bulge” because the plane had bulging metal blisters on either side of its nose, just ahead of the cockpit. Behind the blisters were superchargers, added to help the fighters operate faster at higher altitudes.
Every other day the routine was the same. Franz and his comrades would soar up to thirty-six thousand feet above the earth, to battle the Four Motors that flew from England. When the squadron was airborne, Bobbi would stay with the mechanics, riding around in their trucks. When Franz and the others returned, the bear became excitable and would lean its mud-covered paws on them. During Willi’s debriefings in the squadron room, when female Air Force orderlies walked past, Bobbi would bolt after them because the swishing sound of their synthetic s
tockings drove him wild. Bobbi would chase the women until they climbed onto tables, screaming. Willi loved when Bobbi did this, because it allowed him to be a hero and rescue the women.
Bobbi was a lighthearted distraction from the harrowing new mission facing Franz and his comrades. They saw their job as simple, to stop the bombs from dropping and killing the German people. And never could Franz have imagined that such a simple mission would soon pit him against his nation.
* * *
* Asked about the personalities in Bavaria’s anti-Nazi movement, Franz would remember, “I did not know any of those people, but my brother did know some of them to some degree. He was very anti-Nazi, as was my family. He had been one of the first anti-Nazis as a young man.”1
* “Bobbi never cleared the landing zone (before jumping),” Franz would remember.
11
THE FARM BOY
EARLIER THAT SUMMER, LOW OVER WEST VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES
THE B-17’S OLIVE-DRAB paint blended with the lush green mountains as the bomber flew at two thousand feet. The plane rattled as it bounced in the turbulence from warm air rising off the mountains. Two young men sat at the bomber’s controls. They could have been mistaken for teenagers who had stolen the plane had they not been wearing olive flight suits with silver wings on their chests and garrison caps on their heads with radio headsets overtop. The young men had opened the cockpit’s side windows and their clothes flapped in the breeze. On their left shoulders sat the blue circular patch of the American Army Air Forces, a white star with a red center and bright yellow wings sprouting from it.
The plane’s pilot sat in the left seat. Although he was only twenty years old, he wore the gold bar of a second lieutenant on his tan shirt collar. His face was square and his brown eyes gazed up beneath short, flat eyebrows. His name was Charlie Brown. Charlie’s eyes looked worried, although a smile spanned his thin lips. He always looked this way, even when things were going well. His looks were ordinary, his build thin to average, but Charlie was a thinker. For his age, he was emotionally deep and quite happy to talk silently to himself, the best companion he had ever known.
Charlie’s smile reflected his rough and humble upbringing on a West Virginia farm like those below his wings. Down there, he had milked the cows before school and lived without electricity. Down there, he had never missed a day of school and had worked as the janitor at the local elementary school every night. On the weekends he had served in the National Guard to earn money for his family. After high school Charlie had transferred to the full-time Army, where he found himself behind the controls of a B-17.
Charlie gripped the W-shaped control yoke while his newly assigned copilot, in the right seat, ignored his yoke to study a map. Charlie’s copilot wore gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses that looked small on his round, full face. He was a second lieutenant named Spencer “Pinky” Luke. Behind his glasses’ green lenses, Pinky’s eyes appeared small and closely set. Pinky was from Ward County, in desolate West Texas, where he had been a mechanic before the war. He and Charlie were still getting to know each other, but Pinky refused to say where he had picked up such an unflattering nickname. Charlie guessed it stemmed from Pinky having a goofy demeanor and growing up in hardened cowboy country. Somehow the name followed him to flight school.
Pinky clicked a white button on the yoke’s handhold to talk over the plane’s intercom. His throat microphone, like a rubber collar, picked up his voice and beamed it to Charlie’s earphones over the cacophony of aircraft noise. Pinky gave Charlie a new heading that would turn them away from their easterly course. Instead they would head south, directly toward Charlie’s hometown of Weston, West Virginia. The detour was Charlie’s idea. The flight that day was the final mission of B-17 training school for him and Pinky. Their instructors at their base in Columbus, Ohio, had assigned their final training flight with one stipulation—stay in the air for seven hours to simulate a mission over the Pacific or Germany. As a reward, they let the pilots plan the route.
Charlie turned his B-17 toward the new heading. He had been flying for five hours already, but nervous energy kept him sharp. Through the cockpit’s side window he watched the fifty-foot wing tilt upward. Two massive round Wright Cyclone engines spun black propellers just feet from his face. Ahead, the B-17’s nose looked stubby to Charlie because most of the plane sat behind him. She was a B-17 F model, seventy-five feet long nose to tail. After this mission, Charlie would fly to Texas with Pinky to pick up the other eight men of his crew. There, they would mount eleven machine guns in the bomber, turning her into a “Flying Fortress.” Until that day, Charlie liked to think of the gentle plane by her other nickname: “the Queen of the Skies.”
Charlie leveled the bomber with the horizon. Through his windshield he saw the West Fork River gleaming in the sun. He knew the river’s bends would lead him home. Charlie’s eyebrows lifted when he looked west of the river and out Pinky’s window. There, a collection of lifeless green barns bordered a grass airstrip. “That’s the state 4H camp,” Charlie told Pinky. “Beyond it is the airstrip where I took my first airplane ride.” Charlie explained that when he was young, a Ford trimotor airplane stopped there while touring the country, offering rides for a fee. He lacked the money to buy a ride, but the pilots took sympathy and made him a deal: if he washed the plane, they would pay him with a free flight.
“Is that how you got hooked on flying?” Pinky asked.
“Not quite,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that he had originally been a soldier in the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord in Monterey, California. As a form of self-improvement, he had entered the base’s boxing tournament in the lightweight class.
“That’s where I met the opponent who changed my life,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that a skinny old soldier had stepped into the ring to fight him, a man with gray hair and arms so spindly his boxing gloves looked cartoonish. Charlie said he had planned to go easy on the old-timer, to pull his punches, and had even smiled at the man to let him know he would not hurt him. “The referee had barely blown the whistle when, all of a sudden, he slapped me upside the head two or three times,” Charlie said. “I didn’t even see his arms move!”
Pinky looked unsure if he should laugh or groan.
“The old-timer was actually an old pro,” Charlie said. “I knew then and there that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Charlie told Pinky that the man had knocked him out of the fight in the first round then visited him at his stool. The old-timer said something he would never forget. “You’re too nice a kid for this army. Check out the Air Corps.”
Charlie turned to Pinky, grinning.
“I did check out the Air Corps, and he was right,” Charlie said. “Flying fits my personality far better than fighting.”
Pinky laughed. Charlie secretly knew that Pinky fashioned himself a fighter, although he was really the nonconfrontational type. He had told Charlie that he wanted to fly fighters and had only accepted B-17s with reluctance. Charlie thought bombers suited Pinky’s personality, too, but did not want to say so.
A small town came into view with buildings on both sides of the teal-colored river. Charlie banked the aircraft and orbited over a flat gray bridge. He told Pinky that he was looking at Weston, his hometown. Pinky looked intrigued. The town was tiny. The bulk of its brick buildings sat east of the river, and none were larger than two stories.
Charlie pointed out east of the town to the town’s glassware factories, which he said made a third of the country’s glassware. He showed Pinky the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum on the west side of the river. The asylum resembled a haunted mansion. Charlie said that during his stint in the National Guard he had guarded patients there after the asylum caught fire and needed to be evacuated.
Charlie tipped the bomber’s right wing toward a gray bridge over the river that ran through town. Old men sat and fished from the bridge, hoping to catch bass hiding under its shade.
“I was almost killed on that brid
ge down there,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that he had been riding in a car driven by his older sister, one of his five older siblings, when another car hit them, head-on. He had flown face-first into the dashboard and broken his nose badly. “That’s why I get nosebleeds,” Charlie said. Pinky nodded, having witnessed Charlie’s nose bleed during high-altitude flights. Charlie knew he was lucky that Pinky had told no one about his nosebleeds, or else their instructors would have banned him from flying.
In the town’s center Weston’s citizens walked from their shops and homes to congregate in the streets and marvel at the sight of the world’s most advanced aircraft circling their town. Children jumped and pointed, amazed that such a large airplane could fly.
Steering the bomber south, Charlie told Pinky he had one last site to show him. He followed the curving river several miles until veering east, over farm fields. Charlie drew Pinky’s attention forward. There, on Pinky’s side of the plane, was a rundown house with a gray tin roof on a small farm.
“Is your family down there?” Pinky asked as they flew past the farmhouse.
“Nope,” Charlie said. “But that was my home for most of my life. We moved out after my mother died.”
Charlie explained that he was twelve when his mother, Myrtle, had died from illness. She had been the family’s guiding light. Her loss crippled his father, who fell into a depression, and they moved to a smaller house. It took years for his father to recover, but he did. While Charlie was in the Army, his father was elected as the local justice of the peace.
Charlie turned the bomber westward, back toward the river and on course for their base. Pinky asked Charlie if his dad was still living. Charlie said he was.
