TROPHY FOR EAGLES
WALTER J. BOYNE
***
Copyright © 1989 by Walter Boyne
Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where the names of actual persons, living or dead, are used, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. To request permission, please write to: Permissions, IPS Books, 1149 Grand Teton Drive, Pacifica, CA 94044.
***
BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE
Non-fiction:
The Jet Age ( With Donald Lopez)
Flying
Messerschmitt Me 262: Arrow to the Future
Boeing B 52: A Documentary History
The Aircraft Treasures of Silver Hill
Vertical Flight (with Donald Lopez)
De Havilland DH 4: From Flaming Coffin to Living Legend
Phantom in Combat
The Leading Edge
The Smithsonian Illustrated History of Flight
The Smithsonian Book of Flight for Children
The Power Behind The Wheel
Flight
Weapons of Desert Storm
Gulf War
Classic Aircraft
Art in Flight: The Sculpture of John Safer
Silver Wings
Clash of Wings
Clash of Titans
Fly Past, Fly Present
Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story
Air Warfare (With Phillip Handleman as editors)
Aces in Command
German Military Aircraft
The Best of Wings
Aviation 100, Volume I
Classic Aircraft
Aviation 100, Volume II
Aviation 100, Volume III
The Two O’Clock War
Encyclopedia of Air Warfare (Editor)
The Influence of Air Power on History
Chronicle of FlightRising Tide (with Gary Weir
Operation Iraqi Freedom, What Went Right, What Went Wrong and Why
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Air Force
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Navy
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Army
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Marines
Today’s Best Military Writing (Editor)
World War II Aircraft: Great American Fighter Planes of the Second World War
Beyond the Wild Blue: The History of the USAF, 1947–2007
Moving America Safely: 50 Years of the Federal Aviation Administration
Soaring to Glory, The United States Air Force Memorial.
Fiction:
The Wild Blue ( with Steven L. Thompson)
Trophy for Eagles
Eagles at War
Air Force Eagles
Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of The Wright Brothers
Roaring Thunder
Supersonic Thunder
Hypersonic Thunder
Visit Colonel Walter R. Boyne’s website: http://www.air-boyne.com/
***
To Jim and David Nagle, who loved aviation
***
PROLOGUE
DEATH FROM THE AIR
Guernica, Spain/April 26, 1937
The old priest was in pain, his side aching from the unaccustomed effort of a twenty-minute run. Inside his thin leather black boot, the homemade patch had built, then burst a blister on his heel. In great sobbing gasps he gathered wind for the dash down the arid hillside into the church of San Juan. The rising drone of aircraft engines gradually drowned out the anguished tolling of the bell—his bell. Helpless, he watched Generalissimo Franco's Nationalist bombers drift from their standard V-formation to become a blasphemous oncoming cross, their bellies disgorging tumbling black dots that straightened into keening pointers of death.
Stopping at a twisted hedge, too late to join his people in the church, the priest saw the line of bombs reach toward the sunbaked houses, Basque-built back-to-back at the edge of the village. With drill-press precision the red-tiled homes disappeared into holes punched into the ground like fingers into dough. Then they erupted, spewing their poor contents in black-and-red fountains that built a smoky staircase pointing back toward the next wave of bombers. His rough sleeve wiped away tears as the string of destruction marched across the city center. He wondered how God could let the Germans build such airplanes, with their pretty butterfly-blue wings and propellers glinting in the sun, only to permit them to bomb this poor Basque village.
Explosions masked the sound of the hotel facade slumping into the street, a dusty cascade of rubble blotting out the familiar double-door entrance. He made the sign of the cross as the bombs two-stepped across the square, turning cobblestones into cannonballs in a rising storm of smoke that blotted out everything behind. Despite the inexorable churning destruction he was sure that it would stop in the square. God wouldn't permit anything to happen to the praying people crowding his church. He staggered and his mouth went slack in horror as the insensate blind bombs continued to fall.
The impossible happened. The front wall of his church dissolved from the bottom up, the bell tower easing noiselessly earthward like a child on a slide. The priest burst forward through the smoke toward the screams welling up as the engine noise trailed away.
The first wave was gone, leaving only a single angular monoplane, a red Messerschmitt Bf 109 V5, above the city. It turned constantly to shepherd the oncoming second Staffel of Jagdgruppe J/88, twelve Heinkel He-51 single-seat fighters.
Circling and dipping like gulls following a fishing boat, they were part of the Condor Legion, mercenaries sent by Hitler from first-line Luftwaffe units to help Franco. The young Germans flying the bobbing fighters were relaxed, reveling in the liquid-smooth roar of their twelve-cylinder BMW engines, pleased to be on a carefree escort mission instead of doing their usual risky ground strafing. They had come to Spain as tourists in civilian clothes, eager to win promotions in an easy war against a crumbling government Hitler had labeled "Red." But then the Russians had sent counterparts in better airplanes to help the Loyalist government, changing the war from easy to deadly. For the moment they were happy, glad to loaf in the sun, waiting for the pampered bomber pilots to finish their work.
To the south, a line of the clumsy trimotor Junkers Ju-52 bombers from Kampfgruppe K/88 bored in at 130 miles per hour, one thousand feet above the ground. These were the Condor Legion's workhorses, aging Luftwaffe bombers that could not defend themselves against an aggressive fighter attack and were totally dependent on their fighter escort to protect them. They were simply dump trucks of the sky, emptying explosives on passive targets, an act without passion or skill. The Ju-52s came in just high enough to avoid the blast effect, low enough for the bombardiers to obliterate the undefended village economically, for bombs were expensive and in short supply.
The casually planned bombing attack was an almost perfectly mindless act of war: innocent people slaughtered in a target without value. No one noted the irony that the bombing helped the Loyalists more than it helped the advancing Nationalists. The German commanders had determined quite by accident to destroy territory about to be surrendered, territory that was already earmarked for destruction by the scorched-earth policy of the retreating Loyalists.
The northern front was crumbling; ther
e was no way to resist Franco's forces as they squeezed the Loyalists, kilometer by kilometer, into the Bay of Biscay. Yet the intractable Basques were inveterate warriors, refusing to surrender. Even as Guernica burned, they launched their last two planes. The snubnosed Russian-built fighters, their gritty green paint broken only by wide bands of red behind the cockpits, raced toward the columns of smoke, the grass from the Bilboa polo field, their airdrome, still spinning on the wheels snugged up in their fat bellies. The pilots—one a Spaniard, one an American—had known each other for only a few weeks, but combat had made them old comrades. They climbed in loose formation as they turned to get the sun behind them to attack the oncoming bombers.
The American crouched in the open cockpit, sheltered from the slipstream. He banked swiftly, checking his rear and then glancing down on the sea-bordered rolling hills reminiscent of the California landscape he missed so much. As he scanned the strange Cyrillic markings on the instrument panel he wondered at the imponderable turns of fate that put him, a pacifist at heart, in the cockpit of a Russian airplane, killing for an alien cause. When he was a boy, his father had had to force him to hunt, goading him with taunts about buck fever when they needed food for the table. In Spain his squadron leaders had dealt with his misgivings by threatening to kill him if he didn't kill the enemy.
It was difficult for an American in the air or on the ground. The Spanish civil war, even though expected and feared for so long, had exploded with an unreasoning savagery that lusted to settle all accounts, political, clerical, familial, racial. A vicious paranoia gripped the land, sparing no one. The enlisted men, the townspeople, the priests, the farmers—all were worn so hard by the bitterness of the war and their own passionate beliefs that they suspected everyone. Even the indispensable camaraderie usually found in every fighter squadron in every air force was missing, replaced by an agonized tension of mutual distrust. There had been only one exception, the other man leading their pathetic last-gasp two-plane formation.
They flew as one, the American one hundred feet to the right and to the rear—not one hundred and one, not ninety-nine, but one hundred feet. It was close enough to see every detail of the leader's plane, the oxide coating trailing out behind the exhaust slots around the broad cowling, the quiver of the ailerons as he caressed a turn, the tips of the 20mm ShVAK cannon protruding from each wing, the bulge of the two machine guns in the nose. His tired engine was weeping oil in a thin film that made what was left of the paint glisten in the sun.
They had saved each other's lives more than once. At the battle of La Corufia, in the bitter January cold, the Spaniard had burst from nowhere to shoot a German off the American's tail. At Guadalajara, he had repaid the favor. Now each knew exactly what the other would do in any circumstance. It was a curious saving grace to being there at all, a compelling human purpose when all the rational ends of duty had lost their meaning.
He understood how the Indians of the Old West must have felt, sad survivors in a changed world. He and the Spaniard were the last remnants of the Loyalist government's air force in the north, sent by the harassed leaders in Madrid to stem somehow the remorseless flow of Franco's forces. But it was not an air force, just two tired veterans flung against long odds, flying airplanes they had never flown before.
In the south he had grown familiar with the Russian Polikarpov I-15, a sturdy biplane that had surprised the Germans and the Spanish with its speed and agility. For the trip to the north—a suicide mission, the Spaniard had called it—the government had given them two of the scarce I-16s, the best and fastest Russian fighter in Spain. A stubby, fat-winged monoplane, affectionately called the Mosca—"fly"—it was as difficult to maneuver as the I-15 had been easy. Yet it had to serve in this last attack.
In isolated unison, the two pilots pulled their goggles down, tightened their harnesses, set the arming switches, automatically performing a precise precombat ritual. The American felt his energy surge, and he was eager to attack, indifferent to the usual twelve-to-one odds. The Spaniard's customary stoic calm was replaced with a fierce burning indignation. He was fighting for more than his homeland; he had been born on a farm outside Bilboa and spent many a market day in the little town square now consumed by flames and smoke. His orders were to ignore the fighters and get the bombers. It suited him. With full tanks, they could make at least three passes before disengaging. Three passes could mean six bombers and many lives saved on the ground.
The German fighter squadron commander in the red Messerschmitt saw the blunt fleeting shapes of the two enemy fighters and shook his head. Where had they sprung from? The last Loyalist fighters in the north were supposed to have been shot down the day before. He waggled his wings and pointed, and the Heinkel biplanes shimmered into little buzzing packets, flying in the newly adopted finger-four formation, each pilot performing his own precombat litany. The two Russian planes were fifty miles per hour faster than the Heinkels, fifty miles per hour slower than the red Messerschmitt. The Heinkels could only meet the Russian I-16s head on, then dive to catch them after the attack.
The priest, standing now at the edge of the square, cheered the flaring sweep of the Moscas' attack. The two green fighters dropped in a knife-edged dive, turning through the Heinkels, and he could hear the clatter of their guns as they attacked the Junkers. Flames immediately broke out from one bomber as the lead Mosca fixed it in a spray of fire before disappearing into the center of a midgelike swirl of fighters.
The American swept up in a wide, twisting arc. He glanced down at his comrade, admiring the finesse with which the Spaniard slammed his fighter through hard uncoordinated maneuvers, forcing his Mosca into attitudes for which it was not built, using the brute forces of acceleration and gravity to slide out from under the guns of one Heinkel and then send his own bullets hammering through another. The American wished he could have this on film to show students how a master worked against the odds.
A check of his instruments and he peeled off in a headlong diving attack. He brushed past the uplifted noses of the Heinkel fighters, their tiny 7.9mm MG 17 machine guns winking on their cowls, to fasten his sights on the rough corrugated skin of a trimotor. The target, camouflaged in the surreal antic angles of a World War destroyer, blossomed in his sights like an onrushing freight train. He knew that inside the pilot would be grimly holding formation, watching for the signals from the bombardier, humped over the bombsight. The rear gunner could see the Mosca coming, and fired a long burst in vain before watching Russian bullets stitch through the cockpit into the wing. The Junkers blew up above the American as he pulled out of his dive into another soaring climb, trying to see where the Spaniard was.
He shrugged as half the remaining Heinkels raced to the north to cut the two Loyalists off from their base. It was a textbook move, designed to ensure that they could not break away, but it probably didn't matter, for the battle would be decided here and now, in the columns of smoke roiling up from battered Guernica below.
The American, his mouth dry and neck tired from swiveling, glanced for an unbelieving instant as the Messerschmitt opened fire from behind and below at his comrade. The Spaniard jinked, trying to turn away from the stream of lead being poured from the two cowl guns. The Russian plane staggered, then spun away, belching black smoke, the Heinkel fighters jabbing at it like magpies attacking a crow.
The American cursed. It could not be, not after so many battles. He prayed that the Spaniard was faking, that his spin was an escape maneuver. Anguished, he dove headlong, firing at the whirling Heinkels, knowing he was too far away to be effective. He pressed the trigger button until the clatter of the gun blocks moaned that he was out of ammunition. Almost out of sight, his friend's plane, tumbling erratically like a drop of water running down a window, stopped in midair, exploding in a crimson splash.
For a moment he was lost, drowned in the thought that one more friend had died flying. There had been so many, in peace and in war. He banked vertically, pulling back on the stick so that the G forc
es buried him in his seat as the Mosca turned on its wing, white vapor trails flaring from its tips. He strained to see if there was someone on his tail, waiting to touch a button that would end him.
A thin line of bile surged in his upper throat, a sour mixture of fear and melancholy that suddenly disappeared in the thought that this was his last battle too. A strange exalted sense of deliverance coursed through him, a knowledge that he would fight no more, lose no more friends, kill no more.
Expectant, he turned again: there was no one behind him. The fevered happiness grew. He wondered if anyone was looking down, anyone of all those men and women he had known so well and whose love of flying had taken them early to their deaths. Now he was ready, eager. If the Spaniard had to go, so would he, but he'd take someone with him.
Bullets came from behind, punching whistling holes in his windscreen, smashing instruments. His engine shuddered and oil spurted from his cowling to smear back over the windscreen in a greasy black blanket. He forced his head outside the open cockpit against the wind, wiping his goggles with his scarf. Blood from a ragged wound on his hand ran down his sleeve.
His exaltation ebbed with the blood's flow, and the old dual response to grasping fear raged back. He felt his guts and knees turn to the usual uniform vat of shivering clotted jelly, even as his brain became alert, detached, and observant. The mind fought on, telling his hands and feet what to do to survive, ignoring the whimpering cry of his body to lose all control, to curl into a corner of the cockpit and fall to the ground. As distinctly as he had seen the Spaniard fighting his last battle, he saw himself jerk the stick against the side and pull back, turning vertically to head due north, in an attempt to disengage before the shuddering engine jerked out of its mounts.
Ahead, he saw the Nationalist formation of Heinkels in two layers, one at three thousand feet, one at five thousand feet above him. Like a trapeze artist swinging down from his loft, the lone red Messerschmitt, already once a victor in this battle, curved south to attack him.
Trophy for Eagles Page 1
