The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots

by Jon E. Lewis

  We would be like hunted animals seeking cover. And without either telephone or supplies we would be cutting ourselves off from the outside world. Nor was there another airfield left in western Sicily.

  I must have fallen asleep, for again the telephone jerked me out of a brief spell of blissful unconsciousness. “Four o’clock, sir.”

  The first light of day was filtering through the Venetian blinds as I got up to open the shutters. I still felt utterly exhausted; indeed, I seemed to be in a permanent state of fatigue. I had but one desire and that was to sleep.

  In the next room Tubby was opening the shutters, putting the chairs in place and rattling the breakfast crockery. It had become a little cooler. In the wan light before dawn, the sickle-shaped bay, the terraces, gardens and white houses were lightly shrouded in mist through which black pines thrust upwards and smoke from chimneys rose perpendicularly into the sky.

  Bachmann and Straden, who were sitting at the table when I entered the day room, answered my “good morning” in low, morose voices. None of us felt any desire to converse. What we really wanted to do, as we drank Tubby’s strong hot coffee, was to cradle our heads in our arms on the table and sleep.

  Kegel came in, sat down and pushed the teleprint over to me without speaking. The white strips of printed text had been pasted neatly on to the pale pink paper of the official form. The first words to spring to the eye, appearing as they did well below the main portion of the long signal, were “Göring, Reichsmarschall”.

  “. . . regard you with contempt . . .” I had no wish to read to the end. It was not my habit to shirk what was unpleasant but this repelled me. It seemed to be directed at myself alone; I was the man responsible for this group and I, personally, was the object of his contempt.

  I handed the signal across the table. Straden took it and he and Bachmann began to read. Then, slowly and carefully, he put the paper down on the table, rose, took his cap from its hook and left the room without a word. Bachmann looked after him uncertainly, then at me and Kegel, eased his chair back and followed Straden. On his way out he said quietly: “I’m driving to the ops room, sir.”

  The telephone rang. “It’s the general, sir.”

  The general’s voice came from a long way away and was overlaid with crackles and hisses. So as to hear him better I held my breath and motioned to Kegel and Tubby to keep quiet.

  “We’re near Taormina,” the general said. “We’re surrounded – d’you understand me? Comiso is no longer usable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I wanted to call you last night before that signal went out but I couldn’t get through to you . . .”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Listen, you’re not to take it seriously. I did what I could. I’ve been urging him to abandon the whole business, but then he sent this signal to Air Corps.”

  He did not continue and I remained silent. Finally he asked: “Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Collect all the aircraft in western Sicily and go to Gerbini. The airfield is usable. By now your 3 Wing will be on its way from Sardinia and they will also land at Gerbini. Your job is to protect the Straits of Messina. Can you tell me how many aircraft will be arriving?”

  “Between fifteen and twenty belonging to 2 Wing and Group H.Q. No. 1 hasn’t reported yet.”

  “Have you any questions?”

  I had indeed, lots of them, but in terms of German military tradition most were not of the kind a major can ask a general.

  “Yes, sir. What’s the situation? How far have the Allies got?”

  “The pressure on our ground troops has increased enormously and we shall be concentrating our defence in the eastern portion of the island. It’s possible that you’ll have to move soon. The enemy is pressing on towards the centre of the island.”

  “But where is the group to move to, sir?”

  “I don’t know yet,” was his somewhat irritable reply. “For the time being no German soldier may leave Sicily. But you should get all your vehicles ready for a move. There’ll be no transport aircraft – Air Corps haven’t a Ju left. And once again: don’t take that teleprint too seriously. D’you promise me that?”

  What could I say over a telephone line that might go dead at any time? We had already discussed this question once before for several hours and had found no solution, so it was quite pointless to say anything further now. I therefore replied:

  “Yes, sir.”

  I felt almost ashamed of my attitude when speaking to the general. It seemed to me that I had been an accessory to an act of treachery of which our pilots were the victims. At the same time I realized how diabolical was the dilemma in which the general found himself. I had thrown in the sponge, simply answering “Yes, sir”. In this answer lay that trust in one’s superior – a whole attitude towards life – which had been instilled into us, into our fathers and into their fathers before them. For us soldiers it had hitherto been the only right attitude, indeed the only conceivable one. The obedience practised for centuries by the German soldier had always presupposed an unshakeable trust that the orders he received would be sensible orders and that the high command would search their hearts very carefully before sacrificing whole formations. And the many who were sacrificed died in the certainty that this was so. Increasingly of late I had found this reflected in the mute expressions of my pilots though for some time there had been a distinct note of interrogation. It still holds good, doesn’t it, sir? they seemed to be asking me. It surely must have some sense if the high command demands it of us, surely it must!

  But supposing that something had gone wrong with part of this old military equation? Who were the “high command” anyway? Supposing that after 1933 a new factor had entered this hierarchy of obedience, a factor which had suddenly allowed the high command to do what it liked, even something senseless?

  Questions, questions! A man would need leisure to reflect on them. He would have to have caught up with his sleep. He would need time, would need someone else to discuss them with. In our business such matters were not discussed. Yet it might have been better if they had been, for in that way our doubts could perhaps have been dispelled.

  For the past few minutes I had been standing beside the telephone table with the receiver in my hand. Kegel and Tubby were looking at me thunderstruck. From the earpiece came a quacking voice: “Are you still speaking? Have you finished? I’m disconnecting you.”

  These were no thoughts for the C.O. of a group at the start of a day’s operations. I grabbed my belt and pistol from the back of the chair where they usually hung and buckled the belt round my waist. For a soldier there is something extremely salutary in this gesture: he is taking a grip on himself, discarding all unnecessary thoughts, focusing his mind on immediate things, on essentials.

  How I detested those flights to Gerbini! Whenever I stood on that barren expanse under the blazing sun, a landscape pockmarked with bomb craters and covered with wrecked aircraft, the scene always brought home to me the hopelessness of our battle for the island.

  “Tubby, let the ops room know that I’m on my way to fetch Captain Straden and Mr. Bachmann. We’re flying to Gerbini.”

  Kegel got into the Kübelwagen with me and we drove between gardens along a narrow, deserted lane which debouched into the main road through a constricted alley-way. Spread out below us in the morning mist, the western tip of the island with the airfield and the white houses of Trapani presented a magnificent spectacle. It was the brief hour before sunrise when a semblance of freshness could be felt coming off the sea, before the scorching heat descended on the countryside from the eternally clear southern sky. Over on the horizon, above Marsala, a row of dark blue smudges floated above the mist – flak bursts. The idyll was deceptive and the war went on. It was five o’clock in the morning and the day was going to go on for ever.

  As we drove up to the operations room I gave Kegel the necessary instructions regarding the preparations for the move.

>   “All ground personnel,” I told him, “other than those needed for the final servicing of the aircraft, should be dispatched to Messina. Check our loading lists and make arrangements to destroy the equipment we can’t take with us.”

  When we arrived, Kegel and I jumped out of the Kübelwagen and climbed the few steps into the hut. Straden was already walking towards me.

  “The general wants to speak to you,” he said.

  He was continuing to avoid my eyes. I had the impression that the Reichsmarschall’s insults were still sticking in his throat. But it was a case of swallow or choke.

  While I perched on the folding chair and waited to be connected, my eyes travelled over the plain.

  The direction finders near Marsala had reported the approach of heavy bombers. There would, however, be no point in sending up our few available aircraft against them since our intention was to leave for Gerbini in a few minutes’ time. The attack might be directed against our airfield, but equally the target could be Palermo harbour. The Allies’ intention was to cut off our supplies so as to lighten their task on the island. To achieve that end they would have to attack the Straits of Messina as well as Palermo harbour. Probably they would attack both at once – they certainly possessed sufficient equipment to do so.

  The firing of warning shots by the flak was followed by the immediate cessation of all activity on the airfield below. In front of the hut a number of airmen were gesticulating and pointing towards Chinisia. And then I, too, saw a long stream of bombers approaching from the west. Suddenly the white strip of runway, which usually gleamed in the sun, was veiled in an enormous cloud of dust. The bomb carpet must have been very wide for the whole length of the airfield was obscured. Only then did we hear the rumble of explosions. As I shouted into the handset, vainly trying to get my connection, the first black clouds of petrol smoke from burning aircraft began to rise up out of the gloom.

  The sight of Chinisia’s blasted airfield reminded me of my visit to the Italian fighter wing stationed there, and at the same time I realized that I had almost completely forgotten about the existence of the Italian fighter arm. During the gruesome finale on this island it was a case of every man for himself. The heavy attacks had begun before we had had time to establish signals communications with each other or to co-ordinate our tactics – steps we would have taken as a matter of course had conditions been anything like normal. This meant that each air force had begun fighting its own war. And, in circumstances where relations between the Italian and German high commands were far from good, not only were the arrangements for controlling the units of the two nations entirely separate but the orders they received were also different, so that any co-ordination in the operation field was out of the question. Indeed, that had been the main defect of the joint command ever since the start of the Mediterranean campaign: the two controlling organizations had been so much concerned with prestige that each had taken all possible steps to prevent its own units being placed under the other’s command. Thus, although the battle was a common one, the assignments and orders were invariably different.

  A bomb carpet is a terrible weapon when used against an airfield and is extremely demoralizing for the airfield personnel, even though they may have a measure of protection while squatting in bunkers or slit trenches. Particularly effective were the smaller bombs which the enemy released by the thousand. The made only shallow craters and the fragments, projected outwards at high velocity and close to the ground, shredded the outer skins of our aircraft as though they were made of paper.

  How would the Italian fighter wing be feeling now, unaccustomed as they were to such attacks and knowing that their superiors had moved them to Sicily only with reluctance? A few day previously I had gone to make my number with the commander of the Italian group. On landing I had noted the surprisingly good condition of the airfield. Having taxied up the long runway, I was directed to a pen surrounded by a protective rampart of white tuff. Macchi fighters, still in the desert camouflage of the North African campaign, occupied the neighbouring pens.

  In front of the flying-control building I was approached by an officer who introduced himself as Major Visconti, the commander of the fighter unit. He said that his C.O. had his operations room and his quarters on Mount Erice, if I should wish to visit him there.

  The man walking beside me had a virile and extremely likeable face. His small white cap with its short peak was pulled down well over his forehead almost as far as his bushy, prominent eyebrows. Beneath the aquiline nose was a black, curling moustache. There was no hint of timidity as he looked at me with his expressive, surprisingly blue eyes. His name was familiar, for I had heard much about him. He had been known to the veterans of my group since the days in North Africa and they spoke of him as a gallant and outstanding fighter pilot.

  He began talking about their wretched communications, his main command channel being a field telephone which, however, seldom enabled him to communicate with his C.O. Moreover, he had no contact with the German direction finders near Marsala and when he saw the German fighters take off to attack, having been alerted in good time, he could only look on enviously, for he had learnt that without guidance from the ground any success was a matter of chance. Nobody, he told me, warned him of the approach of the enemy and in the air he received no orders whatsoever.

  I could sympathize with his position. If we ourselves felt misunderstood by our high command, what must he feel? Wondering how I could help him, I felt something like pride when I compared his own hopeless situation with ours. At least we had the technical means to wage a successful battle – indeed we still had them! And it was a poor sort of C.O. who sat back, high up on a mountainside, watching part of his group lying idle on a first-rate airfield until such time as it should be knocked out by an accurate massed bombing attack! As I shook Visconti’s hand and turned towards my aircraft, I resolved to call on his C.O. as soon as our daily operations allowed.

  The present attack on Chinisia airfield reminded me of the resolution and the prediction I had made then. I was surprised that the Allies had not attacked this admirable airfield before. Had they, perhaps, ceased to take the Italians seriously? Had they ever taken them seriously?

  It was a line of thought I did not wish to pursue, for it somehow seemed uncomradely towards Visconti with whom I felt a bond. At all events I intended to seek out his peculiar C.O. up on Mount Erice.

  Then the preparations for take-off, the take-off itself and the task of leading my small formation into the air claimed the whole of my attention. Again and again the demands of the moment prevented us from reflecting and this was just as well. For one way or the other, anyone who gave himself over to brooding was lost: either he would be killed through lack of concentration and resolution at the crucial moment of the battle or else, faltering even before he had made contact with the enemy, he would turn back, not once but again and again, until finally he would have to be posted away, his days as a fighter pilot at an end.

  We circuited Gerbini airfield, searching for the landing strip which had been marked out for us with small, barely identifiable flags. At last, having formed a picture of the layout, I decided to land. In the fields much of the yellow stubble had been burnt. The plain, a notably fertile one, was patterned hideously with bomb craters and the black scars of fires. Descending towards them I felt an almost overpowering reluctance to land. As the machine came to a standstill opposite the hut, the propeller continued to give a few fitful jerks accompanied by loud bangs. It was much too hot for the engines when one had to taxi at walking pace. I had had some trouble in finding my dispersal pen and the mechanics had guided me half-way round the airfield before I arrived at the hut and the place reserved for me. In the chaos of bomb craters and skeletons of aircraft among the burnt olive trees it was difficult to keep one’s bearings, much more so than it had seemed when coming in to land.

  Straden, Bachmann and Zahn had parked their 109s close by. Even at this hour of the morning they were already
exhausted and they dragged their feet as they walked towards the hut. Outside it was a bench made of a few stone slabs and a balk of timber, and on this they sat down without further ado.

  I walked past them in silence and went into the hut where I began trying to make contact with the Fighter Leader, Air Corps or indeed any other higher formation. Eventually Sergeant Korn came in – how on earth had he got here? – and announced that no purpose would be served by contacting any of the head-quarters since orders had already arrived for us to “refuel, take off and fly cover over the Straits of Messina”.

  Armed with this cut-and-dried information I joined the men on the bench who, with legs outstretched, were dozing in the scanty shade. Resting my head against the hot wall, I, too closed my eyes. From all sides came the familiar noises of an advanced landing ground: the click of the fuel hand-pumps, the shouts of the mechanics, the rising howl of an engine being run up on test, I heard it all and as I listened I consciously registered the passing of every minute.

  In this place we were utterly exposed. It had only to occur to the enemy to come here; he need only pass this way by chance, and it would be the end of us. Nervously we awaited the completion of refuelling, well aware that we would be lucky if we managed to get into the air unscathed.

  When the dull rumbling crumps of a distant bombing raid assailed our ears we leapt instantly into the slit trenches. As though at the touch of a spectral hand all signs of life disappeared from the surface of the field. The flak to the south began firing heavily and then fell silent again. This time the attack was being directed against another part of the huge plain, not against us. It was only when the distant drone of aircraft engines had diminished in volume to the level which persisted, almost without intermission, throughout each day, that we emerged suspiciously and very cautiously from our trenches. An Me 109 was taxiing across the airfield in a cloud of dust and someone in the group operations room reported that Colonel Larsen had just landed.