As a child growing up in the suburbs of Berlin, Peter remembers the chaotic years prior to the Nazis taking power. ‘I’d go down into the street and watch the different parties marching around with my sister, Eva,’ he says. He can still see the badge vendors supporting whichever group was marching that day, noisily parroting ‘Red Front!’ or ‘Heil Hitler!’ to whoever would buy their wares.
I turn on my tape recorder, at which he looks momentarily askance. I remember my manners and ask him whether he minds. ‘You tape record as much as you like!’ he adds with another dismissive wave.
Then he bolts ahead, tantalising me with fragments of stories from the Russian Front, or flying over England and being forced down in the English Channel. He points to a large scar on the centre of his left hand, then mentions the nurses who looked after him, and something about a gorgeous female officer in Hamburg. But we wouldn’t want to get ahead of ourselves.
‘I was thirteen when I first started learning to fly,’ he tells me. It was the same year Hitler came to power, 1933. Peter was packed up and sent to live in Berlin’s prestigious Lichterfelde military cadet school, a grand old Prussian establishment built by the Kaiser in 1873. It was expensive and sounds utterly Dickensian. Visits from friends and family were forbidden. Only once was the rule broken, when his mother came to see him as he lay ill with diphtheria. Despite this, and visits home being restricted to two a year, Peter loved it.
Once Hitler became Chancellor, in January, the teachers could openly wear the Nazi Party badges they had been concealing for years under their lapels. Cadets like Peter were given a choice of which service they wanted to join. ‘Ever since I was a kid I wanted to fly, fly, fly,’ he says. Some of his earlier chuckle begins to return.
Officially at least, Germany still had no air force, banned as it was under the Treaty of Versailles, so Peter was required to join the Hitler Youth flying school to learn the basics in gliders, then powered aircraft. ‘The instructors were tough, really tough,’ he recalls. Peter, though, was a natural, perfectly executing his solo examination flight in a Henschel biplane and earning his pilot’s wings in 1937.
To gain wider knowledge of the aircraft he would be flying, cadet pilot Mehrtens was sent to Bremen for a stint at the Weser Flug factory constructing the famous Junkers 87 dive-bomber, the Stuka. Here he was put to work as an electrical fitter, installing some of the fifteen kilometres of wiring that went into every aircraft, as well as learning instrument-making, a skill he would be thankful for in a later life. It was here though, that it all so nearly came undone.
One morning after a birthday party, Peter awoke with a hangover and decided to stay in bed without calling in. Nazi Germany, however, had little tolerance for sickies, especially in the military. Clocking on the next day, Peter was promptly arrested and interrogated by the resident SS officer, one Hauptsturmführer Wiesler. A shocked Peter was charged with sabotage: failing in one’s contribution to Hitler’s Germany was seen as tantamount to conspiring against it. As he stood to rigid attention in a small office, his file lay open on the officer’s desk. Above it, a pen was poised ready to wipe out years of hard work and the dreams of a lifetime. It appears, however, that a decent grovel and the hint of a tear could, even in that macabre atmosphere, occasionally work wonders. Peter was let off with a severe warning. He never missed a day again.
After swearing personal loyalty to the Führer, ‘and other nonsense like that’, he says, Peter passed out as a nineteen-year-old Luftwaffe lieutenant in April 1939 – five months before the start of the war.
Like most young pilots, he hankered to fly fighters. It was not to be. Peter was instead sent to Bavaria for yet more training at Kampfflieger Schule for bomber, transport and long-range aircraft. Here he learned to handle the cumbersome Heinkel 111 and Junkers 52 tri-motor transport, an aeroplane for which he still holds affection. ‘I fell in love with that big plane,’ he says. The ones he flew were ex-Lufthansa, still with their peacetime fittings. ‘I even had thoughts of becoming an airline pilot after the war,’ he says, and chuckles darkly.
He also tried out on the Stuka, but the 90-degree dives just didn’t agree with him. To pass the test, you were made to sit back-to-back with the pilot who executed two dives in quick succession then landed immediately. ‘Then I had to jump out of the plane and stand to attention in front of the doctor. If your eyes were still spinning after a minute or two, you were out. I, unfortunately, was out.’ I doubt he could have remained disappointed for long: over England, Stuka losses were horrendous.
Despite a conviction that the war would be over before his training was completed, Peter was eventually posted to the famous Kampfgeschwader (bomber squadron) 53, the ‘Legion Condor’, so named during its time fighting alongside Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. In late 1940, he arrived at an aerodrome at Vitry-en-Artois near Lille in northern France, ready to take part in air operations against England.
First, though, he was treated to some spoils of war: part of the vast hoard of equipment left abandoned on the beaches of Dunkirk by the British in June. The squadron was given three railway wagons, still locked and ready for looting.
‘One was full of cigarettes and booze, the other fine cloth. But the third was full of golf balls! Can you believe it? I didn’t even know what golf was!’ Several towns in northern France soon became inundated with the things.
Thus, in the latter stages of the Battle of Britain, Peter commenced his long and eventful combat flying career. He piloted the Heinkel in daylight, attacking places like Bristol, Southampton and London. They were shot at and hit many times, but not seriously. ‘The English were not very accurate then,’ he says. He encountered the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the RAF but made a habit of putting his aircraft into a sudden dive when they came close, which he reckons saved him on several occasions.
Once he saw a Hurricane passing close to him, probably out of ammunition. ‘I could see the pilot quite clearly. I waved … he waved back!’ he chuckles. Then over the Isle of Wight one day, he caught a shrapnel splinter above his eye – the first of many wounds he was to survive. Back at Vitry, the surgeon simply grabbed a pair of pliers and yanked it out. ‘I will never for the life of me forget the pain,’ he says.
One day over Kingston near London, Peter’s wireless operator and friend, Willy, a veteran of the Spanish campaign and obviously a man at the end his tether, gave in to his frayed nerves and simply jumped out of the aircraft. Back in France it was the source of much amusement. ‘Better strap your boys to their seats,’ the other officers joked. ‘Who’s going to want to fly with you now?’
Peter also took part in a night raid, his first ever and one he can never forget: the devastation of Coventry, 14 November 1940. He hardly needed his navigator – the firestorm could be seen a hundred kilometres away. ‘It was a frightful sight,’ he remembers. ‘We had no specific target, just the area northeast of the city. When I saw it had already been flattened, I asked over the radio if I should target another area. I was simply told, “Bomb according to plan.” I will never be able to forget it.’
I’m unsure whether it’s the subject matter, but Peter at this stage abruptly stands and mumbles an apology about having to get to lunch. He pulls on an old reefer jacket that has seen better days and with both hands grabs hold of a movable walking device he keeps by the door. I realise only now that movement for him is neither easy nor comfortable. I stand to thank him, and ask if we can possibly reconvene sometime over the coming week, as I feel we’ve only just got started. ‘Anytime, anytime,’ he mutters.
Then, without even turning to look at me, he suggests I might like to simply wait there till he gets back. I accept his trusting gesture and settle back into the seat, alone in the old airman’s modest room, wishing I had something to stem a sudden feeling of melancholy. I pick up his book and, for the next hour, read.
When Peter returns, he looks even worse than before. I just let him sit there for a moment, catching his breath. Eventually,
he looks up and sees his book open in my lap. ‘Such is life,’ he mutters. ‘The good times and the bad.’ I agree that it’s not a bad title. ‘I was a career pilot for a while, too. Flying all the big shots around. Ha,’ and he shakes his head.
In March 1941, on his 42nd mission over England, at about four in the afternoon, Peter discovered that not all English anti-aircraft gunners were rotten shots. After dropping his load of bombs over Southampton harbour, he passed over the Isle of Wight in his Heinkel, and caught a big burst of anti-aircraft fire between the starboard motor and the cockpit. The perspex in the nose shattered, the engine caught fire and Peter suddenly noticed that he could see bones sticking out of his bloodied right hand. Next to him sprawled out on the cockpit floor, Werner Moos, the co-pilot and most experienced of the crew, lay dead, his head split open by a shell fragment. Peter was covered with blood – his own, as well as his friend’s.
‘He was a terrific guy,’ he tells me. ‘One of my best friends. I remember his strong Cologne accent and his lovely wife – she’d just given birth to a baby daughter.’ Peter did his best to trim the aircraft but the big ungainly Heinkel, an aircraft not renowned for its gliding characteristics, ditched in the Channel, a hundred or so kilometres from the English coast. The three remaining men scrambled into a life raft and bobbed around in the sea for a couple of hours before being picked up by a German destroyer. ‘We just had to ditch Werner in the sea,’ says Peter, who was patched up, spent a few weeks in hospital, and was sent back to the squadron.
The day he arrived back at Vitry, his hand still heavily bandaged, the place seemed deserted. Only a single private was on duty, with some advice that he might like to quickly make his way to the parade ground where the rest of the squadron had assembled to honour an important visiting general. As Peter approached the group, he thought he recognised a loud and familiar voice. ‘I could hear someone saying something like, “We’ve got England on her knees” and “push harder!” etc.’ Like a skulking schoolboy at assembly, he tried to hide up the back. To no avail. His commander caught his eye and thrust him forward into the presence of Reichmarschall Hermann Goering himself.
‘I never liked the fat bastard,’ says Peter. Even after a clean, Peter’s uniform still looked ghastly from its spell in the sea, and his officer’s cap was missing. ‘You look shocking,’ Goering said to him. After what he had been through, Peter was not in a particularly reverent mood. ‘Well, I have just been in the water,’ he said and proceeded to explain. His candour obviously impressed Goering, who conferred on him the Iron Cross Second Class on the spot and promoted him to first lieutenant. ‘You will go to hospital in Bremen, have three weeks holiday and a new uniform on my account,’ he pronounced.
And so he did, making particular effort to seek out the most expensive tailor he could find, and forwarding the bill to ‘Luftwaffe Headquarters, Berlin’, marking it, ‘Attention: Goering’. As far as he knows, it was paid.
A little later, Peter and his crew, though not yet officially back on flying duties, made one brief, highly irregular trip: a return to the spot in the sea where they had committed their friend Werner to the deep. Spirited inside the aircraft that day was an extra passenger, Werner’s wife. ‘Just so she could see the spot where he died,’ he tells me. Peter is a little vague on what, if any, permission had been received for this poignant unofficial funeral flight.
I look at Peter curiously. Once or twice I have to remind myself that the air force days of which he speaks, laced with anecdotes of individualism, and a less-than-solemn respect for authority, took place on the German side. He still looks pale, and occasionally stops for gulps of breath, as if walking up stairs, before launching back into his story once again.
One morning a few months after Peter ditched in the English Channel, the officers of the squadron were ordered into the mess at 7 a.m. to hear the voice of Goebbels on the radio. It triumphantly declared, ‘By our Führer’s command, our victorious troops, at five o’clock this morning, crossed the Russian border to smash the Soviet Union and Stalin!’ According to Peter, this announcement of war in the east was met with dead silence as the men huddled around the set. ‘Is he going mad?’ someone asked, the question seeming to catch the general consensus.
Now began a very different kind of war for Peter Mehrtens. A few weeks later, he found himself in Russia, flying the three-engine Junkers 52 transports to supply the trapped Second Army Corps, surrounded by the Red Army at Demjansk near Leningrad. Despite it being dubbed ‘the corrugated coffin’, Peter liked the big Ju52. It was slow but reliable and, covered in its unique ribbed skin construction, highly robust. Just as well, as running the eight-kilometre gauntlet on supply drops to the besieged German army was dangerous work.
He was shot at constantly, and avoided the big anti-aircraft fire by flying perilously close to the ground. ‘After thirty-two missions and a plane full of gunshot holes, we knew it was not all fun and games,’ he says with an odd chuckle. Then, around October that other enemy began to arrive – winter. ‘At that time, I had no idea how bad things were going to get,’ Peter says. The snows began, and then cold such as he’d never known.
Even at 20 below, they were still expected to fly. Simply keeping the aircraft airworthy was a nightmare. ‘One sergeant came up with the idea of throwing petrol on the exhaust stubs to warm the engine.’ The theory was that once the engine started, the propeller would extinguish the flames, hopefully before the aircraft blew up.
There were days when the mercury plunged to minus fifty-two – too cold even for war. ‘We couldn’t leave our huts even for the twenty metres to get food,’ he says. ‘All we could do was stand in front of our heating drums, warming our backs while our fronts would freeze, and then rotate,’ he says.
One bright day the temperature registered a balmy minus five, and flying was back on. It was only a distance of ten kilometres, and Peter had a war correspondent along for the ride. Overflying the Russian lines, he felt ‘a hard bump. I thought I’d hit a tree.’ In fact it was a mortar shell which had exploded behind the cockpit and left a gaping hole in the fuselage. Peter’s elevator controls were dead and all he could do was put the aircraft down, crash-landing safely in the snow, close, he thought, to his own lines. Five men piled out and started tramping towards their own positions, only to be greeted with heavy bursts of machine-gun and rifle fire.
Every conceivable obscenity they could think of was screamed, but to no avail. The war correspondent stripped off his white winter overalls to reveal his German uniform underneath and, handkerchief in hand, boldly led the wary procession over to the ‘friendly’ lines. Once there, the correspondent asked to see the officer in charge, and promptly punched him in the mouth. ‘He felt a lot better after that,’ says Peter. German-speaking Russians, it was explained, were a favourite ploy of the enemy.
This incident provided Peter with another wound courtesy of a bullet he failed to even notice until someone pointed out the blood pouring from his leg. It earned him another stint in hospital, a promotion to Hauptmann (captain) and another Iron Cross – this time First Class.
I can soon see why Peter was compelled to write a book of his own, but even that, he tells me, barely scratches the surface. I read between the lines on some pages, and press him to fill me in on other matters. At the start of the great retreat from the east, he was ordered back into the air making several trips to Kiev to pick up wounded soldiers in his Junkers painted with the red cross. ‘It made no difference,’ he says. ‘In Russia a red cross meant nothing.’
‘Lines and lines of wounded men,’ Peter remembers, some screaming, some hysterical, all desperate to get out. On several occasions the plane was mobbed. ‘Even as we taxied to the runway, guys were hanging off the wings and even the wheels. The military police had to shoot them so we could take off. On one flight we took out 200 wounded. The whole thing was absolutely shocking – a nightmare.’ He points to a page in his book, a rough photo taken at the time. ‘There, that’s me,’ he says
. ‘I’m that skinny kid.’
Then came an order to report to Field Marshall Milch in Berlin who, by coincidence, happened to be a friend of his aunt. This was, however, no social call. For his services to the Reich, Peter had been decorated yet again, this time given permission to wear around his neck the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. He was also given what can only be described as a dream job – official courier pilot attached to Luftwaffe Headquarters flying generals and other Nazis all over the Greater German Reich. It’s hard to believe his auntie’s influence didn’t play its part, but Peter was given a natty little single-engine Messerschmitt 108, and carte blanche to stay in the best hotels across Europe. Understandably, he speaks of these few months as his happiest of the war: paradise compared to what he had seen of it so far. ‘Yes, I flew all the big shots around all over the place,’ he tells me. ‘I even had Himmler in the back once,’ although not a word, he says, passed between them. His proximity to people such as these would later land him in deep trouble.
Once, he thought his number was surely up when, carrying a general to somewhere in France, he watched as two RAF Spitfires dipped their wings to attack from above. Armed with nothing but a flare pistol, Peter calmly thought, ‘Goodnight, general, we are dead.’ But not a shot was fired. The attacking aircraft wheeled around and simply went home. Peter still doesn’t know why.
Then there was the time he was ordered to Augsburg to pick up a certain Lieutenant Reiner to take him on to a Luftwaffe training camp in Hamburg where he was to spend a few days lecturing the recruits. Arriving, he found no one who fitted the description, until a stunning uniformed blonde held out a hand. ‘I’m Lieutenant Reiner,’ she said, admiring his Knight’s Cross. ‘Ah, young Irma,’ Peter remembers with a definite sparkle. ‘Warm, bubbly and wonderful.’
Fly Page 2
