His first instinct was to be angry at the host who’d thrown him so cruelly into the deep end, but, to his surprise, he’d so enjoyed the experience that all he could say was why hadn’t he simply asked him?
‘If I’d asked you, you would have said no,’ replied the man with a grin. Henry couldn’t argue with the logic of that one. He is German after all.
For Henry, it was the start of a minor flood of requests for talks and engagements from groups and clubs and individuals, all of whom wanted to hear first hand what it was like to fly and fight in Hitler’s air force during World War II. For a while, it turned him into something of a local celebrity before health troubles, and the death of his beloved wife of fifty years, made him retire from the speakers’ circuit for good. I, he was at pains to point out, would be his last audience.
‘You’re lucky to talk to me, I can tell you that,’ said Henry, wagging a finger as we sat down in his lounge room.
‘Oh, I know that, Henry,’ I replied. ‘I know that very well.’ I thought I’d been lucky enough to find just one old German in Peter Mehrtens. Henry was a bonus I could hardly believe. Thanks to his twilight career as a speaker, though, word had gradually trickled out and found its way circuitously to me. When I spoke to him on the phone, he was a little more dubious at the idea than had been Peter, but my powers of persuasion must have been on form that day. Besides, there was no way I would take ‘no’ for an answer.
Henry sat across the room from me in a comfortable chair, a walking stick laid across his knees, his left leg jigging a little, sizing up this stranger who had come into his home and was now setting up a tape recorder on a coffee table in front of him. ‘What on earth is he going to ask me?’ I could almost hear him thinking. I start off, as I do with all the men I speak to, by asking where he came from. I repeat some of the names back to him and try to show off a passable schoolboy German accent.
Henry is a little on the short side, which surprised me for a pilot, but even in old age he is healthy looking with a zest for life and an impressive head of thick white hair. His voice is loud and enthusiastic, his strong accent, like Peter’s, corrupted by decades of exposure to the Australian vernacular. He doesn’t mind swearing, laughs frequently and, in keeping with his beloved, adopted Heimat, particularly enjoys using the word ‘mate’, savouring the mish-mash of European and Australian vowels: ‘Have another cup of tea, ma-aiyyt.’
‘I spent five years in that bloody war,’ he tells me. ‘I had ten days off in the whole time – ten days!’
The town in which Henry was born – or Heinz, as he was known back then – doesn’t exist anymore, or at least not as the same place. On 5 August 1945, courtesy of the Potsdam Conference – as well as the desire of Stalin to compound the misery of the German people by carving off a few hundred square kilometres of their country – the German city of Breslau became, overnight, the Polish city of Wroclaw. Not that Henry had any desire to return to it anyway – by 1945, the once elegant Silesian capital had been wrecked – flattened by the Red Army in a ghastly fourteen-week siege in one of the final battles of the war.
‘My father was a member of the Party. I learned to fly gliders in the Hitler Youth,’ he tells me upfront, a fact of which he is neither proud nor ashamed. ‘It was what everyone was doing at the time,’ he says. Henry says that he himself never joined the Nazi Party, despite his early sympathies. ‘I had a stepmother who didn’t like Hitler. Long before the war – I forget exactly when – she said to me, “That man will start a war.” I was disgusted. I hated her for that. Later I came to know she was right.’
Afewmonths months before that man’s war started, Henry was required to complete a form, nominating the service in which he would most prefer to serve the Fatherland. ‘I just wrote underneath, “I would like to fly aeroplanes,” ’ he says. When required to elaborate he added, ‘Because I already have a glider pilot’s licence.’
Henry could almost taste the glamorous air force career stretching before him, and confidently awaited the arrival of the telegram congratulating him on his selection for pilot training. A telegram came alright, but instead of flying school, it ordered him to report to an anti-aircraft battery in Essen. Luftwaffe pilots, it seemed, were expected to conform to the Nazi image of the master race, and Henry fell short of the mark – a full two inches short. ‘I thought, “Shit – that’s finished it for me.” ’
Small in stature he may have been, but Henry was smart, and decided the quickest way upwards was to make himself indispensable to his seniors. Thus, he volunteered to be the battery’s telephone exchange operator. This kept him out of the weather a bit, and was slightly more interesting than feeding shells into the muzzles of 88-millimetre guns. Still, it was hardly the way he’d envisaged spending the war.
Late one night, a single phone conversation changed everything. In December 1939, an important call came through from the Air Ministry in Berlin. ‘Write this down,’ said the official-sounding voice at the other end. As Henry wrote, he could barely keep hold of the pencil. ‘Kannonier Heinz Hempel is immediately transferred to pilot training school in Bavaria …’
‘Shit!’ Henry blurted down the line.
There was an astonished silence at the other end. ‘What did you say?’ Henry spluttered an apology. ‘Look,’ the voice demanded, ‘do you have a Heinz Hempel in your battery or not?’
‘Yes, and you’re talking to him,’ replied Henry, and the ice was broken.
‘You lucky bastard!’ the man said.
Unknown to Henry, a rule had come in stating that all prospective pilots must first complete a glider course as part of their training. Someone had come across Henry’s form, was prepared to overlook his modest stature and shove him to the head of the queue.
The Luftwaffe was nothing if not thorough. It was six months in the classroom before Henry even got his hands on an aircraft, a sturdy Jungmeister biplane, but once he did, he excelled. After lights out at ten, Henry would continue studying with a torch under the blankets in his barracks. Nine months later, it paid off as he stood to attention alongside a batch of similarly fresh-faced young airmen to receive the distinctive badge of the Luftwaffe pilot – a flying eagle clutching a swastika. ‘I knew I was good,’ he tells me. ‘I passed all my exams well and I was a nut behind the stick!’
The sobering words from their instructor, however, tempered their enthusiasm. ‘No matter what you’ve learned here,’ he told the raw airmen on their departure, ‘it’s all going to be completely different when you get to the front. So don’t get too pleased with yourselves!’
Henry begins the lengthy and at times rambling tale of his long war. Without a logbook, and given the fact that so much has remained locked up in his memory for so many years, the chronology is a little all over the place, a fact for which he apologises. ‘I can tell you what happened, but it’s like a big soup,’ he explains. No problem, I say, tell it any way you want.
Initially trained up on fighters, Henry was sent to a Kampfgeschwader – a bomber squadron – near Honfleur on the newly conquered French Channel coast, flying the Junkers 88 twin-engine medium bomber, an aeroplane of which he remains particularly fond. ‘I could do anything with that aircraft,’ he tells me. The first thing he did do with it was fly to London and drop bombs on oil refineries along the Thames. ‘That was the first time we had shit in our pants!’ he says, laughing, although somewhat nervously.
He still talks affectionately of the Junkers 88, reminiscing about it as one would an old lover. Indeed, the speed and performance of this aeroplane made it one of the most versatile – and feared – in the Luftwaffe, and Henry flew it in several of its many incarnations. Despite being attacked during the Battle of Britain, he seems not to have been too concerned. ‘We flew in Staffels of nine aircraft, each one protecting the other. I had quite a few holes in my aircraft, mainly from the Hurricanes. They weren’t as good as the Spitfires, though,’ he says.
Having been the victim of a life-long obsession with the Ba
ttle of Britain, I find this rare encounter with one its participants – particularly one from the other side – has me groggy with the pictures he is putting in my head. The various arms of the Luftwaffe were considerably more integrated than those of the RAF, and in a way that would have been impossible for a British pilot, Henry alternated between both bombers and fighters as the tactics of the campaign developed. But I begin to notice a certain caginess creeping in when I ask him to elaborate on his time flying the twin-engine Messerschmitt 110 heavy fighter.
Successful over Poland and France, these ‘destroyer’ Messerschmitts were themselves destroyed in spades by the more agile Spitfires and Hurricanes in the sunny August skies above Kent. ‘Like a bloody big truck in the air!’ he says. ‘You couldn’t dance round with the 110 like you could with the 109!’ But apart from that, I can’t get Henry to give too much away.
‘No comment,’ he says abruptly when I try to push him. No matter. I decide to bide my time. He does, however, provide one particularly interesting anecdote. ‘The RAF would talk to us on the radio,’ he tells me. For some reason, I have always found the notion of combatants communicating with each other fascinating. There are indeed one or two accounts of pilots exchanging insults over the same radio frequency, and Henry tells me how the British would try to sap their morale by reading out the names and squadrons of those German airmen already shot down. They hardly needed to do so. The Luftwaffe’s own lengthening list of losses was enervating enough.
One day over London, Henry’s own luck ran out. Peppered by shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns near the coast, one motor in his Junkers ‘just collapsed’, as he puts it, and the other soon began spluttering. He trimmed the aircraft as best he could and headed out over the Channel, hoping to maintain height long enough to reach the French coast. ‘I told the crew to check their life jackets and prepare to go in,’ he says. He ditched as gently as he could. ‘I was lucky,’ he says. ‘The shrapnel made only small holes.’ The aircraft stayed afloat long enough for the crew to scramble out and into the water. Unbelievably, they weren’t issued with a life raft, in contrast with the RAF who obsessed about such things and drilled their crews endlessly. Henry just shrugs his shoulders. ‘Some of us were issued with them, some of us were not.’ I suggest this might be a part of the Nazi doctrine of ‘no surrender’. Henry thinks about that one for a moment, then laughs out loud once more.
Bobbing around in the English Channel, then picked up by a German rescue launch, Henry was hauled aboard and given some whisky. ‘As soon as I drank it, I felt fire going right through my body,’ he says. He then became violently ill, found he couldn’t move his right arm, and blacked out. Two of his crew of five didn’t make it onto the boat and were never seen again. He tells me he feels responsible for their deaths to this day.
In hospital in Le Havre, a doctor told him that he was a lucky young man. ‘Lucky?’ said Henry indignantly, ‘I can’t move my arm.’
‘You’re lucky to have an arm,’ said the doctor. Evidently, Henry’s toughly constructed life jacket had softened the blow from a large chunk of English shrapnel which would otherwise have sliced through his bone below the shoulder. He was stitched up and allowed to recuperate for all of ten days. As he healed, his legs began to itch. ‘I scratched and scratched, and started to pull out bits of metal,’ he says. ‘Some are still in there today.’
Although very much the weapon of a totalitarian state, with ruthless consequences meted out for cowardice and disobedience, the Luftwaffe – indeed the German armed forces in general – incorporated some curiously democratic aspects which contrasted with those of the British, and even the Americans. There was, for instance, far less class distinction between officers and men, who would often eat together in the same mess – a practice abhored in the British Army. In some ways, too, the common soldier was accorded comparative respect, such as by not being required to ask for ‘permission to speak’ before expressing a cautious opinion in the field. Most German officers also went without batmen – still standard among their counterparts in the western Allied armies.
They had not, however, dispensed with all their arcane notions. As late as mid-1943, young German officer cadets were being instructed on such niceties as the correct way to drink a glass of champagne or how to hand a bouquet of flowers to a young lady. This, while their comrades endured the catastrophe of Stalingrad, perishing in their hundreds of thousands.
The German crews were, however, made to fly – virtually continuously in fact – until either wounded, captured or killed. The Luftwaffe even issued their pilots with a special brooch to commemorate the completion of two hundred missions. Such a figure was almost unthinkable in the RAF where, in Bomber Command, completing the obligatory thirty was hard enough. But in the short-range engagements of the Battle of Britain, where pilots would perform two or three sorties in a day, men such as Henry were proudly wearing their ‘200’ brooches on the left breast of their blue-grey tunic in just a few months.
Once or twice a convoy of shiny black Mercedes-Benzes would arrive at the airfield and out would step Hermann Goering to hand out medals. ‘What was he like?’ I ask Henry. Peter Mehrtens likewise had had a close encounter with the Reichmarschall, and was less than flattering. Henry offers a contrasting, if slightly disturbing, assessment. ‘Terrific,’ he says, ‘like a ma-aiyte,’ and then, ‘He was a big bloke, too.’
By successfully completing a great many air operations over Britain – including, again like Peter, the infamous night attack on Coventry; he still shudders to think of the intensity of the fires he saw that night – Henry soon gained for himself a reputation, a promotion to Leutnant and a telegram from his chum, Goering. He and his entire crew were duly summoned to the Reichministerie in Berlin. It could only be good news – a decoration. As he already wore the Iron Cross both First and Second Class, it had to be for one thing – the coveted Knight’s Cross.
Standing to attention in an anteroom beside his crew as the obese, drug-addled Goering muttered platitudes about the Fatherland, Henry watched proudly as each of his men was handed a small black box containing the Iron Cross. Then it was his turn. The big Nazi greeted Henry warmly, gripping his hand in one fat paw and handing him a box with the other. He could feel the Knight’s Cross already hanging around his neck.
At last he lifted the lid to reveal – not the Knight’s Cross at all – but possibly the gaudiest, least popular bauble in the obsessive pantheon of Nazi regalia, the Deutsches Kreuz – often referred to by its underwhelmed recipients as ‘The Order of the Fried Egg’. The Deutsches Kreuz wasn’t really a cross at all, and was steeped with none of the old Prussian pedigree so imbued into the traditions of the German army. It was a showy, blatantly political decoration, a splodge of metal – in gold or silver – surrounding a large ugly swastika. Some recipients not particularly enamoured of the Nazis hated wearing it and even found ways to lose it. Henry, despite being the first Luftwaffe pilot ever to receive it in gold, felt a rise of disappointment that he dared not show. The Knight’s Cross would forever elude him.
Henry moved around a great deal throughout the war, flying about a dozen types of aircraft over England, Russia, the Mediterranean and even having a stint on convoy patrol flying Germany’s only operational four-engine aircraft, the long-range Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. Flying deep out over the Atlantic, the throbbing drone of his engines came to be dreaded by the men in the ships far below, who, their location revealed, could expect a subsequent U-boat attack.
In late 1942, Henry did something he would forever tell other pilots never to do under any circumstances: he volunteered. Coming up to Christmas that year, word got out that an entire army had been cut off and surrounded in a pocket on a bend of the River Volga in southern Russia, and pilots with multi-engine experience were being asked to put their hands up to make supply flights. Although he didn’t know it, Henry was about to fly into the infamous ‘Kessel’ of Stalingrad. Taking off from an aerodrome in Poland in a heavily laden Junkers 52 tri-m
otor transport, Henry swung the nose around to the southeast for the long flight into hell on earth.
Defeated, starving, and slowly freezing to death in the sub-zero temperatures, the Germans at Stalingrad already knew they had been left for dead, or would be taken prisoner by the Russians, which amounted to much the same thing. The last attempt to relieve them by land, ‘Winter Sturm’, had been blasted into the ice by the Russian armour weeks before. The only hope of succour for the 200 000-odd trapped men was by air.
‘They were mad, the soldiers in Stalingrad, mad,’ Henry tells me. ‘They knew they were going to die in Russia.’ The aerodrome, such as it was, was a patch of frozen steppe, constantly under fire from the Russian guns just a few hundred metres away. The first aircraft Henry flew in had its undercarriage shot out as soon as he had landed. He only managed to get out again by hitching a ride in another aircraft taking off. At least he was able to do so. For the soldiers in their ragged uniforms, hysterical with starvation and fear, it wasn’t so easy. I ask him to tell me what he saw around him.
I suspect he hadn’t intended to tell me about his time at Stalingrad, but having stumbled into it, he has no intention of sugar-coating the pill.
Henry looks far away for a while. ‘I get very … sentimental about this,’ he says, and the jolliness in his demeanour has vanished. In their desperation, he tells me, the men attempted to grab the freezing wings of the aircraft with their gloveless hands as Military Police shot them to keep them from swamping the planes. ‘You see, we were already overloaded with wounded,’ Henry says, perhaps feeling a need to atone. He took off, dodging fire both large and small. ‘Later, when I landed, I could see pieces of their skin left behind on the metal,’ he says. I look up, and he is in tears and apologising – I’m not sure why.
Fly Page 14
