Eagles at War

by Boyne, Walter J.

  "Visionary?"

  "Exactly. Do you think we can take on half the world and win with inferior weapons? We are going to have to win with ingenuity, with weapons the Army High Command hasn't even dreamed of."

  "Like what?" Weigand's Berliner accent dripped doubt.

  "Come, let me show you."

  Hafner opened a door and rolled down the polished hardwood path at a speed faster than the other two men could run, spinning twice like a top to wait for them at the entrance to the building.

  "Let's look at solutions to the production problem first. This is my fastener section. Nobody thinks about it, but fasteners are one of the most important elements in building an airplane. They determine how large a section you can build at a time, how strong you can make it, how you can put it together."

  They went inside. The machine shop was lavishly equipped, and in a large jig was a section of an aircraft fuselage, mounted next to a stub of a wing.

  "Let me show you how Junkers designed the wing attachment for the Ju 88."

  He pointed to the two sections. "You see these bolt holes? They are so precisely drilled that you have to use a jig to install the wing; it's like fitting a gear in a watch. Wonderful craftsmanship—but it takes twenty man-hours to do in the factory, and can't be done at all in the field." He turned to a burly machinist, lovingly wiping the turning metal on his lathe with an oily rag.

  "This is an old comrade, Fritz Ihelfeld. Fritz, show the gentlemen your wing attachment fitting."

  "Jawohl, Herr Direktor. It's quite simple—you bore a large tapered hole in the fuselage fitting, and slide the bolt in easily. Then you use a squeeze plate to take up the slack with the nut. Three mechanics can replace a wing in forty minutes with hand tools. And it's stronger than the original."

  Both Josten and Weigand nodded approval. All that Hafner said had made sense; this sort of thing added to the force of his argument. If you doubled the work force and reduced the skill requirements, you could increase production enormously.

  Hafner sped them around the peripheral track from building to building. The first four had dealt with solutions to production problems: quality control, interchangeability, standardized specifications, training techniques, determining how to make things good enough—but not too good. Weigand saw a sign saying, IF THINGS CAN GO WRONG, THEY WILL GO WRONG—DON'T LET THEM.

  Waffen SS sentries scrambled to rigid attention at Weigand's approach. Hafner said, "Now let's see what we are dreaming up next for the Luftwaffe."

  Wheeling his chair faster than they could follow, Hafner took them on a whirlwind tour of the long wooden buildings, showing them new tools, new weapons, rockets, fire control systems, and torpedoes. They were breathless when, in the last building, he paused in his chair before a canvas shroud that concealed the rear of the room.

  "Now what you see here, you leave here, understand? This is most secret; the Fuehrer has given orders that no one is to be allowed in without my personal authorization, and that no one is to talk about it."

  As soon as they entered, the lights went out and a film projector clattered. The words "Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke" appeared and there followed company test photographs of the Heinkel He 176 rocket plane and the He 178 jet. Josten had seen the films before—the flights had been made in the summer of 1939—but Weigand was startled that the two planes could fly without any propellers.

  When the lights came back up, Hafner said, "There is the future, gentlemen, turbo jets and rockets."

  Weigand said, "Very impressive, but I thought Heinkel was persona non grata with the Fuehrer—too many promises, too many demands, too many problems."

  "He is—and that's why I want to show you these drawings."

  Hafner opened a cordovan leatherbound portfolio marked messerschmitt a.g. Inside were stylish drawings of a twin-engine jet fighter.

  Josten whistled. "Whew. When are these going to be ready?"

  "That's what you two are going to tell me. If we leave it to Messerschmitt, it will be three years before we get any airplanes, because he can make more money turning 109s out in quantity than by experimenting with these. But if we develop the airplane here, ourselves, we can get it in operation within eighteen months."

  "What are you talking about, Bruno? You don't have production facilities here."

  "Wait and see. I have one more thing to show you."

  The last spur of the web of walkways led them to the grass-covered hillock. A shallow ramp led down almost thirty meters to a door at the bottom.

  "Don't let go of my chair; I'd pick up speed in the dive and crash right into the concrete wall."

  He led them inside the cavernous manmade cave.

  "Labor from prison camps built it for me. We scrape the ground level and pour the concrete first—ten meters thick, one hundred meters wide, two hundred meters long. Then we excavate beneath it and put in walls and floors. It makes an instant factory; you can build them cheaply, as big as you want, and they are bomb-proof. I'm going to bring in raw materials at one end and fly jet fighters out the other."

  Weigand looked at him with admiration. "Bruno, you're either mad or a genius. Which do you think, Captain Josten?"

  Josten shook his head. "Both, I hope. It took a madman to conceive of this, but it will take a genius to get it in operation. Does Professor Messerschmitt know that you intend to 'help' him?"

  "No. Only the Fuehrer knows what I intend, and he told me specifically not to tell Goering about this; he doesn't want him to take it over. This is my project. It will win the war for us."

  Back in the octagonal office, Hafner said, "Now, Weigand, the most important thing I've shown you is the jet fighter. We have to get them into operation before the British do."

  "Do the British have one yet?"

  "Not yet, but we know they are doing research. A young RAF officer named Whittle has been working on a jet engine for years."

  Weigand stood up, obviously impressed and ready to go to work. "Well, Bruno, you've convinced me. The only thing that worries me is the expanded work force. How will we feed two or three million more workers? You know they've already cut fertilizer production because of the demands for nitrates for munitions."

  "That's a problem I'm working on personally. It has a lot of interesting variables. I'll let you know in a few months what I find out."

  Hafner sat at his desk long after the two men were gone. He knew he could depend upon them both, but he knew that was not enough. He was going to have to do more than take Himmler into his confidence if he was going to be able to get the raw materials and the personnel he needed. He was going to have to play upon his obsession, the perverse black streak of racial hatred that Kersten so deplored. Whatever he asked Himmler, it would have to have the appearance of assisting in the solution of the Jewish problem.

  It would be easier if either Hitler or Himmler had a real idea of the true potential of the United States—it was a vast, untapped cornucopia of material, labor, and ideas. At present it was probably using less than 40 percent of its latent strength. Poor Germany was already operating at 95 percent of its capacity, straining at the seams, forced to use ersatz materials, scrambling for labor wherever it could be found. There was room for expansion, too, but it could only come out of the substance of the nation, from its very bone and fiber. One could almost plot the curve. If a maximum effort was made in Germany, ruthlessly exploiting everything in Europe and quickly overrunning Russia, it would be strong enough in 1944 to face the United States and England. But unless vast changes were made in its methods, by 1946 it would crumble from within, exhausted, out of food, manpower, and critical materials.

  Hafner shook his head in both hope and dismay. Hitler was a gambler, willing to bet all on the throw of the dice with Russia. But it was just possible that they could pull it off. If they did, and they really reformed their research and production methods, Germany could win a war against England and the United States.

  *

  Caffiers, France/September 14,
1940

  Josten was vastly relieved to be away from Cottbus and back on active duty. After the day's three missions in miserable weather over England he was bone-weary, but a month of heavy losses had chopped the pilots' roster in half, and it was his turn for alert again. It was late in the day, though, and there was little chance that they'd be ordered to take off. He sat in a folding beach chair, a little apart from the other eight pilots at the well-camouflaged Luftwaffe Einsatzhafen—operational base—at Caffiers.

  The pilots, encumbered with emergency life vests, flares, and sea-dye packets, sprawled in front of austere, hastily built hangarettes. One was built to look like a typical French barn; the rest were covered with camouflage tents or netting. Each was just large enough to house a Messerschmitt Bf 109E, the trusty "Emil." The alert aircraft, fully serviced and ready to go, were protected by sandbags stacked between sawed-off tree trunks. The planes were parked a sprint away under the apple trees along the grass runway, parachutes in the seat, straps hanging out of the cockpit. If the loudspeaker commanded, they could be airborne in less than two minutes.

  Josten pulled his sunglasses off to allow the sun to shine redly through his closed eyelids. Little dots moved in front of his retina; he knew they were blood cells in some tiny capillary, but he played that they were British fighter planes and he had to keep them in his sights. The dots were as shirty as Spitfires, and just the thought of combat squeezed enough adrenalin into his system to sit him bolt upright, eyes wide to scan the field.

  The third Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 26's airfield was bustling with activity even after the day's forty sorties. At the edge of the runway, mechanics were swarming around the almost new Renault tow truck they had "requisitioned" from Paris, tugging at a battle-damaged fighter that had belly-landed into the green-scummed pond at the end of the field. In one of the tents, a 109's wings rested on tripod jacks as a retraction check was run, the slow, un-synchronized lifting of the gear evoking the image of a novice ballet student practicing at the barre. In front of it, a new Daimler-Benz DB 601A engine dangled precariously from a homemade A-frame. Other fighters sat with the mechanic's legs sticking out of the plane's entrails like a half-digested fish from a pelican's beak.

  The improvisation was marvelous, a fine by-product of the Luftwaffe's discipline, so much easier than the Army's. Left to themselves, the men could do almost anything.

  And overseeing everything was the Kommodore of Jg 26, Major Adolf Galland.

  Galland's devoted ground crew joked that he looked like the personal insignia painted on his airplanes—a big-eared Mickey Mouse. His brow reached high into jet-black brilliantined hair, brushed closely back. Extraordinarily large black bushes of eyebrows clung to the bony ridges over his deep-set dark eyes. His once classic nose had been pounded by crashes into an irregular beak that was punctuated by a smear of a Hitler-style mustache. His mouth, generous enough in size when he smiled, seemed small as it perched over his jutting jaw. Taken individually, his features were not handsome, but they were stitched together in a way that made him seem larger-than-life and extremely attractive to women. Galland's ordinary expression was intent, almost obsessively serious, but he smiled readily, and he could explode into riotous laughter.

  His headquarters were at Audembert, but he maintained a room at Carriers as well. Rumor had it that he also maintained some select and lovely women at each place. Galland knew all of the Jagdgeschwader personnel by name and always spoke to them of some personal element—their families, their hobbies, their escapades. Yet Josten found him to be the most focused man he'd ever met.

  In ordinary conversation—or in combat, over the radio—Galland spoke clearly and distinctly. But in a serious man-to-man discussion, his fast-working mind compacted his speech pattern, changing it into short, brittle, information-laden fragments studded with blanks that one was supposed to understand. Usually what he said made sense, but sometimes Josten had to stop him to fill in the clipped code, and that made Galland impatient.

  Josten closed his eyes and was content. His father would be very proud of him, here at the very knife's edge of combat. Gerhard Josten had been an officer in the Imperial Navy, one of the old school. He'd been absolutely nonpolitical and found it easy to weave the high ethics of his service into the stern fabric of his Lutheran faith. A gunnery officer, he had survived Jutland, only to have his faith and dignity destroyed by the ignominious scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow.

  But his father had developed admiration for the discipline of the Royal Navy, drilling into Helmut the importance the British attached to smart appearance so that he was always "ready for inspection." Unlike most of the pilots, who would slip a flying suit over everything from pajamas to dinner jackets, Josten always flew in the prescribed uniform, boots polished to a high luster. And just as he dressed to please his demanding, long-dead father, so did he believe in his father's code of ethics and love of country. Josten's youth had been spent listening to his father's patriotic catechism, railing against the injustice of the Versailles treaty, and emphasizing the need to make Germany strong again. These were ingrown beliefs to Josten, as were the other things his father had taught: absolute honesty, compassion, fairness. Josten had protested when Lyra had accused him of equating Hitler with his father—but he knew it to be true, because the Fuehrer so closely fulfilled his father's political requirements.

  Josten was Galland's Katschmarek, his wingman, and he wanted to be liked by his leader. They'd gotten off to a rough start the very day he'd shot down his sixteenth aircraft and was tapped to fly on Galland's wing. After the decision had been made, the major had invited him to go bird shooting.

  "No, thank you, Herr Major, I don't like to shoot birds and animals."

  Feeling rebuffed, Galland had stiffened, his eyes looking Josten up and down in contempt. Then he had laughed abruptly, without humor. "Well, now, you're a real Nazi, aren't you, Josten? You just like to shoot people!"

  Although they flew well together, their friendship developed slowly. There were formidable differences. Galland was an iconoclast, railing constantly against orders he considered stupid, recklessly challenging the party line to anyone, even Goering himself. His sarcastic request, "Please reequip my wing with Spitfires, Herr Reichsmarschall," was already a legend in the Luftwaffe. But Galland's forty kills and Knight's Cross gave him cards that few men could play.

  There is no place like combat to measure a man. It was obvious that Galland was a genius in aerial tactics, a hero as well as a patriot, and day by day he had eroded Josten's orthodox beliefs.

  They had gone to supper after the alert was terminated. Later that night in Galland's quarters they had nursed the one cognac they allowed themselves before an early morning mission. Galland was only twenty-eight, but the strain of the day's missions was still as evident on his face as the marks of his oxygen mask. He sat with tunic unbuttoned, cigar constantly going, unburdening himself in a torrent of words.

  "You know, Josty, Germany's been lucky so far; we're like some postal clerk that breaks the bank at a casino."

  It was a challenge. "Lucky, yes, but inspired, too. We've soaked up Europe from Norway to Spain like a blotter, and Hitler hasn't made a mistake yet."

  "He's made dozens, and the biggest one is Goering, no joke intended."

  Josten brushed back his blond hair, looking nervously around the room, glancing at the light fixture and the bookcase. Galland smiled.

  "Don't worry, we can talk. I have my radio man check this room carefully—there are no listening devices. Just watch what you say over the telephones, though; Goering has taps everywhere."

  He stubbed out his cigar and lit another. "Dolfo" Galland's cigars were as much a part of him as his nose or his ears. Big, black, and deadly, with a distinctive acrid odor, they were gifts from admiring countrymen. The Voelkischer Beobachter had run a lead story on Galland's Knight's Cross, awarded after his thirtieth victory, and had mentioned his fondness for cigars. A week later, the mail room began to bulg
e with cigars from all over, so that Galland was able to select his favorites and give the rest to the men. Even his plane was equipped with a cigar holder; he smoked before a mission until he clipped his oxygen mask on. After landing, as soon as the canopy was lifted open, he lit up again.

  "Your reaction is part of our problem. We don't have any trust because we are not trusted. I tell you again, so far we've been incredibly lucky." He drew at his cigar as if it were a vital source of inspiration. "Now our luck is running out. We've got the wrong fighters, the wrong bombers, and worst of all, the wrong leaders."

  Josten started to speak but Galland went on.

  "Look at this big bloody ditch they call the Channel, waiting to soak us up when we come back, like Rudi and Gunter today. No wonder the pilots get Kanalkrank—Channel sickness! If we had drop tanks we could range all over England and fight for an hour or more! We had them in Spain, why not here?"

  "I don't know, Dolfo—it must be material shortages."

  Galland's smoldering intensity seemed to compress him like a rubber ball, concentrating his strength and his will and at the same time threatening to release it in an explosion. His closely set black eyes burned hypnotically.

  "Nonsense. They're made out of plywood and we have tons of that!"

  Josten rallied. "But look how magnificently we improvise; this strip is a perfect example of our strength."

  Galland snorted with contempt. "Perfect example of our weakness! We're not some gypsy raiding party, trying to steal a few cows from the Bulgarians! We've started a world war."

  He took a sip of cognac, calmed himself, then leaned forward.

  "And this is just the start. Do you think America will see England go down the drain? Do you think Russia will stand by and let us prepare to attack her?"

  Josten said nothing.

  "Germany has to get serious/build ten times as many planes, ten times better planes." He paused, then almost shouting, yelled, "Serious planes, not criminal short-range pea-shooters."