"Criminal" was the current omnibus Luftwaffe slang for anything terribly hazardous or terribly wrong.
Josten felt the time was right. "I think there's something that can be done about it. You know Bruno Hafner, of course?"
The gravel voice came back, clipped, funeral tone, pell-mell pace. "Of course, Richthofen Geschwader, Pour le Merite, industrialist, wounded in Spain, and perhaps a madman. I know Hafner; what about him?"
Josten spilled out the details of his visit to Cottbus, emphasizing both the production improvements and the radical weapons. Galland sat in silence absorbing what he said.
"I don't know, Josty. I'd like to believe it. But Hafner has a murky past; you've heard the rumors about his leaving America?"
"Some nonsense about killing his wife by sabotaging an airplane? You don't believe that, surely."
"Perhaps not—but he's supposed to love to kill for the pleasure of it."
"I don't give a damn about that if he has the right formula for building airplanes. If he can produce five hundred jet fighters for us next year, airplanes that could fly across the Channel, wouldn't you accept them?"
A great grin lit up Galland's face. "If he can do that, I'll personally kiss your ass in front of the chancellery on Hitler's birthday!"
"That won't be necessary. But to work with Hafner, I may need to take leave at odd times, just to keep things going. Are you willing for me to help these projects along?"
"Of course—as long as you keep me posted—and as long as you let me fly the new planes."
They toasted silently with the last of the cognac.
*
Northolt, England/September 15, 1940
Galland and Josten were crossing the French coast heading toward England as Frank Bandfield sat perspiring in the cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane fighter of the Polish Kosciuszko Squadron 303.
Bandfield was an outsider thrust upon them. Caldwell had sent him to England to follow the progress on the RAF's jet engine, and to get in some combat experience if the British would let him.
He glanced wistfully around the primitive facilities at Northolt, mentally questioning why he was there even as the hot anticipation of combat rushed through him. A tiny corporal, his uniform rank with the body odor of unbathed weeks of toil, leaned across Bandfield to strap him in.
"At least you can understand the briefing, sir, better than these bloody Poles."
In the short pre-takeoff briefing, Squadron Leader Keeler had told him that their task was simple: attack the bombers. If there were Messerschmitt fighters in the way, they would simply ignore them.
"Leave the Me's for the Spitfires, Bandfield. If we can get the bombers to jettison their bombs, we've done our main job. After that, any we shoot down are just icing on the cake."
Bandfield did not think of dogfights as being quite so tidy, but perhaps things had changed since Spain.
The young squadron leader had the face of a choirboy and the voice of an experienced commander. He had turned away abruptly, then come back and shouted, "You've had a few hours on the Hurricane, I expect?"
Bandfield said, "Yes, twenty-three," and Keeler smiled broadly, hoping that the Yank would not be a total loss. Bandfield had found the Hurricane to be a delightful airplane, with its broad thick wing, deep fuselage, and handsome lines. It was heavier on the controls than the Spitfire or the American Curtiss P-36 but the visibility from the cockpit was wonderful as the fuselage curved down from the cockpit to the spinner. The wide landing gear track made for easy landings. The only difficulty Bandfield had was in mastering the Dunlop pneumatic brakes. You had to use a lever on the control column spade grip, pulsing air as you moved the rudder pedals—a bit dicey. He'd damn near ground looped on his first taxi-out. Anyway, they obviously didn't expect too much of him, knowing that he was there to pick up experience for the Air Corps. They probably figured that, with luck, he'd get killed and maybe create some additional pro-British sentiment.
Bandfield was number two in Natty Flight, four Hurricanes sitting at the edge of a frame shack-studded grass strip on the western outskirts of London. As he plugged his radio in he could hear Squadron Leader Keeler bawling over the radio, "Come on, get your bloody fingers out, Natty Flight!"
A month ago twelve aircraft would have scrambled, three flights of four each. Attrition had cut them down, and on this, 303's third mission of the day, only four Hurricanes rolled, khaki-colored storks, kicking dust up behind them as the pilots carefully kept the measured balance between lifting the tail off and keeping the prop tips from digging in. Northolt fell rapidly behind them, disappearing into the neatly mulched greens and fading brick reds of the garden allotments surrounding suburban London. From the corner of his eye he saw at the field's edge the main road that ran from London to Oxford, a good checkpoint if he had to come back by himself.
The Hurricanes climbed hard, gray-black streams pouring back from the exhaust stacks and staining the camouflaged fuselage sides. The fires from last night's raid had largely been contained by London's exhausted fire companies, but this morning the Luftwaffe had returned. Flames and smoke grew from the dock area in huge tiered stalagmites that ran together at the top, a long greasy gray string against the teal-blue sky.
The myriad cries of the ground-to-air radio chatter formed a chaotic stream: "Operations calling, operations calling, Beta squadron scramble, hello Long Mike, hello Rugby Leader," a thousand directions, questions, and sometimes salty observations, all done in accents ranging from cockney to Oxbridge to Australian. The controlled panic was at first a jumble to Bandfield, but he was beginning to be able to sort it out as he glued himself to Keeler's wing. When he got to the scene of the battle he'd know what to do. He had done it often enough in Spain, against the same enemy.
Keeler led them in a curving climb at 170 mph, flying in two tight elements. The Hurricane was fun, a study in contrasts. Modern-looking, its performance suffered because the propeller was just a big wooden club, no different in principle from props used in the Great War. Top speed was supposed to be about 320 mph; yesterday Bandfield had not been able to nudge his past 300 mph in level flight. The obsolete propeller was just another one of England's pennywise economies that had cost them bitterly on the continent. Engine power was everything in modern combat; without it no airframe was worth anything. That's why the sheer power of the jet was going to be so important.
The other two planes stayed glued to him and Keeler. He had met the pilots at the bar the night before. They were older men, majors in their own air force, but like all the gallant Poles in the RAF, they had to start with the most junior commissioned rank, pilot officers, because of some stupid bureaucratic concern about seniority. One—Bandfield thought his name was Pisarek—spoke English fairly well and had that very morning taught him rather more about Kosciuszko's role in the American Revolution than he had wished to know.
Bandfield concentrated on keeping his position, close in on Keeler's wing. It was a bad formation for combat; they should be more strung out, letting all four pairs of eyes comb the sky rather than depending upon just Keeler and Pisarek.
He smiled to himself, "There I go again—I'm here to learn, not to teach." But he recalled his last combat flight, in Spain, in 1937, and how he and his old comrade Lacalle had flown farther apart, able to fly formation easily and still scan for the enemy. It was at times like this when he wanted to believe in an afterlife, to think that Lacalle was somehow looking down at him, preparing to take care of him, just as he had in the old days.
*
Above the English Channel/September 15, 1940
Josten squinted into the bright blue afternoon sky, searching for the little dots that would appear from nowhere and try to kill him. His eyes traversed the horizon from north of London toward Land's End, noting the changing striations of color above the cliffs' chalky smear. The variegated countryside was tan and dull green to the north, growing stripe by stripe to a viridian brightness in the far south. While he and his comrades had fought their long battle, su
mmer had drained June's bursting green glow to the sere tans that forecast an early winter. With luck, perhaps a peaceful early winter.
The Royal Air Force could not hold out much longer according to the intelligence reports, straight from "Beppo" Schmid at Luftwaffe Headquarters. Schmid, whose unremitting optimism had destroyed his credibility weeks ago, had again pronounced that the poor "chaps" flying the vulnerable Hurricanes and the nasty Spitfires had been worn down to a pitiful handful.
And yesterday the RAF attacks on the bombers had been poorly coordinated and not pressed home, perhaps a sign that they were indeed losing their nerve. Josten eased out his right foot from the retaining strap of the rudder bar and stamped it upon the cold metal cockpit floor of his Messerschmitt, muttering, "Wishful thinking."
Below them, in an aerial staircase stacked up and back from twenty thousand feet, flew 150 bombers, mostly Heinkel He Ills with a few Dornier Do 17s mixed in. The bomber pilots were obviously tired, letting their prescribed tight mutual defense formations straggle into lengthening oblong ovals. Wearily courageous, they plodded implacably toward an already burning London.
The whole scene looked strangely different to him after last night's conversation with Galland. Yesterday the bombers had seemed lethal and purposeful; today he realized what a puny force they really were.
It was like a tug of war, he thought, each side mustering its dwindling strength, trying to make the last-gasp effort to overwhelm the other. Both sides were worn and battle weary. He wondered if the RAF intelligence was as bad as the Germans'. Maybe they'd just fight until there was no one left.
Josten reached up and ran his finger around the edge of his oxygen mask, letting the perspiration seep out. The prospect of combat made his senses more acute, and he could smell in the arid oxygen a scent of the hay stacked in neat little triangles along the strip at Caffiers.
They were flying as the staff flight in a two-ship Rotte, a loss-induced departure from the usual four-aircraft Schwarm the Luftwaffe had employed since Spain. He glanced across the 175-meter gap that separated him from his leader. The yellow nose of Adolf Galland's Messerschmitt Bf 109E fighter glistened vividly in the hot afternoon sun. The Emil, capable of 570 kilometers per hour, was loafing along at 450. It banked slightly as Galland ceaselessly checked for enemy aircraft, and on the gray-green fuselage side, beneath the canopy, Josten could see his leader’s personal insignia, the bloodthirsty Mickey Mouse, smoking a cigar and holding a battle ax in one hand—paw?—and a pistol in the other.
The pair of them were lucky, on a free chase while the rest of their squadron mates below were still confined to a close protective weaving orbit over the slow bombers, per the embarrassed Reichsmarschall Goering's orders. Just one month ago, on Eagles Day, he had promised the Fuehrer a victory within five days.
It had been easier said than done. At each attack, the Hurricanes and the Spitfires were positioned correctly to defend their territory, the beneficiaries of expert radio detection. The enemy fighters were hacking the German bombers out of the sky, five, ten, twenty a day. And despite their own losses, the RAF kept coming.
For a change, the radios were silent; this, too, was simple fatigue, well earned in months of endless warfare. As soon as the first glints of the British fighters appeared, the usual quivering, yipping cries would begin to jam the channels. Luftwaffe radio discipline was appalling; Josten realized that it was one of the many changes that had to be made if they were to win the war. He wondered if the bomber crews talked as much as the fighter pilots. He didn't know because they were on totally different frequencies, another planning fiasco. It wouldn't have taken too much brainpower to figure that the bombers might like to talk to the fighters!
The pleasure he took in the almost mutinous thinking surprised him. It opened up a whole series of possibilities beyond the daily dogfights. He could help both Galland and Hafner—and really make a difference. It was one thing to shoot down a few airplanes; it was quite another to have an effect on the war!
Josten was jerked back into his cockpit by a sudden waggle of Galland's wing. He caught a glimpse of his rudder, the Luftsieg stripes of forty victories picked out, each with a date and type recorded. Josten's thoughts swung briefly to Lyra, then to the horizon, where dozens of dots suddenly swarmed, a whirling mass of lethal gnats hurtling toward the bombers.
*
Above Southeast England/September 15, 1940
Leveling off at twenty thousand feet, the Hurricane gained speed and its controls tightened, imparting the taut, finger-drumming feel of a sailboat placed precisely before the wind. The magnificent Rolls-Royce engine's turbine-smooth song of power inspired more confidence than the American Allison engines Bandfield had flown behind. All the compounded forces of the aircraft—the pistons flashing up and down, the gears turning, the propeller trying to tear itself apart, the suck of wind upon the wings, the invisible air battering it everywhere—all were smoothed by the airplane's harmonious lines into a single flow of power, an endless sheet of energy he controlled with the tip of a finger. Only the hammering recoil of the eight .303-caliber Browning machine guns would disturb the Hurricane's dolphin-smooth flight.
Bandfield had never felt lonelier. He thought of Patty and the children constantly and hated missing even part; of George's young life, the wonderful time when he was proficient in crawling and just beginning to think about taking the first step. He wondered if even a vagrant thought of him flickered through the children's heads. Charlotte must think of him; perhaps even George, with his crooked grin and slobbery smile, might sometimes remember him.
Abruptly, Keeler's voice came through his earphones as loud as if he'd been in the cockpit beside him: "Short John, Short John, this is Natty Leader."
Short John, the deputy controller for Northolt came back, "Hello, Natty Leader, we have some custom for you; vector one-twenty degrees, angels twenty."
Keeler's roar didn't need a radio.
"Angels twenty my bloody ass, Short John. I can see the bastards and they're at angels twenty-five if they're an inch. We're climbing to meet them."
Unruffled, Short John said, "Thank you, Natty Leader, 74 Squadron is climbing behind you."
Keeler's voice was calmer. "Short John, it's a mixed bag of Heinkels and Dorniers with a stack of 109s just above them."
Then, to his flight: "All right then, Natty Flight, line astern, head-on attack on the lead Heinkels."
Bandfield felt his muscles go through the automatic constrictions that tried to squeeze him into a tiny ball hidden by the engine and the armor plate behind the seat. The four Hurricanes had leveled off, accelerating as they swung to the attack. He felt a surge of hope as a squadron of Spitfires slammed into the top cover of German fighters, the two groups first merging in a dense ball and then separating like incompatible fluids into a series of clawing individual dogfights.
Natty Flight bored in and Bandfield eased farther to the left so that he could concentrate on the oncoming Heinkels. They were sinister-looking airplanes, full of complex curves, the sun shining on the perspex canopies and the twin cowlings, little red winking dots issuing forth from the single guns in front.
He crouched down farther in the cockpit as the Heinkel blossomed in size. Pathetic, he thought, I've got this big engine in front of me like a ton of armor plate and that poor brave bastard is sitting in a fishbowl. I've got eight great guns to hit him and he's popping at me with a little pea-shooter!
The Heinkels got prettier as they got closer, the gray-green shapes sometimes flashing a bit of blue when an undersurface was exposed in a quick formation-closing bank. A slight shudder told him he was taking hits from somewhere, nothing vital, not enough to disturb his concentration. He pushed the firing button just as the circle of the reflector sight shrank around the Heinkel like the loop of a snare. The eight. 303 machine guns reached out in a harmonized pattern of ball, tracer, and De Wilde incendiary ammunition. The mass of lead converged into an arrowhead, hammering the Heinkel's perspex fi
shbowl into powder. The instant tornado of wind fire-hosing into the open fuselage cavity braked the Heinkel to a shuddering, convulsive stall that pitched it out and to the left. Bandfield followed Keeler into a hard turning descent to the right that rapidly changed into a prop-hanging climb to trade the energy of the dive for precious altitude. "Form up, Natty Flight," Keeler's rough voice called.
Bandfield looked around; one of the Poles was gone. Shot down? Or as the courageous Poles were prone to do, just off on some forbidden solo hunting?
The German formations had drifted to the right, extending the distance between them to almost a thousand yards. The void left by Bandfield's doomed Heinkel, now spiraling eccentrically away, had been filled by another.
"Once again, Natty Flight, line astern, attacking, go." Bandfield savored the thrill of combat, wondering at his own detachment, at his lack of concern at having killed again.
Four thousand feet above, Galland's guttural voice crackled into Josten's earphones: "Attacking."
They plunged down on the three Hurricanes, Galland fastening onto the leader. The old pro flew bucking into Keeler's slipstream, letting the brown camouflaged fuselage fill his windscreen, aiming just forward of where the huge identity letters—rf and f—flanked the blue-white-red of the cockade. He pressed and quickly released the firing button for the two cowl-mounted machine guns and the two wing-mounted 20-mm cannon. The three-second burst slammed almost twenty pounds of lead into Keeler and his fuel tanks. Swirling flames and wreckage blotted out the sky around Galland as, unable either to turn or to stop, he lunged through the debris of the exploding Hurricane.
Josten slid over to attack the number three Hurricane. He fired carefully and saw his own victim stagger, turning inverted to plunge away burning, black smoke pouring from a vicious red blot of fire. "Twenty," he thought, "now that's a decent number."
The murderous assault on Keeler forced Bandfield into a violent turn to the right.
Josten pounced on him, trying to edge the remaining Hurricane into his sights when Galland gruffly ordered, "Return to base."
Eagles at War Page 8
