Eagles at War

by Boyne, Walter J.

  The bombers would not be far behind. The relief flight of Messerschmitts had just showed up; that meant Josten had ten more minutes on this sortie, then back for fuel and a cup of coffee.

  Five minutes later he saw a German E boat swing sharply to engage five British motor torpedo boats approaching at high speed from the west. Where were the British aircraft?

  The British were coming, in a balls-up rivaling the Charge of the Light Brigade for both bravery and stupidity. The mighty British Empire, forewarned of the possibility of the German sortie for weeks, had so disposed its forces that only six ancient Swordfish torpedo planes were available when, after incredible delay, the first attack was made.

  The open cockpit Fairey Swordfish would have looked at home on the Western Front in 1918. Encumbered with a stiltlike fixed landing gear and laden with drag-inducing struts and wires, it was nicknamed "Stringbag," after the bags made of string netting that women carried when shopping. Designed in 1934, the three-placer—pilot, gunner, and radio man—could drop an eighteen-inch torpedo. Its crews bolstered their courage by bragging that Luftwaffe gunners could never hit it because their ranging devices were not designed to fire at a target that flew as slow as eighty-five miles per hour. And, they boasted, any lucky hits would pass right through the Swordfish's wood and fabric frame without damage. There was some minimal truth to both of these whistles in the dark.

  The Stringbag had already done heroic work. Operating from HMS Illustrious, twenty-one Swordfish had crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940. The following spring, Swordfish from the Ark Royal had launched torpedoes that jammed the Bismarck's rudder and set her up for the heavy guns of the Home Fleet. But those attacks had been made without fighter opposition.

  Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde flew the lead Swordfish. He had just made a command decision, the last of his short life. The fighter escort had not arrived at the rendezvous point; the German fleet was getting away, beyond the Strait into the Narrow Sea. He elected to attack, knowing that the German fighters were waiting, and that few, if any, of the Swordfish would survive.

  As the six Swordfish lumbered toward the target, a flight of ten Spitfires—less than a quarter of the promised escort—suddenly materialized and a brief glow of hope stirred Esmonde—there might be a chance after all.

  The red fuel warning light was blinking as Josten saw a sheet of flak erupt from the destroyers on his left. All of them had been fitted with crude welded mounts for extra 20-mm automatic weapons, and the wall of smoke and flame they laid down looked impenetrable. To his amazement, six Swordfish stumbled through the curtain of fire in two flights of three, battered but on course to the main fleet. Banking to engage them he reefed back on the stick to avoid a forest of water spouts blossoming in front of him. The eleven-inch guns of the battle cruisers were firing shells right through his own line of flight to ensnare the Swordfish. He shrugged; he'd never know if one hit him.

  The port lower wing of one Swordfish vanished, as if Neptune had reached up from the sea to clutch it. Its nose rose sharply, then bowed to the left before disappearing in a spray of water. Josten's own starboard wing scraped the wavetops he racked around to slow himself enough to pick up a head-on shot at a target. He pressed the trigger and saw his tracers passing behind his target as he whipped through the formation. He blinked as he did so, not believing his eyes. On the third Swordfish a madly brave gunner had crawled out of his seat and was straddling the fuselage like a horse, facing the rear, trying to beat out a fire in the fabric with his hands.

  Josten throttled back, slowing down to drop some flaps; there were Spitfires about, but the top flight of Messerschmitts had already engaged them. His targets were the remaining Swordfish.

  Other Messerschmitts were attacking, barracuda against bonito, getting into each other's way as the Fleet Air Arm planes lumbered forward. One of the Swordfish disappeared in a huge ball of flame—a shell must have exploded its torpedo; another simply stopped flying, to drop limply into the Channel like a dead fly in a glass of beer.

  Josten gained on the formation slowly this time, aiming and firing with care. The wood and fabric of the trailing Swordfish sponged up his gunfire. Smiling grimly, he trod on the rudder pedals, walking his tracers back and forth across the cockpit until the guns went silent. Just as he ran out of ammunition, he saw the gunner throw his hands up and the pilot lurch forward on the stick. The big biplane tucked its nose into a wave and halted, swamped immediately to its aft cockpit by the building sea, then slipping without reluctance beneath the surface.

  He had overflown the attackers again, reaching almost to the jaws of the Scharnhorst's thundering main batteries when he threw his fighter in a steep bank to reverse his course. The amount of cannon fire roaring past him did not bear thinking about. There was only one Swordfish still flying, gamely headed directly toward the big battle cruiser, torpedo ready to be launched.

  The fuel warning light was burning red steadily now. It didn't matter, for Josten knew he would never reach shore. He caught the Swordfish in his sights, the big three-bladed fixed-pitch propeller glistening in the mist, the enormous wings pushing the shell-freighted air aside like a child burrowing in the sand. He pressed the trigger, just in case, but nothing happened. The two airplanes closed. In a single fluid motion, Josten lifted his fighter over the huge upper wing of the torpedo plane, then dipped his port wing so that it sheared off the Swordfish's vertical fin. The Swordfish dropped straight into the sea, the Messerschmitt cartwheeling at its side. A geyser of water covered Josten's cockpit, turning the outside world rapidly from blue to gray to blue again as his tired fighter bobbed up and down before lurching to a halt. Jettisoning the canopy, he pulled his one-man life raft out just as the plane sank beneath him.

  Battered, stomach and mouth engorged with the teeth-rattling chill of the seawater, Josten inflated the raft and struggled into it. He looked up to find the last Swordfish directly in front of him, engine sunk deep, water flowing over the cockpit rails. The gunner was dead in his harness, but another man, the radio operator probably, was dragging the unconscious pilot out of the cockpit. He had just freed him when the tailless Swordfish rolled over and plunged out of sight, as if glad to end its embarrassing agony.

  Josten choked back nausea as he paddled toward the two British survivors. The radio man was treading water, holding the pilot up and trying to inflate his life jacket as the rolling sea bounced them. Josten knew that he could expect to survive no more than a few hours in his raft; the two enemy crew members would not last for twenty minutes as the chilly Channel sucked warmth from their bones.

  A wave crested, dropping Josten's raft next to the British airmen. He reached out and grabbed the pilot's jacket, saying to the radio operator, "Hold on to the raft. I'll take care of him."

  The radio man, too cold to be surprised by Josten's English, nodded gratefully. Josten managed to get the jacket inflated and then held his arms around the pilot's head, keeping it from bobbing forward into the water, the long blond hair slicked tight against his skull, veins showing big and blue beneath the translucent skin, deep blue eyes open with pupils fixed.

  The radio operator's teeth chattered like a flak battery while his color drained to a gray-blue as, cell by cell, he gave in to the cold.

  "Can't hold on, going to let go."

  "Nonsense, there are dozens of E boats looking for us. Just hang on."

  A decision was forming in Josten's mind as he scanned the water, praying that a German boat would spot them. The unconscious pilot was not going to make it. He could not afford to waste his strength on him. The radio man was a goner unless he somehow got out of the water. The raft was not supposed to be able to hold two people, especially in the swelling chop of the Channel, but he'd have to take the chance. He shook the radio man's arm, forcing his eyes open.

  "I'm going to have to let your friend go. I can't hold on to him. When I do, you crawl aboard. You've got to help, I don't have the strength to bring you in myse
lf."

  The radio man looked mutely at his comrade and mumbled, "No, hold on to him."

  Josten let the pilot go; he bobbed away, disappearing at once, then reappearing, his head lolling back now so that his accusing open eyes stared deep into Josten's soul, seeming to say, "I have died and you are going to live." It was a sight Josten would never forget.

  "Do you have the strength to get in?"

  The radio man shook his head.

  Josten tried and failed to haul him in the raft.

  He was still holding him, arms aching with the cold and fatigue, when an E boat came alongside thirty minutes later. Rough hands pulled him on board; the radio operator, dead for many minutes, slipped out of their hands to drift in search of his pilot.

  Below deck they wrapped Josten in blankets and forced muckefuck—ersatz coffee—laced with schnapps down his throat. It acted like a depth charge to the seawater he'd swallowed; he vomited and at once felt better.

  The E boat raced at top speed back to port, the water pounding the thin planks on which Josten lay. As warmth returned to his extremities, he had time to rethink the battle. It was incredible that the British had thrown antiques like the Swordfish against them. No matter how brave the pilots were, they couldn't overcome their disadvantage in equipment.

  The true meaning of the battle dawned on him. It wouldn't make any difference how many airplanes Germany had, unless they were of superior performance. The jet fighter had to be built.

  *

  Wolfschanze, Rastenburg, East Prussia/March 20, 1942

  No one could accuse Hitler of ostentatious living. Josten, Galland, and another fighter pilot, Leutnant "Bubi" Zink, waited in the paneled tea room, furnished in the varnished pine and padded pillow comfort of a Bavarian rifle club, but by far the most elegant of the buildings they had seen. Situated in the heart of a forest near the Masurian Lakes, the headquarters was a collection of utilitarian single-story wooden barracks and concrete blockhouses, each about twelve meters long and five meters wide, without paint or decoration of any sort, and grouped according to their official functions. Other bunkers, larger, were under construction, and the whole was neatly knitted together by concentric rings of barbed wire.

  Everywhere except on the graveled paths there was snow; even the camouflage netting, strung on the tops of the pine trees, sagged under its weight in a pendant mouse-gray ceiling, filtering light and noise.

  They had been waiting for two hours in the Number Two Mess in the Gorlitz Kurhaus, the dining room for the Operations Staff, thawing out from the four-hundred-mile flight from Berlin in an unheated Junkers Ju 52. Josten had spent part of the time talking to Christa Garnowski, Hitler's garrulous private secretary who had come in to apologize for the delay—the Fuehrer was in conference with Dr. Goebbels. She mixed a loving Fuehrer fervor with the desire to be recognized as a real insider, someone who was secure enough to criticize freely. Young and pretty, she warmed immediately to Galland, as all women seemed to do.

  "This is the nerve center of the Reich—and the most boring place in the world. At least now we don't have the mosquitoes, but it's so cold we take turns holding the dogs, just to get our hands warm."

  Josten tried to walk the line between being friendly and curious.

  "How could it be boring here?"

  "It's the crazy hours we keep. We follow the Fuehrer's schedule—dinner at seven, then a small social meeting with the Fuehrer later." As she spoke, her pride was evident.

  "He needs to unwind, so he talks to us—sometimes it's two in the morning before we get away. We go to bed, and it might be noon before we go to work again. There are no newspapers, no radio. Occasionally there's a film, but not often, not since the Fuehrer stopped watching them. The winter was so terrible for him."

  The newly promoted Major Josten was hungry. They had left Berlin before lunch and had not eaten anything since. Worse, Zink had brought along enough brandy for a platoon, and they had drunk most of it. Now his stomach was queasy and his head ached. All three men had been following the Fuehrer for almost four days, waiting to be summoned to his presence. The investiture ceremony was to have taken place in Berlin; Hitler had abruptly broken off his visit and returned to his headquarters, and they were sent after him. Galland, who had received the ultimate decoration, the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds, in January, was there to debrief Hitler personally. Zink was to receive the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross. It was a special distinction for Josten to be told to accompany them; his award was the Knight's Cross, normally given by the local commanding officer.

  "I suppose that you eat very well here."

  "You're joking, Major Josten! It's virtually a starvation diet. The Fuehrer is an ascetic who eats only the simplest things. Here, let me show you the menu for tonight so that you won't be surprised."

  She reached in her leather purse and handed him a small ivory-colored card. On it was written in good German script:

  wolfschanze

  Pea Soup

  Rice Pudding

  Rye Wafers

  Apple peel tea

  20 March 1942

  "Keep that for a souvenir. That's what you'll be having. The rest of us will do rather better tonight, pork chops, the first time in weeks. But you get to eat with him and Dr. Goebbels."

  Galland had been leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. He had met Hitler before on several occasions but had never seen Goebbels in person. Josten wondered if he should talk to the good Doctor about Lyra and Magda's friendship.

  "Dr. Goebbels is going back right after supper. That's why you are eating early."

  The door opened, and Colonel Nicholas von Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, bustled in. Tall, thin, blond, his condescension conveyed the proxy power peculiar to the personal assistants of great men.

  "The Fuehrer will see you . . . What's that smell?"

  He walked over to the three pilots and sniffed; when he came to Zink he said, "You've been drinking and you stink like a French whore from that hair oil. You cannot be admitted to the Fuehrer's presence like this. Go back to the barracks and wash; I'll try to arrange for him to see you tomorrow. You two, follow me."

  As they entered, Hitler stepped forward and clasped them both by the hand and introduced them to Goebbels and the other staff members. Goebbels felt a curious satisfaction that Josten was such a good-looking young hero. He grinned wolfishly and pumped Josten's hand, saying, "I've heard of you."

  Hitler led them to a wall map where a small table held the decorations. A staff photographer came in. With each photograph, a restrained tussle occurred among the people present as they vied for a position as close to Hitler as possible. Goebbels did not. He always made sure that he stood on the extreme left of every shot so that his name would appear first in the photo caption.

  Hitler's voice was firm and strong, hinting at the range and depth of tones he used in his speeches.

  "Major Josten. I don't usually award the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross personally, but this is an exception. If you had not rammed the Swordfish, we might have lost the Scharnhorst."

  None of the conflicting stories Josten had heard about Hitler had proved to be true. He had the appearance of a correct, friendly business executive, obviously in good health, and immaculately turned out. His eyes were a deep blue, but Josten didn't sense the burning magnetism journalists attributed to them.

  Goebbels, on the other hand, was exactly as depicted by the rumor-mongers—tiny, with a limp, and a hideous oversize grin that looked as if it had been forcibly stuffed in his head by a revengeful dentist. The little Propaganda Minister stepped forward to congratulate Josten again, saying, "The captain of the E Boat has reported your heroism in trying to save the British crew member. Newspapers all over the world will print the story. I thank you for a propaganda triumph as well."

  As Josten replied, Goebbels continued to press his hand thinking, Well, the Fuehrer has decorated you with the Knight's Cross, and I've decorated you with horns.r />
  The meal lasted only a few minutes. A plane was waiting for Goebbels, and the pea soup and rice pudding were equally tasteless glue, nothing to linger over. Hitler had monopolized the conversation, discussing various European opera houses, a subject neither Galland nor Josten could do more than nod about.

  After Goebbels left, they went back to the tea room, and Hitler began to ask pointed questions about the Luftwaffe.

  "What do you think, Colonel Galland, were we lucky in the Channel, or was it skill? Be honest with me."

  "Sixty percent luck, forty percent skill. It was lucky that the British were so slow in reacting. But when they did react, the Luftwaffe stopped them. It was a good feeling."

  Hitler interrogated them about the quality of their aircraft, the training new pilots were receiving, what the Luftwaffe's weakspots were, how many fighters should be built, a thousand details. He had incredible grasp for specifications, calling out the speed, range, armament of all the major aircraft, Allied and German, and even quoted them the muzzle velocities and throw-weights of the various weapons. Suddenly he seemed to change the direction of the conversation.

  "You have an excellent friend in court, Major Josten. I suppose you know that."

  "Yes, my Fuehrer, Colonel Galland has taught me a great deal."

  "Not Colonel Galland; I'm referring to Lieutenant Colonel Hafner, the director of the experimental station at Cottbus. He speaks very highly of you."

  "Colonel Hafner is a good friend."

  "Do you agree with him on his ideas about expanding production by building interconnected industrial complexes around Germany?"