Major General Henry Caldwell responded groggily to the three-thirty wake-up call, slumping back on his cot before switching on a light. He stared for a moment at the unfamiliar uniform, then realized that for this one mission he was Major George White, an observer from the Fifteenth Air Force.
Muscles kinked and mouth dry, feeling every one of his forty-six years, he persuaded himself once again that he had to be there, had to find out for himself what was going wrong. Air Corps doctrine had been built on precision daylight bombing, and he had geared the entire B-29 program to it. Long ago, the British had told Arnold—and Spaatz and Eaker, too, and anyone else, whether they asked or not—that daylight precision bombing was impossible. Implicitly the message was: "If we couldn't do it, surely you can't." The British felt that they had learned early in the war that daylight raids didn't work, that the bloody losses of the Wellingtons and Hampdens proved that the German fighters and flak were too good. And the truth was that the USAAF was not getting enough bombs on the target. Caldwell hoped to find out why, today, over Schweinfurt.
Coughing, he swung his feet out of the bed and lit a Camel. In similar Quonset huts all over England, twenty-three hundred other Americans were getting ready to fight their way across Europe to the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt. Eleven centuries old, a sheep and cattle town until the industrial age, Schweinfurt was a vital manufacturing center for most of Germany's ball bearings.
The pace of the day picked up—a quick breakfast, a briefing, and then the silent ride in the Jeep to the hardstand. He was flying with Captain Chet Schmidt on Bonnie, crewed by young men with the strangely old look of twenty-nine-mission veterans. He had met them two days before and, despite his nom de guerre, most knew who he was, treating him with the easy familiarity they knew went down well with visiting brass. The one exception was the brand-new copilot. Major Malcolm McLean was a hotshot feeling his oats, just back from a tour in the Pacific, and replacing Schmidt's regular copilot, who had picked up a flak wound on the last mission.
McLean had spent the previous two days pissing off Schmidt's crew by telling them what an easy war they had in Europe, and how tough the flak and the fighters were over Rabaul. He was at first openly contemptuous of Caldwell's presence, mumbling something about "old guys trying to pick up medals." Caldwell didn't mind that; what he hated was the brown-nosing that started when McLean learned that the "old guy" was actually a general officer.
Feeling better as the day went on, Caldwell was glad to stand by unobtrusively, to help with the loading of gear, to take his place in the special fold-down seat that had been rigged for him aft of the pilots. It was one of those days when nothing else mattered. His whole life had been in preparation for this, husbanding the Air Corps resources, keeping the manufacturers alive, selecting the best airplanes, all for this moment. He wouldn't have missed it for anything.
A routine takeoff lifted them into a cloud layer briefed to be two thousand feet thick. Instead they staggered through six thousand terrifying feet of gray swirling mist filled with hundreds of other bombers and fighters boring upward like blinded swarms of gnats, from airfields all over east England. There was no attempt at ground control, other than spacing the takeoffs at individual airfields. Survival depended only upon luck and the vastness of the sky. Caldwell whistled with relief when they burst out on top of the clouds, the sun glinting off the hundreds of camouflaged B-17s as they wound round and round to get into formation, alerting the German radar even before they left the English coast.
The long lines of aircraft queuing up made for impressive pageantry, reminding him of the coronation films of King George VI. Individual aircraft circled gradually into squadron formation, then squadrons would join into the combat box, aircraft staggered in altitude and azimuth, positioned so that their 540 heavy machine guns had the greatest fields of fire. Then, streaming contrails, the boxes aligned themselves into a majestic ten-mile-long armada. Instead of pennants or flags, there were the proud tail markings of sixteen bomb groups, from the red checkerboard of the 385th, the slash of red and black triangle A of the 91st, to the ominously fitting black rudder of the "Bloody 100th." The planes, of course, had names—Dry Martini, Cabin in the Sky, Eight Ball, Great McGinty, Gremlin Gus.
Republic P-47 fighters—affectionately called "Jugs" because of their bulbous shape—milled around above them. The bomber crews had joked at briefing about having fighter escorts all the way—P-47s to Aachen, then Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs to the target and back to Aachen. The briefing officer had concluded with, "This is a tough job, but I know you can do it. Good luck, good hunting, and good bombing." A gunner had immediately added, "And goodbye," and the room had broken up in nervous laughter.
Caldwell was glad no one knew how keenly he felt responsible for the absence of a long-range fighter. His conscience told him that if he had put out the same effort on the P-51 that he had on the Sidewinder, there would have been escort fighters in quantity. Now it would be next year before they arrived—and by then the German jets might be dominant. He had to do something before that happened.
If he got the chance. The damn Truman Committee was on his tail, not about the jet fighters—yet—but about the unsatisfactory Sidewinders. Bandfield had been allowed to tell him about his interrogation at the Lockheed plant. The committee had received rumors that the Russians were now going to complain formally about the Sidewinder's performance, which made Caldwell wonder what would happen to Scriabin. Members of the committee had gone to Nashville to investigate. It hadn't helped that when they arrived, two Sidewinders had just crashed, gone off the end of each of the two runways. What a stroke of fate; both crashes had been pilot error, but it had naturally soured the committee and set the course for the investigation. Caldwell would be lucky to last another six months before he was court-martialed. Maybe it wouldn't matter—maybe he wouldn't return.
The light flak started at the coast, but opposition was light until Aachen, when the P-47s, at the absolute limit of their range, apologetically dipped their elliptical wings and headed back to England. The Fortresses were now on their own, and the formations, already tight, shrank closer together as if the twenty-below-zero temperature outside was contracting them.
Caldwell chafed at: having to sit and watch, unable to fly. On an ordinary training mission, they would have swapped seats to let him at the controls, but this was combat. The radio discipline was good. There had been little chatter on the intercom and absolutely no interplane communication. His unit formed the low box of the lead division, and he could see planes of both the lead and the high box through the right cockpit windows.
The Germans were ready and waiting. The first attack came from a distance, twin-engine fighters—mostly Messerschmitt Bf 110s, with a few Ju 88s mixed in—lobbing their 21-cm rockets into the formation. The first salvo missed, but the second blew off the tail of a B-17, sending it tumbling down, the first of many. Caldwell realized with a twinge just how much the P-51 pilots would love to slaughter the twin-engine jobs, burdened as they were with the stove-pipelike tubes under their wings.
"109s, twelve o'clock, level."
The call was from the lead plane; Caldwell picked them up on the horizon, waves of wiggling crosses, a dozen at a time heading directly into the guns of the lead formation.
Schmidt's voice came on the intercom: "Guns, they'll be diving through the lead formation at us; watch the two o'clock high position."
The Messerschmitts charged in echelon directly into the bombers' guns. Caldwell watched them, their nose and wings alight with cannon fire, admiring their discipline as they closed, fired, then rolled insolently to dive under the first group of B-17s. He saw one Fortress buck, then slowly side out to the left, flames already roaring from its center section as the black commas of the crew, turning end over end, bailed out.
Other ranks of Messerschmitts came on, hitting the lead elements and diving down, ignoring the return fire. They were putting on a first class air show—too bad it was so goddamn
frightening to watch!
There was a lull in the attack. From his position he could see that they'd already lost at least four B-17s; how many more were down behind him? The Germans returned to attack, mottled gray-green hyenas pulling down gazelles. They formed up in pairs, sometimes two pairs together, nervously wriggling to dodge the hail of .50-caliber bullets. They bored in from all angles, slicing down to hit the top formation, their cruciform constantly altering as the bank angle and the deflection changed, then suddenly shooting by so close that Caldwell could pick out details: a pilot wearing a white scarf, the streamlined gondolas for the underwing 20-mm cannon, nitrous oxide exhaust stains down the fuselage. Then they were gone, and the next batch was coming in.
He did not see the one that hit them; 20-mm shells suddenly exploded in the cockpit, metal ricocheting everywhere in a cacophony of sound he'd dream about for the rest of his life. It was terrifying to have no job to do, no gun to fire, and at the height of his panic he was surprised, later, to find that his thoughts had been of his wife, Shirley, rather than of Elsie.
No one had been wounded, but now the bomber sang a different note as wind whistled through holes left by the cannon shells. God, those Germans had guts, and they could fly, too.
There was a brief respite and he noted that the sky was filled with terrifying scents, sights, and sounds: rank cordite from their own guns, huge blossoming belches of oil and gas from the exploding B-17s. The worst smoke of all came from the endless, filthy flak-clouds, black deadly puffs studding the sky in a pointillist painting, resonating waves of turbulence accompanied by the rain-on-a-tin-roof patter of shrapnel against the B-17s' aluminum skins. Yet the heavy flak afforded some relief, for it meant the fighters would not attack for a while.
He turned to check Carolina Cutie, framed in his right upper cockpit window. It was flying in the number two slot of the lead division and he had checked on it all the way from form-up, neatly tucked into formation, an olive-gray shell with ten bright young men in it, the yellow triangle K of the 379th Bomb Group on the tail glinting in the sun. As he watched, an 88-shell scored a direct hit on its bomb bay, the tremendous explosion stopping Carolina Cutie in the sky. Caldwell's mouth dropped at the incredible scene. A fifty-thousand-pound aircraft, moving at 160 miles per hour, had been instantly transformed into a splotchy expanding shadow of white, black, and red from which fell debris, no piece larger than an entrance hatch. No parachutes, of course.
Heading on a collision course with Caldwell's bomber, Oberstleutnant Helmut Josten tucked the wing of his brand-new Messerschmitt Bf 109G-6 next to that of Major George-Peter Eckerle, Kommodore of ]agdgeschwader 3.
The B-17s were formed up ahead, stately, almost majestic, silver contrails streaming, thousands of guns pointed at them. Eckerle had devised a new tactic, a hell-for-leather, line-abreast formation that met the oncoming Fortresses head on. Josten heard Eckerle's calm voice call "Attacking," and they streamed in, twelve fighters flying into the steel teeth of the bombers.
Josten now fought with an absolute awareness of the whole situation. Just as a champion billiard player plans one shot to lead to the next, he knew instinctively how much fuel he had, how much ammunition was left, who had been shot down, and from where to make the next attack. And amid this calm comprehension he knew that, for the first time in his life, he was going to funk it.
Ahead the sky lit up with . 50-caliber bullets, the tracers leaving an arcing curve, every line seeming to drive directly at him. Fear squeezed him down in his seat, trying to hide behind the thundering Daimler-Benz DB 605A-1 engine, sneaking glances to his right to maintain formation.
He felt his fighter shudder from hits, saw Eckerle begin his roll as they dove through—and he had not even fired!
As the remaining Messerschmitts—there were only nine in their flight now—began to form up, Josten knew why he had failed. It was the baby, of course. He had not been in combat since the jet fiasco at Ploesti. Since then Ulrich had been born. When word had come from Stockholm that Lyra had delivered a baby boy, things had changed. Before he'd gone into combat with a reckless abandon, certain that he would prevail. This time all he could think about was surviving for Ulrich's sake.
As they struggled for altitude he felt sick—if he had fired he might have gotten one of the gunners who had killed his comrades. And what about Lyra? Why hadn't he felt the same way about surviving for her? Was he some kind of freak, that the thought of having a son could suddenly be so important, could affect him so?
The next attack went better. He concentrated his fire on the cockpit of a Fortress and saw it pitch forward, as if the pilots had fallen on the controls, plunging directly into another B-17 in the formation below.
Josten and Eckerle landed at the same emergency field. While they were refueling, he spoke to his Kommodore.
"Major Eckerle, sorry about that first attack. I funked it, forgot to fire. No excuse."
Eckerle pulled the acrid wartime cigarette from his lips. "Happens to me all the time. Don't worry about it; you caught an Ami on the second pass, and got two for one."
He flipped the cigarette away, and they leapt back into the cockpits of their fighters, canopies slamming down as the hand cranks spun the inertial starters. Within seconds they were climbing again to the attack, Josten feeling as if he were being sucked up an inverted funnel of danger into another duel with the Fortresses.
Twelve hours later and five hundred miles away, Henry Caldwell woke up from the sleep of exhaustion, the hysterical laughter of his dreams turning into a choking fit. Red-faced, veins purpling, he was barely able to light his cigarette as he tried to recall what he'd been dreaming of—then it hit him and he roared again.
There had been damn little to laugh about on the mission, but whatever there was had been provided by the smart-ass copilot, McLean. Schmidt and the rest of the crew could barely tolerate him.
The man was nervous, no question. Some experimental flak gear had been put on board to see if it would be effective in warding off shrapnel. McLean had managed to secure an extra flak vest to sit on, joking uneasily about preserving the "family jewels," and had put his flak helmet on early in the flight. With a veteran's disdain, Schmidt had laid his own flak helmet between them on the floor behind the control pedestal.
En route the copilot had kept up his jabbering about the rough war in the Pacific, especially the flak over Rabaul. Then, just before they turned in on the Initial Point, McLean had looked ahead at the black clouds over Schweinfurt and said, "Looks like a thunderstorm over the target."
Shooting a quizzical glance at him, Schmidt turned in on the bomb run, saying, "Shit no, Major, that's just the light flak opening up."
McLean, green-faced and unbelieving, scanned the billowing black clouds multiplying like raindrops on a window. He half turned in his seat, picked up Schmidt's helmet, and vomited into it. Then, gutsy enough, he wiped his lips, refastened the A-8B oxygen mask, and went back to his copilot's duties.
Schmidt hadn't noticed. He was concentrating on the bomb run, keeping the airspeed constant, the plane straight and level, and following the bombardier's instructions until the PDI locked in, giving the bombardier control of the aircraft.
The bombardier called "Bombs away," and Schmidt rolled trim in to keep the aircraft from bounding up, lighter by three thousand pounds. The turn off-target took them into an even thicker wall of flak ahead. Schmidt, concentrating on the turn, reached down and put on his flak helmet, letting out a scream of rage as McLean's breakfast cascaded down over his ears.
After landing, Schmidt hurled himself out of the airplane and was wiping himself clean when McLean walked up and said, "Sorry, Captain, about the flak helmet. Must have been something I ate."
Without a word, lines from the oxygen mask pressed into his haggard face, Schmidt punched him in the belly so hard that McLean doubled up on the ground, puking again. Schmidt watched him, then reached back into the plane, pulled out a flak helmet, and tossed it down beside him.
<
br /> "Use your own this time, you loudmouth son of a bitch."
Remembering, Caldwell wiped laughter tears from his eyes and lay back, now wide awake. Adrenaline pumped, driving him to relive some of the less amusing bits of the raid, assessing the effect of battle on the B-17s. He'd watched too many of them go down, each separate victim's tableau a distorted vector of time and space, as the shattered aircraft turned into freshly minted flotsam slowly decelerating into the void.
The first reports after they landed indicated that sixty planes had gone down over Germany, with another twelve written off after landing. Six hundred dead or captured, many more wounded. No matter how badly they had hurt Schweinfurt, the Eighth Air Force couldn't go on like this without long-range fighters. He'd have to accelerate the P-51 every way he could. The Thunderbolt was never going to have the range it needed, even with auxiliary tanks, and the P-38 wasn't suited for dogfighting in Europe. He had to get Mustangs over here fast, if it was the last thing he ever did for the air force. If they'd had Mustangs today, the Germans would have been beaten to the ground, and they would have lost only a dozen or so B-17s.
He knew he had to talk to Eaker and Spaatz. The only solution now was to concentrate on destroying the Luftwaffe on the ground, to bomb the factories and shoot up the airfields. It was too costly to try to eliminate them in individual aerial combat. As soon as the Mustangs arrived, they'd have to begin smashing the Luftwaffe in its lair, to hold off the jets.
He felt purged by the danger of the mission, realizing that there would have to be a showdown with Elsie. She'd have to admit to what was bothering her—he knew it was Hafner!—or he'd drop her. And she'd have to quit her work at McNaughton—that damn Troy was a bad influence on her. Hell, he made good money! If it wasn't enough, the hell with her. She could go back to her stupid dreams of Hafner.
The thought came to him that if they court-martialed him, he wouldn't even have a general's pay.
A knock on the door summoned Josten to a telephone call from Galland. Aching with fatigue, stomach still upset from combat, he padded down the dimly lit hallway in his stocking feet, confident that he was the senior officer in the building and wouldn't be called down for his informality.
Eagles at War Page 28
