Now safe on the ground, Caldwell sweated in empathy as the 385th bored implacably toward its target, the Messerschmitt component plant at Regensburg-Pruefening. He would have far preferred to have been along, at the controls, but made himself content that he had planned this particular strike and chosen this particular target. It was a knife aimed at the heart of the German jet program. The ULTRA system had reported that the tooling for full-scale production of the Me 262 was being built at Pruefening. He meant to destroy it. If he did not, the planes it would build would almost certainly destroy him and his comrades.
*
Over Frankfurt/February 25, 1944
A ragged formation of eight Messerschmitt Bf 109Gs of ]g 3, led by Major George-Peter Eckerle, was being vectored toward Regensberg on an angle that would intercept the intruding B-17s just after their fighter escort had turned back.
Eckerle sat in a well of pain. The cold and altitude conspired with his parachute straps and oxygen mask to torture his aching body. A pilot with 134 kills, twenty-three of them heavy bombers, he had been shot down eleven times, suffering seventeen wounds and four broken bones. Now his aching body cried out for rest. For the first time he felt his courage ebbing, for he knew there was no one to back him up, no one to depend upon. If only Josten had been on his wing! Instead, he had a new man with less than two hundred hours flying time, only ten in the 109G, a youngster who should have been paddling a Faltboot down some peaceful river. It was criminal! The rest of the flight had even less experience—just kids, who had played a few years at being Hitler Youths and then were given the briefest possible flight training.
"Achtung, Uhrmacher am Gartenzaun." Eckerle shook his head and groaned. More bad news. Those code words, "Watchmakers on the garden fence," meant that fighter-bombers were shooting up the home base. Just what they needed.
He saw the B-17s ahead. It would be such a beautiful sight in peacetime, the clouds below, the great regatta of aircraft sailing effortlessly, spaced as carefully as squares on a chessboard. Even the black clouds erupting from the undercast might be considered pretty, were they not the flame-corrupted essence of German towns and German people. He cinched his straps further down into his pain, waggled his wings, and began the dive.
*
Regensburg-Pruefening/February 25, 1944
At the entrance to the Messerschmitt factory, Obergruppenfuehrer Kurt Weigand's scarred face was beaming with pleasure. "Welcome to the club! What a sinister pair you two make. Between Bruno's wounds and Helmut's bandages you look like a hospital ward!"
"Kurt, it's hard not to have one or the other in Germany nowadays."
It was three and a half years since they'd first met at Cottbus to talk about speeding up the 262. Since then Germany had reached the heights of world power and then gone spinning toward disaster.
Hafner pulled himself out of his wheelchair and walked up and down, rubbing his back muscles with his huge hands, trying to fight off the corpse-cold wind whistling across snow soiled with the soot of industry and the ashes of air raids.
"What the hell is going on, Helmut? After months of inactivity, the Amis are at our throats."
The bandages on Josten's arm and head covered the multiple cuts he received when a burst of machine-gun fire from a Liberator shattered his canopy over Brunswick on the previous Sunday. He'd bailed out and spent two hours wandering through the woods, bleeding like a pig, before he could get back to the base for assistance. The aging medical officer sewed him up, then grounded him for a week. Josten was glad for the chance to rest.
"The weather's broken and they've changed tactics. The escorts are not sticking with the bombers anymore. You're more apt to see an American fighter in the landing pattern than one of our own. It's brutal."
Hafner nodded impatiently. "Yes, but I'd rather face the Americans flying against us than some of the idiots who are supposed to be for us."
Weigand nodded in agreement. "We saw that in November when the 'Groefaz' came to see us at Insterburg." The other two stared at him. Things must be precarious if the diehard Nazi Weigand was mocking Hitler with the current joke. Political humorists had dubbed Hitler 'Groefaz,' an acronym for Goebbels's adulatory title, "Groesster Feldherr aller Zeiten," greatest strategist of all time. The greatest strategist impressed by the demonstration of the 262's performance, had decreed that the 262 was to be a "Blitzbomber" and not a fighter at all. As usual, the obsequious Goering thundered agreement, and the 262 program was set back even further while Messerschmitt jury-rigged the plane to carry bombs.
Hafner snorted, saying, "Typical Third Reich management! It took a lot of work, but I've got that turned around how—at least they're willing to call it a fighter-bomber."
Hafner settled back in his wheelchair, tucking a blanket around him as Josten trundled him down the glaze of ice covering the red brick sidewalk. The meeting was bound to be adversarial. Both Messerschmitt and Junkers were resistant to taking Hafner's advice on the 262.
"Kurt, what are you going to be able to offer them in the way of manpower?"
"I can deliver an initial shipment of three thousand skilled workers and seven thousand unskilled at the end of this month. After that, I'll provide another five thousand unskilled every quarter. They'll have to be trained."
"How about attrition?"
"All factored in. We'll only be able to feed about twelve hundred calories a day until summer, so you'll lose maybe thirty percent by then. But we should be able to make it up with Italians."
Josten listened dispassionately. Laborers were mere raw materials now, press-gang workers streaming endlessly from a pipeline that began in a round-up and ended in a furnace. He stirred himself to join in the conversation.
"What did you have brought down with you, Bruno?"
"Everything." He pointed to a covered siding, where foreign laborers were busy unloading odd-sized packages. "You can see it right there—three trucks, loaded with enough of the new turbine blades for two hundred engines and the special jigs that old Fritz has created to build them. Fritz came along to teach them his methods."
The wheelchair got hung up on the curb and they struggled with it before Hafner went on. "The rest of the tooling is already stored in the same building. If they do what we tell them, we can have one hundred 262s by March, and five hundred by June! By the end of the year, we can be producing a thousand a month."
Josten had seen Hafner's optimistic production planning charts calling for twenty-five aircraft to be delivered in February, seventy-five in March, then two hundred per month in April and May. If they actually got half those numbers, it could mean a miracle, a reversal of the fortunes of war.
"They'll have to do what you tell them; you've got Hitler's direct orders in your pocket."
"These bureaucrats are experts in evading orders—they use paperwork as a matador uses a cape. If we make them freeze the design on the airplane and the engine and start building them, they'll find every reason in the world why things won't work. But at least they talk to me at Messerschmitt. The Junkers people won't answer my letters, won't return my calls—you'd think I was a leper. They are determined to muddle through with their own design."
The meeting took place in an unheated "administrative office," its unseasoned lumber walls pierced by the February cold. Two low-watt light bulbs, one burned out, dangled from the ends of cords. It had been a storage room, and the empty bins lining the walls made the office a perfect symbol of Germany in 1944. A varnished fiberboard table sat in the middle, adorned with one tablet and one pencil. Everyone was dressed in overcoats, hats, and mufflers, looking more like refugees from the Russian front than business executives.
Sullenly silent, the people from Junkers and Messerschmitt listened to Hafner's exhortations without comment. They showed some interest at Weigand's projections for skilled labor, but quickly lapsed back to their silence. At the first blast of "Goering's Bugle-horn," as the air raid sirens were now ironically called, they leapt to their feet and filed off to a
special company shelter for executives, taking Fritz and Weigand along, but leaving Josten to manage Hafner and his chair. The two men found their way to one of the employee shelters.
A foreigner—probably a Ukrainian by his accent—had helped Josten carry Hafner in his wheelchair down the steps. They sat him at the entrance door, next to a garrulous old woman. Josten stood beside him, grateful once again the Lyra and Ulrich were safe, desolate because Lyra's last letter made it all too clear that she was abandoning him.
The old woman was clothed completely in black, a bonnet peaked over her dirty gray hair. Blackheads had cratered her lined face, and a steady stream of saliva ran from the corner of her toothless mouth. Her hands moved as if she were knitting, but there was no yarn, no needles.
They ignored her at first, too preoccupied with the violent alternation of pressure-suction-pressure of exploding bombs, a rise and fall that plugged ears and sucked hair upright. In the interval between explosions they heard her say, "Two-hundred-fifty kilograms."
"What's that, mother?"
"Those were two-hundred-fifty kilogram bombs. That's why I come here rather than a public shelter. It's safer. The concrete is almost two meters thick."
"Are you an expert on bombs?"
"In two wars. I was in the Ruhr in 1918 when the French bombed. Piddling stuff. Even this is nothing like what the RAF uses."
Josten saw that frightened as they were, people around them were listening to her with amusement. He egged her on.
"A bomb's a bomb, isn't it?"
"Not on your young life. The bad ones are the British eighteen-hundred-kilogram bombs—they'd cut through this shelter like it was a cheese paring. But at least you don't hear them coming—just woof, and you're gone."
The groaning ventilator shaft acted as a stethoscope to the outside world. The momentary quiet was broken by a whistling noise, like a flock of doves whirling up through branches.
"Incendiaries," she cackled. "Sounds like the little phosphorus and magnesium sticks. Not too bad—just break the head off and put it in a bucket of sand, then cover the rest with sand. The bad ones have the benzol and rubber—they spread out over a hundred meters, burning everything they touch."
"How did you learn so much?"
"I started in Cologne. My husband was killed there and my son moved me to Berlin. We were burned out there. They killed him, my little Karl. Now I live with my daughter here."
In this interval of quiet, Hafner offered her a flask of cognac. She took it and drank greedily, not forgetting to wipe the mouth of the flask before she turned it back.
"You think I've learned a lot; it's the British who are learning, and the Germans who are forgetting. I was in Cologne during the first big raid—you remember, a thousand bombers?"
Josten nodded.
"The next day, the roads to Cologne were clogged with relief trucks. They set up a hundred distribution points, handed out millions of cigarettes, food, clothing, liquor, everything. Then they brought in workmen; in a few weeks, we had windows again. What happens now? You're lucky to get a slice of sausage or a bowl of soup. Everybody is bombed everywhere, so there's no relief trucks to send."
The conversation was taking an unamusing twist. War damage claims for civilians had grown into so many billions of marks that the country could no longer afford to pay them.
"So you see we have true democracy here, my son. Everybody gets bombed. Even rich Bonzen like you, with your cognac and your leather shoes."
Hafner saw that she was wearing the straw-topped, wooden-soled "war shoes," the only kind still obtainable.
When he glanced back her lips had curled into a gummy smile. "It doesn't matter. People will live. As long as there's enough food for today, and a plank to put over a hole, people will live. It won't go on forever. It will just seem like it. At my age, that's not too bad."
As if in reply to her stoic endurance, a tremendous explosion directly above them shook the shelter, showering them with dust and knocking out the flickering light.
*
Over Regensburg-Pruefening/February 25, 1944
"Steady, steady, PDI centered."
"I've got the airplane."
Chet Schmidt turned the last few hundred yards of the bomb run over to the bombardier, relaxing his grip on the control wheel, but keeping his fingers curled around it, ready to take over at once. The airspeed was locked on 160, the heading indicator on 135 degrees, the altimeter read 24,500 feet. So far they had not been hit by flak or fighters.
McLean was professionally quartering the sky, glad that there were no fighters in sight, ignoring the bubbling wall of flak that flickered around them, black dahlia clouds, creased with obscene red centers. Raw tension compressed the crew's energy into an anxious coil, ready to spring forth at the first sign of a fighter.
Eckerle led his Messerschmitts' attack on a heading of 210 degrees, slanting down from ten thousand meters, cannons blasting at the outermost B-17 of the formation, then rolling inverted to dive away.
As he'd done a hundred times before, Eckerle tugged back steadily on the Messerschmitt's stick, pulling its nose toward the earth, the G forces shoving him into his seat, curving away from one set of flickering guns into the mouths of another. He glanced quickly back over his right shoulder at the B-17 they'd attacked, saw that it was on fire, edging out of formation. The victory cry "Horrido" was forming on his lips when, among all the premeditated danger, he accidentally plunged his fighter into Bonnie's cockpit. Where in one instant there had been two airplanes and eleven men, there was now just a vaporous explosion and nonexistence.
*
Washington, D.C./March 21, 1944
The committee was in recess while Senator Harry S Truman attended a roll call. Henry Caldwell sat with his hands folded, thinking for the one-hundredth time that he could so easily have been aboard Bonnie and gone to his death with Schmidt and his crew. Two hundred twenty six bombers had gone down during Argument. Yet it had been worth the grievous cost. The targets had been heavily hit, and a decrypted Ultra report indicated that the Germans had lost one third of their single-engine fighters and 18 percent of their pilots during February alone. No army could withstand casualties like that.
Then, on March 6th, the Americans had bombed Berlin for the first time, with Mustangs as the fighter escort. No matter what else happened, no matter who was aware of it, Caldwell knew in his heart that the air war was won. And he knew what he had contributed to that victory.
Being shot down might have been better than being badgered by this obscure senator from Missouri, with his nasal voice and thick glasses. Hick or not, Truman was tough and well prepared. He'd scarcely had any assistance from the covey of aides who sat behind him in the hearing room.
So far the questioning had been ominously innocuous. Truman was simply laying his case out as if it were a jury trial. Hell, I'd be better off if it was, Caldwell thought. This way, he's the judge and jury combined.
The Missouri senator had established that while McNaughton Sidewinders cost about ten thousand dollars more than a P-40 and six thousand more than a P-51, their performance fell far below either airplane. Truman had been fair, pointing out that the P-47 and P-38 were both more expensive than the Sidewinder, and that while better than the Sidewinder, neither were considered to be as effective as the P-51.
Caldwell had been warned that the real issue was the Lend-Lease program. Harry Hopkins had been filling Roosevelt's ear about Russian complaints, and Roosevelt had personally met with Truman on the matter. The last few questions explored the reasoning behind giving virtually the entire production run of Sidewinders to Russia. Truman was no Russia-lover, but he was under the gun by Roosevelt to establish that there was no official decision to furnish substandard airplanes under Lend-Lease.
Caldwell also thought he'd detected the faintest whiff of interest in his personal dealings with McNaughton. He might have been mistaken.
Truman burst back in the room, the million-candlepower grin fading as
he sat down and looked at Caldwell.
"Now, General Caldwell, how would you characterize the performance of the Sidewinder?"
"Disappointing, sir. It has not measured up to our expectations."
"No, indeed it has not. The thing that surprises me, though, is that it hasn't measured up to its own test reports. There is a serious discrepancy between the official test report figures and the performance of production machines. Will you comment on that, please?"
"Senator, I've been in England, as you know, and I'd like to ask if I can provide you with the answer to that question for the record. I'll personally go to Nashville and get at the heart of the matter."
"You'll go personally?"
Was there any malice in the question?
"Absolutely, Senator. It's far too important a matter for me to delegate."
The yellow light from the frosted globes dangling from the ceiling glinted off the flash of Truman's teeth.
"I'm glad you feel that way. Let's return to the matter of Lend-Lease. Are you aware that the McNaughton Sidewinder is regarded as a death trap by Soviet pilots?"
"I don't think that's the case, Senator."
Truman picked up a sheaf of folders. "These are reports from U.S. pilots on the Alaska-Siberia route, ferrying planes to Russia. Everyone states that their Soviet counterparts are openly contemptuous of the Sidewinder."
"There were some initial difficulties with the aircraft, sir. It was much more sophisticated than anything the Russians had used before, and they took a long time to adjust to it."
"Is that your opinion, or do you have some objective proof?"
"Senator, may I give you an original letter from my counterpart in the Soviet Union, Commissioner Giorgi Scriabin? I've taken the liberty to have it translated, but you may wish to have someone look at the original."
Eagles at War Page 30
