“Herr Major. I respectfully request that I be excused from this mission.”
Seebeck gave him a searing look from his good eye.
“Request denied. Now go.” Then more to himself he added a footnote of finality. “This ends today.”
Fifteen minutes later, while the rest of JG 32 chattered amongst themselves about the mysterious takeoff of the Heinkel He 111, a pair of fully armed Focke-Wulf 190As roared down the grass and lifted off, heading west with the morning sun behind them.
58
We’d been flying for a half hour now, steadily chugging westward, and so far all was well. I leveled us off at ten thousand feet, as any higher might have made breathing difficult for the sickly Leopold. The mood in the aircraft began to improve as a sense of security that accompanied seeing the Third Reich disappear farther and farther behind us cheered my passengers. Amelia moved directly behind me as I scanned the skies while keeping my hands on the wheel. I felt her arms around me and her chin on my shoulder.
To my right, Jakob continued to gaze in wonder through the strutted canopy at the marvelous sights of Europe two miles below us. I recognized his face. It was the same one I had worn when I first climbed into a trainer biplane and saw my country for the first time from above.
Krup and Constanze sat in silence with heads turned to each other as the choppy air bounced us along, both watching little Elsa as she slept in her mother’s lap. I could only imagine what they were feeling at this moment. Freed from their prison, but now wondering what lay ahead. Was Germany the exception, or were Jews unwelcome everywhere? What was the world like after years of near isolation? It must have been a bittersweet moment for them.
“Well,” whispered Amelia. “You did it.”
It was time for a dose of reality. “I’ve done nothing yet. Look around you. We’re flying a German bomber towards a battlefield. The Allies will have clouds of fighters overhead. If I don’t raise them before they spot us, we’re dead meat.” Her smile faded after that, and she sat back and let me work. I adjusted the headset so it covered my ears securely. Then I adjusted the dial to find what I knew to be a commonly used open frequency, over which we’d often eavesdrop on the Amis’ chatter when they weren’t observing radio silence. “I only hope my English is not so terrible.”
I clicked the talk button and began to call out to all who were in range—German and Allied alike. In broken English I said:
“This is Nebel-One calling on an open frequency to any Allied controller or aircrew. We are a Heinkel He 111 with German markings on a route west to Caen. Exact coordinates unknown. We are a single aircraft. We are not hostile. Repeat, we are not hostile. We have refugees onboard. I request an escort to English airspace. Please come in, any Allied air personnel…”
“…come in, any Allied air personnel.”
What on earth are you doing, Harmon? thought Mueller as he tweaked his whistling radio set to more clearly hear the crackling voice of his friend over the airwaves.
“Mueller, is he a madman?” came the cry from the plane with which he was flying in pack wing formation. Mueller tried to stay in a wingtip configuration with the FW-190 to his right, but the man flying Becker’s plane was no Becker. His aircraft bounced and weaved to and fro as if on a roller coaster. Twice already they’d nearly collided, and so Mueller gave the aircraft he’d once felt comfortable almost touching with his a wide birth. He never realized how smoothly he and Becker had worked together until he attempted to fly with someone he considered a rank amateur. He was quickly coming to despise the mission and even more so the man who had ordered him on it.
“I cannot say, Herr Major,” responded Mueller, deadpan.
“Well he’s a damned fool for sure. Ground control has a fix on him now.”
“They are off to your eleven o’clock, Hanny zero zero, about forty miles. You will see them soon,” chimed in the ground controller. “Estimate contact in five minutes.”
“Victor,” responded Mueller robotically.
As I continued to make my desperate plea over the radio, Krup quietly appeared in the crowded nose and put his hand on my shoulder. I stopped talking long enough to pat his hand in reassurance.
“Harmon,” he said solemnly. “I heard about Paul. Now your parents too. I have no words to tell you how sorry I am.”
I closed my eyes as the memories of those I’d lost came flooding back to me. “There’s nothing to say. What matters right now is getting out of here. Or we’ll be with them sooner than we wish.”
Krup was going to say something else, but I held my hand up to silence him as the first response to my radio shouts came through my headset. My heart sank. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Leo,” I sighed. “You’d better sit back down with your wife. This is going to get rough.”
“Becker,” said the familiar, shrill voice over the wire. “You have two FW-190s on your six o’clock high.”
“Shit!” I cried.
Jakob whipped his head to see my face. “What is it?”
I looked up but couldn’t see them in the overhead rear-view mirror.
“Jake,” I said. “Run back to the gunner’s station and tell me what you see.”
The young man nodded and scurried behind us through the fuselage until he found a dorsal glass hood with a mounted machine gun a quarter of the way between us and the tail, just in front of where his nervous parents and sister were seated. Carefully he poked his head up and scanned the blue skies behind us. At first, he thought that all was clear, but then he spied two black shapes rapidly approaching out of the eastern sun. They were fighter planes moving fast and closing the range on us. Jake didn’t need to be told whose side they were on, and an electric current ran up his spine.
He quickly ducked his head back down and found his parents, who were pale with airsickness, looking at him with fear. “What’s wrong?” asked his father. Jake ignored him and reported directly to the cockpit.
“Well?” I asked.
He looked at Amelia. Then to me. “I saw two fighter planes. Coming out of the east. I think they’re German.”
At that moment, as if to add confirmation to Jakob’s report, Seebeck’s voice again pierced through my headset.
“Becker, if you do not turn back now we will open fire.”
Then I heard Josef’s voice pleading with me: “Please, Harmon. Do as he says.”
“Mueller,” I barked over the radio, “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll shoot down the bastard next to you and follow me to England. Get out of this war while you still can.”
“Harmon, do you even know what you’re saying?” he responded.
“Enough, First Lieutenant,” I heard Seebeck interject. “I’ll take the shot.”
“Oh Christ, Major!” I shouted to him. “Let it go! Let us go!”
Silence but for the hissing of the radio. Then: “Cover me, First Lieutenant.”
I felt ill. Looking around I saw no clouds to hide in. I thought about taking evasive action, but I knew that the agile Focke-Wulf 190A could literally fly loops around this lumbering machine. I was desperate. And so, I did something desperate. I turned to Jake, who was sitting behind me in a crouch, biting his nails.
“Was there a weapon in the gunner’s station?”
“I saw a machine gun, yes,” he said.
“Was it armed?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Was there a belt of ammunition running into it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I think so. I mean, yes. There are bullets, yes!”
I stood up. “Shift places with me,” I said to Jakob.
“What?” he asked.
“Do it!”
He quickly slid into the pilot’s seat. “Put your hands right here,” I said while placing them on the yoke. He just gawked at me. “Dammit, boy, just do what I say!”
His han
ds gripped hard on the wheel. My instincts so far were correct, as I knew this boy had an affinity for machines. He looked quite comfortable at the controls. Only a single bead of sweat running down his temple betrayed his anxieties.
“Okay,” I said, removing the headset. “Keep your hands steady. Pull back to go up, push forward to go down. But don’t do any of it. Just keep her straight and level and pointed west. It’s not hard to fly a plane if you don’t need to take off or land.” I pointed to the altitude indicator. “Watch that line. Keep it straight and level. I’ll be right back.”
I shoved my way past Amelia. “Harmon,” called out Jake from the pilot’s seat. “Are you sure I can do this?”
“You already are, aren’t you?” A grin spread across his face and he turned to face the sky through the nose cone.
Amelia stayed hunkered down behind him but said not a word for fear of distracting our teenage pilot. As I made my way past her in the tube of the aircraft guts, Constanze asked me: “Harmon, who’s flying the plane?”
“A very bright young man,” I said as I manned the gunner’s station. The plane violently yawed clockwise and I almost fell over. “Dammit, Jake, keep your feet off the rudder pedals!”
“Sorry!” he called back. And then to my relief we leveled off again. The lad was a natural in the air.
I grabbed a pair of headphones to listen in on the chatter and pulled back the bolt of the MG52 machine gun and loaded the first of the long belt of rounds into the chamber. And then I waited.
Suddenly the two fighters appeared in my field of vision. My first thought was actually one of annoyance. That swine’s flying my plane! Then I threw down the proverbial gauntlet. “Come on, Hans, let’s do this.”
At the moment, that swine was too slowly pulling back on the throttle and would soon over-shoot our slow-moving Heinkel.
“Sir,” cautioned Mueller. “If you don’t slow down, you’ll fly right past him.”
But Seebeck remained silent. He needed all his concentration to compensate for the lost depth perception of only one eye. “Just a little closer,” he said to himself.
As my former fighter plane crept so close that I could now see the man in the cockpit and even make out the flower petal-like pistons cooking inside the radial engine cowling, I lined up the gunsight.
Mueller’s voice was railing at him over the radio. “Sir, if you don’t fire now you’ll either over-fly him or collide!”
“One more second!” said Seebeck to his wingman.
“Good boy, Jake,” I muttered under my breath. “Keep her steady.” Then to Seebeck, whose plane now filled my sights. “That’s it, Major.”
“Almost there.” Seebeck was coaxing himself. I could hear his labored breathing.
Mueller suddenly noticed my form in the gunner’s position over his nose and called out to Seebeck: “Watch the gunner!”
“What gunner?” I heard a confused voice reply.
Mueller banked hard left and pushed the stick forward to slip under the bomber and clear of my aim.
But it was too late for Hans Seebeck. He was at point-blank range at no more than forty paces. As I squeezed the trigger and let the rounds fly, there was no way I could miss. My gun shuddered, and white flashes burst from the muzzle that was aimed right at Seebeck’s face.
The Krupinskis screamed in terror as the gun just behind them blasted away, dropping sizzling spent cartridges on my feet and even their shoulders. I didn’t have to concern myself with conserving ammunition with short bursts, so I doused Seebeck’s plane with a steady stream of projectiles as if from a garden hose.
The hail of bullets sprayed into my commander’s exposed radial engine and windscreen above it. Sparks pinged off the propeller blades from the rounds that were deflected away. The rest of my volley scythed into the machine. I saw several flashes in the cockpit and could tell that I’d hit the pilot right between the eyes.
Seebeck’s fighter violently flipped over in a snap roll and went inverted and fell away. Leaping down through the fuselage to the gunner’s ventral gondola below me, I strained to get a better view of the crashing fighter. I could see through the glass panes a smoking Focke-Wulf 190A spiraling towards the ground. I saw no parachute. Immediately I knew that Major Seebeck was dead. I should have felt more, but after everything I’d been through, I’d turned quite callous about killing those trying to prevent us from getting away. “One down, one to go,” was the only eulogy I could muster.
I scrambled back into the cockpit, where Jake was maintaining a respectable control over the machine.
“What’s happening?” he asked. I looked to Amelia. “My major’s dead.”
“You got one of them?” replied Jakob, excited at my exploit. Amelia, on the other hand, bowed her head. There is only so much killing one can take in a period of time.
I had no time for reflection. I quickly shooed Jake out of the pilot’s seat and took the controls. “Good job,” I said, sliding on my headset with one hand while gripping the wheel with the other.
“Thanks.” He beamed. “Are we in the clear?”
“Not yet. We still have one more out there.”
His eyes lit up. “You want me to take the gun? I can shoot as straight as I fly.”
I patted his head. “No, Jake. I assure you this one’s no Seebeck.”
Amelia squeezed my arm tightly. “Mueller would still come after you after your commander’s dead?”
“I’m afraid so,” I reported sadly. “Dammit, I need a cloud. Any other day I’d pray for this weather for flying. Now it may kill us.”
“But I thought he’s your friend?”
I shook my head. “He is. But he’s a soldier first.”
As if on cue, Mueller’s distressed voice hissed in through my headset. “Harmon, come around to a new course on me.”
“Sorry, Josef,” I said. “I’m only going one way.”
“Please,” he continued. “I don’t want to do this.”
Krup, hearing one side of my conversation, momentarily left his bawling wife and daughter to peer up through the gunner’s station to look for Mueller’s plane. “I can’t see anything,” he said with a wisp of wishful thinking.
“Did you hear that?” echoed Amelia hopefully.
“He’s in the sun,” I said, squashing their momentary relief.
“How can you be sure?” she asked.
“That’s where I’d be,” I offered grimly. “It’s right behind us, and so is he.”
“Harmon, I repeat, I do not want to do this,” he said. I could almost hear his voice quaking. I briefly considered weaving the Heinkel left and right to both present a more challenging deflection shot to him as well as pull him out of the sun’s rays. But that would just prolong the inevitable. I had to try to reason with him. After all we’d been through, for one of us to die at the hands of the other was absurd, and I told him so.
“Josef, you don’t have to do this at all. The man who gave you the order is dead.”
“You know that doesn’t change the order,” he replied.
“Dammit, man, it changes everything!” I protested. “Are you more than just a robot? Either come with me to safety or turn around. But I’m not heading back with you if you choose the latter.”
There was a pause. Then he responded, more deadpan: “I have my orders.”
I was growing more frustrated than scared at this point. “Orders! Josef, it’s time to forget protocol and think about tomorrow. You have a chance to get out of this unholy mess with your honor intact. No one will fault you for not murdering a family of refugees just wishing to leave.”
That didn’t work on him. He was a child of totalitarianism too. And he’d had no Leopold Krupinski or Amelia Engel to show him the way as I had.
“I told you, Harmon, there is no tomorrow. Only the here and now.”
As I b
anked slightly just to stay on course, Mueller followed to reveal himself out of the sun. A menacing, stalking machine that seemed to be coming right for Leo and his family. Krup cried out from the gunner’s spot with panic. “There he is! He’s right on us!”
There was nothing I could do to get away. Our only hope was to try to get my old friend to come to his senses and remove his blinders through which we’d both once viewed the world, but I’d since discarded.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I protested. “Listen to me, Josef. We are friends. You’ve always trusted me as I you. Trust me now when I tell you that this war is over. Germany has lost. I think it’s even for the better. All that will matter in a year or two is how you conduct yourself right now. How you behaved as a man. What will you tell your children about this day?”
Again, I had no effect. “I’ll tell them that I was a good soldier who honored my sacred oaths and did my duty and obeyed my commands.”
I spat, thoroughly disgusted. “Commands from who? A madman like Hitler?”
“Stop it, Becker!” he pleaded.
“A fat oaf like Göring? The Hans Seebecks of the world? Why should you surrender your life to such lesser men?”
I could tell he was having an internal dialogue. We would have otherwise been dead by now. Of that much I was certain. I gunned the Heinkel to full throttle, but the little fighter effortlessly kept up with power to spare. This was the final moment of truth.
“Harmon, I’m giving you one last chance to turn back.” And with that he fired a warning burst over our heads. But one round must have spun wild, because it smashed behind me through the windscreen and pierced me below the left shoulder. I’d been shot yet again. Amelia screamed when she saw the bullet thump into my flesh and me grunt in pain.
Of Another Time and Place Page 34
