Eagles at War (22 page)

The war, perpetually at a crucial stage, was expanding on all the fronts, never quite achieving a final victory. Now they had the answer in hand, if he could only come up with a solution that would convince the right people. If these jets went into action in 1943—even by the fall—Germany could stop the enemy bombers.

*

Berlin/August 14, 1942

Her breakfast had been the usual porridge mixed with yogurt—now her stomach was rumbling, and she wondered whether the office canteen would have its standard red cabbage with meat sauce for lunch, or perhaps the tasteless but more filling stonefish patties. Lyra started to get up when, hands suddenly trembling, she saw the two items in the "Blue Sheet," the daily military intelligence summary. She quickly checked to see if her unctuous chief, Anton Rascher, was properly buried under his paperwork. Hostile when she'd come on board, Rascher was a tea-and-biscuit twit who became friendly in a smarmy way after he had sniffed out her "friendship" with Goebbels.

The thought of the little Propaganda Minister made her skin crawl. Try as she might, it was impossible to blank out the memories of her personal war, the nastiness of her physical relationship with Goebbels. Fortunately, the sessions were always short. Goebbels was an inept lover, ejaculating almost instantly. He always seemed relieved that she had no demands of her own, and believed, or pretended to believe, her protestations of satisfaction. The sole saving grace was that he always had hot water in his apartment so that she could bathe quickly.

Shuddering, she turned back to her task, thanking God for the insatiable German penchant for documentation. Short of the outright criminal activity,
everything
was put on paper, stamped secret and promptly circulated on one of the numerous interdepartment "restricted lists." Rascher was high enough on the Foreign Ministry totem pole to rate several, none of which she was supposed to read.

It was strange to see Helmut's name and an account of his successful flight in the jet. Even more interesting was a detailed account of Hafner's subsequent meeting with Speer—the diligent clerk even noted that Speer had given Hafner a dachshund puppy!

She placed the Blue Sheet in an aging manila folder for camouflage, then began to copy the salient points.

Her hands were sweating, and the steel nib of the pen scratched the cheap paper, a pad of old reports that had been reversed, then bound in another one of the department's "economy drives." The carte blanche Speer had given Hafner for his experimental center was amazing. The Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg had twenty-four airframes for the 262, standing idle because there were no engines for them. Speer had approved their transfer to Hafner, who had guaranteed bringing an operational jet unit into being within the year. He was going to freeze the airframe design and promised somehow to solve the engine problems.

There was more. Hafner had an experimental feeding program for his foreign laborers, trying to determine the minimum calorie level he could provide and still get ten hours work a day from them. One group was to get two thousand calories a day, another twelve hundred, and a third eight hundred. A phrase leapt out at her: "The workers are to draw on their present stock of fat and muscle in the service of the Reich." A very elegant way to say, "The workers are to be starved to death."

She decided to pass on the information about the feeding experiment to Caldwell, too. It was sickening. She could understand how Helmut might be so loyal to Germany that he tolerated the Nazi idea. But how could he have anything to do with a monster like Hafner?

*

Guadalcanal/September 29, 1942

In the South Pacific, the Japanese, flush with an apparently endless series of victories, were startled by the Americans in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May. For the first time in naval warfare at sea, the exchange was entirely by air; no ship on either side saw the enemy. The Japanese claimed a victory, having inflicted slightly more losses than they received, and rejoiced in the sinking of the famous American aircraft carrier, the U.S.S.
Lexington.
But it was far from being a victory on the scale of Pearl Harbor. The real result was that the intended Japanese invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea, was postponed.

Determined to lash back, and mindful of Doolittle's Tokyo raid, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto decided to take Midway Island, some thirteen hundred miles west-northwest of Hawaii. He dispersed his fleet from the Marianas to the Aleutians. Sailing on the world's most powerful battleship, the 72,800-ton
Yamato,
Yamamoto commanded the greatest armada ever assembled in the Pacific, 165 warships.

He himself was commanded by worms. Yamamoto loved sashimi and had indulged himself before his ships sortied. En route, tiny parasites staged their own Pearl Harbor in his intestinal tract, virtually incapacitating him during the most crucial moments of battle.

Besides Yamamoto's worms, the Japanese fleet had to contend with a U.S. force, albeit smaller, savagely hungry for revenge, and as a result of intercepts, well informed on Japanese intentions. The American carriers were ably handled—and lucky. In the ensuing battle in early June 1942, Japan lost four carriers, more than three hundred aircraft, and the bulk of its most highly trained pilots. Precisely as Yamamoto had predicted, Japan had run wild in the Pacific for six months; now the tide was beginning to turn. Now Yamamoto concentrated his efforts on evicting the invading Americans from Guadalcanal.

Captain Jim Lee, sitting in a pool of sweat as his McNaughton Sidewinder vibrated beneath him like a Harley-Davidson with a blown gasket, was not aware of the war's new trend. He'd arrived on Guadalcanal the week before, flying in with four other pilots from the Sidewinder Operational Training Unit. They were replacements for the 67th Pursuit Squadron, part of the "Cactus Air Force," a tiny group of Army, Navy, and Marine pilots who maintained a tenuous American grip on Guadalcanal as Japanese efforts to retake the island escalated.

The battle for Guadalcanal, an obscure island until it was seen as the logical stepping-stone for a Japanese invasion of Australia, centered on the tiny airstrip the Marines had wrested from the surprised Japanese defenders. American engineers poured in, and with bulldozer and interlocking perforated steel plates—Marston mat—made it available to Grumman F4F fighters and Douglas SBD dive-bombers.

So far the fighting had been fairly even. The American planes were generally slower and less maneuverable than the Japanese, but they were far more rugged and had greater firepower. The principal Japanese bomber was the Mitsubishi G4M1, called
Hamaki
—cigar—by its crews because of its round, fat fuselage. These were large, fast airplanes, possessed of a very long range because of their huge, unprotected fuel tanks. Regularly, they flew in impeccable formation over the six hundred miles from Rabaul, New Guinea, in the Bismarck Archipelago, to bomb the airstrip. Mitsubishi fighters—Zeros—escorted the bombers, then made their own strafing runs.

With highly disciplined hit-and-run tactics, the Grummans could combat the Zeros on even terms; dogfighting with them was fatal. But the F4F pilots loved to catch a flight of the vulnerable G4M1 bombers and light them up like torches with just a few hits.

For the thousandth time, Lee realized just how tough Caldwell had been with him—and how lucky he was for it. First he'd been sent for a month-long indoctrination at the McNaughton factory to check out the Sidewinder. Presumed to be Caldwell's friend because he came from Headquarters, he was immediately introduced to the top management—including the woman he'd heard so many rumors about, Elsie Raynor. In the process, he'd really learned to fly the Sidewinder and had concluded that, while it wasn't as good as McNaughton claimed, it wasn't as bad as most people thought.

Lee was not unaware that McNaughton had given him a specially prepared airplane, powered by a more powerful engine and cleaned up on the basis of wind-tunnel reports. Troy McNaughton insisted that if the Packard Merlin engine was installed, the Sidewinder could be used as the desperately needed long-range fighter. From the reports he gave Lee, it looked possible.

More important, Lee recognized that Elsie was extremely powerful. When people wanted things done in the plant, they went to her first. Troy obviously liked and trusted her, and he valued her link to Caldwell. Lee had done some pro forma flirting, just part of a pilot's customary routine, and was surprised by Elsie's immediate and direct response. Flattered that a younger man would be interested in her, amused that they were both redheads, she had taken him to bed within a week of his arrival.

Now, wiping sweat from his brow in Guadalcanal, Lee was watching a line of Navy Grumman Wildcats warm up. The Marine and Navy pilots had been quick to fill their Army reinforcements in on living conditions, nicknames, tactics, and survival in the miserable heat and humidity. The island, so beautiful from the air, green and clean against the blue waters and white clouds of the Pacific, was dourly distressing close up. The jungle's exuberant growth choked the volcanic soil; its rotting vegetation was laden with poisons. Even the slightest nick required medical attention to prevent rampant infection.

Situated in "Mosquito Gulch," their rain-drenched tents were spotted among the huge coconut palms of the old Lever Brothers copra plantation, between the field and the beach. There was no flooring and a shortage of cots; some pilots had to sleep on stinking wet Japanese straw mats. Each day, at the height of the rain, the cots and mats sank into the mud, to be pried out later.

Dress wasn't a problem; they had only the flying suits or the khakis they'd arrived in, their "cover" a blue baseball cap designed to shield them from the burning sun that followed the rains. They ate a miserable melange of captured Japanese rice and Spam, cooked in as many different ways as possible by beleaguered Marine cooks, who worked with spoons in one hand and rifles in the other.

The war was everywhere. Every night ships of the Tokyo Express would come down the slot to heave shells into the compound, to be followed by small two-place seaplanes harassing them with machine-gun fire. They called the seaplanes "Washing machine charlies" in jest, but the noise destroyed their chances for badly needed sleep.

The pilots lay less than two and one half miles in any direction from the fighting perimeter held by the First Marine Division. A "banzai" charge could overrun them in just a few minutes, so most kept a weapon near at hand.

There were hazards everywhere else as well, from taxiing the fighters over the rough, watersoaked ground, to clearing the trees that surrounded the runway in an enormous green crash barrier.

The one great advantage of the Cactus Air Force—the name came from their radio call sign, "Cactus"—lay in the coast-watcher reports, the information from the patriots who hid themselves in isolated island outposts and reported the movement of Japanese ships and planes. With admirable foresight, the Australian Navy had recruited from a mixed bag of civil servants, retired enlisted men, and planters an intelligence force that radioed critical information on Japanese indentions. It saved the pilots precious fuel by letting them delay until the last minute before scrambling.

Now Lee waited, his eyes glued to the needle of the coolant temperature gauge that was hovering at its redline, as heat shimmered from the olive-drab Sidewinder. If his flight didn't take off soon, the Allison engines would cook themselves to pieces, and instead of four McNaughton fighters, they'd have four fixed-machine-gun nests to trundle into the firing line.

He grinned, recalling his last time on the firing line, in Nashville, two days before he left for the Operational Training Unit. He'd submitted a whole series of test reports on the cleaned-up Sidewinder, but General Henry Caldwell hadn't believed one of them. Caldwell was always looking for an excuse to visit Nashville, so he came down to "talk to Lee personally"—and get in a little time with Elsie.

Things had started off badly—Lee had walked into the conference to find Caldwell and Elsie yelling about someone named Hafner. They were both embarrassed at his arrival, and Caldwell was giving him a severe dressing down on the etiquette of knocking before entering, when Troy McNaughton bounced in—also without knocking.

Like a schoolboy caught with jam on his face, Caldwell tried to cover by talking about Lee as if he weren't there.

"Jesus, Troy, back at Headquarters, Captain Lee raised hell with me, telling me that the Sidewinder wasn't any good. Then I get these reports that say it can be a superplane."

"He just had to get familiar with it, Henry. It's the same with all pilots. I'll bet even Bandfield would like it if he flew it a few hours."

"Well, if these are right, you've done a spectacular job cleaning the airplane up. I couldn't believe Lee's reports—picking up thirty miles per hour in top speed, and an extra four hundred miles in range."

"He's a good man, Henry. I didn't like him at first, thought he was a smart-ass, but he did his job and he was fair."

Elsie chimed in, "He's a real good test pilot, too. He'd fly the airplane all day and spend all night writing up the reports. He kept me busy typing."

Lee broke in, trying to sound properly modest. "I was just lucky, General; all the work had been done before I got here. All I had to do was validate it."

They ignored him.

"We had our best people on it, Henry, our 'tiger team.' They went over that airplane bolt by bolt, nut by nut. It was details, just details, but they added up."

When Caldwell left the meeting to go back to Washington, he had shaken McNaughton's hand, barely nodding to Lee and Elsie. Now, as Lee sat stewing in the Guadalcanal heat, he wondered if Caldwell knew that nothing was ever as it seemed—not love, not airplanes, not anything.

The scramble call crackled through the headsets, and the four Sidewinders took off, rocking back and forth as the nosegear chattered along the rough runway. Ahead, eight Grumman F4Fs were in a circling climb, waiting for them to catch up.