Eagles at War (31 page)

"Okay, you're on. But one more thing. When I come back, I don't want to stay with the B-29 program. I want to work with McNaughton on the jet."

Caldwell was immediately suspicious—could Lee be interested in Elsie? "Jesus, is the rest of the war being arranged conveniently for you? Would you like to see the second front at Malibu, rather than France?"

"Come on, General, you've run me around the world working for you. I'd be of more use to you in Nashville than I would in Wichita, and I'd like it better."

"We'll see." Caldwell grabbed his brass-laden hat and bounded out the door, leaving Jim Lee thinking sad thoughts about how nice it had been working for a creampuff like Claire Chennault.

A chance to test my theory hell! It's a chance to get my ass shot off one more time.

***

Chapter 9

Cottbus/May 19, 1943

Exhaustion lay across his heavily muscled shoulders like stones from a quarry, but Bruno Hafner was supremely content as he methodically went through the shutdown drill of the Messerschmitt Bf 108 communications plane. It was wonderful to be able to fly again, even in a little crate like the
Taifun.
He'd had to tear out the original four-place configuration and replace it with his own special seat, tailored for ease of access. There was a jump seat and a bucket for his faithful but airsick prone bodyguard, Sergeant Boedigheimer.

Hafner relished the popping of his eardrums, the smell of hot oil, and the wheezing sounds of the airframe metal coming to rest, sounds as therapeutic to his broken body as Kersten's massaging fingers. He nodded and Boedigheimer arranged the ladder to help him out. He was strong enough now to pull himself out of the airplane by upper-body strength alone.

In the air, his bad legs made no difference, for he had lost none of his skills, nor any of his enjoyment of flight. He'd probably never fly in combat again, but then he'd been told that he'd never walk. Now he could do a half a kilometer without a cane, and his endurance was building.

He had just looped and rolled through the white clouds dotting the blue sky, embracing the glorious day in an effort to shake off the worries of the doleful war news. After all of Rommel's tremendous successes, the
Afrika Korps
had come to an inglorious end, with General von Arnim left to hold the bag of defeat. And the goddamn RAF had somehow blown up the Mohne and Eder dams with some devilish new kind of bomb, flooding the Ruhr Valley and severely reducing the power and water available for industry. Goebbels's Ministry, in their indefatigable efforts to show a bright side, had made much of SS General Stropp bringing the bloody fighting in the Warsaw ghetto to an end. Some victory—SS troops and tanks against a bunch of Jews armed with homemade pistols.

Hafner glanced at his watch: nine o'clock, time for the damned meeting with Josten. The more involved Josten became with the jet program, the moodier he got. Hafner wondered how he'd be to work with if things weren't going so well with the 262; as it was, he was increasingly ill-tempered.

Boedigheimer grunted as he strained to keep the wheelchair from speeding off down the long concrete ramp to the cavernous underground factory. Hafner always half expected to be met by a flight of millions of bats roiling out of the gloomy entrance below. It was another one of his "follies" turned into triumph. Everyone, from Himmler down, had thought he was crazy when he laid the huge concrete block on top of solid ground, then burrowed out the factory space underneath. But Speer, a man of vision, was excited by the plant and told Hitler about it. Now they were going to build much larger structures on the same model all over Germany. It was the kind of idea that appealed to the Fuehrer, who was already demanding that caves, railroad tunnels, mines, and every other sub-surface area be used; he wanted all of his industry underground by the end of 1944 in a troglodyte world, all craters above and workers below. When Hitler had said, "Give me four years and you won't recognize Germany," he hadn't been jesting.

It wasn't going to be possible, of course, but the Cottbus method was the cheapest and the easiest. And Speer, as arrogant as he sometimes was, always gave Hafner full credit for the idea, an unusual occurrence in the Third Reich.

Always correct to the point of annoyance, Josten stood up and saluted him as he entered.

"Ach,
Helmut, what is the complaint
de jour?"

"Herr Direktor,
what is the progress on the turbine blades?"

"Some good news, for a change. We've finally licked the welding problem. Old Fritz has come up with a totally different approach, and even mechanized it. Let's go next door."

The two men donned welder's goggles and went into the next room, where Fritz was bent over a machine. The turbine blades were being brought in one by one on a slow conveyor belt. Fritz's device, not too different in operation from the claw machines used in carnivals, had a mechanical hand that grabbed each turbine blade and with a blinding blue-white flash, electrically spot welded the clamped edges along the top.

Hafner, a gargoyle with his burnt twisted face and blue-lensed goggles, showed him a turbine blade. "Fritz toughened the ordinary steel by introducing nitrogen into the annealing process. Then he made one side of the blade longer than the other, bent the top over, and spot welded it."

Josten held the turbine blade in his hand. "Looks pretty crude; doesn't the air bleed out between the welds?"

"Absolutely, and that keeps the temperature down. I'm going to have twelve engines built up by the end of this month, and as many as twenty more next month."

Josten was silent, obviously impressed. "With that sort of schedule, we could start training in June and have a squadron ready to go by the end of July."

"Have you identified your pilots?"

"They've all identified themselves; they are either recovering from wounds, been court-martialed, or are persona non grata politically. I've picked twelve, and they are picking their own ground crew, all with the same kind of background, a regular bunch of pirates!"

"Will
'Unser Hermann
let you have them?"

"He'll never know about it. Galland is arranging for their orders to read Peenemunde—but they'll be amended so they can report to me here."

"How long will it take once you get the airplanes?"

"We ought to have two weeks of ground instruction, especially on engine operation. We're ready to start on that. Then there ought to be two weeks of multi-engine training for the 109 and 190 boys—we can use Messerschmitt 110s and 410s. Then a solid six weeks in the 262."

"Six weeks?"

"It's a totally different animal than a regular fighter—just navigating is a problem, you're going so fast. We've got to work out tactics, do some fighting against captured enemy airplanes. It will take a week or ten days just to learn how to shoot, throwing all past experience out the window."

"You'll have to compress the training. It's important that you're ready in July at the latest, while the weather is still good and the Amis are still coming in force. We want to hit a big formation, knock down lots of bombers, make a big splash. Then we can force Junkers to convert to our methods, and get Messerschmitt to stop fiddling around with development and start producing."

Josten was straightforward as always. "Do you have an interest in those firms?"

"Messerschmitt yes, Junkers no. But I don't see why I can't license the turbine blade design to Junkers—it would only be fair."

"Why don't you offer it to them now?"

"They'd never accept it—not their idea! The last thing they want to do is pay an outsider a royalty on something they think they can develop themselves. Time means nothing to them! We need a big bomber massacre to force Hitler to order them to take it."

After Josten left, Hafner wheeled himself to his refuge, a smaller underground facility at the extreme left of the experimental complex. The only sign of life was the steady stream of
Wehrmacht
trucks driving up to an elevator in the aboveground loading dock.

In contrast to the bright, noisy underground plant, the inside of the building was dimly lit, with a host of whispering Italian laborers working with enormous microfilm cameras. The loudest sound was the rustle of paper as page after page of documentation was fed into the cameras.

This was his escape hatch, his guarantee. The arrangement with Caldwell was all very well, but he might need to up the ante. And it was always possible that he might have to go to Russia. The use of forced labor was becoming widely condemned—it might affect his amnesty agreement. The Russians wouldn't quibble about forced labor—they were past masters at it.

Technical data from all over the Reich—engineering data from Peenemunde, documentation on the atomic experiments, heavy water stations, poison gases, aerodynamics, metallurgy, every product of the engineering genius of Germany, all went before his cameras. It was the single greatest concentration of secrets in the Reich, authorized by Speer and eagerly approved by Hitler, who was intent on preserving the record of his infallible decisions. Speer had authorized the equipment and the film, valuable and increasingly scarce. Hafner was supposed to make three copies of each document, for storage in three different areas. Instead he was sabotaging the program, making only one copy. It saved time, materials, and money—and it ensured that he would have the only copy to bargain with. If, as he still hoped, the Reich should win the war, he could quickly make as many duplicates as he needed.

*

Benghazi, Cyrenaica/July 14, 1943

He was becoming a connoisseur of sand, a gourmand of grit. In Guadalcanal it had been more granular, dusty enough to become mudlike when the rains came, but still substantial, concrete-mix-quality sand. Libyan sand was a corrosive red talc that invaded carburetors, eyelids, and the inevitably tepid lemonade with equal facility; it filled the tents, jammed guns, and filed away at the enamel on your teeth, a groaning, abrading filth, tasting of fly-specked tombs. Its effect upon morale was bad; upon engines, disastrous, cutting the normal three-hundred-hour life expectancy to sixty or less.

Jim Lee lay in his sack, contemplating a career that had given him enormous exposure yet always cast him in the role of outsider. The iron cot listed in the sand, which quietly, unevenly, swallowed even the empty K-ration cans he'd planted under the cot legs as footpads.

He reached over and tapped his tentmate's arm. Colonel Willie Westerfield had remembered him from the days in Hawaii and was virtually the only man in the whole operation who had been friendly, gladly taking him on as copilot. Westerfield's eyes followed Lee's finger to the duffel bag strung from the tent roof. It contained their emergency food—cans of Vienna sausage, gum, K-rations, packages of cheese and crackers—and swung under the weight of a desert rat busily trying to gnaw through the sand-dusted fabric.

"Those little bastards have seen too many Tarzan movies. That's a six-foot jump."

Westerfield pulled his service .45-caliber out of its holster and fired; the rat looked down and began chewing on the hole made by the bullet, probably thinking that a German officer would never have missed.

To Lee's amazement, Westerfield fired again, blasting the rodent into bloody bits against the tent wall.

"Jesus, that's disgusting, Colonel! You've been out here too long! Besides, you could get court-martialed for firing a gun like that."

"Only for missing him. They'll never hear it in this windstorm, and if they do it only means that I won't have to go on this totally snafued mission."

Outside the powdery khamsin wind divided its efforts between filling the billowing tents and dropping the visibility toward zero, turning the setting desert sun into an ominous red smear. Shaking his head, his ears still crackling from the sound of the pistol, Lee strode out to the nearest "desert lily," the conical urinals fashioned out of gasoline tins and stuck at random intervals around the base. As he relieved himself, thinking about Westerfield's assessment of the mission, he let his eyes wander around the junkyard that four armies had made of a once peaceful desert. Amid the scattering of palm trees were the oil drum privies, burned-out tanks, an international collection of junked aircraft, scavenged for parts and now capable to serve only as wash lines for the minimum laundry that anyone deigned to do. Even this detritus was coveted by the Arabs, who lurked nearby and stole everything they could, whether it was fastened down or not.

Back in the tent he asked, "Why do you say this is a snafu? I'd say the planning was better than usual. They've built an exact scale replica of Ploesti and flown a bunch of practice missions against it. The sand table model is perfect, we all know it by heart; Tex McCrary's training movie showed us what to bomb, and the flak defense is supposed to be light. What's going to go wrong?"

Westerfield sat upright, arms and legs unfolding like the blades of a Swiss Army knife.

"Look, Jim, you're new here, and everybody's been giving you the business, 'cause you just dropped out of Headquarters and you're going on the mission. They think you'll go back and be a hero, and they'll be out here to try to live out the rest of their tours."

"Reasonable enough."

"Yeah, but behind the gruff exteriors are some pretty mean bastards, and they're not getting along. Old Killer Kane, running the 98th, has been here so long he calls his outfit the Tyramiders.' He likes this kind of stuff, and he thinks he knows how to run the show. Then they bring us in, guys from the Eighth Air Force in England, and
we
think they know it all. Then we've got some new guys who don't know nothing, no more than they learned on our practice low levels. That includes you."