Eagles at War (39 page)

Intelligence had reported that the Luftwaffe had used the intervening four months to recuperate. Fighter tactics had been improved and the armament of the Focke-Wulfs had been upgraded. The German Air Force could still muster twenty-two hundred operational fighters, and of these, more than fifteen hundred were allocated to the "Defense of the Reich." That meant that across the vast Russian front and the smaller line in Italy there were less than seven hundred operational fighters, perhaps a fifth of the real requirement, and far too few to be effective.

Caldwell had been in the war room at Castle Coombe all week, trying to help assess the results of Argument as they came in. The air offensive had started out brilliantly, with a successful combination raid by the RAF Bomber Command and the American Eighth Air Force on the Junkers factory at Leipzig. Then four hundred B-17s and 272 B-24s had ranged over Germany, striking at aircraft manufacturing plants, just as he had been demanding for months. But the really important news was that almost nine hundred fighters, including a few of the new Mustangs, had overwhelmed the Luftwaffe, claiming sixty-one victories.

By midweek, the Germans had stiffened their defense and American casualties rose. Arnold had said he was willing to accept as much as 25 percent losses, because the U.S. could provide replacements, and the Germans could not. Caldwell was estimating that losses would be less than 7 percent—staggering by prewar calculations, but worth it if the Luftwaffe was hammered to its knees.

The night before Caldwell had gone out to Great Ashford, in Suffolk, to be with the 385th Bomb Group again. He had drinks in the Quonset hut that passed as an officers' club, sitting next to the brick wall with the missions proudly labeled on it—Chateauroux, Wilhelmshaven, Rostock, Leipzig, Schweinfurt—each one more dangerous than the last. In the morning, he'd gone to the briefings, noting the anxiety of the crews, watching as they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee out of thick white china mugs. There was some horseplay, a little joking, but most of the men simply sat locked into their private thoughts.

A bombing operation was an elaborate process that began with a flurry of paperwork, rose in scale to industrial proportions in a furious twenty-four hours, then wound down to a few final actions—tailfins being attached to the bombs, mechanics in a swarm over airplanes for last-minute troubleshooting, Thermos jugs being stowed aboard. A mystic quality attended these last efforts, as if each person was trying to impart his personal strength to the airframe itself, blindly willing it to return.

Caldwell had participated in the ceremony, using a rag to polish the already gleaming landing gear oleo struts of
Bonnie,
the airplane he'd flown in on the Schweinfurt mission.

It worried him that
Bonnie's
skipper, Chet Schmidt, was haggard and apprehensive, his hands trembling as he chain-smoked, a totally different man than the one he'd flown with just a few months ago. His copilot, McLean, had changed for the better, well enough accepted by the crew to josh Caldwell, telling him. "Wish you were coming with us, General. We could use an old hand on this run." "I understand Chet puts his flak helmet on right away nowadays." McLean blushed, but poor Schmidt couldn't manage a grin, saying, "General, the way those bastards are shooting over there, we need a flak helmet over the whole damn airplane."

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."