Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (38 page)

The next day Rommel gave the order to withdraw, and the Afrikakorps fell back to their starting positions southwest of El Alamein. Alam Halfa had cost the Allies 1,800 dead and nearly seventy tanks against about 3,000 Axis casualties and forty-seven tanks. But the Germans had been stopped and Rommel would never again mount a major offensive in North Africa, so Egypt and the Suez Canal were safe.

Hans Marseille alone accounted for over a third of the sixty-eight Allied aircraft lost. For the rest of the month he’d fly another eight missions, and on four of them he’d shoot down anywhere from four to six fighters per mission. On September 7, a few days after the German withdrawal, his best friend, Hans-Arnold Stahlschmidt, was posted as missing and presumed dead. Jochen gave up drinking and became even more solitary, rarely leaving his tent when not flying. But he did come out on the sixteenth to meet with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel himself.

Recently promoted, Marseille at twenty-two was now the youngest
Hauptmann
in the German air force. He and Rommel talked about the war and how they could probably never win now that America had joined in. Marseille voiced his opinion that the Nazis were ridiculous and that captured pilots should be treated honorably. The Desert Fox agreed and said that they were all human beings and honor was a vital code for them to live by. It seemed that two kindred spirits, two gentleman warriors, had a few pleasant moments in each other’s company. Rommel would fight on bravely for another few years in Africa, Italy, and France before dying by his own hand.

Hans Marseille would meet another fate.

Taking off in the late morning of September 30, 1942, he headed east toward El Imayid to intercept British fighters that had been spotted in the area. Unable to close with them, the Germans turned back west, and at 11:30 a.m. Marseille radioed in that he had engine trouble. Vapor was trailing from his plane and there was smoke in the cockpit. His flight closed in around him and guided him toward the German lines, which they crossed about six minutes later. Gasping on the radio, he said, “I have to get out now . . . can’t stand it anymore . . .”

That was the last thing anyone ever heard him say.

A few minutes later, with less than 2,000 feet of altitude, his wingmen saw the canopy open, then blow off. The stricken Bf 109 pulled up slightly, then rolled over, with Marseille tumbling out through the heavy smoke.

No parachute opened, and he fell to the desert, dying on that last Wednesday morning in September. The 115th Panzergrenadier Regiment was just south of Sidi Rahman that day, and the regimental doctor happened to see the whole thing. He later stated, “The pilot lay on his stomach as if asleep. His arms were hidden beneath his body. As I came closer, I saw a pool of blood that had issued from the side of his crushed skull; brain matter was exposed. I turned the dead pilot over onto his back and opened the zipper of his flight jacket, saw the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords [Marseille never actually received the Diamonds personally] and I knew immediately who this was.”

The doctor had also found a horrible gash above the hip and across the chest that could’ve only been caused by striking the horizontal stabilizer. This had either killed Jochen or knocked him out. It was also later discovered that the reduction gear had come apart, severing a hydraulic line and dumping fluid back into the engine. This produced the intense heat and smoke that had forced Marseille to bail out.

His friends came and retrieved his body. They laid him out in a tent and said goodbye in their own ways. The next day he was taken to the German cemetery at Derna and laid to rest.
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In a way it was fitting that Marseille died in the same desert where he’d sent so many others and that he, too, would remain there.

Hans-Joachim Marseille was a nonconformist in a police state who refused to surrender his individuality. A man who personally opposed everything the Nazis stood for, yet remained one of Germany’s greatest warriors—and this is a distinction worth emphasizing. Most fighter pilots considered that they were fighting for their homes, their families, and the men with them, and in this Jochen was no exception. He fought for Germany, not for National Socialism or Hitler—a truly lethal man who never lost his humanity.

He certainly was an exception in that he flew 482 combat sorties and was credited with 158 victories. All but four of these were fighters, and all were flown by Western pilots. Erich Hartmann, the top ace of all time, and Adolf Galland both regarded Marseille as the very best. He was an extraordinarily gifted pilot, a very complex human being, and truly gallant—the very best word to describe this extraordinary lord of the sky.

The world was a grayer place without him.

PULL!

Back . . . just a bit more . . . a bit more. . .

His feet and hands moved almost at will. He pushed on the rudder pedals and pulled back on the stick to keep the twisting Yak-1 fighter in the center pane of his windscreen. It was an old trick: get the target in the window, then . . .
There!

The Soviet fighter was waffling back and forth, out of airspeed. Flicking his wrist, the German pilot’s mouth opened slightly and his breathing quickened as the stubby, thick wings filled up the REVI gunsight. Ignoring the dangling oxygen mask, he squinted at the faint orange glowing circle on the reflecting glass. Unconsciously holding his breath, the pilot jabbed down on the firing button atop the stick.

Two
. . .
three
. . .

The Bf 109G, called a “Gustav,” shuddered as ninety-six 13 mm shells left his guns. Even as his right thumb came up, the Yak skidded, and the German saw his rounds pass to the side and a little high of the dark green fighter.

“Scheiss!”

Instantly correcting, he watched for a moment, timing his next burst, then fired again. Pieces of wood flew off the Yak as his guns hit the wing and part of the tail. The Russian tried to roll away, but at least a part of the control surfaces was damaged. Jockeying the throttle to hold his range, Erwin Meier grinned and shot again, this time with the
Motorkanone
. Mounted with the engine and firing through the propeller hub, the cannon shook the whole aircraft. It had a slower rate of fire than the MG 131 guns and only coughed out about fifty rounds for the same three-second burst. But the 20 mm shells did horrible damage if they hit. Luftwaffe
experten
like Meier generally used the smaller guns for sighting and damaging a target, then finished up with the cannon, as he was doing now.

Roughly the size of a woman’s forearm, the cannon shells nearly destroyed the Yak’s rudder.
Not long now. . .

Suddenly the Gustav rocked sideways like it had been violently kicked. Reacting instantly, he quit firing and slammed the stick left, booting the rudder at the same time. The kicking stopped, and he twisted sideways to look back over his tail.

Another Yak!

Swearing again, Meier flipped the fighter and reversed, trying to throw the Russian off his tail. He’d forgotten a cardinal rule and fixated on his target. In a dogfight you were most likely to get killed by the threat you never saw.
Not this time, Russian,
he thought, whipping his head around to watch the other fighter overshoot and fly past like all the others.

But it didn’t.

Scheiss
. . . shit! It was still there, hanging off his tail. Just then Erwin Meier, eleven-victory ace, felt his mouth go dry, his heartbeat quicken, and an unfamiliar pang of fear shoot up from his gut. The first Yak was completely forgotten as he fought for his life. He’d seen the Volga pass beneath and knew he was east of the great river running past Stalingrad—on the wrong side. Definitely on the wrong side!

Meier had to get away.

But he couldn’t.

He flinched down behind the armor plate as more shells thudded into the 109. A horrible surging, clanking sound filled his ears, and even as the German jinked again, his eyes flickered to the tachometer and oil pressure gauge. Daimler-Benz made a superb engine, and the big DB 605 V-12 was the best he’d had, but it couldn’t survive being holed by the Russian’s ShVAK cannon. Running rough now, he couldn’t see forward because of the smoke, which was rapidly filling the cockpit.

Yanking the throttle back, he groped for the engine instant-stop lever on the left bulkhead and pulled it. At least he wouldn’t explode . . . or so he hoped. The controls were still responding, and he tried to turn back west, but the motor gave up. Bitter smoke filled his lungs and he coughed, eyes streaming. Grasping the red release handle on the left rail, he jettisoned the canopy. Blinking furiously against the cold wind, at least he could see to unfasten his belt. The Gustav was burning when he rolled left and tumbled out of the cockpit.

Unbeknownst to Erwin Meier, both Soviet pilots were women. The Yak he’d nearly shot down was flown by Raisa Beliaeva, who’d been on an aerobatics team before the war. The pilot of the other Yak he would meet later that same day.

After floating down east of the Volga with no chance of escape, the German was captured. He asked to meet the man who shot him down, and since they were fairly near the Yak airbase at Verkhnaia Akhtuba, his guards obliged. Much to his shock and dismay, the “man” was a tiny, gray-eyed female who proceeded to describe, in front of all the gathered pilots, how she’d shot down his Messerschmitt.

The girl was beautiful.

Lidiya Vladimirovna “Lilya” Litvyak was just twenty years old on that early fall day in the skies over Stalingrad. She’d been born in Moscow and raised during the dangerous, turbulent Russian Civil War that followed the Great War. In 1922, when she was a year old, the Bolsheviks became Communists and formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—the Soviet Union.
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Despite the illusion that the new union was a workers’ paradise ruled by the proletariat, it was, in fact, controlled by professional revolutionaries who’d never really done a day’s work in their lives. With the exception of Lenin, the other prominent leaders weren’t even ethnic Russians. Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronshtein, was a Ukrainian Jew. Felix Dzierz·yn´ski was a Pole who would form the dreaded secret police, the Cheka. Joseph Stalin, the man who would come to personify and symbolize the Soviet Union, was a Georgian.

By the time Lidiya turned six, Stalin had exiled or killed his competition and become the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union. Born Iosif Dzhugashvili, he Russianized his surname to Stalin, meaning “steel.” Basically a thug with no trade and no skills, he was also a consummate plotter and politician. Ruthless and stubborn, Stalin had little regard for the lives of the common people under his control. In 1928 he unveiled his economic Five-Year Plan, which would elevate his empire, as he saw it, to its proper place in the world through industrialization. Certainly something was needed; many Russian families were crammed into 100-square-foot apartments in newly created “workers’ cities.” Literacy had declined to about 25 percent, bread was rationed, and factory output was 10 percent of prewar levels.
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So much for paradise.

Agricultural output had fallen so far that famine ensued, adding another 10 million lives to the 9 million lost between 1914 and 1922. Land ownership passed from the nobility to the state, and millions of peasants were now homeless. Most made their way to the big cities, desperate for work. Suddenly the Five-Year Plan could become reality. The first task was to consolidate all resources under the state’s (Stalin’s) control. Farms became either collectives or directly run by the government. All businesses were nationalized and the middle class, such as it was, eradicated. Private enterprise died, and with it most forms of independent thinking and choices. This was the point—the Soviet Union could only tolerate one icon, and that wasn’t a monarch, nobles, a free citizenry, or the church. It was Joseph Stalin.

Liliya did it correctly. She became a Little Octobrist as a child and a member of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) as a teenager. At fourteen she began hanging around the Moscow Flying Club, and she soloed in a U-2 biplane at fifteen. Female aviation legends were making news all over the world. In 1930 Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, making the 11,000-mile flight in a Gipsy Moth. The next year she became the first pilot to fly from London to Moscow in a single day.

May 20, 1932, saw Amelia Earhart take off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to land in Derry, Ireland, nearly fifteen hours later and become the first female to solo across the Atlantic. In 1938 three Soviet women, Valentina Grizodubova, Marina Raskova, and Polina Osipenko, made a 1,500-mile flight from Sevastopol in the Crimea to Arkhangelsk on the White Sea coast. Two months later, in September, the same three became national heroines by setting a 4,000-mile distance record.
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Stalin, who was rarely interested in women, showed considerable interest in Marina Raskova. He was seated next to her at a post-flight celebration banquet, and afterward the two stayed in touch. Raskova was a gorgeous, charismatic woman who’d trained for a career in opera, so perhaps Stalin’s attraction isn’t so hard to understand. She was frequently seen in his official car or at his country dacha outside Moscow. Sexually involved or not, they maintained a close friendship that would change many lives—Liliya Litvyak’s among them.

The early 1930’s marked an unprecedented growth in Soviet military strength and capabilities. Stalin had finally realized that for the Soviet Union to be the world power he envisioned, the existing army of workers and peasants would have to be modernized. The absurd practice of democratically elected “officers” was abolished, military schools were reestablished, and training vastly improved. Modern equipment designs were purchased directly from Walter Christie, the famous American innovator, and would become the basis for the T-34 main battle tank. The Red Air Force had more than 15,000 highly experienced pilots and, just as the Germans had done, used Spain as a proving ground for better fighter designs.