1945 (2 page)

Hitler was surrounded by his entourage — Göring, slightly ridiculous in his robins-egg blue uniform, Goebbels, the gnomelike master of propaganda, Himmler, bloodless hps pulled back in a sardonic grin as his elite armored division rolled past, the ever-present Bormann, dressed in the brown uniform of the Party. In a wider circle around them were the field marshals, generals, industrialists, and Party hangers-on. Victory Day was the holiest day of the Nazi liturgical calendar, and the high priests of darkness reveled in their celebration of all that they had done to the world.

Again Martel became uneasily aware of how his own blood was set racing by the sense of power and glory that drenched the entire artificial drama. It was like being aroused by a woman one despised. No matter the revulsion, despite the inner certainty that never would one yield, beneath all moral rectitude there lurked a dark, compelling attraction. Again he wondered: was it his maternal heritage that made him feel this way? He very much hoped the attraction was at a more universal level, and not something peculiar to his personal history.

But how his mother would have cheered. German pride, German discipline, the Germany nation itself reborn in victory, marching in perfect unison toward its true and glorious destiny.

Martel shuddered slightly and interrupted his dark musings to thank his God that he was an American like his father before him and, again like his father, an officer in his country's navy.

It had been when traveling as part of a US Naval delegation to the German Imperial Navy that Captain Jefferson Lee Martel had met Katerina von Mannheim, he an attache to the legendary Admiral Sims, she the daughter of a German rear admiral. After a whirlwind courtship too romantic to be quite real, they had married. Not long after had been born unto them a son, their only child, James Mannheim Martel.

Martel had always been fascinated by the two so similar and yet so different traditions that he was heir to. Had his father been the German and his mother American he might well have been part of the crowd roaring beneath him rather than a foreign military observer.

As things had actually transpired, in 1917 his American father had sailed into the North Sea, where he might have been killed by Rear Admiral von Mannheim in battle. Instead his father had returned home safe from his passage through harm's way—while not long after taking part in the "mutinous" scuttling of the German fleet rather than transfer it to the Allies, his grandfather had died a suicide.

Little Jimmy Martel had been three years old at the time of America's entry into the Great War. Yet he would never forget how, when he walked down the street holding his mother's hand, people he had first met in his very own house would turn their backs on him and his mother rather than acknowledge the existence of the Hun amongst them. His mother had not taken it well. Among her class and nation the accordance of dignity and consideration to a forlorn female "enemy national"—to say nothing of the wife of an officer of the host nation! —would have been so automatic as not to bear comment. The naively close-minded patriotism of the American middle class did not charm her aristocratic soul.

Initially, Katerina had been determined to become the American wife of an American naval officer. After America entered the fray her attitude quickly became that of an enemy alien, a prisoner of war trapped by the existence of her son. And while she loved him and fulfilled her duty to him as she saw it, she did not hide her feelings. This small continuation of the Great War lasted until 1921 when she died of diphtheria, and the boy was sent to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to live with his American grandparents. During the years that followed his father spent as much time as he could with his only child, but he was much at sea.

For the sake of her memory Jim clung fiercely to his mothers heritage, even retaining German as his second language through constant private reiteration and practice. His grandfather had encouraged him in this. Being the son of a defeated Confederate naval officer, he understood how precious lost causes could be. There was nothing disloyal in it—quite the contrary! —and Jim's father and grandparents had even agreed to Jim's spending 1932, his last year of high school, in Berlin with his mother's family. That had been the happiest year of his life, even though he had lived it against the backdrop of the gathering Nazi darkness that had culminated in Hitler's final grab for power.

After Germany had come four years at Annapolis, where he graduated third in his class. Perhaps for that reason he was chosen to spend a further two years as a junior instructor. His senior thesis on the development of German naval air reconnaissance during the First World War (a field his grandfather had helped launch) also may have been a factor. Despite his expertise in aviation however, because he could so easily pass for a native German, his advisors at Annapolis had tried to push him into naval intelligence—but it was naval aviation that drew him. Perhaps that was inevitable; his father too was a pioneer in the new discipline, having been converted to air power as a result of the 1929 Panama fleet war games in which the new carrier
Saratoga
slipped through the covering lines of battlewagons and "destroyed" the locks. The umpires of the game were later pressured into reversing their decision but some observers, including the Japanese naval attaches, had paid attention.

His old man, as Jim fondly recalled, would lecture by the hour to anyone willing to listen about the revolution to come, even after — especially after — his forcible retirement due to a heart attack. Whatever his successes at converting the rest of the Navy, his son was hooked. After flight school came Jim's assignment to the
Enterprise
as a fighter pilot. His tour began on December 5, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor. When compression fractures to two vertebrae, the result of trying to bring in a shot-up Corsair that quit a hundred yards short of the deck, ended his flying career, he was America's number-seven ace of the Great Pacific War.

After several months in traction, Jim emerged to find that the war in the Pacific was all but over, and now that fighter aces were a drug on the market some old dark spots on his personnel folder had come back to life. Like Billy Mitchell and his own father, Jim believed that the US military, including the Navy, was paying far too little attention to the
next
war. By the time Jim was at Annapolis, no one had any doubt as to the magnitude of air power's role, but to him it was obvious that far too little attention was being paid to advanced technology. In his superiors' view to merely vocalize such opinions was bad enough — and Jim had published.

The fact that he had published under his father's name in obscure professional journals had kept him out of the hottest water, but the true authorship was an open secret —his dad's iconoclasm had not extended to airborne radar vectoring (science fiction!) nor the accelerated reaction times carriers would require when confronted by jet-powered aircraft. So while his discretion had left the brass merely irritated rather than wildly outraged, still there were some in positions of power who thought him another loudmouthed maverick in the Mitchell vein who was badly in need of a lesson in patience, and why it was a good idea to keep superiors happy.

Besides, the Navy quite validly felt that Jim was uniquely well positioned to understand just exacdy what lurked in the dark underside of Nazi conquest: Europe enslaved, concentration camps, labor camps still teeming with Russian POWs, the blood-spattered basements of Gestapo headquarters, and, still only whispered about, a nightmare called "the Final Solution." Let him spend a few years out of the way, fixed so he can learn to keep his mouth shut good and proper, the thinking had gone. And so had come the posting to Berlin. To Jim's way of thinking, the worst part of it was that he couldn't keep up with the details of cutting-edge research in the USA. On the other hand there was some pretty damned cutting-edge stuff going on right here in—

As the last SS battalion passed by, Jim was pulled from his reverie by a sudden high-pitched whine that quickly rose in volume to a wailing shriek as a group of Me-262 jet fighters grouped in the shape of a swastika came roaring in, their shadows racing them down the boulevard. Mason, who was also a pilot, looked up at them with hostile envy. Jim shared Mason's envy, but was more phlegmatic about it, perhaps because he knew the plane fairly well.

Behind the 262s came a formation of less familiar shapes, and Jim abandoned his camera for his binoculars to get a closer look. He hoped his companion, who was snapping away, was doing his job right. The Germans were building three carriers, and American intelligence was still trying to figure out which planes would be adopted for seaborne operations.

As he watched, the flight of Arado 234 twin-engine jet bombers swept by, breaking from their swastika formation to climb almost vertically up through the scattering of clouds. Compared to the 262s, they did not seem all that agile, but as torpedo attack planes they would be formidable, far different from the lumbering Avengers the Americans had flown during three years of combat in the Pacific.

Jim still kept as a souvenir a picture of a young American pilot, Lieutenant George Bush, standing on the wing of a splashed Avenger. He'd flown cover for the kid while he waited for rescue. Martel smiled as he thought about him. He had been one of the youngest flight leaders in the fleet, but by God if you needed someone to lead a group straight into enemy flak like they were on rails, he was your man.

After the 234s came the twin-engine Me-510s, prop-driven ground-attack bombers, their fifty-millimeter antitank guns looking like long ugly stingers slung under the nose. Either plane would be well suited for carrier-based operations, but the Germans were keeping that part of their hand close to the chest; none of the planes flown today had the necessary arresting gear for carrier landings.

"Here come their new heavies," Mason yelled as he pointed back up the street. Martel swung his binoculars around. Below, the crowd broke into wild yet inaudible cheers as a flight of Me-264 heavy bombers thundered overhead at rooftop level. Wait. . . this was a variant on what he'd expected. Longer... and the wings—were they larger too? There had been rumors of a new "stretched" 264E. Clearly this was it.

For the final two years of the war England had slowly increased the pressure of night bombing with their fleets of Lancasters. Though the destruction had never seriously hindered the German war effort, Hitler had not been amused—and Göring had sworn to his Führer that never again would Germany lack the means to retaliate in kind. Next time, Jim thought sourly, both sides could dedicate massive portions of their industrial capacity to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.

This Me-264 variant was massive, even bigger than the American B-29s they rather resembled with their glassed-over forward canopies. Unlike the American plane, however, these were a curious mix of prop and jet: four BMW 901G radial engines and two Jumo 004 turbojets. Mason was again busy with his sixteen-millimeter camera. Like any hunter, he had focused in on a single member of the herd and was clicking away.

Though fully briefed on the standard-version specs, Martel watched in silent awe as the fast and deadly behemoths passed overhead. Earlier wisdom had been that Germany would not build a bomber fleet capable of reaching New York. The Germans, analysts had argued, simply could not afford the fuel consumption: Five hundred bombers flying five missions a month would devour one sixth of all avgas produced in the Reich. In a classic example of the perils of depending on narrow-gauge experts for strategic decision-making, the capture of Russia's Baku oil fields had changed all that. Still, it could have been worse; Intel believed that only a few 264s had been built. So far they had been pretty competent at that sort of analysis, thanks to code breaking and in-country agents — and anyway, the conclusion seemed reasonable to Martel. German air doctrine remained focused on tactical support, not strategic bombing. Furthermore, they had enough
Arados
and older twin-engine stuff to keep England quietly in her place.

As the last of the 264s passed, another even higher-pitched whine made itself heard in rapidly increasing intensity. Suddenly, gone almost in a blink, batlike forms shot across the avenue at right angles to the thoroughfare. A few oddly empty minutes in which the loudest noise was the chatter of the crowd followed. Then, "There they are!" Mason shouted excitedly.

Martel looked up past the Brandenburg Gate where Mason was pointing. A few miles away the formation that had just passed overhead was swooping around in an impossibly tight turn to come racing up the boulevard in precise single file, literally below rooftop level. He had seen the early intelligence specs, and had been specifically instructed to photograph the Gothas if they appeared. Though he would have vasdy preferred to continue direct visual observation, Martel dutifully picked up his own camera and started to mimic Masons efforts, snapping off shots and trying to keep a single plane centered in the viewfinder as they passed.

To Jim the Gothas looked utterly bizarre, and very, very threatening. Based on a flying-wing design, they had no fuselage, and in place of a tail showed only two tiny vertical stabilizers mounted on the outside trailing edges. Except for their exhaust oudets, the planes' twin engines were invisible.

Their boomerang shape, Jim thought, would be entirely at home in a Flash Gordon serial. Scary as they looked though, he knew that the Germans had discovered some serious flaws inherent in the flying-wing concept; if the
Luftwaffe
had, as rumored, really achieved supersonic velocities, they hadn't done so with flying wings. But subsonic or not, the Gothas were fast, highly maneuverable, and presented a razor-thin target silhouette when approached from astern. Martel found the mere thought of going up against them in a Corsair or Bearcat chilling.