Eagles at War

EAGLES AT WAR

WALTER J. BOYNE

***

Copyright © 1991 by Walter Boyne

Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where the names of actual persons, living or dead, are used, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. To request permission, please write to: Permissions, IPS Books, 1149 Grand Teton Drive, Pacifica, CA 94044.

***

BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE

Non-fiction:

The Jet Age ( With Donald Lopez)

Messerschmitt Me 262: Arrow to the Future

Boeing B 52: A Documentary History

The Aircraft Treasures of Silver Hill

Vertical Flight (with Donald Lopez)

De Havilland DH 4: From Flaming Coffin to Living Legend

Phantom in Combat

The Leading Edge

The Smithsonian Illustrated History of Flight

The Smithsonian Book of Flight for Children

The Power Behind The Wheel

Flight

Weapons of Desert Storm

Gulf War

Classic Aircraft

Art in Flight: The Sculpture of John Safer

Silver Wings

Clash of Wings

Clash of Titans

Fly Past, Fly Present

Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story

Air Warfare (With Phillip Handleman as editors)

Aces in Command

German Military Aircraft

The Best of Wings

Aviation 100, Volume I

Classic Aircraft

Aviation 100, Volume III

The Two O’Clock War

Encyclopedia of Air Warfare (Editor)

The Influence of Air Power on History

Chronicle of FlightRising Tide (with Gary Weir

Operation Iraqi Freedom, What Went Right, What Went Wrong and Why

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Air Force

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Navy

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Army

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Marines

Today’s Best Military Writing (Editor)

World War II Aircraft: Great American Fighter Planes of the Second World War

Beyond the Wild Blue: The History of the USAF, 1947–2007

Moving America Safely: 50 Years of the Federal Aviation Administration

Soaring to Glory, The United States Air Force Memorial.

Fiction:

The Wild Blue ( with Steven L. Thompson)

Trophy for Eagles

Eagles at War

Air Force Eagles

Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of The Wright Brothers

Roaring Thunder

Supersonic Thunder

Hypersonic Thunder

Visit Colonel Walter R. Boyne’s website: http://www.air-boyne.com/

***

To my inspiration,
my wife Jeanne,

and children Molly, Katie, Bill, and Peggy
plus Max and Minnie

PROLOGUE

The B-17s came from the northwest, locked in formation as precisely as migrating geese, their target the Dornier aircraft factory near Friedrichshafen. There were no escorting fighters and the bomber crews sweated with fear, their nervous young gunners probing the hostile sky for bogies, seeking cold comfort in the heft and wicked oily smell of their guns.

The Bomb Group Commander repeated his call to close up the already tight formation. He had flown Flying Fortresses through the blood baths of Schweinfurt and Regensburg and knew the chilling odds against them.

The crews crouched in their frozen aluminum tubes, swaddled in zippered leather suits, bodies kept barely mobile by electrically heated garments, deafened by the unremitting roar of slipstream, the prairie-fire crackle of their headsets, the pounding of propellers and engines. Their fingers itched to add to the din with the reassuring thunder of their . 50-caliber Brownings, to
do
something other than passively wait for a random burst of flak or the quick slash of a fighter.

From the southwest, a single North American P-51 fighter turned parallel to the distant bombers, its pilot watching the flickering images of B-17s projected against the towering silver cumulus clouds behind them. The Mustang was free-lancing, briefed to seek out and strafe anything moving—a train, a truck, a wagon, even a soldier on a bicycle. One of its mates had been shot down, the others were somehow missing. Now the pilot was headed home alone, low on fuel and ammunition.

From the east there came a dot, a single speck that quickly changed into a speeding shark, moving in and out of the line of clouds more swiftly than any airplane he had ever seen before. It banked sharply, an arrow shape curving around the bomber's flank. The American pilot checked his instruments and dove. This was a predator from a new technology, something special that must be reported—after he killed it.

The German pilot focused on his attack. He knew how many hits it took to hurt a B-17 and how savagely a formation of them responded. In the old piston-engine Messerschmitts, he'd had to fly long, tenacious attacks, trying to concentrate twenty or thirty cannon shells in a vital spot, aiming and shooting amid a virtual bath of machinegun fire from the bombers. Fearful and inexperienced pilots would fire from a thousand yards out, fanning their shells into a pattern through which the bombers could slip.

Keeping his turn wide, the German pilot banked around the northern edge of the bombers, wisps of moisture curling from his swept-back wings. He wanted to pass through the formation diagonally, preventing all the guns from being trained on him at once, curving constantly, masking his own plane with those of the enemy. He knew that most of the gunners would fire behind him, unprepared to compute the lead necessary to nail a target moving at his jet's 850 kilometers per hour.

Turning in, he selected the B-17 at the northernmost corner of the formation, noting its graceful shape, the green diamond mark on its vertical surfaces, and the brush-bristle stippling from the machine guns studding it. He didn't see the name
Rebel Rose
on the nose or the copilot crossing himself.

In three seconds his six cannon hurled ninety-six pounds of lead, the tight cluster of shells impacting near the inner port engine, shredding the aluminum bridge-truss structure of the spars and ribs. The unleashed gyroscopic forces of the overspeeding propeller ripped the engine from its mounts, wrenching the wing apart, sending the
Rebel Rose
reeling, the dead crew members at peace, the living to face long tumbling moments of terror before the impact. The lone German plane skimmed over the dying B-17 like a track star leaping a hurdle, cutting to the formation's center. Its pilot pressed the trigger again, pouring a terrible fire into the bomb bay of a B-17 named
Cloud Duster,
the crew on its thirtieth and—truly last—mission. Plunging through the red-black explosion of metal and body parts, the pilot hoped that the jet engines would not suck in the debris.

Exactly ninety degrees from where his first victim still spun toward the ground, he put the formation leader in his sights, a touch of rudder sliding him to the left to rake its forward fuselage. It was the
Minnesota Mauler,
its crew proud to be carrying the Bomb Group Commander on its twentieth mission. The young colonel commanding was alert, aware of the intruder in his flock, unable to deal with it. The cries of "Bogie at six o'clock" and "B-17 going down" had squirted adrenalin through him, changing everything. A moment ago the mission had been but a stepping-stone to his stars. Now the mission was survival.

The German jet shuddered as it fired, destroying the bodies, minds, and ambitions of the two men at the controls. The dying colonel convulsively hauled back on the B-17's control column, pulling the bomber up into a violent stall, tumbling the remaining crew like dice in a cup and trapping them in the spinning wreck.

Inside the other bombers, the eager gunners were calling off the jet's position, firing randomly.

The German pilot climbed, a hawk circling panicked rabbits. Invulnerable, he glanced down at the black strings of gunfire still erupting futilely in all directions from the formation. Enough fuel and ammunition for one more run, he thought, then home for a drink.

The single American fighter pilot hurled his aircraft toward the battle, ignoring the fires buzzing from the desperate bombers. He roared toward the German plane at top speed, but the distance seemed unchanged as he watched the German plane tear up the bombers. In dreamlike slow motion, though his nose was thrust down, his throttle full forward, he couldn't close and stop that lethal green-black shark from tearing bloody chunks out of the formation.

His Mustang quivering like a reed, he deliberately fired from too far to distract the enemy. All six of his . 50-caliber wing guns were firing at first, then four, then three, as the ammunition was exhausted. As he dove through the formation the bombers' gunners fired frenziedly at him, not recognizing him as a friend, riddling his fuselage with hits. His radio suddenly went dead.

He didn't see the Messerschmitt break off its attack, climbing insolently, the raw power of its jets lifting it faster than any piston-engine plane could follow, the pilot only mildly annoyed at the interruption.

The B-17s clustered together again, closing up the gaps torn from the formation, guns silent now, the Deputy Group Commander's voice coming over the air hesitantly, repeating "Close it up," and then, plaintively, "See any chutes?" There was a quick gabble of responses; no one had seen any chutes. Finally a quiet Alabama voice asked, "What was that that come through us? A rocket?" There was no answer.

Far below, the normally docile Mustang hurtled down toward the green German countryside, controls locked solid by air squeezed to compressibility, battering at the speed of sound, airframe porpoising and shuddering as if it were flying through boulders instead of clouds. The pilot had chopped the throttle and tried to roll the airplane to safety, but the ailerons were as locked by speed as he was by fear as he plunged vertically, insane aerodynamic forces tucking his nose under, ripping control away from him. The rate-of-descent meter pegged as the altitude melted away, clouds whipping past. He placed both feet on the bottom of the instrument panel, leveraging his grunting heave on the stick. It didn't matter if he bent the wings or pulled them off; the alternative was to punch a big black hole in the earth. The ground was looming up, no longer just colors, but now flecked with roads and lakes, crossed by fences and tree lines. He was horsing back on the stick and the houses were getting bigger and bigger, straight beneath him, the landscape scroll was not rolling, he was going to go straight in, bore down thirty feet, become fused with the engine in an amalgam of flesh and oil and fire.

***

Chapter 1

Yankee Stadium, New York/October 9, 1938

The score was 4 to 3, Yankees, but the raucous Cub fans were roaring with expectation—the series wasn't over yet. In the McNaughton Aircraft company box, halfway down the third-base line, four people were gamely trying to stitch together the relationships ripped by the morning's arguments. A fifth person, the man who had done much of the ripping, was oblivious both to the situation and the game. Colonel Henry Myers Caldwell was totally engrossed in the good-looking woman sitting next to him.