Eagles at War (11 page)

The whole scene looked strangely different to him after last night's conversation with Galland. Yesterday the bombers had seemed lethal and purposeful; today he realized what a puny force they really were.

It was like a tug of war, he thought, each side mustering its dwindling strength, trying to make the last-gasp effort to overwhelm the other. Both sides were worn and battle weary. He wondered if the RAF intelligence was as bad as the Germans'. Maybe they'd just fight until there was no one left.

Josten reached up and ran his finger around the edge of his oxygen mask, letting the perspiration seep out. The prospect of combat made his senses more acute, and he could smell in the arid oxygen a scent of the hay stacked in neat little triangles along the strip at Caffiers.

They were flying as the staff flight in a two-ship
Rotte,
a loss-induced departure from the usual four-aircraft
Schwarm
the Luftwaffe had employed since Spain. He glanced across the 175-meter gap that separated him from his leader. The yellow nose of Adolf Galland's Messerschmitt Bf 109E fighter glistened vividly in the hot afternoon sun. The Emil, capable of 570 kilometers per hour, was loafing along at 450. It banked slightly as Galland ceaselessly checked for enemy aircraft, and on the gray-green fuselage side, beneath the canopy, Josten could see his leader’s personal insignia, the bloodthirsty Mickey Mouse, smoking a cigar and holding a battle ax in one hand—paw?—and a pistol in the other.

The pair of them were lucky, on a free chase while the rest of their squadron mates below were still confined to a close protective weaving orbit over the slow bombers, per the embarrassed
Reichs
marschall
Goering's orders. Just one month ago, on Eagles Day, he had promised the Fuehrer a victory within five days.

It had been easier said than done. At each attack, the Hurricanes and the Spitfires were positioned correctly to defend their territory, the beneficiaries of expert radio detection. The enemy fighters were hacking the German bombers out of the sky, five, ten, twenty a day. And despite their own losses, the RAF kept coming.

For a change, the radios were silent; this, too, was simple fatigue, well earned in months of endless warfare. As soon as the first glints of the British fighters appeared, the usual quivering, yipping cries would begin to jam the channels. Luftwaffe radio discipline was appalling; Josten realized that it was one of the many changes that had to be made if they were to win the war. He wondered if the bomber crews talked as much as the fighter pilots. He didn't know because they were on totally different frequencies, another planning fiasco. It wouldn't have taken too much brainpower to figure that the bombers might like to talk to the fighters!

The pleasure he took in the almost mutinous thinking surprised him. It opened up a whole series of possibilities beyond the daily dogfights. He could help both Galland and Hafner—and really make a difference. It was one thing to shoot down a few airplanes; it was quite another to have an effect on the war!

Josten was jerked back into his cockpit by a sudden waggle of Galland's wing. He caught a glimpse of his rudder, the
Luftsieg
stripes of forty victories picked out, each with a date and type recorded. Josten's thoughts swung briefly to Lyra, then to the horizon, where dozens of dots suddenly swarmed, a whirling mass of lethal gnats hurtling toward the bombers.

*

Above Southeast England/September 15, 1940

Leveling off at twenty thousand feet, the Hurricane gained speed and its controls tightened, imparting the taut, finger-drumming feel of a sailboat placed precisely before the wind. The magnificent Rolls-Royce engine's turbine-smooth song of power inspired more confidence than the American Allison engines Bandfield had flown behind. All the compounded forces of the aircraft—the pistons flashing up and down, the gears turning, the propeller trying to tear itself apart, the suck of wind upon the wings, the invisible air battering it everywhere—all were smoothed by the airplane's harmonious lines into a single flow of power, an endless sheet of energy he controlled with the tip of a finger. Only the hammering recoil of the eight .303-caliber Browning machine guns would disturb the Hurricane's dolphin-smooth flight.

Bandfield had never felt lonelier. He thought of Patty and the children constantly and hated missing even part; of George's young life, the wonderful time when he was proficient in crawling and just beginning to think about taking the first step. He wondered if even a vagrant thought of him flickered through the children's heads. Charlotte must think of him; perhaps even George, with his crooked grin and slobbery smile, might sometimes remember him.

Abruptly, Keeler's voice came through his earphones as loud as if he'd been in the cockpit beside him: "Short John, Short John, this is Natty Leader."

Short John, the deputy controller for Northolt came back, "Hello, Natty Leader, we have some custom for you; vector one-twenty degrees, angels twenty."

Keeler's roar didn't need a radio.

"Angels twenty my bloody ass, Short John. I can see the bastards and they're at angels twenty-five if they're an inch. We're climbing to meet them."

Unruffled, Short John said, "Thank you, Natty Leader, 74 Squadron is climbing behind you."

Keeler's voice was calmer. "Short John, it's a mixed bag of Heinkels and Dorniers with a stack of 109s just above them."

Then, to his flight: "All right then, Natty Flight, line astern, head-on attack on the lead Heinkels."

Bandfield felt his muscles go through the automatic constrictions that tried to squeeze him into a tiny ball hidden by the engine and the armor plate behind the seat. The four Hurricanes had leveled off, accelerating as they swung to the attack. He felt a surge of hope as a squadron of Spitfires slammed into the top cover of German fighters, the two groups first merging in a dense ball and then separating like incompatible fluids into a series of clawing individual dogfights.

Natty Flight bored in and Bandfield eased farther to the left so that he could concentrate on the oncoming Heinkels. They were sinister-looking airplanes, full of complex curves, the sun shining on the perspex canopies and the twin cowlings, little red winking dots issuing forth from the single guns in front.

He crouched down farther in the cockpit as the Heinkel blossomed in size. Pathetic, he thought, I've got this big engine in front of me like a ton of armor plate and that poor brave bastard is sitting in a fishbowl. I've got eight great guns to hit him and he's popping at me with a little pea-shooter!

The Heinkels got prettier as they got closer, the gray-green shapes sometimes flashing a bit of blue when an undersurface was exposed in a quick formation-closing bank. A slight shudder told him he was taking hits from somewhere, nothing vital, not enough to disturb his concentration. He pushed the firing button just as the circle of the reflector sight shrank around the Heinkel like the loop of a snare. The eight. 303 machine guns reached out in a harmonized pattern of ball, tracer, and De Wilde incendiary ammunition. The mass of lead converged into an arrowhead, hammering the Heinkel's perspex fishbowl into powder. The instant tornado of wind fire-hosing into the open fuselage cavity braked the Heinkel to a shuddering, convulsive stall that pitched it out and to the left. Bandfield followed Keeler into a hard turning descent to the right that rapidly changed into a prop-hanging climb to trade the energy of the dive for precious altitude. "Form up, Natty Flight," Keeler's rough voice called.

Bandfield looked around; one of the Poles was gone. Shot down? Or as the courageous Poles were prone to do, just off on some forbidden solo hunting?

The German formations had drifted to the right, extending the distance between them to almost a thousand yards. The void left by Bandfield's doomed Heinkel, now spiraling eccentrically away, had been filled by another.

"Once again, Natty Flight, line astern, attacking, go." Bandfield savored the thrill of combat, wondering at his own detachment, at his lack of concern at having killed again.

Four thousand feet above, Galland's guttural voice crackled into Josten's earphones: "Attacking."

They plunged down on the three Hurricanes, Galland fastening onto the leader. The old pro flew bucking into Keeler's slipstream, letting the brown camouflaged fuselage fill his windscreen, aiming just forward of where the huge identity letters—rf and f—flanked the blue-white-red of the cockade. He pressed and quickly released the firing button for the two cowl-mounted machine guns and the two wing-mounted 20-mm cannon. The three-second burst slammed almost twenty pounds of lead into Keeler and his fuel tanks. Swirling flames and wreckage blotted out the sky around Galland as, unable either to turn or to stop, he lunged through the debris of the exploding Hurricane.

Josten slid over to attack the number three Hurricane. He fired carefully and saw his own victim stagger, turning inverted to plunge away burning, black smoke pouring from a vicious red blot of fire. "Twenty," he thought, "now that's a decent number."

The murderous assault on Keeler forced Bandfield into a violent turn to the right.

Josten pounced on him, trying to edge the remaining Hurricane into his sights when Galland gruffly ordered, "Return to base."

Josten horsed his Messerschmitt around, glancing down to the blinking red warning light. There was just enough fuel to make it to France. He trailed Galland, pushing over in a maneuver he knew the carburetor-equipped Hurricane could not follow. Diving, he realized how right the man had been the night before. All the preparation—and then no time to fight. If they'd had drop tanks they could have finished off the other Hurricane and perhaps protected the bombers for another half hour. He thought of them, plunging toward London, prey to the fighters being called down from beyond the Messerschmitt's range limits. It was outrageous! You couldn't fight today's war with yesterday's technology! Things had to change!

Turning back to reengage, Bandfield saw the two German fighters fast disappearing. He watched them go, at once ashamed to have been beaten so soundly—losing three out of four in a single attack was inexcusable—yet suffused with the unbelievable sense of vitality in being once again a survivor.

All of Spain's old combat fears and hatred welled over Bandfield. He had scarcely known Keeler or the Poles, but to lose them in a single mission seemed incredible, especially to just two enemy fighters. He set course back to Northolt, cursing the Germans, cursing the Hurricane.

We're going to have to come up with something a lot better than this, he thought. Wonder what Roget has cooking?

*

Wright Field/September 15, 1940

"Holy shit!—oops, sorry, Gracie." Hadley's priceless secretary, Grace Davidson, had joined him from California, and she strongly disapproved of bad language.

Roget had never liked paperwork before; now all he did was plow through reams of it, enjoying every moment. It wasn't the usual "you stamp my drawings and I'll stamp yours" review process that had suffocated him years before at Wright Field. Caldwell's project amazed him as its details unfolded before his information-greedy eyes. Even better, Caldwell continually called him in for advice on other projects. The two men shared a rare ability to envision the flow of air over an aircraft, all of it, not just over the wings and fuselage, but over the little details—struts, radiators, even rivets. It was what Tony Fokker had meant when he said, "You've got to see the spray." Only if you could "see the spray" could you tell if a design was really excellent. Too many people fixated on an individual element—the engine, the wing—and forgot that it is the whole airplane which flies.

Gracie was filing the evaluation of the response to the Request for Data R40C—Operation Leapfrog, an innocuous-sounding government inquiry that had detonated a charge of dynamite under the imagination of American aviation manufacturers.

Everything was in the file—sleek twin-boom pushers, crazy "tail-first" airplanes, flying wings—all the things Caldwell had said should be experimented with. Impatient with her calm methodic approach, Hadley shuffled down through the pile of folders and pulled out one marked "McDonnell Aircraft Company, St. Louis, Model 1."

"This is the one, Gracie, believe me. Nobody else thinks so, but just look at this beauty."

The airplane was a twin-engine fighter, conventional in everything except for the sinuous beauty with which its wing, fuselage, and engine nacelles were melded together.

"Lookee how this thing curves together, no angles; hell, it's built better than you are, Gracie—no offense. If they get the right engine for this little hummer, it's a winner. I'll bet they'll know what to do with jet engines when we get them some. You keep your eye on this outfit, Gracie, they are going places."

"You're going places, too. You're supposed to be at a meeting with Caldwell in Building 12 in ten minutes. You've just got time to walk over there; I put a copy of the new contract in your briefcase."

"Bless you, Gracie, I'm glad someone can keep me squared away. Be sure you stick that folder on the McNaughton jet in with the others."

Bless old Henry Caldwell, too, he thought as he walked. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be here having all this fun. But the designs he carried tucked under his arm disturbed him. They were unusual-looking, but none projected the blazing potential he'd hoped to see. Maybe it wouldn't matter—not with the North American job coming along.

The previous year, the British Air Purchasing Commission, desperate for more fighters of any caliber, had asked Caldwell if he would object if they contracted with North American Aviation to build Curtiss P-40s for the RAF. The P-40 was already obsolete, but a new plant could begin building them with a minimum loss of time. Caldwell had been inclined to agree, but in January Hadley had dragged him out to Downey, California—the site of the old Roget Aircraft plant—to talk to the head of North American Aircraft, Dutch Kindleberger, about a new design. Roget had brought with him all the data from the labs of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, back at Langley, and opened the meeting with an unwelcome bombshell.