Eagles at War (25 page)

Caldwell signaled to the busy bartender, who in two sweeping motions poured
branvin
from a greasy unlabeled bottle, then filled their beer glasses while laying down two of the papier-mache" sandwiches. Caldwell drank the rough-tasting brandy—"burned wine" was the literal translation, probably made in the back from God knew what—and sipped the beer.

"What would it take?"

Hafner looked up at him, weighing his words, lowering his voice to a whisper. "I've always been a conservative investor, Henry. I think it's time I invested in my future."

"Go on."

"There's a joke going around in Germany—'Enjoy the war, the peace is going to be terrible.' Well, if, God forbid, Germany doesn't win this war, I want somewhere to go. I lived through most of one occupation. I'm too old and broken up to try to live through another."

"Go on."

"If Germany loses the war, I want to be able to go back to the United States and live out my life in comfort. I want amnesty, and protection. That shouldn't be too hard to arrange."

"Christ, Bruno, you're wanted for murder there. How could you come back? How could I trust you?"

"I've just put myself in your hands. The Gestapo would kill me in a minute if they knew I was transmitting information on the Messerschmitt jet. . . . And let me raise the ante a little."

Caldwell felt the real subject of the meeting was about to come up. Hafner reached into a pouch tucked beside him in the wheelchair and produced two sheets of paper.

"These are spec sheets in English on what our friend Dr. Goebbels calls "wonder weapons," the revenge weapons. You won't believe what you see, but I can tell you it is factual. Take a minute to read them, and then give them back."

The light was dim in the Damberg and Caldwell had to hold the sheets close to his face. The first sheet was headed A-4 (V-2) and described a liquid-fueled rocket, forty-six feet tall, weighing 26,000 pounds, and carrying a one-ton warhead. Range was over 180 miles. The line that caught Caldwell's eye read: "There is no defense possible against this weapon."

Caldwell felt his chest constrict—there had been rumors of the rocket firings, but no one had any inkling of the potential. At this stage of development, its only use was against England. With five years of development, it could be an intercontinental weapon!

His hands were moist as he turned to the second sheet, headed fzg-76 (V-l). At first glance the V-l seemed to be a far less impressive weapon—a flying bomb, powered by a pulse jet. This carried a ton of explosives, too, but had a range of only 130 miles and a speed of about 350 mph—less than most piston engine fighters. But the planned production rate of eight thousand per month was terrifying. Firings were supposed to begin in January 1944.

He read the two pages again to compose himself, then handed them back to Hafner.

"Pie in the sky, Bruno. Germany will lose this war before these weapons are ready. Look what's going on in Africa and all along the Eastern front."

"Don't be too sure. We've been in tough spots before. Hitler's pretty clever. We might make another deal with Stalin. If we put enough V-1s across the Channel, there would be no second front. They take only a few hundred man-hours to manufacture—and nobody gets killed flying them. Just think, every month eight thousand of these pounding down on the ports, the assembly areas, the flying fields, and at the same time the V-2s will be smashing London. No, don't count us out yet."

Indecisiveness had never been Henry Caldwell's shortcoming. He discounted the two "wonder weapons," but the information on the jet was valuable enough.

"Okay, we've got a deal. I'll want full data on all three—the jet, the rocket, and the flying bomb. That means full specifications, drawings, everything. In return I'll start work on getting amnesty for you. It's not going to be easy—you don't have many friends in the States."

"Henry, if the going got tough, neither would you. I'll send the material to you through Elsie."

"Elsie? What the hell do you mean, 'through Elsie'?"

"Well, I can't very well send it directly to you, and I don't want the trouble of coming back here. We've got contacts in Switzerland. I'll have the Swiss attache mail it to her at home."

"Goddamnit, Bruno, you keep Elsie out of this. I don't want you contacting her in
any way
—now, or after the war."

"Don't get excited, Henry. Whatever you say. How do you want me to do it?"

"Have your Swiss flunky contact me in Washington. We can meet at the Willard, and he can give it to me there. You stay away from Elsie!"

Hafner made no attempt to shake hands; he barked a low command and within seconds his bodyguard had wheeled him out through the low door of the Damberg pleased with the deal, delighted that Caldwell had revealed his feelings. It might make things easier later.

Caldwell stood rigid at the bar, aware that he had given Hafner an advantage by overreacting to the mention of Elsie's name. But the deal was almost too good—it could make all the difference for McNaughton with the jet, and the information on the two new weapons would be useful for the next war. Why would Hafner make such an offer? He'd left America because of his "patriotism." Now he was bailing out of Germany, where things were going badly. Hafner had made a fine art of survival.

*

Pitomnik Airfield, Stalingrad/January 7, 1943

He had done the one utterly stupid thing that everyone joked about, grasping frozen metal. Josten peered closely at his fingers, welded to the corrugations at the bottom of the careened fuselage. He was deep inside the fuselage of an abandoned Junkers Ju 52/3m transport, broken in half and covered with snow for more than a month. A canny supply sergeant had told him that it contained a spare propeller governor, one that he needed badly for the Heinkel He 111 he had flown into beleaguered Stalingrad the day before.

The Russians had set up a flak alley on the route from the airfield at Morosovskaya, where he had taken off, all the way to the diminishing German lines around Stalingrad. No matter how he had thrown the Heinkel around the sky, the gunners had tracked him. He had feathered the propeller on the final approach, and only the grace of God had let him pick his way to a landing between the wrecks strewing the runway.

The Junkers to which his hand was frozen had been looted by passing stragglers, then used as a latrine; the inside was filled with debris and drifted snow, crusted over with the pervasive brown layer of ice that covered the forlorn defensive lines around Stalingrad's last usable airfield. Pitomnik had started out as a fighter strip; now an entire army depended upon it as frantic efforts were made to make another field, Gumrak, ready.

Josten had removed his glove to reach into his pocket for a screwdriver, then slipped on a piece of ice. Trying to brace himself, his hand had pushed against the corrugated aluminum skin, precisely as cold as the thirty degrees below zero weather outside.

Behind him a skinny, gray-eyed giant in a torn fatigue uniform laughed.

"I'm glad you find it amusing, Sergeant Greutzmacher. Now how the hell do I get loose without leaving half my fingers inside this crate?"

Greutzmacher stood above him. "No problem, sir. I've always wanted to do this to an officer."

With a great deal of effort, the sergeant searched within the voluminous folds of his flying suit for a moment, unbuttoned his fly, and began urinating on Josten's hand.

"Pull loose as soon as you can, sir. In this cold I've got a short stack and not much manifold pressure."

Disgusted, Josten pulled his hand away, leaving only a tiny triangle of skin. He wiped his fingers on his fleece-lined flying suit.

"Well, Greutzmacher, I guess you'll enjoy telling this story."

"I will if we ever get out of this place, sir. Unless we get that propeller fixed today, you and I both will wind up with a rifle in a trench, and it won't be only your hand that's frozen."

They searched the wrecked Junkers for another twenty minutes before Greutzmacher triumphantly hacked a box out from a brittle mound of congealed oil.

"This looks like it, sir; let's go back to the shack and warm up for a minute, then I'll get some help to fix our crate."

Like most shelters in Stalingrad, the shack was actually a cave hacked out of the side of a shell-hole in the ground, covered over in this case with a wing from a Stuka. The structure was heaped with frozen clods of earth to give some protection from shell splinters. Inside, three petrol jerry cans had been converted into a precarious stove that impartially threatened asphyxiation and explosion, depending upon the fuel thrust into it. It burned everything from chunks of frozen oil to explosives pulled from land mines and mixed with sawdust, to timber splinters. No one got into the room without contributing something to use as fuel.

The dugout was crowded with stragglers, and Greutzmacher had to use the box as a battering ram to get the two of them space to pull out the prop hub to work on it. Josten backed into a corner, leaving Greutzmacher both room to work and to enlist some help from the starving, apathetic troops seeking a little warmth. One was chewing at the bare white bone of a horse's foreleg. There was absolutely nothing on it, not a shred of meat or gristle, but the others looked enviously at him. It would go into the pot of frozen snow being brought to a boil on the makeshift stove.

God, that the mighty German
Wehrmacht
had come to this! Outside, the wind had died down, and the stove and the bodies were generating a real warmth. Josten sat drowsily watching, his mind going back over the years. He remembered the newsreels of the huge Nuremburg rallies, where thousands of soldiers stood in perfect alignment, row after row, steel helmets glistening, packs perfectly prepared, big, tough-looking men, all fanatically supporting the Fuehrer. He wondered how many of the troops at those rallies had survived all the campaigns—Poland, the West, and now this charnel house of Russia. How many of those steely-jawed supermen were dead, how many had been converted into emaciated scarecrows like those in the hut, men whose jaws now worked weakly at the sight of gnawed bone?

At first it had gone well; everyone had believed in victory when the Army had surged across Russia, almost to Moscow, triumphant everywhere, bagging whole Russian armies. And even after the first dreadful winter, when Stalin had reached into his Siberian stockpile and hurled the hordes against the invaders, even then there had been a recovery. It had looked as if 1942 might indeed be the year of victory. Rommel had chased the British once again across Africa and German troops had conquered the Caucasus and reached all the way to Stalingrad.

When the arms of the Russian trap closed around von Paulus's Sixth Army at Kalatsch in November, the Fuehrer ordered the Army to stand fast, to fight or die in place, and turned for help to Goering, a man no one trusted any longer, not even Hitler himself.

The
Reichsmarschall,
puffed with self-importance, had proclaimed that the Luftwaffe would airlift six hundred tons of supplies a day into Stalingrad, enough to keep the Sixth Army fighting until it could be relieved. Six hundred tons a day was an absurdly optimistic promise, even if there had not been the Russian fighters and antiaircraft. For there was, inevitably, Russian weather, the eternal victor.

A hodgepodge of forces congregated in the loop of the Don, on two large air bases—Tazinskaya and Morosovskaya. Neither base had hangars, billets for air or ground crews, spare parts or supplies, but yet the airplanes came, lumbering squadrons of Ju 52s, Heinkel He Ills diverted from bombing tasks, and later, every ragtag plane that would fly, from the fragile Focke-Wulf Condors, normally reserved for long-distance flights over the North Atlantic, to the trouble-prone Heinkel He 177 bombers. It was in all a perfect example of what had come to be the standard German reaction, the very thing Galland had warned him about, a complete reliance upon improvisation and upon "will." In essence, the commanders asked the Luftwaffe to substitute blood for equipment. Blood was provided in plenty, but blood didn't carry food and ammunition.

The airlift could never have worked—there were not enough operational planes to deliver six hundred tons of supplies a day under perfect conditions. When the weather was really bad—as it was now most of the time—the planes wouldn't even land in Stalingrad but simply dropped the supplies by parachute. Most drifted into the Russian lines.

Josten had heard horror stories about the remaining ones that did make it into the lines. Starving soldiers would break open the canisters to find a supply of condoms or Christmas trees. The latter at least could be burned for heat. But bread and fat, the two things absolutely necessary for survival, were rare commodities. The U-boat fleet had vast stores of dried and condensed foods, perfect for an air-supply mission because of their light weight and portability. Incredibly, none was forthcoming. The soldiers had soon consumed everything edible within the ring.

The day before, shivering with cold and feeling sorry for himself, Josten had watched two
Landsers
creep forward toward the Russian lines. It was unusual—most were content to hole up and stay out of sight unless driven to fight by their officers.

Then he saw why. Incredibly, an emaciated horse, its harness trailing, was pitifully trying to get up an icy incline. The two soldiers stood up and ran for the horse, as Russian machinegun fire opened on them. They didn't hesitate or dodge—the two of them smashed into the horse simultaneously, knocking it over. Using the twitching body as a shield, the first soldier blew a gaping hole in the horse's skull with his rifle. Throwing the rifle down, he dipped his hands into the skull, pulling out a blob of bloody tissue that he crammed in his mouth. The second soldier moved forward and did the same. Then, very businesslike, as if they had done it often, they put a grenade between the horse's rear legs and dove for cover fifteen meters away.

The grenade exploded, blowing the rear of the horse into pieces and spinning its forward section like a top, intestines streaming out like prizes from a pinata. The two soldiers scampered out and picked up the bloody chunks of meat, cramming them in their coats. They were hurrying until they realized that the Russian firing had stopped. During the entire surrealistic butchering, the Soviets had been methodically covering the area with machinegun and rifle fire. The two men slowed, picked up the choicest pieces of meat, waved in acknowledgment of the unusual show of mercy, and ran back to their dugouts.