Eagles at War (51 page)

Josten, still working directly with Messerschmitt in Augsburg, had begun testing the new developments in combat, bypassing the normal Luftwaffe red tape. Everyone, himself included, knew that it was futile, that it could have no effect on the war, but he persisted just as the Messerschmitt plant did. It enabled him to deny what was happening, to focus so sharply on an instrument of war that the war itself was forgotten.

Galland went on. "It's incredible that the mighty Luftwaffe could fall so low. Imagine, if you hadn't been bombed out, you'd have had a
Staffel
of 262s at Ploesti in August of '43. Now, more than a year later, we're still only able to put up six today! How the hell did we get ourselves in this position?"

Josten stretched and yawned. "It took the
'Groefaz'
to do it, Dolfo. We always said technology would win the war—we just didn't know it would be American technology."

Galland laughed mirthlessly, saying, "You and your technology! It's always just brute force, one set of animals clubbing another set to death." He ground his cigar into the ashtray and said, "But at least in the beginning, we had the clubs!"

They were quiet for a while, then Josten asked, "How are things with you?"

"All right until this morning. Headquarters usually leaves us alone. We're getting more airplanes now—the other bases are being overrun and there's nowhere else to send them. And we're finally getting the R4M rockets issued. If we'd had them in 1943, things would be very different now. They are lethal."

"What happened this morning?"

"They told me that Bruno Hafner is coming in to commandeer my two last transport aircraft. I need them to fly parts in to keep my aircraft in the air, and he's pulling them out from under me. What's worse, we're supposed to escort him in our jets!"

"On whose orders?"

"Hitler's, no less! The worse the war gets, the better it goes for Harrier."

"I don't want to talk to him. I know he was trying to help Lyra, but if it hadn't been for him she might still be alive."

"Too late. This must be him now."

A Mercedes staff car, closely followed by an Opel truck, drove up. Struggling by himself, refusing any help, Bruno Hafner wriggled his twisted body out the back door like Houdini escaping from a chained trunk, then pulled himself upright and saluted Galland. In the interval, Josten moved out of sight behind the sandbagged revetment.

"General Galland, you received the orders from OKW on escorting my aircraft?"

"Yes, Colonel. I protested, but they confirmed the orders. The two airplanes are ready." He nodded toward the field's edge, where the two Junkers had been prepared for flight. Hafner's crew members were already on their way over to them.

Galland pulled the cigar from his mouth and jabbed at Hafner with it. "Do you realize that they are the last I have and that I desperately need them to collect parts to keep my combat aircraft in commission?"

"That may be so, General, but I have my orders, too. Directly from Heinrich Himmler. I've got to get these planes to Leipzig this afternoon."

Hafner, still charged by Himmler with the responsibility of "saving the Fuehrer," had lost his big six-engine Junkers in an Allied strafing attack. Now he was collecting a smaller four-engine Ju 290 and one of the old reliable Ju 52s.

"Can't you wait until tonight? You're sure to run into enemy fighters if you try to fly now."

"No choice. It's Himmler's timetable. And I've got to be in Flensburg tonight."

"Well, no matter what the orders are, we can't escort you. You'll be flying at treetop level at two hundred fifty kilometers per hour. We'll be at eight thousand meters, flying nearly four times as fast. Who in God's name suggested that we could fly cover for you?"

"Hitler. Who else? I told him the same thing—discreetly, of course—but he's buried down in the bunker, divorced from reality. He just waved his arms and told me to get on with it. He said that if you could get three battle cruisers through the English Channel you could get two airplanes to Leipzig."

"We'll get on with it, but with some sense. I've managed to get a flight of 109s assigned to the mission. They'd be better employed elsewhere, but we'll follow orders. We'll act as high cover for them, and they can protect you. But God help you if you get caught by Mustangs—we won't be able to."

Hafner nodded, then walked slowly toward the Junkers Ju 290. He still limped badly, but he hadn't used his wheelchair since early March.

"You're still a dreamer, Josten. There's nowhere in the world for Hitler to go. The Allies would track him down like a mad dog, and if they didn't, we would. No, Hafner wants those airplanes for Hafner, make no mistake about that. He's one of the few who have fooled both Hitler and Himmler."

"It doesn't matter to me anymore, Dolfo. We've got a few more weeks of flying before the American tanks get here. The only thing that matters is keeping these Turbos running. There's still much to learn about jet aircraft."

"You're incorrigible. Other people are here fighting for the sheer hell of it, or because they hate the thought of losing. You are fighting for a piece of machinery."

"I know that it's stupid. But it's as if I've transferred all my human feelings to the airplane. I can't help it—I don't have anything left. It's the only way I can go on."

"What about your wife and child, for God's sake? You don't know whether they are alive or dead. You ought to be worried about living, to protect them."

"Lyra's dead, I know. I would have heard from her otherwise."

Josten's voice trembled with emotion. "And the child is in good hands, better off than he would be in Germany. I don't even know if I'd be good for him—I'd ruin his life just as I ruined Lyra's."

Galland pulled on his cigar for a moment. "Don't talk like this. There was nothing you could have done."

"Yes, there was. And you, too. Before the Stauffenberg fiasco, either one of us could have shot Hitler. We saw him a few times—we could still wear sidearms in his presence."

"We're not assassins."

"No, we just should have been. We've spent a war trying to kill young Englishmen when we could have solved the problems of the world with a single bullet in Hitler's head. And now we've got to escort Hafner to safety, when what I ought to do is shoot him down."

Exasperated, Galland sneered, "Don't destroy an airplane and kill his crew. If you want to shoot him, take your pistol over to the airplane and do it now. Damnit, Josten, you wouldn't even shoot a partridge. I can just see you murdering Hafner, or Hitler for that matter. That's just talk."

Angry with each other for the first time in years, they turned away to watch the big Junkers Ju 290 lifting off to hug the treetops, setting course for Leipzig. The Ju 52 followed it just as the flight of escort Messerschmitt Bf 109s appeared overhead.

Josten felt embarrassed. Galland had enough on his mind without arguing with him. "Sorry, Dolfo, I didn't mean to lose my temper."

The armorers were swarming around three Turbos, installing the twelve R4M rockets on wooden racks under each wing. The 55-mm rockets had the same trajectory as the 30-mm cannon shells, so they were able to use the same gunsight. All twenty-four rockets were fired in a salvo from three hundred meters out, beyond the distance of the bombers' guns. They blanketed a hundred-meter-square area, and a hit from just one was enough to destroy a B-17.

The speed of the Turbo had made the old
rotte
and
schwarm
formations that the Luftwaffe had used since Spain obsolete. Now they took off and flew in a loose V-formation of three planes. The other pilot in their trio,
Leutnant
Karl Rademacher, a veteran from the Eastern Front, walked up as Galland began his short briefing.

"This makes no sense, as you know. We can't fly at their altitude and speed. So we'll do this for show. We'll climb to eight thousand meters and do S-turns above them. If they get in trouble, we'll drop down and try to help. When they get to Leipzig, we'll return here, if we can. If not, we'll go to Prague. Agreed?"

Rademacher asked, "What if we see some
Viermots?"
He was a four-engine specialist, having shot down fourteen of the big bombers. A dour little man, lean as a whippet, he was as focused on combat as Josten was on the Turbo.

"It depends. If I think the 109s can get the Junkers into Leipzig, we'll attack."

The jets burned fuel so fast that they were routinely towed to a starting position at the edge of the field and screened with camouflage netting until the last moment. Galland was in the center aircraft, Josten on his left wing and Rademacher on his right.

At Galland's signal they rolled forward, accelerating slowly. The tricycle gear had vastly improved the takeoff handling of the aircraft, and Josten was soon absorbed in the sheer pleasure of jet flight. He was sure that the other two were caught up in the sense of superiority the airplane gave. What did it matter if there were fifty American planes in the sky for every one of the Luftwaffe's?
They
were flying Turbos, and that's all that counted.

The three 262s climbed rapidly to eight thousand meters, then began curving in great wide arcs above the escort Messerschmitts so far below them. The weather had been miserable on the two previous days but now only half the sky was filled with cottony patches of cumulus clouds, sunlight glinting on their rounded tops. The clouds obscured the planes they were supposed to be escorting but served equally to hide them from any marauding Allied fighters.

Josten divided his time between maintaining a loose formation with Galland and recording his instrument readings carefully on a tablet strapped to his knee. He was flying a specially modified aircraft, equipped with an automatic throttle control designed to prevent flame-outs. There was also a new auxiliary tank installed behind his seat to provide some additional fuel. The extra weight moved the center of gravity to the aft limits, making the aircraft as uncomfortably unstable as a marble balanced on a needle. He needed to use as much fuel from the aft tank as possible before they engaged in combat.

Forty minutes later they heard Hafner's transmission: "QFU Leipzig," the standard code inquiry for landing directions. They had made it. At the same moment Rademacher's excited voice came crackling through the headset: "Marauders five thousand meters below, straight ahead."

"Attacking." Galland's voice carried the same crisp authority it had five years before over England—it was as if nothing had changed.

The three Turbos slipped down in a wide arc, the airspeed nudging nine hundred kilometers per hour. Josten noted with approval the way the automatic throttle control kept the engines within limits, the
"Zwiebels,"
onion-shaped cones in the jet exhausts, moving in and out to match the changes in thrust.

The twin-engine Martin B-26s were ahead and to the left. They were old friends, extraordinarily rugged aircraft filled with heavy machine guns, much harder to shoot down than either a B-17 or a B-24. Through the holes in the clouds, Josten counted eight of them, a group of five and a V of three off to the left. All silver, he thought, the bastards don't even bother to camouflage their airplanes anymore. They think they own the skies.

The three Turbos spread out to approach from the rear. The standard tactic was to dive below the enemy's altitude, pop up level and fire off the rockets, then close in to use the cannons.

"Take the group to the left, Josty; Karl and I will take the big formation."

Josten's fingers caressed the stick and the 262 curved slightly, closing swiftly on three Marauders packed so tightly in formation that their wings were overlapping. He decided to get closer, to fire the rockets from a hundred meters so that their pattern might cover all three enemy planes. He'd be closing on the Marauders at a rate of four hundred kilometers per hour—just time to fire the rockets, then shoot.

Josten approached cautiously, switching his attention back and forth from the target to his engine instruments, where a slight rise in temperature worried him. At one hundred meters out he pressed the firing button.

Damn!
Nothing happened, he'd forgotten to arm the rockets. A silver Marauder filled his windscreen, bullets streaking out from its turrets. Mashing the cannon button, he saw the Martin stagger from the hits as he hurtled up in a wide left turn. A quick glance showed him that Galland or Rademacher had scored against the others, but his own target was flying on, streaming smoke from the right engine.

Deliberately shoving the throttles forward to test the automatic regulator, he noted the calibrated engine response with approval. In an ordinary Turbo, mishandling the throttles like that could have caused a flame-out. Reaching down to arm the rockets, he again checked the engine temperature and revolution instruments to see if there were any changes.

All of them changed before his eyes into a shattered mass of glass and aluminum as . 50-caliber bullets stitched through the cockpit, wounding him in his left arm and leg, shattering the instrument panel and blowing up the left engine. The Turbo rolled violently to the left, its aft center of gravity throwing it out of control and setting the earth to spinning wildly.

As the airplane snapped he saw Thunderbolts pass on either side of him. He pulled the throttles back and let the Turbo spin through two turns, then popped the stick forward and pushed the right rudder pedal all the way forward. The airplane shuddered as if a hand had grasped it, breaking the spin as he passed through eight hundred meters height. Raising the nose he saw the tracers from another Thunderbolt's guns passing ahead of him. He stuck the nose down, diving into the cloud cover below, adding power to the right engine, fighting to keep control of the bucking 262.