Eagles at War (52 page)

They were near Brandis. If he could shake the Thunderbolts he could land there. He looked down, surprised to find that there was an ugly red-rimmed hole in his leg the size of his fist. There was no pain, but now he felt blood coursing down into his boot. He had to land, soon, before consciousness drained away. The altimeter showed only two hundred meters.

Magically, the camouflaged field at Brandis appeared on his left, its pockmarked runways barely apparent against the forested green and brown backdrop.

Radio's shot away, he thought. I'm just going to plant it on the runway and pray. Josten slowed his approach to the field to two hundred kilometers per hour before dropping his gear. Behind him, six Thunderbolts were jockeying each other for position to shoot, anxious to claim an aerial victory over this cripple. Josten touched down as multiple lines of American machine-gun fire created a musical staff down the runway, the notes the puffs of powder rising from the bullets. The Turbo slewed to the left, catching its wingtip on an earthen mound. The 262 bounded upward again, as if it had to make one last flight, a final trip through the air. The seamless steel tubing landing gear sheared off as the masterpiece of technology touched down again, shedding the port wing as it skipped along the runway like a flat rock on the water. Josten rode with it, futilely pushing stick and rudder. The fuselage rose again and then slammed down, flame bursting from the ruptured tanks. As he glanced out of his shattered canopy through the flames he saw one of his wheels bound by, arcing over the debris of the fuselage seemingly in slow motion. There was a hissing sound, and long streaks of ragged fire began bursting past him, snaking over the ground to explode a hundred yards away.

Groggy, he talked to himself. "My left wing is firing at me. The damn R4Ms wouldn't shoot when I wanted them to; now they're going to shoot me down on the ground."

Josten unbuckled his harness and heaved upward on the canopy. It swung heavily to the side as flames began to reach up around the cockpit section. There was no strength in his left leg; with his arms he pulled himself out of the cockpit and to the ground where the wing should have been. Searing flames plucked the oxygen from his lungs as he crawled away from the wreckage. He didn't see or hear the Thunderbolts' next firing pass.

***

Chapter 14

Plon/May 2, 1945

Hitler was dead, his ravaged Germany expiring like a wounded wolf, teeth bared even as life emptied from a thousand wounds. Organized resistance was almost over. There was no longer any grand strategy or central direction. Individual battle groups fought bravely if their leaders demanded, surrendered gladly if they did not. Yet at the provisional headquarters at Plon, life went on at an almost placid pace.

Hafner's presence at the first meeting of the Doenitz government was an accident. The designated Luftwaffe liaison officer, the great bomber pilot Werner Baumbach, had not yet arrived, and it had fallen by chance to Hafner to supervise the pitiful rump that remained in North Germany of the once feared Luftwaffe. As far as he was concerned, only one aircraft was important—the one for his escape.

Choking back his impatience, he watched the bickering for position with concealed contempt. It reminded him of pampered apartment house dogs consecutively marking the lobby potted palm as exclusive turf. They kept up the trappings—the Reich battle flag was raised each morning, wherever they were, and the grand admiral was chauffeured in one of Hitler's own Mercedes limousines. Himmler's menacing personal guard was turned out in immaculate uniforms. Yet they were arguing without embarrassment for precedence in the convoy that was leaving that night, its destination Flensburg. Undoubtedly it would prove to be the last capital of the Third Reich.

Once they had been Hitler's paladins, masters of Europe.
Reichsminister
Albert Speer had galvanized the German economy to unbelievable heights of production—now at the last moment he was accepting blame, and calling for a corporate responsibility for the Nazi excesses.
Reichsfuehrer
Heinrich Himmler had terrorized the world with ruthless killing camps. Now he saw himself at the peace table, negotiating the fate of Germany. Yet, the two men, always cautious, were carrying on a surreptitious dialogue on the prospect of escaping to Greenland and hiding there, a fantasy escape for this fugitive government.

Since the fateful word from the Bunker, there was a new Fuehrer, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the dour fanatic whose submarines had almost brought Great Britain to its knees. Small and wizened, his uniform always seeming to be two sizes too large for him, he had been as surprised as anyone to have been selected as Hitler's successor. Now he seemed torn between a desire to honor his oath to the fallen Fuehrer and a heartfelt urge to end the killing by surrender. He knew about killing. His U-boats had sunk millions of tons of shipping—and of his forty thousand submariners, thirty thousand had drowned.

Perhaps the thought of their deaths had given Doenitz the early morning courage to inform a shaking and unbelieving Himmler that there was no place for him in the new government. It was a crucial decision that affected Hafner directly, for the two Junkers escape planes he had waiting at a small field outside Flensburg were guarded by loyal SS troops. There was no way he could use either airplane without Himmler's permission.

Doenitz and his cabinet had spent the day making meaningless decisions and issuing hollow statements solemnizing Hitler's death.

Now the meeting was breaking up for the one-hundred-kilometer retreat to Flensburg. The shabby Doenitz government, moving in a ragged convoy, was going to run the gauntlet of British fighter bombers, fleeing north of the Kiel Canal to the naval cadet school at Murwik. Himmler, refusing to believe that Doenitz could operate without him, had insisted on hanging on. Doenitz had acquiesced, but insisted that they not travel together. Abashed but quietly defiant, Himmler agreed that his own convoy of Mercedes staff cars would follow the Doenitz party.

Hafner waited patiently in the gathering dusk, standing quietly by Himmler as the last Mercedes was being loaded with the
Reichsfuehrer's
personal papers.

"Ah,
Herr Reichsfuehrer,
it is times like these when the services of our friend Dr. Kersten would be invaluable."

Startled, Himmler turned his owl eyes upon him, clearly unaware of his presence until that moment.

"Oh, it's you, Hafner. Yes, Kersten is a magician. He has done well for you, I see."

"Herr Reichsfuehrer,
may I ask you a question?"

"Not now, Hafner, I'm preoccupied. Get in the car with me. We can talk en route. Right now I have to think."

They sat in the back of the Mercedes as Doenitz's caravan pulled out. Himmler watched his wristwatch steadily for ten minutes, then curtly nodded his head. His own convoy followed.

The road to Flensburg was crowded with refugees moving slowly along the sides of the road while untidy detachments of troops, using any sort of conveyance, retreated in disorder, as much afraid of the brutal execution of summary court-martial squads as of the Russians. The roadsides were littered with burned vehicles, corpses, and dead horses. Among the martial debris, strange mixtures of destroyed domesticity hinted at an earlier, saner life. There were baby carriages loaded with clothes, broken bottles of wine, torn paintings, an open family album with photos staring blankly at the passing parade, dolls, a dead puppy, a harp. All had been at one moment the most important thing in the world to their owners, selected from all other things to flee with. And now they were abandoned forever.

Himmler stared straight ahead, his hands positioned on his knees in the position of a cadet sitting at attention, his lips occasionally moving soundlessly. Hafner noticed that Himmler's usual military luster was dulled—his uniform had not been pressed, and it was without the usual array of medals.

Drumming his fingers on the cushion beside him, Hafner waited to speak. He had left his own car at Plon, but it didn't matter. If he reached Flensburg with Himmler's permission to take off, he'd walk to the airfield if he had to.

In the red haze of the deepening dusk they saw the all too familiar British Typhoons attacking the road ahead of them, a sight as common in Germany now as marching Hitler Youth once had been. Their driver pulled off the road to shelter under some trees.

Himmler turned to Hafner and smiled.

"Our new Fuehrer"—the word "Fuehrer" sounded as if his tongue was handling it with tongs—"is tasting some of the problems of office. I'd volunteered to precede him, to make sure things were safe. Now the Tommies are giving him a little lesson."

Hafner nodded, and Himmler peered intently at him, his eyes growing large behind the round lenses of his glasses.

"What is it you wanted to ask me?"

"Herr Reichsfuehrer,
I owe you a great deal. If you had not allowed Dr. Kersten to work with me, I never would have walked again. Now, I implore you to allow me to fly you to freedom. We have two Junkers aircraft at Flensburg. I could fly you to Spain in the larger airplane, the 290. You could go incognito, and perhaps escape to South America." Hafner had no intention of flying Himmler anywhere—if he boarded the aircraft with him, he would take him to Russia as a present.

Tears misted Himmler's eyes. He had always been sentimental, sensitive to his own feelings, and the nearing end made him more so.

"Ah, Hafner, there are few left like you. Even in my own SS there are traitors. But I can't go. I'm the only one the Allies will deal with. Doenitz doesn't realize this yet, but he will want me to become the Chancellor. No—but you go. I'll authorize the release of the aircraft as soon as we reach Flensburg."

"Thank you,
Herr Reichsfuehrer."

Hafner felt relief sweep through him. He had been convinced ever since that meeting at Nordhausen that Himmler's almost paternal benevolence toward him masked a raging suspicion. Now things had so shifted that he no longer cared what Hafner did.

But Himmler's previous reluctance to provide him with an aircraft had forced Hafner to take risks, forcing him to set the date of his defection early. His last contact with Scriabin had been his easiest—the Russian advance had been so swift that they had captured town after town with the telephone lines intact. Scriabin had simply rung him up at his Cottbus office. Now he was just going to make it. He had arranged with Scriabin that he would arrive off the Baltic Coast near Peenemunde just after dawn on the 3d, 4th, or 5th of May. The Russians would have a fighter escort on station each day for one hour, waiting to escort him in to his new fatherland.

They drove in silence for a while and Himmler turned to him.

"Tell me, Hafner, who made the best offer, the Americans or the Russians?"

*

Munich-Reim/May 2, 1945

"I was here before, you know."

Caldwell grunted apathetically.

"Back in 1936, when you told me I was going on a boondoggle."

As usual Caldwell didn't reply. At least he wasn't drinking anymore. Bandfield had initially been pleased when his old friend had said that he was going to join him on Operation Lusty. But he'd started drinking on the C-54 flight across the Atlantic and didn't stop until what Bandy was mentally calling the "Miracle in Frankfurt."

If they had been in any sort of regular outfit, Caldwell would have been brought up on charges long ago. But because they were operating independently, Bandfield was able to keep his old friend under cover most of the time. It had been a strain caring for him, protecting him from himself. He'd spent most days passed out in the back of the Douglas C-47. The tragedy was that it was exactly the sort of irregular, free-lance work that Caldwell ordinarily enjoyed. Their original charter called for them to "closely follow" the advancing American armies, but the Germans were now so eager to be in American custody that they had twice landed behind German lines to accept the surrender of an airfield themselves. It was laughable—the C-47s they flew were normally unarmed, but Bandfield had had two . 50-caliber machine guns installed in flexible mounts. One was fixed so that it would fire out the big door on the left-hand side, the gunner restrained by a makeshift harness of safety belts and parachute lines. The other fired through the aperture of an escape hatch on the right. They'd been afraid to test-fire them, for a huge long-range fuel tank was rigged in the center of the cabin, and it gave off fumes continuously. Caldwell had requisitioned a small arsenal of captured German weapons—rifles and submachine guns—but they'd lain inside under a canvas cover for the whole trip.

It didn't matter to the Germans that they were virtually unarmed; there was no question of protocol or rank, or of marching out with flags and arms—they just wanted to surrender to the Americans.

"Let me show you something eerie, Henry. All Germany is in ruins, and this place has survived everything. Come on."

They went down a flight of stairs of the Luftwaffe's officers' mess, abandoned by all but its white-liveried staff. Bandfield led the way down a hallway lined with framed paintings of
Staffeln
insignia to a white-tiled lavatory, immaculately clean.

He pointed to large white basins fitted with large drains in the center, equipped with handles at the sides. Above each basin was an enormous faucet, more the size of a fire hose than a bathroom fixture.

The uniform Lieutenant General Henry Caldwell had worn on the Schweinfurt raid when he posed as "Major White" hung loosely on him, disheveled and sported with cigarette burns. He was chain smoking again.

Caldwell sighed, saying lugubriously, "They're strange people, Bandy."