Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (12 page)

The crew helped Tom run away from the PBY, stopping when they felt they had enough distance between it and a possible explosion. As soon as the motley set of rescue vehicles rolled up, they pushed Tom into what passed as an ambulance before he had time to say more than thanks. He was in the primitive aide station grandly
marked “Hospital” for two hours when his squadron commander showed up, a big grin on his face.

Major Delaroy was carrying a bottle of beer and some more Spam sandwiches, saying, “I knew we couldn’t get rid of you! Just three more Wildcats and you’ll be a Japanese ace!”

Tom winced—it was the second time he had been shot up by Zeros; the first time he had limped back to the field, but his badly damaged Wildcat never flew again.

“Never again! I’m transferring to bombers, where I can get a little peace.”

They talked for another hour, Delaroy filling him in on the victories and losses of the past week.

“We’re getting to the point where we can replace some of our people; do you want to go home for a bit and recuperate?”

“Never! I’m ready to go back on operations right now.”

Delaroy smiled. “Let me talk to the flight surgeon; I’m sure he’ll sign you off in a day or two.”

The CO left the room and Tom went back to the details of his fight with the Zero and the flight back from the island in the Catalina. Both times he had been trapped, unable to do anything. If he had not been thrown out of the Wildcat, he would have gone in with it. The same with the Catalina—if the Zeros had come back for one more pass, the airplane would have crashed and he and the whole crew would have been killed.

There had to be a better way to get out of airplanes. Tom decided that if he lived through this campaign, he would find a way to make emergency jumps no matter what the state of the aircraft.

• THE PASSING SCENE •

Allies invade North Africa; Germany suffers disastrous defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein; Allied leaders meet at Casablanca; “round-the-clock” bombing begins; Japan driven from Guadalcanal after months of bloody battle; German submarine victories peak, then decline; U-boat losses go up; first Kaiser “Liberty Ship” launched; Germans surrender in Tunisia; Sicily invaded; Italy invaded; Mussolini deposed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lechfeld, Germany, May 22, 1943

The Messerschmitt firm was reeling from the backlash of Willy Messerschmitt’s angry accusations of incompetence, and no one was more upset than Woldemar Voigt, the lead designer of the new jet fighter.

Voigt mastered his usually powerful personality, stifling his resentment, as he stood in his cluttered office, head bowed, listening to the balding, jut-jawed Messerschmitt rant about his incompetence and stupidity. Abstractly he thought,
‘This is so unlike Willy,’
for normally he ran a congenial shop, giving his department heads authority to make major decisions. Now he had lost control and was saying things he would regret later.

Only ten months before, the good Dr. Messerschmitt believed he had won the race to build a production jet fighter with the first flight of the Me 262. On the basis of that success, the Reich Air Ministry had decided not to
issue contracts for the rival Heinkel He 280 and instead ordered a pre-production series of the 262s, to set the path for mass production.

Since then there had been a series of disasters that was pushing the program to the brink of cancellation. Last August 11, the veteran test pilot Henrich Beauvais had been unable to master Wendel’s takeoff technique. Beauvais had bounded down the field, tail rising, then falling back down, until he plunged off the end of the runway, tore up a cornfield, caught his wingtip on a manure heap, and spun the sole flying prototype into a mass of smoking metal. Fortunately, Beauvais walked away from the crash, but suddenly things were reversed and Heinkel was the only firm with a flyable jet fighter prototype.

Some evil specter seemed to be stalking the program, and only Messerschmitt’s eloquence had persuaded the Reich Air Ministry to continue along and even increase the order to thirty pre-production aircraft. This was a double-edged sword, for while it was a godsend to the program, seemingly ensuring its life, it required the acquisition of many more scarce engineers and hard-to-find machine tools. Messerschmitt’s forceful efforts to get them caused resentment in the Air Ministry’s bureaucracy, and the barely cordial relations created by the 262’s success were destroyed.

It wasn’t till early in 1943 that they had another flyable 262 prototype. It made one successful flight before it crashed, diving straight into the ground after takeoff, killing Wendel’s top assistant, Wilhelm Ostertag.

Messerschmitt’s voice, normally low and measured, now seemed to climb an octave as he sputtered, “And now I find out that we do not have a viable test program! We have one prototype flying now, in May 1943! This is impossible! What am I to tell Milch? He’ll have Heinkel back under contract in an instant when he learns about this.”

Voigt looked up. He had not spoken since Mersser-schmitt had burst into his office, interrupting a staff meeting,
ordering everyone out of the room. They were all cowering in the hallway now, listening to Messerschmitt scream, ready to disappear if he left the room.

“Dr. Messerschmitt, please let me talk.” Voight was always soft-spoken and deferential in dealing with Messerschmitt, less so when dealing with his own subordinates.

“No, you listen, Dr. Voigt. The Air Ministry is already demanding changes; they want a tricycle landing gear and they want production speeded up! How can I do this if you’ve allowed all the prototypes to crash?”

It was blatantly unfair, and Fritz Wendel, listening with the others in the hallway, decided to intervene. He eased the door open and walked in uninvited. No one else in the plant would have dared to do so, but he was Messerschmitt’s favorite test pilot and had earned the privilege. Wendel came right to the point.

“Dr. Messerschmitt, Dr. Voigt is not to blame on this. You dictated the number of prototypes to build, and you know very well we have to expect losses; we will crash a dozen of these 262s before we begin to get it right, and you know that better than anyone.”

Embarrassed, knowing Wendel was right, Messerschmitt sputtered and reached his hand out to Voigt’s shoulder.

Wendell went on, “And I can tell you that today is the day that we can get back on track.”

Messerschmitt and Voigt looked at him. Wendel was a brilliant test pilot but hardly a production program expert.

“As of today, after a lot of effort on the shop floor, we have two prototypes ready to fly. Last week, I took the initiative to invite General Galland down to fly one. He is here now, in the operations building, getting briefed on the controls and the systems.” Wendel knew he was in dangerous waters; he had exceeded his authority, going behind Messerschmitt’s back to invite the most admired man in the Luftwaffe down to fly the Me 262.

Messerschmitt literally staggered back to the wall, appalled that Wendel had the temerity to so exceed his authority but realizing at the same instant what an opportunity it was. Adolf Galland was the Luftwaffe’s Inspector General for Fighters. He had shot down nearly one hundred enemy aircraft officially and, it was said, many more that he hadn’t bothered to confirm. He was barred from combat flying because he was so valuable as an organizer and tactician.

Voigt’s heart leaped within him. Wendel had put his career on the line, and everything depended upon Messerschmitt recognizing the value of Galland’s approval. They had always planned to have the veteran ace fly the airplane, but not until later in the year.

Messerschmitt’s engineering mentality was a runaway train evaluating the pluses and minuses of the situation. The great danger was that Galland might crash and be killed in the 262. If that happened, the program was finished. Milch would cancel it and Göring would approve. Messerschmitt himself would probably go to a concentration camp—he had already been threatened with prison. Ah, but if Galland flew the airplane, he would see its value at once, and his approval would set the program in concrete, assuring mass production. And then there was the morale situation to consider; if Messerschmitt refused to allow Galland to fly, he would have to somehow punish Wendel for his impertinence and Voigt would also have to be censured.

Time slowed in Dalí fashion, but within a minute it had become clear to Messerschmitt that Wendel had thrown him a life preserver. This was in fact the only way out of the shortage-of-prototypes problem—and also the embarrassing personal situation he had created by berating Voigt.

“Fritz, I should fire you, but I won’t because this is the only way out. I salute you for your brazen impudence—but don’t think you can do it again. Dr. Voigt, I apologize.
I was distraught, and I blamed you for things that I am at least equally to blame for. Now let’s go see if this
wunderkind
Galland can fly us out of all this trouble.”

All three breathing huge sighs of relief, they walked the two hundred yards to the operations building where the dapper major general sat listening to a group of test pilots and mechanics explain the systems of the 262. Of medium height, with a shock of black hair and a mustache that made Hitler’s look like an eyebrow, he sat smoking his usual big black cigar. He was the only pilot in the Luftwaffe to have his Bf 109 cockpit fitted with an electric cigar lighter and an ashtray. He smoked continuously while flying, removing his oxygen mask to take a drag on one of the cigars that poured in on him as gifts from admirers all over Germany and even from the occupied territories. His aircraft carried his personal insignia, a pugnacious version of Mickey Mouse smoking a big cigar. Galland was also the definitive ladies’ man, with sweethearts at every airfield, many of them so devoted that they followed him from assignment to assignment, creating a tryst-scheduling problem for him.

But he was first and foremost a fighter expert, determined to gain air supremacy for the Luftwaffe, despite its derelict leadership. He had made aviation history during the Battle of Britain when, after a particularly galling speech by Hermann Göring, he was asked by the great man what he wanted in the way of equipment. Galland’s response, “A squadron of Spitfires,
Herr Reichsmarschall,
” had brought him to within seconds of court-martial, but it also gained him the undying devotion of his comrades.

Galland was a legend who had emerged from the shadow of another hero, his friend and mentor Werner Moelders. They had vied for being the top ace of the Luftwaffe, with Moelders leading by a comfortable margin until he was killed. His death was a total waste, flying back in a Heinkel He 111 to attend the elaborately fraudulent funeral for Ernst Udet. And rumor had it that
there was not a crash at all, but that Moelders, a devout Catholic, had been killed because he had protested the brutal Nazi policies used on the Eastern Front, going so far as to refuse to wear his medals.

Moelders’s heir, Galland, had seen the Luftwaffe go from dazzling air superiority in Poland and over France to a stymied force over Great Britain. Then, in the vast reaches of Russia, the Luftwaffe became just a fire brigade, sent to where the danger was greatest, unable to achieve air superiority anywhere except by concentrating its forces in a particular area for a short time. Now it was bowing under the great and growing weight of the Allied bombing campaign. Fighters, vitally needed on the Soviet front, were withdrawn to defend the airspace of the Reich.

For three years he had raged against the shortsightedness of Luftwaffe leaders, who had kept German aircraft plants on a one-shift-per-day basis and never bothered to expand production schedules to match the Allied challenge. The same leaders had stifled new developments so that his units were fighting with primarily the same types they had when the war started while the enemy continually reequipped with new and better aircraft. Worst of all, he had to contend with the haphazard strategy of Göring and other leaders, who spread the Luftwaffe around in bits and pieces, instead of allowing Galland to concentrate an enormous force of fighters to oppose the enemy bombers. He knew if he could put up one thousand fighters on a single mission, he could inflict devastating losses on the incoming American and British bomber units and stop the fearsome growing carnage they executed daily in Germany. Anyone else who spoke out as he did, in the forums he chose, would have long since been court-martialed and sent to Dachau. But Galland was beloved by his subordinates and his position was so secure that not even Göring dared move against him—at least not yet.