The Dog Who Could Fly (2 page)

A Potez 63 French warplane, of the type that Robert Bozdech was shot down in—leading to him finding a tiny German shepherd puppy in no-man’s-land.

Aeronautics Aircraft Spotters’ Handbook,
Ensign L. C. Guthman, 1943

R
obert Bozdech had a horrible, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as the twin-engine warplane began its shallow dive toward earth. But for once it wasn’t fear of being pounced on by one of the enemy’s deadly Messerschmitt 109s that so unsettled him. In the thick fog that had blown across the landscape, they were all but invisible to any marauding German fighters.

No. It was fear of the guns that lurked below that held him in its viselike grip.

“The fog is down so thick, Pierre!” he yelled across at his fellow airman. “It is foolhardy—”

“And if we return with no photos, we will be a laughingstock,” Pierre Duval, the aircraft’s French pilot, cut in. “Keep your eyes peeled!”

It had been a fine morning when the French Air Force’s twin-engine Potez 63 fighter-bomber had taken to the dawn skies. Stationed at the aerodrome at Saint-Dizier, Pierre and Robert had been tasked with flying a reconnaissance mission over the German front, from where the massed ranks of enemy armor menaced the supposedly impregnable defenses of the French Maginot Line.

It was the winter of 1939–1940 and Germany and France were locked in the so-called phony war. But there was nothing very phony about it from Robert’s perspective, when flying a French aircraft that was a hundred kilometers per hour slower than the nimble German fighters that stalked the skies above them. As he hunched over his twin machine guns in the rear gunner’s seat, he couldn’t help but notice how thick the fog had become. It was condensing in thick rivulets that cascaded down the Plexiglas turret.

Both a spirited maverick and a man of real principle, Robert had refused to bow to the jackboot of Nazi oppression as its forces had invaded his native Czechoslovakia several months before. He had escaped and made his way to France, and after a short stint in the French Foreign Legion had returned to what he had learned well in the Czech Air Force, serving as a turret gunner on a hunter-bomber aircraft. But what he hadn’t quite bargained for was the difference in temperament between himself and some of the more flamboyant French aircrew.

Lacking little in terms of sheer guts and bravery, the Czech airmen tended to be a levelheaded and a solid bunch. By contrast, Pierre Duval, the aircraft’s pilot and captain, had a tendency to be impetuous and unpredictable, as today’s mission was about to prove. Sure, it was a brave move to dive headlong into the fog directly above the German lines in the hope that Robert might be able to grab a few reconnaissance photos, but it was also a distinctly suicidal one.

No sooner had the aircraft begun to emerge from the lower reaches of the fog—its outer edges trailing tendrils of water vapor like wisps of smoke—than the air was rent by the pounding percussions of antiaircraft fire. The German gunners had heard them coming and were poised to strike. The aircraft was too low to be targeted by flak, but all around them the air was laced with the angry red trails of murderous tracer fire.

Their controlled descent through the mist was over in a matter of seconds. In spite of Pierre’s desperate maneuvers, the German gunners quickly found their mark. Rounds ripped through the thin fuselage and shattered the Plexiglas cockpit. As smoke and fire bloomed from the port engine, Robert sensed that they were going down. They were barely two hundred feet above the snowbound earth when he saw the port propeller die completely and felt the enemy fire tearing into their starboard engine.

Robert braced himself for the impact of a crash landing or worse. The hard, frozen ground was rushing up to meet them, a wide expanse of glistening snow lit here and there a fiery red by the tracer fire. Barely minutes after they’d first been hit, the belly of the aircraft impacted with a terrible tearing of metal. The stricken warplane lifted once, settled again with an ear-piercing screech, and plowed toward a patch of dark woodland.

The doomed aircraft was thrown savagely around as its left flank caught on a thick trunk, and with a tearing of steel the wing was ripped clean away. By the time it came to a juddering halt, half buried in the snow and with its crumpled nose cone embedded in the thick foliage, Robert had lost consciousness.

He came to with little sense of where he was or how much time he might have lost. For an instant he mistook the thick wisps curling all around him for fog, and then the acrid smell of burning hit him. The very idea that their aircraft might burst into flames at any moment brought him back to reality with a savage jolt.

Choking from the acrid smoke, he reached down, groped for the release catch on his safety harness, flipped it free, and stretched up to clamber out onto the surviving wing. As he did so he felt a stabbing, burning pain shooting through his chest—no doubt the result of the safety harness biting into him upon the sudden impact of the crash landing.

Having dragged himself out of the shattered turret, Robert half tumbled the short distance to the ground and began to stumble away from the wreckage. After a few paces he collapsed into an exhausted heap on the snow, the shock and the trauma of being shot down overwhelming him. For a few seconds he lay there, struggling to regain his breath and fighting back the waves of nausea, before a thought struck him with the power of a speeding steam train:
Pierre! Where is Pierre?

Robert searched with his eyes, scanning the wreckage and the tangled, splintered mass of bare winter branches all around him. The fog seemed almost to reach to the ground, mingling with the steam and smoke rising from the crumpled remains of the aircraft. It was an eerie, ghostly scene, one made all the worse by the fact that there was no sign of the French airman.

He risked a call: “Pierre! Pierre! Are you there?”

There wasn’t the barest hint of a response. Apart from an angry hissing where the aircraft’s hot engines met the snow, all was quiet. The Germans must have seen the fighter-bomber go down. From what Robert knew of how Pierre had thrown the aircraft around during their final few seconds, he figured they must have crash-landed somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the French and German lines.

A flare of angry red in the aircraft’s fuselage drew his eye. They’d been carrying over a thousand liters of fuel at takeoff, and barely a third of that had been used. Robert sensed what was about to happen and he knew exactly what he had to do. Pierre might well be dead. In
fact, being in the front seat of the cockpit, he more than likely was. But that wasn’t going to stop Robert from making an attempt to find him, no matter if the aircraft was about to burst into flames.

Scrambling back onto the wing, he yelled out the Frenchman’s name, but there wasn’t a word of reply. As he peered into the shattered cockpit he sensed the glowing licks of flame all around him—the fire beginning to take deadly hold. At the same moment he spotted a figure slumped over the aircraft’s controls, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. It looked as if the silly bastard had broken his neck, but from this distance Robert couldn’t be absolutely sure.

He reached forward and snatched at the remains of the cockpit hatch, dragging it open. As he did so he felt a stab of agony in his hand, from what had to be a broken or sprained finger. Ignoring the pain, and the frightening smell of aviation fuel that filled the air, Robert leaned in and felt for the pilot’s release catch. He found it and pressed hard, but at the very moment that the metallic
thunk
signaled to him that Pierre was free, he heard a terrifying sound from below.

There was a hollow, evil crackling as fire rippled along the fuselage. Ignoring the flames at his feet, Robert pulled with all his might, his hands grasping Pierre’s armpits as he fought to drag the deadweight up and out. He had Pierre’s body halfway free when the pilot’s harness caught on some obstruction—yet still Robert was determined not to leave him. They had flown together and fought together, and in spite of their differences they had bonded as brother warriors of the air.

In desperation Robert heaved for all he was worth. Not a moment too soon, the harness came free and Pierre with it, and Robert found himself falling backward. He landed in a snowdrift, the weight of the Frenchman driving him deeper into the cold whiteness. Above them the fuselage was awash with flame, and Robert knew it was only a matter of moments before one of the fuel tanks caught, rendering the wrecked aircraft a white-hot, seething fireball.

With his arms gripping Pierre’s flight jacket, Robert struggled backward through the snow, dragging the Frenchman farther from the wreckage. He’d gone about thirty paces when there was a massive explosion as the aircraft’s fuel tanks ignited. Robert felt himself thrown backward by the blast as a wave of heat and fire washed over him. Burrowing deeper into the snow, and forcing the Frenchman down alongside him, he did his best to shelter himself from the searing heat, and from what he knew was coming.

An instant later the aircraft’s ammunition started to explode as it roasted in the inferno. The silence was torn apart by the terrifying snarl and roar of bullets ripping through the air. It would be just his luck, thought Robert, to have survived a suicidal French pilot and the German guns only to be killed by their own bullets exploding.

It was then that he remembered the full extent of their predicament: they were far from safely out of this one yet. They were well within sight of the ridge to their south, which marked the mighty trenches and bunkers of the Germans’ Siegfried Line. If the enemy hadn’t seen exactly where their aircraft had gone down, they were bound to know now—for a giant black fist of smoke had punched upward from the fiery inferno.

Just as he was wondering how they might make their getaway without being gunned down by the Germans, Robert heard a faint groan from the figure lying in the snow at his side. Moments later the French pilot had struggled into a sitting position, apparently oblivious to the bullets and shrapnel zipping past like a swarm of angry hornets.

“Bloody keep down!” Robert yelled at Pierre as he wrestled the wounded Frenchman back into the snow. “Keep down!”

“I’ve hurt my leg,” Pierre groaned confusedly.

“Bugger your leg,” Robert shot back at him. “If you don’t keep down you’ll lose your bloody head as well!”

Robert managed to keep the Frenchman still until the worst of
the explosions had died away. The aircraft was still burning fiercely, but it seemed as if the ammunition had mostly spent itself. Robert felt a crushing, leaden fatigue, but he knew they were finished if they stayed where they were. Sooner or later a German search party would reach them and he knew well what that would mean. There was a price on Robert’s head as a Czech fighting for the French. The Germans would send Pierre to a prisoner-of-war camp, but for him there would be only a bare post before a bullet-pocked wall and the firing squad.

“Wait here,” he told Pierre, who seemed pretty much unable to move. “We’ve got to get a look at that leg of yours and I need to find us some cover.”

Rising to a kneeling position, Robert spotted what looked like an old farmhouse a hundred yards or so to their north. He hadn’t seen it during the crash landing, but as the smoke and heat from the burning aircraft drove off the mist more and more of their surroundings were becoming visible. Leaving the fiery remains of their aircraft to his rear, Robert began crawling through the trees toward that patch of cover. As he did so he realized that the woodland in which they had crash-landed was actually an orchard, one that backed onto farm buildings.

He stopped a good few yards from the farmhouse and studied it closely. He didn’t think for one moment that it would be occupied, sandwiched as it was between the German and French lines, but you could never be too careful. He couldn’t detect the barest trace of footsteps in the thick drift outside the door. The snow had lain on the ground for weeks now, and it looked as if the farmhouse must have been abandoned shortly after the Germans had started to shell the French lines.

Robert moved forward at a crouch, sticking to the cover of the trees to keep himself hidden from any watchful eyes. Skirting a rickety outhouse, he reached the back door, a wooden affair whose glass
panes must have been blown out during the shelling. Robert reached through the broken glass, felt a key still in the lock, turned it, and with one hand eased open the door. With his other he drew his revolver, and with that thrust before him he moved into the dark interior.

A smell hit him immediately, one of a damp and airless neglect and of fireplaces long unlit. He didn’t doubt for one moment that this place was deserted. He was in what was clearly the living room, with a long wooden dining table pushed against one wall and a stone fireplace opposite. He ran his free hand along the tabletop and brought it away coated in a thick film of dust. Plaster had fallen in chunks from the ceiling, a result of the repeated shelling.

He glanced at the grate and the ashes lying there were cold and black from where rain and snow had made their way down the unlit chimney. He crossed the room and turned left into what was obviously the kitchen. A wide fireplace was stacked high with thick oaken logs, piled up beside an iron stove. A blackened pot lay atop the stove, and Robert half expected it to be full of a moldering stew. It seemed that whoever had lived here had left the place in a terrible hurry.

Above him, the feeble winter light filtered in through a hole blasted clean through the roof, broken slates framing its jagged edges and scattered across the floor. For an instant Robert stood completely still and listened. As a boy growing up in his native Bohemia, he had spent many an hour tracking animals in the forests and mountains. He knew well the value of pausing to listen and to wait, just in case there was anything that chose to break cover and so disturb the silence. Thankfully, he could hear nothing but the beating of his own heart and the faint whistle of the wind through broken tiles.