The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (38 page)

Four distinct sounds yammer at Lottie’s window. At the bottom, like the bass voice in a quartet, is the hum of the planes, a pleasant sound really, a deep purr that seems to come from everywhere at once. Next up is the beat of explosions going off in the city. The bombs fall in the north and northeast sectors of Berlin, in Reinickendorf, Wedding, and Pankow, on the factories there, and in the city center, around the Brandenburg Tor and Hitler’s Chancellery, only two miles from where Lottie sits. Higher pitched than the detonations is the tattoo of German flak guns situated on top of four massive concrete towers, spread across the city. The flak breaks the manicured vision of the bombers high overhead with black cottony puffs in their path. The last voice is the bombs themselves, they whistle and squeal on their way down like excited schoolchildren hurrying to play.

Lottie does not hear the four voices in cacophony but separately, as instruments and scripted parts in the music of the killing of Berlin.

For twenty minutes she stares across the cityscape and into the cloud-free sky. She watches the bombs go to earth and hears the eruptions without horror, she imagines buildings staggering and tumbling just two miles away from her window in Charlottenburg. Lottie is not afraid; she feels she has already been taken away from here, she is on the bus and safe, and all that she sees today and tomorrow and until she is safe is nothing but the overture. The fact that the bombs fall close to her but miss is a nice bit of proof.

How will the
Amis
receive her and the BPO? Lottie imagines the nightfall bus ride, all the men in suits clutching their instruments, their passports to life. There will be challenges at roadblocks, but the trucks and buses will be waved through when the German guards learn who the passengers are. Every minute will be another mile away from Berlin. Finally, an English voice will bark in the dark. Halt! The convoy will stop and the musicians will climb off and kiss the ground. We are world-class musicians, not combatants, we’ll be honored by the
Amis.
Perhaps we’ll assemble right there and play for them.

But these are the Americans right now in the sky, lashing Berlin. Maybe to them, all Germans are bad. No Germans are to be honored.

How will the people of Berlin react when they learn we have escaped? What happens to the BPO’s proud name? Cowards?

A particularly loud report makes Lottie jump on her windowsill seat. She is shaken from her reverie. Her eyes return to the skies.

Something different is taking place overhead. The American bombers have not broken their close ranks, but there is a new presence in their midst, a new handwriting in the vapor trails behind them. Some of the lines are curved, like chalk in a fainted hand; these planes are shot down, falling out of the crowd. What could do this, with so many fighters to protect them?

Lottie hears a new sound join the morning war chorus, not the thump of explosions or the drone of propellers but a rocket ship’s
whoosh.
She catches a glimpse of things up there moving faster than the bombers and their escorts. They are airplanes, but flashing silver, diving and cutting new crazy, fast patterns.

Jets!
Luftwaffe
jets! For months Goebbels has been promising to unveil them, a secret weapon in the skies over Germany to make the cities safe from Allied bombers. Lottie, like the rest of Berlin’s civilians, began to believe the rumors were just bold hype, wishful thinking by the Nazi propagandists. But here the jet planes are. Lottie watches their debut.

This is awry from her fate. This is dreadful. The German superplanes, the jet fighters, are taking a toll. Another American bomber skews out of line. It falls seeping fire and white billows. It will crash. No!

Lottie’s stomach knots. Is it possible that she’s watching the moment of a German turnaround in the fortunes of the war? A dozen parachutes drift over the city, American airmen out of dead planes. The jets slash, the American fighters counter. Lottie balls her fists. The sky, already concentrated with plunging bombs and black-winged flecks, thickens now with even more tumult, a swarming smoking dogfight. There seem to be only two dozen jets against vastly superior enemy numbers. Lottie wants nothing to interfere with her fate. These German fighters risk altering the outcome.

Without moving or speaking, she cheers for the German pilots. This is against common sense. But if the jets can swipe a few bombers out of the sky, maybe the attacks will come less often. Maybe the Americans will learn a little more respect. But nothing more will come of this day. Lottie’s sense of her deliverance has reasserted itself. The end of the war cannot be stopped. It will come when the Russians bring it. Lottie will be long gone. Everything is on track.

And nothing will stop the bombs. Lottie watches the impact of the jets. They shoot down fifteen American bombers, the flak claims another seven. She sees two of the bombers fall into the Tiergarten only a mile away. Dozens of parachutes descend, white wisps of failure. But twenty-two bombers out of a thousand is a drop in the ocean. The American might is overwhelming. Goebbels’ secret weapons withdraw. The bombers’ formations spread out. For another hour Berlin continues to be rocked, it teeters and crumbles. Lottie in her window surprises herself; she begins to despise the
Amis.
Berlin is defenseless. The bombs are like pummeling a man after he’s down. Those four sounds she heard so distinctly at the beginning of the raid now blend into a single shriek. Lottie leaves her sill and closes the window. She throws herself on her bed, covering her ears with her pillow.

When the all-clear sirens sound, Lottie rises. She walks to her window and looks again at the sky. It’s not there. She looks at a black mist, like an iron pot clamped over Berlin. Fires belch an eclipse of greasy clouds into the air. Fallen structures leave whorls of brick and mortar dust as ghostly markers where they stood minutes before. Steam breaks into the wind from fire departments trying to stem blazes with their little efforts. Lottie has seen all this before. But this morning, because she will soon be leaving Berlin, because she will not share the city’s doom, she’s outraged at its treatment at the hands of the Americans. Tonight, the British Mosquito bombers will come and add to the agony. In her heart Lottie has left Berlin. She looks at her home now with the protective and chauvinistic eyes of the expatriate.

She hurries down the stairs and darts for the front door. She moves quickly to avoid encountering the Jew, should he be returning to his basement lair. She slams the door behind her. Out in the street, Lottie heads in the direction of the city center and the destruction.

The air in her lungs is acrid. The people of her mother’s neighborhood return to their homes. They all glance into the smoke wafting low overhead. Many women bring their hands to their breasts in relief that it is not their house on fire or lying in shards. Lottie scoots through the trudging crowds. The closer she gets to the Charlottenburger Chausée, which travels through the heart of the Tiergarten, the more the atmosphere thickens to an almost velvet shroud.

Inside the park, the trunks of trees are aflame. The trees themselves have long ago been hewn by shrapnel down to mangled staffs. Far off, across a sward of stripped earth where there once were grass and shrubs, parasols and artists, the sheared wing of an American bomber lies, the propellers on the huge engine are bent back like dry and dying petals. Lottie finds herself running.

She speeds through the park. Berliners wander on all sides hefting bundles and babes, in bowler hats and scarves, some wear gas masks, they all seem nomadic in their own city. Lottie jogs farther. She dodges a crater, then a fallen tree. An elderly couple sitting idly on the cold ground watch her fly past, there is nothing on their faces, they seem stunned like the park.

She runs for five, then ten minutes. At Hermann Göring Strasse, along the eastern boundary of the park, she slows to a walk. The Brandenburg Tor, the triumphal arched gateway to the park, is chewed badly and smirched with soot, but intact. On top, the winged goddess of victory in her two-wheeled Prussian chariot is still pulled by her four horses, but her journey looks to have been through hell.

Lottie comes to a stop at the foot of the gate. Her lungs are seared from her haste and the soiled air. A charred bicycle rests on its side in the street. Mixed up with the frame of the bike are leg bones; above the melted seat a rib cage nests in cloth tatters, a skull is in an air raid sentry’s helmet. The remains will have to be collected with a shovel and a broom, like street litter. This was an old man, a brave old man, riding his bicycle to warn Berliners off the streets, the Americans are coming. The Americans rewarded him, proved him correct, by dropping a firebomb on him.

Lottie is rooted beside the skeleton, under the loom of the scorched Brandenburg Tor, beneath a sky rippling past in black sheaths. In the streets around her, rescue squads begin to pump air into basements to trapped survivors. The newly homeless sit because there is nowhere to walk. Already women and more old men appear with shovels to clear avenues through the rubble. Food stations are being set up on card tables to hand out soup and bread.

Tonight, the British will come with more bombs. Tomorrow, perhaps, the Americans again.

Lottie sits on the curb near the air raid warden. He has no smell.

She hates the
Amis.
She tries to fight it because they will be her salvation. But they have left the old man on the bicycle nothing, not even his flesh.

~ * ~

March 24, 1945, 1020 hours

In a C-46, 600 feet over Holland, with the

U.S. Seventeenth Airborne Division

Nearing Wesel, Germany

the crimson get-ready light flashes on.

Bandy stands. He’s steady on the flooring, even loaded down as he is. The morning air is clean; the fat transport plane’s flight has smooth all the way, nobody puked. There are two lines, Bandy’s at the rear of the right-hand one. Fifty paratroopers ahead of him check their gear and weapons. The twin doors are open on both sides of the plane and all Bandy can hear is the roar of the wind and engines. Some soldiers pound hard on the helmets and shoulders of the men around them, jacking each other up for the jump and the fight.

Bandy reaches down to his legs to make sure that his cameras are strapped on securely. He doesn’t trust them in his backpack or across his chest, in case his landing is rough. He’s only had one other jump before this, into Spain six years ago, and that didn’t go too badly, he only separated his shoulder. He thinks, you can’t get injured
every
time you jump. This one ought to go easy.

The first burst of flak shakes the plane. They must be nearing the Drop Zone. Men shuffle toward the doors, the two queues tighten. Bandy at the tail end pats his breast pocket. A metal flask of Tennessee whiskey answers his knock. His last letter to Victoria, the one in the plastic wrap he keeps with him always, hides behind the liquor.

In another few minutes he’ll be leaping out over the east bank of the Rhine. He’ll land just north of the town of Wesel, about fifty miles north of Jülich. To get on this plane, Bandy had to hitchhike last week all the way from Jülich back to northern France, to the staging town of Arras, where he pulled a few “famous-photographer” strings and got permission to join the Seventeenth Airborne for this jump. Yesterday the entire division shaved their heads in Mohawk fashion, leaving just a thin pelt from their napes to their foreheads. Bandy turned down the offer of a similar coif. But he is reassured to know that he is jumping into battle with the best kind of soldiers, berserkers.

The Seventeenth’s mission is to land behind enemy lines and push westward, the direction they come from, to stop the Germans from retreating in the face of Montgomery’s infantry assault across the river, under way right now. The paratroopers will take all the wooded high ground they can find in the Dierforderwald, overlooking river crossings and paved routes in and out of Wesel. As soon as they can, they’ll link up with Monty’s charging infantry and turn east together.

The airborne operation is code-named Varsity; the land operation, Plunder. Together they are the twin prongs of Montgomery’s gigantic push for Berlin. The land offensive started last night. This is the biggest assault on enemy forces since D-Day, aimed through the north rim of the Ruhr valley, then set to roll across the north German plains to the Elbe River, stopping only once they get to Hitler’s front yard. Monty sent the troops off with a final preattack message: ”…The enemy has in fact been driven into a corner, and he cannot escape. Over the Rhine, then, let us go. And good hunting to you on the other side.”