The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (47 page)

He plunges almost vertically, but regains control just above the surface with desperate strength, and climbs steeply – mortally hit. I see him struggling to get out – he wants to jump, He’s like a hunted quarry during any such chase and I feel with him – pray feverishly for him.

There she goes! The damaged aircraft’s climbing vertically in front of me in its last convulsion, the great roundels on the wings standing out bright and hostile – filling me only with horror. In the seconds which decide a man’s life my finger again crooks automatically one millimetre – and the burst streaks redly out! – I shudder. It shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t necessary. But I can’t bring those deadly jewels back; it’s done now.

“Jump! man, jump!” I shouted aloud in despair. Instead I see him bathed in the red of his own blood; his body strains half over the side to hang there, mutilated. Then the waves close over him. . . .

Perhaps it was only the trembling of my finger that brought death to that man? I didn’t know. But again it came to me – how fate goes its own way and strikes us down as it pleases. I couldn’t stop it, and nor could you – whoever you may have been.

I turned over on my pillow and reached for the reading-lamp and the cigarettes. For a long while I gazed meditatively at the pictures of my parents. Perhaps tomorrow they would be weeping for me.

“Still awake?” Ulrich asked softly, although he knew well I wasn’t sleeping. He too was staring at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about?”

“What am I thinking about. . . .” I repeated, rather at a loss. It was a difficult question; as a soldier I had had to forget how to talk from the heart. But it was easier to talk lying there gazing upwards – you can speak so much more easily and naturally to the ceiling.

“What am I thinking about, Ulrich? The Tommy of this morning,” I confessed. “It simply wasn’t necessary. Why didn’t the man jump before he did?”

“You must forget it,” Ulrich replied. “One gets used to anything, including shooting people down . . . but even so, war’s a pretty bloody business.” We were silent. “But, you know,” he began again after a pause, “it’s a great deal bloodier for someone like me who does it all without any real conviction.”

Nothing more was said. I don’t know how long we lay there with our eyes open, and the light was still burning when the dawn woke us.

THE STRAITS OF MESSINA

JOHANNES STEINHOFF

A veteran of the Battles of Britain and Stalingrad, Steinhoff assumed command of
Jagdgeschwader 77
(77th Fighter Group) in 1943, shortly before its withdrawal from Tunisia in the face of Allied victory there. The evacuation was carried out in dramatic fashion, with Group pilots carrying mechanics in the fuselage of their Messerschmitt 109s over the sea to Sicily. The
Jagdgeschawder
11 found little peace in Sicily, however, for on 10 July 1943 the Allied invasion of Sicily began. Here is an extract from Steinhoff ‘s diary of 12 July, 77’s last day on the island. It was a turning point of the war for Steinhoff, the moment at which he understood that the Luftwaffe had “been assigned a task which was incapable of execution”‘. It was also the selfsame day that Goering issued his infamous order to the fighter pilots of the Second Air Force demanding “an immediate improvement in fighting spirit”. This blithely ignored the real reason for Luftwaffe fighter arm’s lack of success – which is that German aircraft were generally unable to match the speed and armament of Allied planes.

The remorseless jangling of the telephone dragged me from my sleep. The noise was unpleasantly loud and in a daze I felt for the receiver in the darkness.

“Teleprint from Air Corps, sir. We made contact at midnight but we’ve lost it again now. Shall I read it out?”

“Wait a moment. I’ll have to turn the light on.”

I looked for the switch in the dark, but when at last I found it, I turned it in vain. There was no current. Eventually I managed to find some matches with which to light the candle stump on the plate beside my camp-bed. My movements were slow, for I was unspeakably tired. As I lay down again in my sweat-soaked pyjamas and picked up the receiver my limbs felt heavy as lead.

“Will you read it out, please.”

In expressionless tones the teleprinter operator, a leading aircraftsman, began to read: “ ‘To the Second Air Force. Together with the fighter pilots in France, Norway and Russia, I can only regard you with contempt. I want an immediate improvement in fighting spirit. If this improvement is not forthcoming, flying personnel from the commander down must expect to be remanded to the ranks and transferred to the eastern front to serve on the ground. Göring, Reichsmarschall’ . . . Are you still there, sir?”

“Yes, thank you. Will you bring it over to the ops room.”

As I replaced the receiver, the airman gave the three short rings prescribed by regulations. Then the room was deathly still. The candle’s flickering flame cast grotesque, dancing shadows on the walls. All at once I could hear my own breathing. I held my breath and remained quite motionless. Everywhere in this small house people were wrapped in soothing sleep, wholly unaware of this fresh insult. As yet the air-craftsman on the teleprinter and I were the only people here to know of the strictures passed by the most senior officer in the Luftwaffe. I tried to imagine what the man on the other end of the line looked like, for I must have seen him often enough. Perhaps he had been a schoolmaster in civilian life; he might even be old enough to be my father. All at once I was conscious of a strange bond between this invisible airman and myself.

But the mood passed quickly, thrust aside by the realization of the sheer brutality of the unbelievable message I had just heard. What ought I to do about the signal? Ought I to read it out in front of a muster parade? But if I were to appear before them and talk about “fighting spirit” they would look at me in mute reproach. Their expressions would tell me that my duty as a C.O. was to spare them such phrases.

So this was what had come of our general’s efforts to save us from court martial. Fighting spirit indeed! In an hour’s time another day would begin and with it yet another feat of improvisation such as had been demanded of us every single day since our return to Sicily. With what we could scrape together of the remnants of the group, we would fly along the north coast and over Etna’s crater towards the Straits of Messina where we would fling ourselves at the Flying Fortresses in a series of uncoordinated attacks. Our numbers were so few that we would do little damage, and even that little depended upon our breaking through to the bombers.

Afterwards we would land in Gerbini if the airfield was still usable, or else at Catania. We would refuel our aircraft by hand-pump, rearm and top up with oil. We would leap into slit trenches and shelters and wait for the bomb carpets to unroll over us. And then we would crawl out again, haul the wrecked aircraft to one side, repair any minor damage and, provided we still had enough machines to make up a modest formation, take off on the next patrol. This was what all these men had had to go on doing day after day. And now I was expected to talk to them about fighting spirit!

I doubted whether we would be able to hold out in Trapani for the remainder of the day. The bombers appeared without warning since they came in too low to be picked up by our direction finders. Flying in close formation, they had been showering down bombs on the airfield until it resembled a lunar landscape. The advanced landing ground near Corleone would therefore have to be our last refuge. Up to now, however, it had been nothing more than a long field covered with yellow wheat stubbled and marked out with whitewashed stone slabs.

We would be like hunted animals seeking cover. And without either telephone or supplies we would be cutting ourselves off from the outside world. Nor was there another airfield left in western Sicily.

I must have fallen asleep, for again the telephone jerked me out of a brief spell of blissful unconsciousness. “Four o’clock, sir.”

The first light of day was filtering through the Venetian blinds as I got up to open the shutters. I still felt utterly exhausted; indeed, I seemed to be in a permanent state of fatigue. I had but one desire and that was to sleep.

In the next room Tubby was opening the shutters, putting the chairs in place and rattling the breakfast crockery. It had become a little cooler. In the wan light before dawn, the sickle-shaped bay, the terraces, gardens and white houses were lightly shrouded in mist through which black pines thrust upwards and smoke from chimneys rose perpendicularly into the sky.

Bachmann and Straden, who were sitting at the table when I entered the day room, answered my “good morning” in low, morose voices. None of us felt any desire to converse. What we really wanted to do, as we drank Tubby’s strong hot coffee, was to cradle our heads in our arms on the table and sleep.

Kegel came in, sat down and pushed the teleprint over to me without speaking. The white strips of printed text had been pasted neatly on to the pale pink paper of the official form. The first words to spring to the eye, appearing as they did well below the main portion of the long signal, were “Göring, Reichsmarschall”.

“. . . regard you with contempt . . .” I had no wish to read to the end. It was not my habit to shirk what was unpleasant but this repelled me. It seemed to be directed at myself alone; I was the man responsible for this group and I, personally, was the object of his contempt.

I handed the signal across the table. Straden took it and he and Bachmann began to read. Then, slowly and carefully, he put the paper down on the table, rose, took his cap from its hook and left the room without a word. Bachmann looked after him uncertainly, then at me and Kegel, eased his chair back and followed Straden. On his way out he said quietly: “I’m driving to the ops room, sir.”

The telephone rang. “It’s the general, sir.”

The general’s voice came from a long way away and was overlaid with crackles and hisses. So as to hear him better I held my breath and motioned to Kegel and Tubby to keep quiet.

“We’re near Taormina,” the general said. “We’re surrounded – d’you understand me? Comiso is no longer usable.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wanted to call you last night before that signal went out but I couldn’t get through to you . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen, you’re not to take it seriously. I did what I could. I’ve been urging him to abandon the whole business, but then he sent this signal to Air Corps.”

He did not continue and I remained silent. Finally he asked: “Can you still hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Collect all the aircraft in western Sicily and go to Gerbini. The airfield is usable. By now your 3 Wing will be on its way from Sardinia and they will also land at Gerbini. Your job is to protect the Straits of Messina. Can you tell me how many aircraft will be arriving?”

“Between fifteen and twenty belonging to 2 Wing and Group H.Q. No. 1 hasn’t reported yet.”

“Have you any questions?”

I had indeed, lots of them, but in terms of German military tradition most were not of the kind a major can ask a general.

“Yes, sir. What’s the situation? How far have the Allies got?”

“The pressure on our ground troops has increased enormously and we shall be concentrating our defence in the eastern portion of the island. It’s possible that you’ll have to move soon. The enemy is pressing on towards the centre of the island.”

“But where is the group to move to, sir?”

“I don’t know yet,” was his somewhat irritable reply. “For the time being no German soldier may leave Sicily. But you should get all your vehicles ready for a move. There’ll be no transport aircraft – Air Corps haven’t a Ju left. And once again: don’t take that teleprint too seriously. D’you promise me that?”

What could I say over a telephone line that might go dead at any time? We had already discussed this question once before for several hours and had found no solution, so it was quite pointless to say anything further now. I therefore replied:

“Yes, sir.”

I felt almost ashamed of my attitude when speaking to the general. It seemed to me that I had been an accessory to an act of treachery of which our pilots were the victims. At the same time I realized how diabolical was the dilemma in which the general found himself. I had thrown in the sponge, simply answering “Yes, sir”. In this answer lay that trust in one’s superior – a whole attitude towards life – which had been instilled into us, into our fathers and into their fathers before them. For us soldiers it had hitherto been the only right attitude, indeed the only conceivable one. The obedience practised for centuries by the German soldier had always presupposed an unshakeable trust that the orders he received would be sensible orders and that the high command would search their hearts very carefully before sacrificing whole formations. And the many who were sacrificed died in the certainty that this was so. Increasingly of late I had found this reflected in the mute expressions of my pilots though for some time there had been a distinct note of interrogation. It still holds good, doesn’t it, sir? they seemed to be asking me. It surely must have some sense if the high command demands it of us, surely it must!

But supposing that something had gone wrong with part of this old military equation? Who were the “high command” anyway? Supposing that after 1933 a new factor had entered this hierarchy of obedience, a factor which had suddenly allowed the high command to do what it liked, even something senseless?

Questions, questions! A man would need leisure to reflect on them. He would have to have caught up with his sleep. He would need time, would need someone else to discuss them with. In our business such matters were not discussed. Yet it might have been better if they had been, for in that way our doubts could perhaps have been dispelled.

For the past few minutes I had been standing beside the telephone table with the receiver in my hand. Kegel and Tubby were looking at me thunderstruck. From the earpiece came a quacking voice: “Are you still speaking? Have you finished? I’m disconnecting you.”