To Kingdom Come (19 page)

The plane’s bomb bay doors were still open. A cloud of black smoke was trailing out of the gun openings. The twin .50s in the ball turret were pointed downward. There was no sign of life in the waist area, and he wondered if the rest of the crew had made it out. Over the noise of the engines, he could hear the continuous sound of the alarm bells as the plane swept by him in its final death dive.

When
Slightly Dangerous II
hit the ground, there was an initial flash of light followed by an orange ball of flame. He slowly counted the seconds until the sound of the explosion reached him. Five seconds, which meant he was about a mile from the crash site. He reasoned that the Germans would probably head there first unless they had seen the parachutes and were following them instead.

In the distance, he could see a paved road, a winding blue river, and a small town lying beyond it. To his right, the gently sloping terrain ended in what appeared to be dense forest.

As the green earth loomed up below him, he knew he was traveling faster than he should be. He wished there was a shallow pond to welcome him, but it looked like a rock-strewn pasture.

He hit the ground so hard that he bounced, immediately knocking the air out of his lungs. For a minute or two, he lay on his back gasping for breath. When he could finally breathe again, he realized his back was throbbing with acute pain and he thought he might have cracked his spine.

In spite of the pain, there was no time to waste. Using his hands to gain support, he slowly got to his feet. After removing the parachute harness, he rolled the silk into a big bundle with his bunny boots and stuffed it all under some shrubbery.

Glancing around, he saw an old man standing at the edge of a country lane about fifty yards away. The man had a small child with him. They were both staring at him. Neither one made a move. It took the Greek a minute or two to hobble over to them. “Bosche ... Bosche here?” he asked.

The Greek didn’t speak French, but he knew that “Bosche” was a French slang word for Germans. In response, the old man shrugged and shook his head, no. The boy just stared up at him with wonder in his eyes.

He decided to head for the forest that he had seen from the air. With his coccyx bruised or possibly fractured, it took him several minutes to cover the distance with a slow shambling gait. Reaching the tree line, he turned to look back. The man and the boy had disappeared, but a German light weapons carrier was coming fast up the lane a couple hundred yards away.

He knew they had seen him as he struggled through the undergrowth of the woods, angling off to the left as he went. He heard the truck grind to a halt and stopped to look back through the foliage. Two German soldiers were walking toward the tree line, their rifles at the ready.

When he felt he was deep enough into the woods to avoid immediate capture, he used his hands to carefully lower himself to the ground. Fortunately, there was a dense thicket to mask him from view. He could hear the soldiers shouting to one another, but they weren’t close. Ten minutes later, he heard the truck moving off.

The Greek knew he needed to make a decision before the soldiers in the weapons carrier returned with enough men to make an organized search of the woods. He spent a few minutes taking stock.

He was wearing his leather A-2 jacket over flight coveralls, and he emptied all the pockets on the ground. It wasn’t much of a haul. Along with the St. Demetrios icon, he had a book of matches, a fingernail file, and two passport-sized photographs of himself in civilian clothing that were supplied by G-2 so identification papers could be more easily forged if he was lucky enough to connect with the underground.

The only other thing he found in the coveralls was a single stick of Beechnut gum. He removed the wrapper and began to chew. Wouldn’t this make a good
Life
magazine ad? he thought. The simple pleasure of chewing the sweet stick of gum actually began to calm his nerves.

He checked his wristwatch. It was close to noon, and he imagined the 388th was probably nearing the French coast on their way home to Knettishall. There, they would go through a quick debriefing with the intelligence team, take a hot shower, and maybe get an evening pass to London. From past experience, he knew that his own bunk would be stripped, and his personal possessions boxed up by the headquarters staff before they got back.

It was time to move out. From a mile high in the air, the forest had looked pretty sizeable. Using the sun as a guide, he decided to head all the way across it and see where he came out.

After finding a stout wooden stick to help ease his back pain, he began walking west. The forest was overgrown with vines and creepers and grew increasingly dense as he made his way through. It would be hard for the Germans to find him unless they had dogs, he thought.

Hobbling along, the Greek began replaying the Stuttgart mission in his mind. It was definitely one for the history books, he decided, remembering the famous words from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Someone had blundered: Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.

To the Last Beat of the Heart

Mailly-le-Camp,
Champagne-Ardenne, France
Jagdgeschwader 2 “Richthofen”
Major Egon “Connie” Mayer
1110

T
he prospect was astonishing.

In almost a full year of combat against the American heavy bombers, Connie Mayer had never seen anything like it. Three hours earlier, he had watched the massive bomber train passing over on its way to Germany, a seemingly indestructible, twenty-mile-long formation of tightly knit combat boxes.

Now, as the Americans made their way back across France, the air controllers of the Luftwaffe air defense command vectored Jagdgeschwader 2 into an excellent position to intercept the returning Fortresses.

It was no longer a bomber train.

To the pilots of JG 2, it looked more like an African elephant stampede, with ragged formations of bombers strung out across the sky. Even during the Schweinfurt battle, the American bomb groups had maintained formation integrity while enduring the worst beating the Luftwaffe had ever dealt them.

Whatever had caused this force to disintegrate, it gave the fighter pilots an opportunity to inflict maximum damage on the strays and stragglers. Given another hundred fighters, they would have had a feast.

Three days earlier, Connie Mayer had enjoyed one of his best days in the air, single-handedly shooting down two Fortresses in less than an hour. Those two engagements had brought his victory total of American multiengine bombers to seventeen, but the stoic Mayer wasn’t counting.

No matter how many B-17s he and his fellow pilots shot down, increasing numbers of them were attacking the Fatherland every month, and it was only a matter of time until the Americans had long-range fighters with belly tanks to escort them all the way to Germany and back. Mayer would do his best as long as he lasted.

At 1110, he was leading a staffel of Jagdgeschwader 2
’s
Fw 190s ten miles northeast of Troyes in the Champagne-Ardenne when he waded into a cluster of bombers approaching from the southeast.

Attacking from twelve o’clock high, he rolled over and headed down toward his first quarry. Opening fire at a distance of thirty meters, he watched the tracer rounds from his drum-fed 20-millimeter cannons disappear into the bomber’s cockpit before he passed beneath it.

By the time he had turned for a second attack, the stricken bomber had already nosed over in a dive, blowing up when it hit the ground near the village of Mailly-le-Camp.

He had posted his eighteenth bomber kill. He went looking for more.

Troyes, France
388th Bomb Group
Patricia
Ted Wilken
1117

Ted and Warren could see them coming.

It was a big swarm of fighters, twenty at least. They had inline engines. Warren hoped they were Spitfires, the ones promised in the premission briefing that would meet the returning bombers over France to escort them home.

They weren’t.

The first waves of fighters were ME-109s. Several of them peeled off from the pack to attack
Patricia
. They each made only one pass before moving on to attack the formations coming behind. None of the cannon fire struck home.

The ME-109s were quickly followed by a staffel of Fw 190s. Warren counted at least fifteen of them, some with silver and black crosses on the fuselage, others with yellow and black checker markings.

Connie Mayer led the first element.

He closed on
Patricia
at 400 miles an hour and opened fire with a short burst from his cannons, passing beneath the bomber a few moments later. An immediate explosion rocked
Patricia
’s nose as one of the shells demolished the bombardier’s plexiglass screen. Another shell ignited a fire in the compartment.

When Ted used his throat mike to ask for a damage report in the nose, Swede Johnson, the young navigator, said that the new bombardier was dead and that he was badly wounded.

Lyle Merrill, the top turret gunner, started down to the nose compartment to help Swede, but Warren told him to get back in the top turret and keep firing until the attacks ended. Desperate for more speed, Ted told Warren to take over the flight controls while he adjusted the mercury levels of the four superchargers to maximize their engine power.

Connie Mayer made his next attack on
Patricia
from below and behind.

With practiced dexterity, he raked the bomber’s fuselage from the waist section to the nose. One of the 20-millimeter shells exploded behind the armor-plated seat backs in the cockpit.

A piece of shrapnel hit the ship’s compass, spattering flammable fluid around the cockpit. One metal shard sliced into Warren’s left arm. Another took off a small section off his finger.

“I’m hit ... I’m hit,” cried out Johnny Eichholz,
Patricia
’s eighteen-year-old ball turret gunner, on the intercom.

Ted called down to ask him if he could continue to man the gun, but no answer came back. In the radio compartment, Joe Schwartzkopf noted that the waist guns had also gone idle. Looking back along the interior of the fuselage, he saw that the two machine gunners were both down.

As acrid smoke began filling the flight deck from the fire in the nose compartment, Connie Mayer drove into them again with another frontal attack. One of the shells blew out a large section of the cockpit windshield in front of Ted, severely wounding him in the hands and face.

Behind him in the top turret, Lyle Merrill was hit in the chest by another round, killing him instantly. Warren turned to see his body collapse onto the floor of the flight deck behind the cockpit.

Ted’s face was covered with blood. Icy wind flooded the cockpit through the shattered windshield, sending a foggy red mist through the air. The already wounded Warren found himself wondering how much of it was his and how much was Ted’s.

Along with the blaze raging in the nose compartment, something ignited the fluid that had spattered the instrument panel, and the cockpit began filling with smoke. Mingled with the smell of melting rubber was the odor of burning flesh.

When the fire began to burn the back of his feet, Warren reached down for his parachute. He kept it under the copilot’s seat so that he could occasionally kick it during the course of the missions to make sure it was there.

The fourth and final pass by Connie Mayer had severely damaged
Patricia
’s control levers and rudder cables. Fire was now all around them, burning Ted’s hands as he clutched the steering column to try to keep the plane under control.
Patricia
began sliding over into a flat spin.

“Get out, she’s going,” Ted called to the crew over the intercom.

In the radio compartment, Joe Schwartzkopf grabbed his parachute from the deck and clipped it to his chest harness as
Patricia
slid over. The overhead escape hatch was directly above him, and he pulled the emergency lever.

The hatch dropped away, and with the strength of desperation he climbed through the narrow opening. The force of the wind slammed him into the vertical radio antenna. He held on to it for dear life.

For Joe, the stricken plane still seemed more solid and reassuring than the idea of falling through three miles of space by himself. The two-hundred-pound giant also had a distrust of parachutes, and had heard numerous stories of them failing to open. He decided to stay with the plane as long as he could.

Flames and smoke were belching out of the top turret when he lost his grip on the antenna rod and fell away, careening into the right wing before skidding off and falling into space.

After plummeting several hundred feet, he pulled the rip cord on the chute pack.

Nothing happened. He looked down to make sure that he had pulled it all the way out. The cord was no longer connected to the chute, but the canvas pack remained tightly sealed as he continued to drop through the sky.