Trophy for Eagles

TROPHY FOR EAGLES

WALTER J. BOYNE

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Copyright © 1989 by Walter Boyne

Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where the names of actual persons, living or dead, are used, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. To request permission, please write to: Permissions, IPS Books, 1149 Grand Teton Drive, Pacifica, CA 94044.

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BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE

Non-fiction:

The Jet Age ( With Donald Lopez)

Messerschmitt Me 262: Arrow to the Future

Boeing B 52: A Documentary History

The Aircraft Treasures of Silver Hill

Vertical Flight (with Donald Lopez)

De Havilland DH 4: From Flaming Coffin to Living Legend

Phantom in Combat

The Leading Edge

The Smithsonian Illustrated History of Flight

The Smithsonian Book of Flight for Children

The Power Behind The Wheel

Flight

Weapons of Desert Storm

Gulf War

Classic Aircraft

Art in Flight: The Sculpture of John Safer

Silver Wings

Clash of Wings

Clash of Titans

Fly Past, Fly Present

Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story

Air Warfare (With Phillip Handleman as editors)

Aces in Command

German Military Aircraft

The Best of Wings

Aviation 100, Volume I

Classic Aircraft

Aviation 100, Volume III

The Two O’Clock War

Encyclopedia of Air Warfare (Editor)

The Influence of Air Power on History

Chronicle of FlightRising Tide (with Gary Weir

Operation Iraqi Freedom, What Went Right, What Went Wrong and Why

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Air Force

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Navy

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Army

The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Marines

Today’s Best Military Writing (Editor)

World War II Aircraft: Great American Fighter Planes of the Second World War

Beyond the Wild Blue: The History of the USAF, 1947–2007

Moving America Safely: 50 Years of the Federal Aviation Administration

Soaring to Glory, The United States Air Force Memorial.

Fiction:

The Wild Blue ( with Steven L. Thompson)

Trophy for Eagles

Eagles at War

Air Force Eagles

Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of The Wright Brothers

Roaring Thunder

Supersonic Thunder

Hypersonic Thunder

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PROLOGUE

DEATH
FROM
THE AIR

Guernica, Spain/April 26, 1937

The old priest was in pain, his side aching from the unaccustomed effort of a twenty-minute run. Inside his thin leather black boot, the homemade patch had built, then burst a blister on his heel. In great sobbing gasps he gathered wind for the dash down the arid hillside into the church of San Juan. The rising drone of aircraft engines gradually drowned out the anguished tolling of the bell—his bell. Helpless, he watched Generalissimo Franco's Nationalist bombers drift from their standard V-formation to become a blasphemous oncoming cross, their bellies disgorging tumbling black dots that straightened into keening pointers of death.

Stopping at a twisted hedge, too late to join his people in the church, the priest saw the line of bombs reach toward the sunbaked houses, Basque-built back-to-back at the edge of the village. With drill-press precision the red-tiled homes disappeared into holes punched into the ground like fingers into dough. Then they erupted, spewing their poor contents in black-and-red fountains that built a smoky staircase pointing back toward the next wave of bombers. His rough sleeve wiped away tears as the string of destruction marched across the city center. He wondered how God could let the Germans build such airplanes, with their pretty butterfly-blue wings and propellers glinting in the sun, only to permit them to bomb this poor Basque village.

Explosions masked the sound of the hotel facade slumping into the street, a dusty cascade of rubble blotting out the familiar double-door entrance. He made the sign of the cross as the bombs two-stepped across the square, turning cobblestones into cannonballs in a rising storm of smoke that blotted out everything behind. Despite the inexorable churning destruction he was sure that it would stop in the square. God wouldn't permit anything to happen to the praying people crowding his church. He staggered and his mouth went slack in horror as the insensate blind bombs continued to fall.

The impossible happened. The front wall of his church dissolved from the bottom up, the bell tower easing noiselessly earthward like a child on a slide. The priest burst forward through the smoke toward the screams welling up as the engine noise trailed away.

The first wave was gone, leaving only a single angular monoplane, a red Messerschmitt Bf 109 V5, above the city. It turned constantly to shepherd the oncoming second
Staffel
of
Jagdgruppe
J/88, twelve Heinkel He-51 single-seat fighters.

Circling and dipping like gulls following a fishing boat, they were part of the Condor Legion, mercenaries sent by Hitler from first-line Luftwaffe units to help Franco. The young Germans flying the bobbing fighters were relaxed, reveling in the liquid-smooth roar of their twelve-cylinder BMW engines, pleased to be on a carefree escort mission instead of doing their usual risky ground strafing. They had come to Spain as tourists in civilian clothes, eager to win promotions in an easy war against a crumbling government Hitler had labeled "Red." But then the Russians had sent counterparts in better airplanes to help the Loyalist government, changing the war from easy to deadly. For the moment they were happy, glad to loaf in the sun, waiting for the pampered bomber pilots to finish their work.

To the south, a line of the clumsy trimotor Junkers Ju-52 bombers from
Kampfgruppe
K/88 bored in at 130 miles per hour, one
thousand feet above the ground. These were the Condor Legion's workhorses, aging Luftwaffe bombers that could not defend themselves against an aggressive fighter attack and were totally dependent on their fighter escort to protect them. They were simply dump trucks of the sky, emptying explosives on passive targets, an act without passion or skill. The Ju-52s came in just high enough to avoid the blast effect, low enough for the bombardiers to obliterate the undefended village economically, for bombs were expensive and in short supply.

The casually planned bombing attack was an almost perfectly mindless act of war: innocent people slaughtered in a target without value. No one noted the irony that the bombing helped the Loyalists more than it helped the advancing Nationalists. The German commanders had determined quite by accident to destroy territory about to be surrendered, territory that was already earmarked for destruction by the scorched-earth policy of the retreating Loyalists.

The northern front was crumbling; there was no way to resist Franco's forces as they squeezed the Loyalists, kilometer by kilometer, into the Bay of Biscay. Yet the intractable Basques were inveterate warriors, refusing to surrender. Even as Guernica burned, they launched their last two planes. The snubnosed Russian-built fighters, their gritty green paint broken only by wide bands of red behind the cockpits, raced toward the columns of smoke, the grass from the Bilboa polo field, their airdrome, still spinning on the wheels snugged up in their fat bellies. The pilots—one a Spaniard, one an American—had known each other for only a few weeks, but combat had made them old comrades. They climbed in loose formation as they turned to get the sun behind them to attack the oncoming bombers.

The American crouched in the open cockpit, sheltered from the slipstream. He banked swiftly, checking his rear and then glancing down on the sea-bordered rolling hills reminiscent of the California landscape he missed so much. As he scanned the strange Cyrillic markings on the instrument panel he wondered at the imponderable turns of fate that put him, a pacifist at heart, in the cockpit of a Russian airplane, killing for an alien cause. When he was a boy, his father had had to force him to hunt, goading him with taunts about buck fever when they needed food for the table. In Spain his squadron leaders had dealt with his misgivings by threatening to kill him if he didn't kill the enemy.

It was difficult for an American in the air or on the ground. The Spanish civil war, even though expected and feared for so long, had exploded with an unreasoning savagery that lusted to settle all accounts, political, clerical, familial, racial. A vicious paranoia gripped the land, sparing no one. The enlisted men, the townspeople, the priests, the farmers—all were worn so hard by the bitterness of the war and their own passionate beliefs that they suspected everyone. Even the indispensable camaraderie usually found in every fighter squadron in every air force was missing, replaced by an agonized tension of mutual distrust. There had been only one exception, the other man leading their pathetic last-gasp two-plane formation.

They flew as one, the American one hundred feet to the right and to the rear—not one hundred and one, not ninety-nine, but one hundred feet. It was close enough to see every detail of the leader's plane, the oxide coating trailing out behind the exhaust slots around the broad cowling, the quiver of the ailerons as he caressed a turn, the tips of the 20mm ShVAK cannon protruding from each wing, the bulge of the two machine guns in the nose. His tired engine was weeping oil in a thin film that made what was left of the paint glisten in the sun.

They had saved each other's lives more than once. At the battle of La Corufia, in the bitter January cold, the Spaniard had burst from nowhere to shoot a German off the American's tail. At Guadalajara, he had repaid the favor. Now each knew exactly what the other would do in any circumstance. It was a curious saving grace to being there at all, a compelling human purpose when all the rational ends of duty had lost their meaning.

He understood how the Indians of the Old West must have felt, sad survivors in a changed world. He and the Spaniard were the last remnants of the Loyalist government's air force in the north, sent by the harassed leaders in Madrid to stem somehow the remorseless
flow of Franco's forces. But it was not an air force, just two tired veterans flung against long odds, flying airplanes they had never flown before.