He was met with the weary, apathetic faces of the pilots and a somber look of the crew chief, who had just been assigned to him.
“What?” Johann peered into the burly man’s eyes, his voice suddenly harsh and taunting, as he stood before him on the verge of a nervous collapse. “You don’t like me, do you?”
The man only shook his head solemnly and took Johann’s duffel bag from him. “You’re my number twenty,” he muttered, already turning away.
At first, Johann didn’t comprehend the meaning of his words. Mere days later, when the front came alive and bombs started raining on them with violent force and he had to dig out mangled bodies of his new comrades with his bare hands, he realized the terrifying truth of them. Still, he didn’t complain; neither did he request to be transferred back to his former Staffel. He only wondered grimly why it wasn’t him who got killed under the shelling.
Johann craned his neck through the newly torn hole in the ceiling of the dugout in which they’d slept. The night was moonless but with bright, shining stars – perfect for the fliers. He pondered bolting out of his shelter and trying to make it to his fighter – the faithful aircraft still stood, unmolested, on the airstrip; he saw its heavily camouflaged, shadowy shape in the light of flares that hung like translucent jellyfish in the night air – when an arm clasped his shoulder in a deadly grip.
“Don’t even think about it.” It was his new group commander, Körner. He was a good commander and a first-rate pilot, with his Cross dating back to the Spanish War. He was one of those action-ready field commanders, in wrinkled uniform stained with oil; in boots caked with mud to such an extent that they would give a heart attack to any drill-sergeant in the flying school; but he could read a map like no one else could and always ensured that his men made it back home from the sorties he led. “I can live with losing a fighter; I can’t afford losing pilots, as of now.”
“They’re far away,” Johann argued. “I can make it.”
“And who’s going to help you crank up the engine? I’m not allowing my crew chief into that hell either.”
And so, Johann sat, silent and sulking and stared into the murky nothingness in front of him.
The men were different here too, battle-weary and silent for the most part. There was no movie theater in the dugout and there were no record players to play jazz while lounging in the sun. There were their tents pitched in the muddy ground, overcast sky with torn clouds in it and Soviet Ratas that rammed their fighters like there was nothing to it. When Johann had just narrowly escaped one such encounter, Körner only shrugged calmly in response.
“Ach, yes, they do that a lot. When the pilot is injured and knows that he’s not going to make it, they ram into our aircraft, trains, ground troops – you name it. So, watch for them.”
They crashed their aircraft into everything that stood on the ground as well. They killed themselves and died with a satisfied smile solely because they’d taken a few Fritzes with them.
“Why, they can afford it,” his new wingman, Kersting, declared with astounding indifference. “They have more people than we have bullets. Where one dies, twenty will stand.”
One positive thing about the Eastern Front, where four sortie missions a day was a regular occasion, was that Johann was scoring victories in such numbers that he couldn’t have even dreamed of back in Africa. His fighter, now green-gray camouflage color, was painted like a beast, with the words Black Knight on its fuselage and a rudder so full that it instilled fear into everyone who had the misfortune to lay their eyes on it. Johann stared at the bird long and hard and then quietly asked his crew chief to put a small red heart with the single word “Mina” on it – the only constant in his turbulent life that was still there.
Germany, January 1943
* * *
The stench was nauseating, unbearable. Only due to some inhuman willpower, did Harald will himself not to cringe or cover the lower part of his face as he supervised the clean-up process. Two years in the Napola drilled it into his head that an Aryan man always prides himself on his appearance, no matter the circumstances. And so, he stood, in the midst of the annihilated street, with not a single hair out of place.
They really got them this time, the Yanks. It wasn’t a nearby village anymore, but a city part; not the central one yet, but they were creeping dangerously close and even the anti-aircraft defense was far too overwhelmed with the sheer number of them to eliminate the threat entirely. His Napola, which was positioned on the outskirts of the city, volunteered its help, at once, for clearing up the debris and digging out the bodies. However, when Harald had first eagerly picked up a pickaxe and headed for the nearest rubble, his supervisor called him out, chuckling.
“Put that instrument down, Cadet Brandt. We’re here to supervise, not actually dig.”
Confusion furrowed his blond brows for a split second while his hand was already lowering the pickaxe to the ground. He was too used to obeying superior orders now; used to the point where it transcended from voluntary obedience into a dog-like reflex.
“You’re in charge of this section, from here,” his superior traced a line from one side of the leveled street to another, “to that church over there. Watch for the foreigners in particular. They have their own supervisors with them but those supervisors are no better. They either don’t work properly or bolt on the first occasion. And make sure they don’t eat anything edible they find in the debris. All the food must be delivered to that Red-Cross station over there.”
“Jawohl, Herr Untersturmführer.”
His instructor concealed a satisfied grin. Brandt was his favorite cadet. An exemplary young man.
The day was thick with mist and the stench of the burnt flesh hung in the air, sickly-sweet and revolting. Harald’s bright, blue eyes were tearing from the acrid gas that still remained in the air as a result of the exploded bombs. From time to time, he wiped his face irritably and shouted at the foreign workers a bit louder, as if it was all their fault.
“Dig faster, you filthy scum! It’s a bomb shelter; there may still be survivors in there!”
An elderly German volunteer, with a blackened face covered with stubble, straightened on top of the debris, his breathing labored. “Why don’t you give us a hand, lad? You young fellows are much stronger than those people,” he said, with a nod in the direction of the foreign workers. “Surely, with your help, the work would go much faster.”
“We’ve been sent here with orders to supervise,” Harald replied coolly. “Somebody needs to mind the order.”
The old man chuckled kind-heartedly. “The police over there are watching the order, aren’t they?”
Harald looked away, dismissing the man’s remark without even acknowledging it.
The corpses started lining up on the side of the road, from which the rubble had been moved, to allow access for the Red Cross trucks and firemen. The top ones, the nearest to the explosion, were all mostly charred remains, unrecognizable and still smoking in the misty air. Harald put the canteen with malt coffee to his mouth but spat it out at once. Even coffee tasted like burned flesh.
The ones that were found lower were broken rag dolls, with crushed limbs and faces smashed to a pulp. Harald tried not to look at them either, staring straight ahead instead, somewhere where the smoking debris met the line of the horizon.
At noon, the relatives started to arrive, wailing and throwing themselves onto the brick and mortar common graves, digging wildly into the mixture of glass and stone with their bare hands. The firemen and the police pulled them away gently, patiently explaining where to look for the lists with the deceased and missing. For the most part, they were an obedient lot, nodding their understanding and heading toward the Red Cross truck to put down their contact information in case their loved ones were found – either dead or alive.
One woman though, with her tear-stained eyes rolling wildly, marched straight toward Harald, jabbing her finger into his chest.
“It’s all because of
you!” She spat, her entire body trembling. “You and your Führer, who started all this! Look at my daughter’s house! She’s buried down there, together with her husband and children. Because of you!”
Harald calmly extracted the small notebook and pencil out of his breast pocket. “Your name, please.”
The woman’s husband was already limping towards them, waving his hands with a desperate expression about him. Noticing a Great War Cross ribbon on his jacket, Harald guessed that the prosthetic leg was another decoration that the man had brought from the war.
“No, no, don’t listen to her, Herr Offizier!”
Harald smirked with one side of his mouth. Calling a regular National Political School student Herr Offizier. As though he didn’t notice his Napola Cadet uniform. They were ready for any sort of flattery once they got in hot water, these people. His superiors warned him about such types.
“Your names, please,” Harald repeated a bit louder.
“Herr Offizier, she’s mad with grief; she doesn’t know what she’s saying! We’re good Germans!”
Harald closed his notebook, extracted a whistle from his breast pocket instead and blew it, looking straight in the man’s eyes. A policeman ran up to them, his hands also covered in soot and concrete dust.
“What happened?”
“Treason,” Harald explained calmly. “This woman was blaming the Führer for the bombing. I order you to arrest her at once.”
The policeman only looked at him uncomprehendingly before he finally uttered, “don’t you have anything better to do, boy?”
“My brother, Hauptmann Brandt, the highest scoring ace in the whole of the Luftwaffe, is not fighting the Bolsheviks on the Eastern Front so that people like them,” he spoke with a disdainful glare in the couple’s direction, “could badmouth our country and our beloved Führer.”
The policeman didn’t seem intimidated. With a smirk and a shake of his head, he spoke, “well, in that case, I can only say one thing; your brother should be doing a better job in protecting our country because as of now your praised Luftwaffe can’t do shit to keep those Yanks away from our cities.”
Harald stepped closer to the policeman and wrote something down in his notebook.
“I have your badge number, sir. Expect to hear from the SD in the nearest future.”
With that, he stalked off in search of his superior.
There were far too many people around, a gray, weary-eyed mass. Without the protection of the castle-like walls of his Napola, Harald was almost terrified of this new, real world that had opened itself to him where disorder and confusion ruled. They barely ventured outside, the cadets. The idea itself was that they were the elite amongst the elite – bright, energetic, and with the faces of Teutonic Knights – whose destiny would lead them straight out of the school and into the marble-clad sanctuaries of the government buildings. They were to drive in polished cars, first as adjutants, then – as owners; they were to live behind the wrought-iron walls of expensive villas in the best suburbs of their respective cities; they were not to ever mingle with that society outside. They were to govern it, supervise it, weed out all of the unhealthy elements that were corrupting it from the inside. But no one told Harald that they were all corrupted.
“What is this?” He shouted at a woman who happened to cross his path. “Mourning clothes?! It’s prohibited! Strictly prohibited! It breaks the morale! We don’t mourn anyone; we’re happy that they offered their ultimate sacrifice! Go home and change at once before I report you!”
The woman stared at him with her dull blue eyes without replying.
“Can’t you hear what I’m saying?” Harald’s voice sounded almost hysterical. “Go home and change at once!”
The woman walked off without saying a word. Harald found his way into the house, the two walls of which still stood, untouched; climbed under the stairs, hugged his knees and wept. This new world didn’t make sense anymore. Nothing made sense any longer.
Twenty-Four
Near Stalingrad, January 1943
* * *
Johann jumped from the back of the truck, waved the driver his gratitude for the ride and trotted straight to the airstrip, lined with heavily camouflaged Stukas. As soon as he had learned from his JG commander that they were to escort Wiedmeyer’s dive bomber squadron, as soon as he leveled his own fighter next to that of Wiedmeyer’s aircraft and recognized the familiar features, Johann swore to himself that he would visit his old mate and comrade as soon as his feet touched the ground again. Good thing that the infantry, stationed nearby, were only too happy to help.
He recognized Rudolf’s raven-black hair, uncovered by anything despite the freezing temperatures, from afar. Wiedmeyer scooped him into a tight embrace and easily lifted Johann off his feet a mere moment later, his black eyes glistening in excitement. He had lost his puppy fat, Johann saw it at once. Rudi’s face was sharp now, just like his gaze from under those black eyelashes of his, long and only intensifying the black circles under his eyes. Johann still looked like a very young boy, with a beautiful, innocent face, a Knight’s Cross at his throat, and nightmares that haunted his sleep.
“What do you think of it? You survived this hell then too, you old fox.” Rudi laughed, as he wrung Johann’s hand.
A sharp emotion creased Johann’s high forehead at once, wiping the genuine joy off his face.
“Willi didn’t,” he replied with a shade of some desolate finality in his voice.
“I know.” Rudi lowered his gaze at once, almost apologetically. “I heard. Did you have a good funeral for him?”
“Very good, yes.”
“Come to my dugout. I have good vodka; let’s drink to his memory.”
A heating lamp glowed in the center of the dugout, several men playing cards next to it without shedding their warm pilots’ jackets. They acknowledged their commander and his guest with soft murmurs but didn’t bother saluting or getting up. Johann grew used to such neglect of the military discipline by now. While in Africa they wore silk neck scarves, drank good Madeira and had a barber to style their hair; in Russia they flew according to their scores and not their ranks, had a moral right to curse out the superior if he didn’t listen to the commands and threw their comrades birthday parties each time they survived another close call. And when they died, there was no burial. They only drank to the fallen hero’s memory until they fell asleep and the next day they would start it all anew.
One of the pilots was sleeping on the cot, a newspaper still clutched in his hand; another one was writing a letter in the corner. Rudi motioned the latter to move aside and reached for his knapsack, on which the pilot was resting. Rudi then carefully pulled the newspaper out of the sleeping man’s hand and covered an overturned crate, which served them as a table, with its wrinkled sheets. Johann watched Rudi pour the transparent, sharp liquid into the glasses that stood on top of the front page with the proud title “Paulus refuses to surrender.” He snorted softly, outstretching his hands towards the warmth of the lamp – sheer Eastern Front instinct. It was always darker than Hades here and twice as cold.
“A fine mess, is it not?” Rudi noticed his smirk.
“You certainly leveled that city with your Stukas.”
“What good is it? We’ll lose it, all the same, leveled or not.” He lifted his glass. “To von Sielaff. He was a fine fellow, our Willi.”
“Yes. He was.” Johann downed the drink and quickly bit into the piece of bread, smudged with margarine. The Luftwaffe still had it; the landser weren’t so fortunate from what he’d heard. “So, are you fellows stationed here permanently now?”
“They had just sent us here from the Caucuses. We’re the reinforcements. Reinforcements, my ass.”
“What else is there left to bomb there?” Johann poured himself a second glass. He could drink all he wanted tonight; he wouldn’t be flying anything until the morning. The twilight had descended on them, covering them like a shroud, about an hour ago. The airbase looked like one b
ig mass grave. “Our own people, holed up in ruins?”
“The Russkies’ strongholds.” Rudi shrugged as if it made no difference to him, then glanced over his shoulder and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Actually, our main new task is to drop packages with food and ammunition instead of bombs. Our troops are almost entirely surrounded. Göring thinks, they’ll break through the circle if they have enough food and bullets.”
Johann scowled dubiously.
“The whole trouble is that their flak is a beast and won’t let us near our own troops,” one of the pilots, with a broad, rose-cheeked face and a wild mop of blond hair, chimed in without looking up from his cards, “so, we just drop those parcels wherever they fall. A whole lot of good it does, too; for the most part, it’s the Soviets who pick them up.”
His comrades guffawed mirthlessly.
“Well, at least someone makes do with our rations.”
“One ought to feel for those poor devils, locked up in the city. They won’t last long there, I tell you.”
“They will surrender, I bet you,” the same blond pilot declared with a knowing look about him. “Give or take two weeks.”
“Defeatist talk,” Rudi tore a piece of paper, made a ball out of it and threw it at his comrade’s forehead.
“Report me, Herr Commander,” the young man replied cheekily.
Rudi laughed. “How much do you want to bet?”
“Ten Reichsmarks.”
“Ten Reichsmarks that they will surrender in two weeks?”
“Yes.”
Rudi leaned in and the two shook hands, sealing the deal.
“I’ve been here two years now,” Rudi said softly glancing at Johann, as though in explanation. “You aren’t used to it yet. Friedmann and I, we saw it all.”
Of Knights and Dogfights Page 23