Silver Wings, Iron Cross

by Tom Young

  Karl knew about Fairburn’s date. His wife was expecting a baby. Other crew members had calendars marked, too. The ball turret gunner, Dick Russo, had been accepted for the next term at Seton Hall. Russo was known as the Kid because he was nineteen and looked about twelve. The bombardier, Pell, was so eager to get back to the States that he’d already started packing. Everybody had begun planning for life after the military. In their minds, they were halfway home already.

  That damned manifold pressure needle stayed low—but not dangerously low. Karl almost wished the engine would fail altogether and make his call easy. The interphone grew quiet; the crew waited for his decision. He had plenty of reasons to hate the Nazis, and now he had one more: for forcing him to make a stark choice between family and duty.

  He glanced over at the number-four ship. Crescent City Maiden was her name; the aircraft commander came from New Orleans. The nose art depicted a woman with impossibly large breasts in a gauzy red gown, lounging with a cocktail glass in her hand. The A on Maiden’s vertical stabilizer stayed locked in Karl’s window; Adrian was doing a good job of holding position. Karl noted the aircraft’s other markings, especially the white star on the fuselage.

  That white star represented the U.S. Army Air Forces, everyone in the Air Forces, and everybody back home. How many hardworking women had riveted these airplanes together? How many hardworking taxpayers had paid for them? Each airplane cost more than two hundred thousand dollars, more money than Karl could imagine.

  Hell, he thought, this ain’t about me and what I want. And I’ve flown with worse glitches than this. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  “All right, boys,” he said finally. “We’re going.”

  Hoots and cheers sounded from behind and below the cockpit.

  Yeah, Karl thought, you fellas want to go home, and so do I. But this is Bremen, a major city of the Reich, not some half-defended French target. Don’t start celebrating yet.

  4

  Suicide Order

  As the wounded U-351 entered the mouth of the River Weser, Wilhelm mounted the ladder to join Captain Brauer on the bridge. Air, cool and clean, filled Wilhelm’s lungs; he could practically taste it. Respiration required no more conscious thought than heartbeat, but Wilhelm thought about it this morning. Something taken for granted now seemed a luxury: a life-giving breath in the sunlight, instead of a final chestful of water and diesel fuel in cold and complete darkness.

  A minesweeper lay at anchor near the Weser’s east bank, and beyond the warship, Wilhelm saw the port city of Bremerhaven. The port’s devastation became evident from a couple kilometers away. The docks should have displayed a line of eleven loading cranes, but only three stood intact. The rest had toppled under Allied bombs. The gaps made Wilhelm think of a prizefighter with most of his teeth knocked out. He thought he remembered a fuel storage facility near the dock, but now there was only twisted debris.

  “I hope Bremen has fared better,” Brauer said.

  Bremen lay farther upstream, but recent wireless reports had given no reason to think Bremen—or any other industrial city in Germany—had fared better.

  “We do our jobs,” Wilhelm said. “Why can’t Göring do his?” Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had once promised Allied warplanes would never penetrate German airspace. Now they did so routinely.

  “Don’t let the wrong person hear you talk like that, Exec,” Brauer said.

  Wilhelm knew his skipper meant only to keep him out of trouble, but the friendly advice darkened his mood. Why is it, Wilhelm wondered, that I can fight so hard and risk such an awful death—yet some fat-ass landlubber Nazi with an honorary commission in the SS can overhear me speak truth in a beer hall, put on his black uniform, and turn me in? And then go back to his safe office job.

  Every time Wilhelm placed his feet back on dry land, things seemed worse than before.

  * * *

  The last time he’d gone ashore, he’d had time to take the train to Berlin, where his parents lived. In the Reich’s capital, bombing had devastated entire blocks. Multistory apartment buildings stood with walls sheared off, their rooms exposed like dollhouses. A kitchen here, a bedroom there, opened to the weather. Staircases leading to nowhere.

  Newly drafted infantrymen, barely old enough to shave, milled about the train station. Their belt buckles read: GOTT MIT UNS. If they’re headed to the Russian front, Wilhelm thought, they’ll need all the divine intervention they can get. But when he considered the increasing losses of U-boats, he realized even these young greenhorn soldiers probably stood a better chance of surviving than he did.

  From the station, Wilhelm had tried to telephone his parents. The operator could not make a connection. Wilhelm fought panic. Were they dead under a mound of blasted bricks? No, no, the telephone system was unreliable. He hired a car that took him home to the Tiergarten district.

  For generations, the Albrecht family had owned a comfortable three-story house in one of Berlin’s finer neighborhoods. Wilhelm’s father worked as an attorney for Daimler-Benz AG—fittingly, a company that built engines for submarines. The job did not bring fabulous wealth, but it kept the family firmly in the upper class. Father might have risen higher in the company if he’d been a Party member, but he stayed out of politics and advised Wilhelm to do the same.

  Wilhelm found his home intact, quiet, dark, and locked. Where had everyone gone? He recalled that his parents had talked of evacuating to the countryside. Distant kin lived in Sembach, a farming village in the rolling hills of Rheinland-Pfalz. Wilhelm fumbled with his keys, found the one for the front door. At first, he had trouble inserting the key, and he wondered if the lock had been changed. But eventually the key worked; the lock had not been turned in some time and needed graphite lubrication.

  Inside the house, sheets covered furniture and rugs. Dust coated the hardwood floors. Closets stood empty. Each footfall echoed loneliness. The air hung stale and musty. This home had always been such a place of warmth, life, and permanence. To see it abandoned meant a world spun out of control.

  Wilhelm came to the century-old staircase. Placed his hand on the bannister and climbed slowly. Every step sounded its familiar groan or creak. Once upstairs, Wilhelm entered his old room. It looked the same and still smelled of the resins in ancient wood. Longing and nostalgia flooded Wilhelm as if some emotional hull had cracked.

  The sea had always fascinated him, and his room contained mementoes of days when he thought the ocean meant adventure, not death. On the mantel: a model of the SMS Ostfriesland, one of the great battleships of the Imperial German Navy. On the bedside table: the hat from his old Sea Cadet uniform. On the wall: an oar from his boyhood rowing team. Wilhelm’s parents had left all his things behind when they fled to the countryside. Had they given up hope of his return? Had they given up hope in the war itself?

  * * *

  Defeat appeared even more certain now as the U-351 slid past Bremerhaven. To Wilhelm, Germany was the center of the universe, a place of absolute security. How could it be so violated? How could so many men fight so hard, follow the orders of their leaders, and still see things come to this?

  When the U-boat reached Bremen, there would be no girls and no brass band, as there had been in previous homecomings. Now there would be just grim-faced dockworkers and exhausted machinists to survey the boat’s damage and work minimum fixes to make her seaworthy again.

  Wilhelm’s grandparents lived in Bremen, but would he find their home deserted, too? He doubted he’d even have time to look. The navy would certainly send him right back out on another patrol.

  Official broadcasts promised new superweapons that would hurl the Allies back into the sea. Missiles tipped with bombs that could destroy an entire city. Jet-powered aircraft in enough numbers to wipe the Brits and Yanks from the skies.

  But if anybody had superweapons, it was the enemy. Their damnable radar alone made submariners miserable. Practically every time the U-351 tried to surface to gasp for air and recharge her batteries,
the radar detection operator would sing out a warning. An aircraft would appear in the distance—a Sunderland or perhaps a Liberator—and the U-351 would dive for her life. Another plunge into the depths as a spread of bombs detonated behind her.

  A call from the control room interrupted Wilhelm’s dark thoughts:

  “Sir, a new message from headquarters. You’ll want to look at this.”

  “You have the boat, Exec,” Captain Brauer said. “I’ll check it out.”

  Brauer disappeared down the bridge hatch. A few minutes later he returned, pale-faced and expressionless.

  “Our orders for the next patrol,” the skipper said.

  Brauer handed Wilhelm the decoded message: WHEN TORPEDOES ARE EXPENDED, ATTACK AND SINK ENEMY SHIPS BY RAMMING.

  A suicide order. The U-351 would propel itself into a freighter, most likely breaching the hulls of both vessels, and the two would sink together to a common grave. Berlin wanted Wilhelm and his crew to trade their lives for a single Allied ship. A single freighter that the roaring production of American shipyards would replace within days. Wilhelm fought the urge to wad up the message and throw it overboard. He kept his naval bearing. Handed the strip of paper back to the skipper without a word.

  And why must we die this way? Wilhelm asked himself. Because a handful of fanatics managed to spread their ideas widely enough to succeed in politics.

  Their ideas included the notion that God had made mistakes and the Thousand-Year Reich would correct them. How had the nation that produced Martin Luther, Bach, and Goethe come to this? Politics.

  At that moment, on the calm surface of the River Weser in the autumn of 1944, Oberleutnant Wilhelm Albrecht decided he would not help lead a crew of dedicated professional submariners to a pointless death. Wilhelm was done with war.

  5

  Cruel to Be Kind

  Over the English Channel, frost edged Karl’s windscreen. Through the glass, he watched the coastline of continental Europe define itself. White breakers crashed onto beaches of light-colored sand, and beyond the coastal dunes lay a patchwork quilt of farm fields. Karl’s altimeter read 21,000 feet. From this altitude, the land ahead looked deceptively peaceful. No hint of the darkness that had fallen across the continent with Nazi occupation, nor of the desperate combat since the Allies had stormed ashore at Normandy.

  Now that they were en route to their target, the bombers had organized into two “combat boxes.” One box contained the standard number of fifty-four planes, and the other made do with forty-six. According to theory, in a combat box the B-17s’ guns created interlocking fields of fire so withering that the formation could manage without fighter protection. That theory had become one of the air war’s first casualties: German pilots found ways of stabbing into formations at high speed, firing on a lumbering bomber, then peeling away. As a remedy, friendly fighters now escorted bomber formations deep into Germany, thanks to fuel tank modifications to the P-51 Mustang. But even the best fighter pilots couldn’t be everywhere at once. A dogfight to the formation’s left might leave Forts exposed to the right, and some bombers would have to fend for themselves.

  “Go ahead and test your guns, boys,” Karl ordered.

  Rapid-fire blasts sounded from over Karl’s head—Fairburn, firing from the top turret: wham wham wham! The whole airframe shook with the recoil. Karl thought he caught a whiff of burned gunpowder from the Browning .50-caliber machine guns, but with his oxygen mask on, maybe that was just his imagination?

  Russo’s guns followed from the ball turret, underneath the aircraft. Pell and Conrad squeezed off shots from the cheek guns in the nose. Farther back, waist gunners Ryan and Firth opened up; Karl saw the tracers through the corner of his eye. More bangs and rattles followed when Baker fired his gun in the radio room and Anders blasted from the tail.

  They weren’t shooting for fun. In the subzero temperatures of high altitude, metal contracted and lubricant gummed up. A cold-soaked, uncharged weapon might not even chamber a round. The crews of the Eighth Air Force had learned a lot of things the hard way since their first combat mission in 1942—and another of those hard lessons concerned hypoxia. That was the reason for the next call on the interphone.

  “Oxygen check,” Conrad said.

  “Pilot okay,” Karl said.

  “Copilot,” Adrian said.

  “Bombardier’s good,” Pell said.

  The rest of the crew responded in turn, each one checking in to confirm he was conscious and breathing pure oxygen. Conrad would repeat the call every fifteen minutes. In the cold, thin air of high altitude, a leak or a loose fitting could cause someone to pass out. This modern war of technology and machines put the human body under unprecedented kinds of stress.

  Far over Hellstorm, horsetail cirrus clouds fanned across the sky. Sunlight backlit the clouds and illuminated them with rainbow colors.

  “Damn, that’s pretty,” Adrian said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Karl said, but the sight just made him sad. Somewhere God—if there was a god—was still making rainbows and clouds. But the whole world was at war, killing on an industrial scale. And for Karl, forcing him to bomb family. He asked himself: Did I make the right decision? Can I still find a way to back out, a reason to abort?

  Don’t be a Hamlet, Karl resolved. From high school, he remembered Shakespeare’s Danish prince, who couldn’t make up his mind about whether to avenge his father’s death. Appropriate lines from Hamlet came to him now: “I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”

  Cruel to be kind, Karl thought. Dear God.

  Back when he was a teenager in English class, he never imagined how that play’s themes would return to haunt him. Hell, this mission would even take him within sight of Denmark: The egress route called for a left turn after hitting the target, which would take the bombers out over the North Sea, west of the Danish coast.

  Karl began to shiver. No amount of fleece and leather could keep a man comfortable at this altitude. Some guys used those powder-blue electrical suits you could plug into the airplane, but Karl found the suits more trouble than they were worth. The wires would short-circuit, and you’d wind up with one leg too hot and everything else freezing. The Stanley bottle of hot tea Karl had brought could offer relief, but he wanted to save that for later. If he drank it too early, he’d spend much of the day needing to urinate, and he didn’t like using the relief tube.

  The formation flew tightly now; ships floated close, left and right, above and below. The planes at the top of the combat box, in the coldest air, began to leave condensation trails: Scores of long white stripes marked the sky. The scene might have awed an observer on the ground, but it just gave Karl more cause for worry. Contrails made it that much easier for enemy flak gunners to spot the formation and gauge its speed. But maybe it didn’t matter. Radar probably gave the Germans the same information. And even without radar and contrails, it was hard to miss a hundred heavy bombers droning along in broad daylight.

  * * *

  Just a few nights ago, Karl had heard “Lord Haw Haw” taunting the Eighth Air Force via shortwave on that very subject:

  “Germany calling, Germany calling. Good evening to my misguided American friends, especially those of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Terribly sorry about those losses you’ve been taking. Sometimes it does seem rather unsportsmanlike of our antiaircraft gunners and fighter pilots to take down so many of your bombers. But my goodness, you make it so easy. Our intelligence agents tell us you call it ‘daylight precision bombing.’ We call it madness, and so should you. Your British cousins don’t dare fly over the Reich during the sunlight hours. That’s why they send their Lancasters at night. They’ve long ago abandoned your suicidal tactics. Why should you lose your young lives doing something for the British that they won’t do for themselves?”

  “I’d like to drop a bomb in his lap and shut him up for good,” Pell had said that night in the officers’ club.

  “He sure knows how to hit us with
a low blow,” Conrad said. “Sometimes I wonder about our tactics, myself.”

  “Yeah, but our tactics must have ’em worried,” Karl said. “Why else would they talk about it?”

  Everybody nodded, and Karl hoped his remark blunted Lord Haw Haw’s impact on the men’s morale. Karl had never considered himself much of a leader; he just wanted to fly airplanes. But along with the shiny new airplanes came the responsibilities of command. That meant more than barking orders. It meant looking after your guys, knowing their frame of mind. Ultimately it meant making them want to do the right thing.

  * * *

  Down below, the Dutch coast passed under the wings. The waters of the Zuider Zee lay calm, the surface like a sheet of iron. Above, the cirrus clouds began to join into a high overcast, and the colors drained from the sky. Hellstorm now flew in hostile airspace, and Karl thought of the dangers ahead.

  “Adrian,” Karl said, “can you take the airplane for a while?”

  “Copilot’s airplane,” Adrian said.

  Karl took his hands from the yoke and pulled off his left glove. That gave him enough dexterity to reach into a lower leg pocket and pull out a sheaf of charts and documents. From the handful of paper, he selected what he needed: an Army Air Forces Target Chart, an AAF Plotting Chart, and an AAF World Aeronautical Chart. A single WAC chart didn’t cover the entire world; the one Karl held now depicted just this part of Europe, on a 1:1,000,000 scale. He’d marked the WAC chart and the plotting chart with known flak concentrations. Hellstorm was not near any of the permanent antiaircraft batteries yet, but Karl decided to take no chances. The Germans could move mobile guns on flatbed train cars. They could also send up fighters at any time.

  “Go ahead and put on your flak jackets, boys,” Karl ordered, shoving his fingers back into the glove. “Just in case the Krauts surprise us.”

  Adrian cut his eyes over at Karl. The copilot’s oxygen mask covered his mouth, but the lines around his eyes showed he was smiling. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, Karl mused. I’m calling ’em “Krauts” and I’m one myself.