by Tom Young
McLendon took a turn at the wrench and eventually broke the wire again. Timmersby reached for the wrench, and McLendon tried to stop him.
“Sir,” McLendon said, “you’re in no shape for this.”
“Poppycock.”
Timmersby took the pipe wrench and broke open another square of the mesh.
After the kriegies cut the wire in eight places, Karl took hold of the partially severed section of fence. He bent it inward. That opened a gap big enough only for a man’s leg.
“Still got a ways to go, boys,” Karl said.
Wilhelm took the pipe wrench and eventually made two cuts. “Save your strength,” Karl said. “Once we spring you, you still got a long night ahead.”
Sparks took the pipe wrench. While he worked, some sort of commotion began across the camp. Karl stood for a better view and saw headlights at the front entrance. The sentries opened the gate.
“Hey, Pell,” Karl said. “Go see what’s happening.”
“You got it.”
Pell strode toward the front gate. He disappeared amid the glare and shadows of headlights and searchlights. While he was gone, Sparks finished a cut and Fox took a turn. Karl’s curiosity curdled into worry: Had Patton returned for some reason? Had another general come to visit? Or was this something else?
At a full sprint, Pell came back, panting. “It’s the French,” he said. “Military police. They’ve come for the guards.”
Now Karl’s worry hardened into dread. “At this hour?” he said. “Damn it all. Look, get back there and stall them. Let them go anywhere but here.”
“Sure thing.”
As Pell turned to leave, Karl added one other instruction: “Tell ’em Gunther’s all right. Make sure they know he helped us.”
“Will do.”
Tex stepped forward and reached for the pipe wrench. “We better double-time this rodeo,” he said. He placed the wrench on the wire and cranked as if he were pumping water from a well. After several minutes, the wire broke. “My daddy always said make sure you use the right tool,” Tex said. “Right now. he’d be saying, ‘Boy, I taught you better’n that.’”
Other kriegies attacked the fence, one by one. While they worked, Karl eyed the goings-on across the compound. The French truck had stopped and turned off its lights. Men moved around in groups and gaggles. Karl heard lots of chatter, but nothing he could make out. No shouts or gunfire, thank God. The Frogs appeared to be touring the prison.
After a few more cuts, Karl again pulled at the freed section of fence. Not quite there yet: The hole remained too small for a man’s shoulders. Karl grabbed the wrench and started cranking. He broke the wire, and the hole widened by a few inches.
An engine clattered to life. Karl turned to see the truck’s lights come on. The vehicle began moving. Toward the back fence.
“They’re coming,” Karl said. “Can you get out?”
Wilhelm placed his boot at the edge of the opening and stretched the wire as far as he could. Placed his arms through the hole and began pulling himself through. Karl grabbed him by the legs and pushed.
Sharp ends of broken wire dug into Wilhelm’s shoulders. The wire left deep scratches. Wilhelm groaned in pain. And he cleared the inner fence.
The truck rolled along the rows of barracks. Now Karl could hear soldiers speaking French.
“Go,” he hissed.
Wilhelm crouched by the hole in the fence. He reached back through the opening and extended his right hand. Karl gripped it and nodded to his friend. He wished for appropriate words of parting, but there wasn’t time. “Get out of here” was all he said.
Electric insulators studded the posts of the outer fence. Experimentally, Wilhelm touched the fence with the tip of his boot. Apparently satisfied that the electricity was off, he placed his hands on the wire and started climbing. He scaled the fence in two seconds. Reached the top and thudded to the ground on the other side.
Without looking back, he disappeared into the night. Wilhelm vanished with such speed and silence that Karl thought of a U-boat submerging into a black sea.
* * *
Five days later, Karl and Pell boarded a C-47 at a newly built dirt airstrip outside the prison camp. The steel-and-sweat smell of the military aircraft instantly shifted the cogs in Karl’s psyche. Climbing into an airplane returned him to a world where he made his own decisions, exercised at least some degree of control.
Kriegies packed into the plane. Karl and Pell perched shoulder to shoulder on seats of canvas webbing. The left engine coughed, barked, and sputtered to life. Exhaust smoke wafted into the cabin. The fumes smelled good to Karl. The right engine fired up, and Pell grinned and offered a thumbs-up.
The C-47 bounced along the runway scraped only yesterday by bulldozers. The tail came up as the aircraft gathered speed, and Karl felt himself lifted into smooth air, an untroubled sky. Some of the former prisoners clapped and broke into song:
“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun,
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At ’em boys, give ’er the gun!”
The pilots turned onto a heading for Le Havre, France. An army reception center near Le Havre, Camp Lucky Strike, had become a processing station for liberated POWs. Home lay just days away: family and friends, school and a job, a place in a wide-open future to which Karl had earned every right.
He scanned the faces of fellow passengers. They all looked happy, and well they might. The uncaring hand of randomness had spared them; everyone knew crewmates who hadn’t survived. Karl still didn’t know how many of his own crew remained among the living. He hoped to learn more at Lucky Strike.
The C-47 climbed, and the air turned cooler. Through a cabin window, Karl looked down at the fields and forests of Germany flowing beneath him. So beautiful in this spring of 1945. How could horrors have unfolded in such a picturesque setting?
In the last broadcast Karl had heard on Sparks’s radio, Edward R. Murrow reported from a place called Buchenwald. The descriptions suggested something eternally damned within the German soul—or maybe within human nature itself.
Yet Karl knew shreds of decency remained. The proof hid somewhere in the landscape below, a sailor making his way home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Did Wilhelm survive? I like to think he did. By the time he escaped, the SS would no longer have been looking for him, and the Allies would have focused on catching war criminals. I imagine Wilhelm a couple of decades on as a West German diplomat, perhaps Bonn’s ambassador to Britain or France.
Once Karl got back to the States, he would have contacted Janet Meade as soon as possible and sent her the dog tags. Perhaps she’d have taken a small measure of comfort in knowing her husband’s fate. Many families never received closure: To this day, more than 72,000 Americans remain missing from World War II, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
At home, Karl would have gone right back to business school. The G.I. Bill would have made that easier for him. I picture Karl becoming a Bethlehem Steel executive, and perhaps a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. We might find him in the VIP section during a salute to veterans at a Steelers game. A natural leader, he may have become commander of his local American Legion post.
Sooner or later, he probably looked up surviving crewmates. Various World War II units formed memorial associations. I can see Karl joining a gray-haired Fairburn and Pell at a Marriott bar, clinking tumblers of Maker’s Mark in honor of Adrian. No doubt Karl would have visited Adrian’s parents and told them of their son’s courage and dedication.
Karl and Wilhelm might have exchanged letters. During their journey together, they transitioned from enemies to uneasy allies, and from allies to friends. Robbed of his airplane, his weapon, Karl also went through another kind of metamorphosis: He transitioned from a team leader and warrior motivated by duty to an individual motivated by conscience. Though he agonized about bombing
Bremen, where some of his relatives lived, he really had no choice. He had his orders, and part of him knew all along he would do his soldierly duty. But when he bailed out of Hellstorm, that part of his war ended. As a downed airman and then a prisoner, he found freedom to make human choices.
Maybe Karl and Wilhelm would have visited each other. Karl might have flown to Bonn to meet Wilhelm in better times. They might have introduced their wives, toured the Rhineland, visited Beethoven’s birthplace.
Or maybe not. Veterans of that generation moved immediately into building careers and families, and a lot of them wanted to put the war behind them. Many of their descendants say their fathers or grandfathers never talked about the war until late in life. Some never talked at all. Even now, new stories from World War II continue to emerge, and some of them are extraordinary. I can’t help but wonder about the stories never told.
HISTORICAL NOTES
My fictional lieutenant Karl Hagan endured an experience shared by tens of thousands of American aviators in World War II. At the end of the war, Germany held 95,000 American prisoners, including 38,000 airmen, according to Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air, a definitive history of the U.S. air campaign in Europe.
A number of POW memoirs served as valuable source material for this novel: Shootdown: A World War II Bomber Pilot’s Experience as a Prisoner of War in Germany by William H. Wheeler; Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW by Alexander Jefferson, with Lewis H. Carlson; and The Flame Keepers: The True Story of an American Soldier’s Survival Inside Stalag 17 by Ned Handy and Kemp Battle.
The Stalag Luft XIV of this novel is fictional, but the Stalag Luft III mentioned in these pages is real. In 1944, seventy-six prisoners escaped Stalag Luft III through a tunnel. Nearly all were recaptured, and fifty were executed. The incident became known as “The Great Escape,” described in a 1950 book of that same name by Paul Brickhill and a 1963 film.
Readers may note that conditions in the stalags depicted herein seem mild compared to Germany’s infamous concentration camps. POW accounts bear this out: Nazi Germany maintained different types of prisons for different types of inmates. Survivability inside the prisons depended on how the Nazis viewed the prisoners. American and British POWs faced food shortages, while some Russian prisoners starved outright. And, as history has noted, the concentration camps built for Jews amounted to death factories.
After Karl reunites with bombardier Billy Pell in Stalag Luft XIV, Pell describes how their navigator, Conrad, was killed by a mob. Sadly, this is also based on veterans’ accounts. In Masters of the Air, an Eighth Air Force flier describes seeing the body of a fellow aviator hanging from a lamppost. Miller’s book also includes an account of six fliers beaten and stoned to death in the town of Rüsselsheim.
To research Wilhelm’s life as a U-boat officer, I drew on Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II by Herbert Werner. After the war, Commander Werner escaped Allied captivity and eventually moved to the United States and became an American citizen. He died in Vero Beach, Florida, in 2013 at the age of ninety-two.
In Iron Coffins, Werner writes of a suicide order that went to fifteen U-boat commanders just before the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Here I have taken a bit of artistic license: Wilhelm’s crew receives the suicide order in November of that year.
Other valuable background information came from Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945 by David Fairbank White. Bitter Ocean mentions Otto Kretschmer, the U-boat ace recalled by Wilhelm for his decent conduct toward crews of torpedoed freighters. Kretschmer was Germany’s most effective U-boat captain: He sank forty-seven Allied ships before he was captured in 1941. Kretschmer spent several years as a prisoner of war in Canada, then returned home and eventually became an admiral in West Germany’s navy.
Chapter 2 of this novel includes a reference to Wilhelm’s suspicions that the Allies could read messages from U-boat headquarters. They could, indeed. Codebreakers at Britain’s Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing, had cracked the Enigma code—including the particularly difficult naval version.
My interest in U-boats began during my college days at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a member of the UNC Scuba Club, I dived on several World War II shipwrecks off the Outer Banks. One of them was the U-352, sunk by depth charges from the Coast Guard cutter Icarus on May 9, 1942. The U-352 lies off Cape Lookout at a depth of 110 feet, listing at a 45-degree angle. She is a Type VII, like Wilhelm’s boat, and her oceanic grave is now on the National Register of Historic Places. By the way, if you’d like to see a U-boat up close, you don’t have to strap on scuba tanks. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago hosts the U-505, a Type IXC submarine captured in 1944.
To check out Karl’s aircraft, the B-17 Flying Fortress, a number of opportunities exist. The Texas-based Commemorative Air Force flies B-17s and other World War II aircraft in nationwide tours. Museums with excellent exhibits include The National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio; the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Georgia; and the Palm Springs (California) Air Museum, just to name a few.
The refusal by Wilhelm and other kriegies to identify Jewish prisoners is based on an actual event. In January 1945, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, of the U.S. Army, was the senior noncommissioned officer in Stalag IX-A near Ziegenhain, Germany. When told to point out Jews in the camp, he ordered every American to step forward. According to witnesses, a German officer said to Edmonds, “They cannot all be Jews.” At gunpoint, Edmonds insisted they were. The German officer backed down.
In 2015, Edmonds posthumously received Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Knoxville, Tennessee, native was designated “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Edmonds died in 1985.
On a personal note, my interest in the air war over Europe began with stories from my grandfather Thomas Morgan Daniel, who served as a B-17 mechanic. When I was ten or twelve years old, I found a softcover booklet in my grandparents’ attic. It was titled Target: Germany—The U.S. Army Air Forces’ official story of the VII Bomber Command’s first year over Europe. The wartime publication described in great detail the men and machines and the dangers they faced. I had a thousand questions for my grandfather—then and over the next couple of decades.
After Target: Germany, I read anything else I could get my hands on about the Eighth. Excellent memoirs by veterans of the Eighth are too numerous to list, but an especially good one is The Lucky Bastard Club: A B-17 Pilot in Training and in Combat, 1943–1945 by Eugene Fletcher.
By the way, my fictional creation, Lieutenant Hagan, flies with the 94th Bomb Group. That was my grandfather’s unit. When my grandfather got out of the service, he could have continued in aviation; he said the airlines offered good pay for experienced mechanics.
But he would have none of it. After the war, he came home to the farm in North Carolina and never touched an airplane again.
Tom Young
Alexandria, Virginia
June 2019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching and writing a historical novel can become a team effort. You bounce ideas off fellow history buffs. You visit museums and libraries, where guides and docents point you in the right direction. You receive input from a circle of trusted manuscript readers. And as with most books, nothing comes to print without the hard work of editors and literary agents.
My circle of support begins at home. My wife, Kristen, is not a professional writer or editor. But as a lifelong reader, she has a natural instinct for flaws in a story or in a turn of phrase. Her red pen knows no mercy. Her mother, retired UNC-Chapel Hill professor Laurel Files, also provided a practiced eye for proofreading.
Speaking of ruthless red pens, some of the best writing instruction I ever received came from Professor Richard Elam, who taught me at the Un
iversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1980s. Our friendship, grounded in shared love for the English language, continues to this day. He helped me polish this book, and he still doesn’t cut me any breaks. I’m sure he’d say the first sentence of this paragraph is too long. Sorry, Dick.
Valuable input also came from an old squadron mate in the West Virginia Air National Guard. Many thousands of miles passed under our wings as I flew with Lieutenant Colonel Joe Myers. Joe loves books, and he loves history, and his suggestions made this a better story.
When I retired from the military, the decision came hard. It’s tough to break bonds forged in harm’s way. But someone gave me good advice: Get involved with veterans’ groups. American Legion Post 20, affiliated with the National Press Club in Washington, has become my new unit. Its former commander, Vietnam veteran Ken Dalecki, worked for Kiplinger Washington Editors and Congressional Quarterly. Ken can spot an unnecessary word at a thousand yards, and he eliminated more than a few from this manuscript.
Novelist and writing instructor Barbara Esstman has helped sharpen all my novels, and this was no exception. My partnership with Barbara goes back years, to when I first took one of her workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Thanks also to Robert Siegfried, for his review of the manuscript.
If you follow news on the radio, more than likely you’ve heard news from Camille Bohannon. During my years with the broadcast division of the Associated Press, Camille became a dear friend and colleague. She knows how to tell stories and paint pictures with words—and she helped me tell the story you hold in your hands.
Other valuable input came from fellow Tar Heel and novelist Jodie Tighe—as with all my novels. Thanks, Jodie, for a writing friendship now in its fourth decade. Thanks also to my parents, Bobby and Harriett Young, for their unflagging support—and close read of the manuscript.