“You’re going to misjudge that one of these days, Carl…” his wingman and XO, Captain Wilhelm (‘Willi’) Meier, observed over the radio. Ritter shot a quick glance back over his left shoulder and smiled with vague cockiness as he returned his eyes forward once more, hauling his throttles back even further and turning his landing run into a taxi toward the main buildings at the far end of the strip. His executive officer was a capable pilot and a good friend, easily experienced enough to command his own fighter wing, and had held the position as Ritter’s XO for the last six months. The pair had developed something of a symbiotic relationship in the air during that time, the closeness of which had saved both men more than once. As Ritter was taxiing, Meier was still airborne and carrying out a much slower, more cautious and, moreover, a more orthodox landing approach several hundred metres behind.
“I think Herr Meier is jealous, sir…” Corporal Kohl observed over the intercom from his gunner’s position at the rear end of the long, ‘glasshouse’ canopy “…if the captain had been a little quicker, it might’ve been he who picked up that Spitfire!”
“You may well be right there, Wolff,” Ritter agreed with a light chuckle. It’d truly been a good afternoon’s flying and he was in a fantastic mood. While on routine patrol over the Channel, Fliegerkorps ground controllers had vectored them onto an interception off the Pas de Calais. Upon arrival, the pair of Zerstörer heavy-fighters had found and pounced upon a half-dozen RAF Blenheims in the process of making life difficult for a flotilla of Kriegsmarine E-boats. The pair of 110s had blasted two of the light bombers out of the sky within seconds, the concentrated fire of their nose-mounted cannon and machine guns devastating indeed.
As the remaining bombers had taken off in all directions and the Luftwaffe heavy-fighters circled in preparation to picking them off individually, Kohl had been the first to spot the lone Spitfire. It had come in low from the west and at high speed – a much higher speed than the twin-engined Zerstörer was capable of at sea level. Meier instantly threw his aircraft into a power climb at full throttle, relatively secure in the knowledge that while there wasn’t a twin-engined fighter built that could take on a Hurricane or Spitfire one for one and expect a fair fight, the 110 could outclimb any RAF fighter at any altitude.
Ritter, on the other hand, acted purely through instinct. The attacking Spitfire was much closer to his aircraft than Meier’s and held a significant speed advantage. Instead of climbing, he momentarily pulled back on his throttles, lowered partial flaps, and jerked the Zerstörer into an upward, ‘Split-S’ manoeuvre as the Spitfire began to open fire at 200 metres. In the middle of that textbook evasive tactic, Ritter jammed the throttles fully forward once more, retracted his flaps, and nosed the aircraft downward again as the momentarily-baffled and less-experienced RAF pilot hurtled past beneath him, caught completely unawares.
The Spitfire was only in his gunsight for the barest of moments but it was enough. A short burst from his cannon and machine guns raked across the smaller aircraft’s port wing and rear fuselage, severing vital control lines and blasting great chunks out of the upper wing and tail. The Spitfire instantly entered into a wild, terminal spin that only ceased as it slammed into the surface of the Channel a few seconds later. Although Meier subsequently managed to finish off three of the remaining four bombers as they vainly sought the relative safety of the English coast, Ritter knew his XO would be more than a little envious. For a Messerschmitt 110 – or any twin-engined fighter, for that matter – victory over a smaller and far more agile opponent such as a Spitfire spoke either of good luck or better flying…or both.
It took just a few moments for Ritter to taxi his aircraft up to the main hangars and workshops at the far end of the grass strip. Divided equally on either side of the ‘runway’, another seventy-two J-110C waited in silent rows, all sporting similar ‘ink-spot’ green/black-green mottled camouflage patterns over a lighter, blue-grey background. Including the pair of aircraft that had just landed, they comprised the entirety of Zerstörergeschwader 26 ‘Horst Wessel’ – the heavy-fighter wing Ritter commanded.
ZG26 was organised in much the same manner as all major Luftwaffe combat units. Staffeln (squadrons) – the smallest official basic unit – were collected into threes to form gruppen (groups). These were further grouped into threes to form larger units – the geschwader or air-wing (often with another two or three aircraft as part of the CO’s staff flight). In this way, standard Luftwaffe designation might denote an aircraft of the Eighth Staffel, Third Gruppe of Ritter’s unit as 8.III/ZG26. Although actual numbers in a squadron varied between combat wings (ranging in most cases from six to twelve), the structure of the system remained basically static across the board. ZG26 at that time carried eight aircraft per squadron, plus a staff flight, thus making for a total of 74 Messerschmitt heavy-fighters.
In the hour or so after landing, Carl Ritter debriefed quickly, ate, showered and changed into a clean, well-pressed uniform. Deciding to take the rest of the afternoon off as there were no pressing matters that required attention, he soon found himself wandering out near one of the manned checkpoints at the far end of the airfield. A rough, unsurfaced road ran along outside the fence and skirted the base on two sides, leading off to the east and the town of St. Omer, just a few kilometres away. Across the other side of the road, the ground dropped away and ran down to an expanse of open fields, farmhouses and such like.
Ritter stopped at the small gate and guard shelter, watching for a moment as a kette – a three-ship formation – of J-110s roared past along the grass strip, lifting slowly into the air and then banking away to the north. The CO smiled, watching one of the passing pilots wave and grin broadly as the aircraft’s wheels left the ground. Ritter waved back then stared on for a few more minutes as the aircraft cruised away at low level, quickly becoming difficult to see against the cloud-spattered blue sky.
Beyond the grass runway, masses of construction workers and equipment battled on in the relative heat as they had every day since the unit had arrived some weeks before. Engineers were slowly but surely installing a second, wider runway of hardened concrete running parallel to the grass one currently in use. The situation was of more than vague interest to Ritter as CO and as a flier generally, and on more than one occasion he’d wondered to himself what kind of aircraft the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe had in mind when it decided it needed to build concrete runways that were all of three kilometres long.
Passing a salute to the guards as they snapped crisply to attention, Ritter sauntered through the gate and crossed the narrow road, walking along the opposite side for a few dozen metres before stepping onto the grassy slope leading down to the fields beyond. The scene before him was of idyllic French countryside that had been fortunate enough to have been spared the ravages of recent battles. Small numbers of dairy cattle grazed here and there, along with a few goats and sheep, and off in the far distance he could see a farmer on horseback working between the rows of his vineyard, although the distance prevented the pilot from working out exactly what was going on.
He sat himself down on the grass near a small clump of low, thorny bushes and watched a pair of children playing some distance away down in the fields. From his raised vantage point he could clearly hear the squeals of delight as a light but constant breeze kept their small, brightly coloured kite aloft, swinging this way and that. The kite soared and dived about as they half ran with it to keep it airborne, towing it along behind them against the direction of the wind.
The children – a boy and a girl of no more than seventeen years combined – lived on the nearest of the small farms thereabouts, their home just a few hundred metres away across the fields. In the weeks since ZG26 had commenced operations at St. Omer, Ritter had become accustomed to spending an hour of two of his free time on that rise by the road, often watching those children – and others – play. The sight of them enjoying the summer sun brought back memories of his own childhood, to him now sometimes seeming to be so
long ago.
Memories often filled his mind of times spent running and playing with his father among the fields and woods of their small country estate on the banks of the Rhine. The house was many years gone now and his father, a decorated army officer, had lost his life at Verdun…just one more casualty among so many millions during the Great War. The crippling economic depression of the Twenties and Thirties, exacerbated by the vacillating incompetence of the Weimar Republic, had cost his widowed mother all she had just to keep her and her only son alive following that so-called ‘War To End All Wars’.
Carl Werner Ritter, the only child of Werner and Lili, was born on their estate just north of Koblenz in the Rhine Valley in the first month of 1905. He was a bright, eager child who’d learned quickly and took readily to formal education. Although the outbreak and subsequent four years of the First World War didn’t affect the young Carl directly, the loss of his father had a huge impact.
Quite close to both his parents, this had been particularly so with his father. Werner Ritter and his son had often gone walking and hunting on their land and in nearby forests and spent a great deal of time together – as much, at least, as his father’s military career had allowed. His father’s death in 1916 struck the boy a massive blow – one that neither he nor his mother every entirely overcame. The financial difficulties brought on by the loss of her husband and the subsequent loss of their fortunes during the depression had been bitter blows indeed and had been an incredible strain upon a young widow trying to raise her teenage son alone.
His parents had been completely in love, although at the time Carl could never have understood the ramifications of the emotional loss his mother must’ve suffered. It was certainly something he’d given little thought to as an adult. His mother passed away of illness at a relatively young 43 years of age while he’d been fighting in the Spanish War, and whatever pain she’d endured since his father’s death had certainly ended right then and there. Ritter had borne his own feelings of loss and pain silently throughout his teenage years and early twenties, a situation that’d caused him to generally remain aloof from his peers and concentrate on his studies. By 1928 he’d completed degrees with honours in science and modern history at the University of Cologne where he’d also met Maria Planck, the young woman who would later become his wife.
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had then heralded the beginning of the Great Depression and a slump in national economies around the globe. Germany was hit harder than many, the collapse of the Weimar economy in no small part due to the crippling war reparations enforced upon the country by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. With inflation and unemployment on a meteoric rise across the nation, a jobless young Carl Ritter looked elsewhere for a solution to providing for his wife and the family they’d hoped to start.
Early in 1930, Ritter signed on to a Civil Aviation Training school and was sent off with many other recruits to an airfield near Lipetsk on the banks of the Voronezh River, 440km southeast of Moscow. With military aviation banned by Versailles, a secret agreement with the Soviet Union allowed for the creation of the German Aviation School. Ostensibly set up to train civil pilots for the national airline Lufthansa, the unit was in fact intended to prepare prospective pilots for combat flight training far away from the watchful eyes of France and Great Britain.
Almost by accident, the young Carl Ritter finally found the career direction for which he’d unconsciously been searching. He proved to be a natural flyer and excelled in his training, and it took little time for the well educated and capable new pilot to display his talents and potential for leadership. Upon the official reinstatement of the Luftwaffe in 1935, Ritter was immediately offered a commission as a junior officer with a fighter squadron.
The experiences he subsequently gained with the Luftwaffe contingent in the Spanish Civil War, albeit against vastly inferior opposition, brought to the fore some of his obvious abilities. Upon his return to Germany at the end of that conflict he’d attained the rank of captain and was already one on whom those in high places were keeping a watchful eye as a potential career officer, destined to go a long way. On the rare occasions that he contemplated it in a deeper sense, Ritter could see the irony in it all. It was more than obvious that the ‘military’ was in his blood, but to find his true calling in the service of his country – the same thing that had taken his father from him – was something that had pricked at his conscience on more than one occasion.
Ritter glanced up suddenly at the sound of the kite above him, now quite close and caught by a shift in the breeze that caused it to twist and falter. It bobbed, jinked, then turned into a wide, sweeping arc downward that brought it crashing to earth among a clump of thorny bushes a few metres from where he sat. As the children ran toward him, he rose to his feet and stepped across to where it had fallen.
Carefully placing a polished boot in among the bushes to provide stability as he reached for it, Ritter extracted the kite. He examined it quickly and was impressed by the standard of construction: a few small tears here and there would require mending, but otherwise it appeared a quite sound and sturdy design.
“S’il vous plait, m’sieur…” The girl’s voice rose hesitantly from behind him. He turned to find her staring at him from the discreet distance of a few metres, seeming at the same time both nervous and intense. Far younger than his sister, the boy looked on open-mouthed from behind her, his face a mask of awe. Ritter was a tall man and although not overly broad, was solidly-built nevertheless. To a small child he must’ve seemed quite intimidating in his grey uniform and peaked cap.
“Donnez le moi, s’il vous plait…” the girl repeated the request, this time stepping forward a little. She was apprehensive, but not so frightened as her brother. Ritter estimated her age to be somewhere around twelve or thirteen. With long, flowing locks of auburn hair, she was tall for her age and slim of build, and the light dress she wore also showed the faint curves that suggested she was on the cusp of beginning the metamorphosis of child to young woman.
“I think that it will require some mending before it flies again, my dear,” Ritter replied in fluent French, a language he’d learned at a very early age courtesy of the French side of his mother’s family. “These holes may tear completely in the wind…”
“I can fix it…!” She spoke proudly as she snatched the kite from Ritter’s open hands.
“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” he replied with a smile, impressed by her courage and confidence. “That’s a very good kite. Did you make it?”
“Are you a German?” The girl countered in the way of all children: changing the subject without warning. “My mother says all Germans are Nazis and they kill people!” As she spoke, the smile on Ritter’s face tightened and lost its humour. His expression turned to vague sadness and he dropped to his haunches, lowering himself to the children’s level.
“What’s your name?”
“Michelle…”
“And yours…?” He turned to the boy, who immediately clutched at his sister’s arm and pushed himself a little further behind her. He peered around beside left shoulder.
“…Antoine…” he answered softly after a long pause.
Well, Michelle and Antoine…” Ritter began with a kindly voice “…let me tell you both something important that I hope you’ll try to remember…” He placed his hands on his thighs for support. “Yes, I am a German, but I’m not a Nazi. Most Germans – even the soldiers – are not Nazis…”
“You’re a soldier: do you kill people?” At no more than five years old, the boy’s awe-struck question stung him more than he’d have cared to admit. Ritter had forty kills to his credit, each recorded as a ‘kill bar’ on the rudders of his J-110, and some – more than a few of them – had been Frenchmen – these children’s countrymen. Some of the pilots of those ‘kills’ had managed to bail out…many had not. Young children sometimes had the innate ability to force people to come to face who they truly were in ways that weren’t always p
leasant.
“I’m a pilot, not a soldier…” he answered with a wry grin, dodging the question altogether. “…I fly aeroplanes.” He assumed the girl must have been old enough to know what a fighter pilot was, but if Michelle saw the lie hidden in Ritter’s answer, she showed nothing of it.
“What’s that?” Antoine asked, to Ritter’s great relief changing the subject once more and gaining enough courage to step forward to his sister’s side and point at the neck of the pilot’s tunic. He glanced down in reflex and then touched a hand to his throat.
“This…?” His fingers touched at the hint of coloured ribbon hidden there amid the folds of the white silk scarf he wore tucked into his collar; a ribbon comprising three narrow bars of red, white and black. He lifted it out from his collar and over his head, the ribbon dragging with it a hefty little medal that’d been hanging hidden against his chest. The sight of the dark medal drew gasps of surprise and delight from both children.
England Expects (Empires Lost) Page 3