The Uvalde Raider

by Ben H. English

  From that day forward, most everything in their lives seemed to take on a different track. At first it appeared as if it was for the better, and many had questioned Vadi’s dark vision for their collective future. That questioning ultimately included even members of his own household, and Max himself.

  Hitler talked of a great aspiration, of an immensely strong new Germany and of a Third Reich that would last for a thousand years. He gave the German people a new self-respect for themselves and their nation, and banished much of the disgrace associated with the ruinous loss of the recent war. Men went back to work and vast new projects were undertaken to showcase Teutonic skill, knowledge and engineering expertise. Among those was a concentrated effort to expand the military, and the building of a powerful new German air force called the Luftwaffe.

  Vadi still entertained a different dream for Max, and a different future for him in being a physician. But of all of Max’s youthful desires, the most persistent and lasting was the one to fly. This led to several discussions that became heated on occasion, an unfortunate circumstance usually brought on by Max. He would become so exasperated with his father, as he could not make the elder Grephardt understand what the idea of flying meant to him. Yes, being a doctor was a noble and respected profession, and Max understood the vital need for good ones. It was just that being a doctor and saving lives did not hold any personal calling to him.

  In the end and ironically enough, Max Grephardt would instead spend much of his younger years in the taking of lives during the war to come. Tragically for the five brothers, he was not the only son who heard the beguiling call of the sirens that sang the songs of military glory.

  Heinrich, the oldest, was the first to don a uniform. He joined the Kriegsmarine, the resurgent German Navy and served aboard one of her dreaded Unterseeboots, or U-Boats. One dark night his submarine slipped out from its base in Lorient, never to return. Somewhere in the vastness of the North Atlantic, it found an unmarked watery grave for all hands aboard.

  The second one out the door was Rudolph. He had enlisted in the Panzers and became a tank commander on the Eastern Front. He and his crew were lost during the Battle of Kursk, when his Panzer Mark IV Ausf.G was turned into a fiery, exploding volcano due to a direct hit from a Soviet T-34. Rudolph and his fellows never even caught a glimpse of the enemy iron monster that killed them all.

  After Max had joined the Luftwaffe, younger brother Willy signed up for the Wehrmacht Heer as a common infantryman. By that time the Grephardt family already had three sons committed to the Vaterland and knew all too well they were in a war in which the tides were turning. But Willy was still eager to go and do his part and dutifully marched on until January of 1944, when he was killed in action outside of Monte Cassino on the Italian front.

  Paul was the youngest and the only one to not put on the uniform. A very bright, introspective young man of faith, he had decided to follow Vadi into the clergy, a decision that brought a collected sense of relief to what was left of the Grephardt family.

  He had gone to study in Frankfurt, not too far away from Meiningen. In the black days of early 1944, he would become yet another civilian casualty to the Allied bombing campaigns. Paul was killed in the same raid that destroyed the historic Paulskirche, along with most of the renowned center area of the city that dated back to the Middle Ages.

  When he received the word, Max had pondered upon the coincidence of his youngest brother losing his life within sight of the church named after the same apostle as he. The timing of this news had been devastating for both of his parents, as they would receive the official notice concerning Willy just days afterwards.

  Yet for Max, he was living his dream and was quite good at what he had always been so keen to try. The tragedies of his own family, along with his personal exploits, found him recognized nationally as one of the true heroes of the Fatherland, and he wore the Knight’s Cross medal proudly around his neck. Luftwaffe Hauptmann Grephardt seemed to lead a charmed life in the midst of a tidal wave of carnage and death that engulfed all around him. The fact that he was now the only surviving brother of five only heightened that assumptive perception.

  The Nazi Party propaganda machine, desperate for such inspiring stories in the midst of so much bad news from so many fronts, ran full length feature articles on him. German magazines and newspapers carried his carefully crafted image, a jaunty young fighter ace with handsome features complete with the required perfectly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. They had even brought him back from his badly needed presence on the Eastern Front, to portray himself on film while spending time in Berlin rubbing elbows with the powerful and privileged.

  That trip to Berlin and being placed so close to the upper echelons of the Nazi Party was when he first discovered that all was not as it had first seemed. His boyish enthusiasms and patriotic dreams in this Third Reich were shocked to their very core, confronted with the reality of what he and so many others had been fighting for. So much blood spilt, so many lives lost and for what? For these pompous, self-serving zecken to strut about at the beck and call of their delusional leader?

  Of course, he had already realized the war was an issue in serious doubt. Max had experienced firsthand the merciless hordes of the Red Army in the east, as well as the industrial might and resolve of the Allied forces to the west. But up to this point the reasons and goals for the struggle had been clear enough for him to follow without question.

  But now, much like the war itself, the doubts and the needlessness of it all began to haunt him. In Berlin, his perspective began to change and the wisdom of his Vadi from years ago began to reveal itself in full. It was then that he first began to suspicion that Germany’s true enemies were emplaced within as much as without.

  He found himself wanting so badly to return to that little Lutheran Church along the banks of the Werra, and to speak with the minister who was so faithful to it and to all that it stood for. This time not as a young boy or a rebellious teenager, but as one man in search of truth from another. A man finding himself confronted with many more questions of essentiality than possible answers for them, and seeking wisdom from what he now saw as the wisest man he had ever known.

  Instead he was hustled back to the front and to the cockpit of his waiting Messerschmitt, to do battle once more against the massed waves of Yaks, Migs, and Lavochkins, as well as the British made Hurricanes and American built Airacobras, Warhawks and Kingcobras. The Red Army was on the move, which meant the Red Air Force was fully deployed in providing the requisite close aerial cover. It was the largest and most brutally effective war machine the world had known up to that time, and it was methodically grinding its German adversaries into the icy, snow covered ground of Northern Europe.

  The Luftwaffe mail routes were often sporadic and unreliable, but still occasionally he would receive a letter from his father. In them he noted an increasingly open disgust for the Nazi Party and its leadership, and the disastrous path they were leading Germany down. Max wrote back as much as he could yet wondered how many of his letters actually made it home.

  He was very careful about what he said and how he said it. There was a joke going around that one would never find a Gestapo man anywhere near the front, as they were too busy sitting around post offices and reading other people’s mail. Such was the dark humor that permeated among the men who were actually fighting, and dying, in this increasingly hopeless war. Max hoped that his father would hear that joke and take heed of the intent.

  It was on his ninth mission after his return from Berlin, and what he had seen and experienced there was still fresh on his mind. Max never even saw the Yak-9U that slipped in from behind, directly astern and slightly lower in the classic fighter-on-fighter line of attack. His first hint of any real trouble was when the powerful 20 mm rapid fire cannon of the white camouflaged Yak ripped the guts out of his tried-and-true Me109, and turned it into a smoking piece of airborne junk that was rapidly falling out of the winter Lithuanian sky.

&nb
sp; That smoke had quickly turned into an oil fire that filled the cockpit of the little fighter, and Hauptmann Grephardt still carried the burn scars to prove it. Max managed to hastily get the canopy back and the mortally-wounded Messerschmitt inverted, upon which he bailed out into the shockingly frigid slipstream.

  With his heavy flying clothes still on fire he was able to deploy his chute, which led to another immediate problem: the victorious Soviet pilot had not only wanted the gray camouflaged 109, but he also wanted one Hauptmann Maximilian Friedrich Grephardt, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. Max had spent the rest of his slow ride down to the frozen ground side-slipping his parachute to spoil the Russian's aim, while still trying to put out the fires on his winterized uniform.

  While ultimately successful on both counts, his rather precarious situation was compounded by the fact that he just happened to bail out over recently acquired Soviet territory. He also found himself unarmed, as he and his issued Walther PPK had evidently gone their separate ways sometime during the hasty exit from the Messerschmitt.

  For two whole days Max led elements of Stalin's military machine on a not-so-merry chase, until he found himself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. On the third morning Hauptmann Grephardt awoke with the ominous muzzle of a Mosin-Nagant 91/30 mere inches from his face and his back against cold, unyielding stone.

  Weak from exhaustion and pockmarked with burns as well as shivering from exposure, he must have not looked important enough to waste a rifle bullet on. Instead, the Red Army soldiers in attendance decided to pick up where the smoke inhalation, the flames, the brutal cold, and the lack of food and sleep had left off. Rather than just up and killing him, they had beaten the hapless hauptmann to the point where he was rapidly becoming more dead than alive. His only saving favor was the timely arrival of a Soviet propaganda officer, who recognized the Luftwaffe pilot for what he was and decided he just might know something of tactical or even strategic importance.

  So Max was packed into a lend-lease American six-by truck, along with some other German prisoners who looked as if they had been given the same Communist warm welcome as he. But the young Luftwaffe officer had other ideas and a second dose of Russian hospitality was not among them.

  Picking his moment, he literally rocketed out of the bed of the truck as it sped along, right under the noses of the guards who had let their own lack of sleep and attending complacency get the better of them. He had hit, skidded and then bounced down the side of a steep incline and into the thick forest below, closely pursued by shouts, cursing and a substantial amount of small arms fire attempting to seek him out.

  Max had jounced hard through the brush line and came up sprinting, encouraged by the cracks and pops of bullets striking all about. He ran as far and as fast as he could until he could run no further. Then the beleaguered young man simply dropped in his tracks and laid there, unable to go another step.

  It was the lowest point he could ever imagine in his entire life. He was shaking involuntarily from the cold, physically exhausted and spiritually spent, and surrounded by his enemies. His bid for freedom and the attending short euphoria of success had been quickly replaced with a realistic appraisal of his current situation, and an overwhelming dread of what might come next.

  Huddled miserably in a snow drift, Max knew he was close to the end of the line. His was a situation beyond hope and beyond any definition of futile, and he found himself drowning in an all-encompassing sea of absolute despair. When Max Grephardt told this story to others many years later, he confided that it was the one time in his life when he actually considered suicide. He found himself wishing for that small Walther PPK that was lost when he bailed out, so that he might bring a swift end to his overpowering suffering and pain.

  Yet deep inside himself, something still stirred. Call it a need or a fixation or perhaps unfinished business in trying to make some things right, but Max knew he couldn’t let it all end here. He had to make it back to the banks of the Werra, to let a man better than himself know that he had been right all along. Vadi deserved that much and he deserved to hear it from his one surviving son. It wasn’t all that Max needed to do, not by a long shot. But it would be a start.

  Max tried to get up again, yet didn’t have enough physical strength left to do even that. It was only then, in recognizing he had run out of the personal courage his father had so often used as an illustration, that he reached out in a way that was also a first in his young, eventful life. The once fearless and so prideful hero of the Fatherland cried out piteously in silent voice for help from a merciful God above.

  With tears coursing down near frozen cheeks, he laid himself bare and begged forgiveness for all the years wasted upon things other than what had been truly important all along. He prayed for the strength that went beyond any of that found in the physical or mental, the kind that can only come through the blood of a crucified Savior who died for all of mankind’s sins. He appealed to a far mightier power than what was merely numbered by men, guns and fighter planes.

  And in that instant, Max Grephardt was saved by Grace and was never the same man again. The old Max died there in that cheerless snow drift on a freezing January morning and a new Max Grephardt got up and walked away, not once looking behind.

  CHAPTER NINE

  For the next few days Max moved west through the Soviet lines, taking sustenance and shelter where he could find it. Filled with his new faith and its attending resolve, he somehow managed to make his way undetected by those who wanted him so badly. In the continuing violence and confusion of small unit attacks and counterattacks, he was finally found by a German reconnaissance patrol and hustled to a field hospital. From there he was moved twice more due to the rapid advancement of the Soviet Army. Finally, he was taken back to Germany itself and placed in a hospital ward for his burns and other physical infirmities.

  Lying there in bed with the sounds of a war growing closer every day, Max rested to regain his strength. He was able to obtain a Bible, devouring the words contained within in the manner of a starving man with a virtual feast set before him. If he noticed the questioning looks or occasional hard stare as he studied the passages, he paid the rejective onlookers little attention. Max Grephardt was trying to make for lost time, and read with a rapturous inner joy what before had never really made much sense to him.

  As soon as he was able to, he left the hospital without any real official orders and started making his way home. In the middle of all the turmoil and endless flow of casualties, he was most likely not even going to be missed for some time. His bed would be filled quickly enough and by someone who was in far greater need than he. There was so much he wanted to talk to his father about, so many things he wanted to say and so many questions that needed asking. The little church along the Werra beckoned to him with the promise of a new beginning.

  Germany was now a country completely wrecked. Soldiers and civilians alike wandered around aimlessly with no clear direction or thought in purpose. Communications and modern transportation were mostly nonexistent, there was no fuel or power. Rumors ran rampant and wild talk was everywhere, which further added to the growing chaos that gripped the nation by its collective throat. A mass migration, usually by foot or by cart was streaming west away from the advancing Red Army. If the German war machine continued to fight with any real goal at all, it was to keep the hated Bolsheviks at bay long enough for the Western Allies to occupy their homeland.

  Along the way Max saw entire cities and populations that had been completely obliterated. It was said that Dresden itself was nothing more now than a burned-out corpse of ashes, while large population centers such as Hamburg, Mainz and Bochum had basically ceased to exist. Devastation raised its ugly head most every mile along his route, and made its presence felt in ways only known to those who have actually experienced the barbaric reality of total war. The Third Reich, once proclaimed as being destined to last a thousand years, was nothing more than a smoldering fu
neral pyre.

  Undeterred, Max pushed on toward the Werra. He was still weak from his prior ordeals and as malnourished as most of the rest of the German population. The hills and valleys were bleak with the aching iciness of a begrudgingly resistant winter, judged to be one of worst in recent European history. Max’s well-worn wool uniform did little to protect him from the biting cold, and his slowly healing burns were chaffed and irritated by the material. He walked when he had to and grabbed a lift with passing military vehicles when given the opportunity.

  No one asked him about his papers or where he was going. It was obvious that the sickly, scar tissue splotched Luftwaffe hauptmann was in no condition to climb back into the cockpit of a fighter plane or do much of anything else. Some of them might have recognized him as the dashing young ace who had so recently been the darling of the German mass media, but no one said anything. Those days were dead and gone, and they had their own problems to deal with in their own hunger, inner doubts and ever-present miseries.

  Finally, one crisp morning early in April he arrived at his destination. Max walked up the country lane, savoring the first tiny hints of spring and the culmination of a long, arduous journey. He was so close; each step was lighter now and he felt a resurgent strength sweeping through his being as the anticipation inside arose.

  But what he saw after walking around that last bend was not what he had traveled so far for. The little white church was only a wasted skeleton of itself, charred and abandoned. The adjoining home where he grew up, the hearth for so many happy memories was empty and barren, its contents mostly either vanished or vandalized. Nothing stirred, no hearty cry of welcome was given from within. The site was like an open grave, silent and foreboding.