by Adam Makos
“What’s wrong?” Franz asked, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!” she screamed.
Franz hesitated and asked again what he had done wrong. The girl threatened to call her father. Franz ran for the door.
That night, Franz sat with his mother as she sipped a beer. Every night, without fail, she always drank a beer. Franz confessed his woes with the brewmaster’s daughter. His mother shrugged with a guilty grin. Franz realized she was somehow behind the slap he had received. He asked his mother what she had done. His mother admitted that when Franz had departed for Africa, he had left so many girlfriends behind that each wrote to her, seeking for news of him. She did not reply. So the girls wrote again and again. Then they started coming to her door to ask about Franz. Annoyed, Franz’s mother wrote a letter to each girl that said: “Franz is married! Leave him alone!” Franz broke out laughing at his stern old mother. He knew she probably still prayed he would come to his senses and become a priest.
Franz’s holiday was supposed to last eight weeks, but he found himself wanting to return to the desert sooner. When he biked around Amberg, his friends’ parents told him where their boys had been deployed. Every morning when he rustled open his newspaper, the headlines revealed bad news from the African front. JG-27 lost forty-victory ace Sergeant Gunther Steinhausen, and a day later, fifty-nine-victory ace Stahlschmitt, both killed.
Three weeks later, the headlines screamed in big black letters that Squadron 3’s hero of the desert, Marseille, was dead. Franz read the story in shock. It said that Marseille had died bailing out of his fighter after a combat mission. But Franz knew there had to be more to the story that no one was saying. The Desert Air Force could never kill Marseille.
As his leave wound down in October, Franz’s orders changed; he was told not to return to his unit because JG-27 was withdrawing from the desert. Africa had become a lost cause for the Germans. The British had launched an attack from El Alamein, a push that Rommel was unable to stop. In early November, as the Germans retreated, a new foe landed behind them in Casablanca: the Americans. When the first American flyer was captured, Neumann invited the pilot to join him for breakfast. Neumann was amazed that the American, a major, wore only a one-piece, olive-green flight suit. Neumann looked upon the enemy flyer with great worry as the American happily ate his breakfast. He knew that behind that one man stood the might of the American industrial empire. Neumann lost his appetite.
Around the table with his father and Father Josef, Franz came to the same conclusion—and worse. They agreed that the war had already been decided, ever since June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and opened a two-front war. Hitler had told his people that Stalin was about to attack them, but the truth did not matter. The older men had already lost a war in 1918 and knew how a nation’s doom played out. They knew at that moment, in November 1942, that Germany was going to lose the Second World War.
“What do I do now?” Franz asked his elders.
“You’re a German fighter pilot,” Franz’s father said. “That’s all there is to it.”
Father Josef nodded, having been a fighter pilot himself. Although he never spoke of his war stories, he told Franz something he would never forget.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We fight our best when we’re losing.”
8
WELCOME TO OLYMPUS
SIX MONTHS LATER, APRIL 13, 1943, NORTHWEST SICILY
HIDDEN IN THE shade of an olive tree, the white nose cone of the gray Bf-109 began to spin, its black blades catching the midday sunlight that snuck through the branches. The engine whined, coughed, and belched white smoke before settling into a powerful rhythm. Franz sat in the cockpit, a pipe clenched in his teeth. He wore just his tent cap, no flight helmet, no ear protection, and worked the throttle of the new 109.
Mechanics in oil-stained T-shirts and baggy khakis watched from the side of the spinning prop. Sicily was as hot as the desert, but unlike Africa, Sicily had trees, flowers, and streams around which high scrub bushes grew. At Trapani Airfield, the Squadron 6 mechanics preferred to work in the shade at the south corner of the base, far from the “big target” hangars on the north end. The lead mechanic leaned into the cockpit and studied the gauges.
“She’s still running hot,” Franz insisted to the mechanic who leaned in to hear Franz’s words. Yellow 2 was a new Gustav, or G-4, model, fresh from the factory. With its new camouflage scheme, the fighter looked like a sleek gray shark as it vibrated in the olive grove. The plane’s flanks and wings were gray, its belly was white, and along the fighter’s spine ran a wavy swath of molted black. A yellow 2 stood starkly from its camouflage.
Franz shut down the plane and hopped out. The mechanic insisted that Franz must be imagining problems. Franz reminded the mechanic that a G model had killed Marseille.
Franz had learned the story of Marseille’s death when he reunited with the unit. When JG-27 had been issued the new G models, Marseille had refused to fly his and had barred his pilots from doing so because the plane’s new, more powerful Daimler-Benz engine was prone to failure. After General Albert Kesselring heard that Marseille was casting doubt on the G, he ordered Marseille to fly the new plane anyway.
That’s how Marseille died. He had been flying home from a mission when a gear in his G model’s engine shattered and broke the oil line. Smoke billowed into his cockpit, blinding and disorienting him. Marseille failed to notice that his plane had slipped into a dive. When he jumped, instead of falling beneath the plane, the airflow sucked his body into the plane’s rudder. The same rudder that had borne his 158 victory marks had smashed Marseille’s chest, rendering him unconscious and unable to deploy his chute. Marseille’s friends had watched helplessly as he fell to earth. His comrades later returned to the airfield in a kubelwagen with Marseille’s body resting across their laps. In a palm grove, they displayed his casket in the bed of a truck. After burying Marseille, they gathered in a tent and listened to his favorite song, “Rumba Azul,” on his gramophone. A month later, they had to be removed from combat due to shattered morale.
The mechanic promised Franz he would take a look. His men reached for their tools, propped up the engine cowlings with rods, and began ratcheting off the engine cover.
Franz departed, darting across the runway with his life preserver in one hand and his flight helmet in the other. Small, silver flare cartridges lined the tops of his boots like bullets. The flares were a necessity now that he regularly flew over water.
Across the runway to the north lay the small village of Milo, with its flat, white roofs. Beyond it stood the massive dusty-looking Mount Erice, which looked like it belonged in the American badlands. Roedel kept his headquarters there, in a cave just below the summit. Atop Erice, an ancient, abandoned Norman castle clung to the mountain’s eastern lip. Called “Venus Castle,” the towers and walls had been built over an ancient temple to the Roman Goddess, Venus. Franz often envisioned ghostly knights staring down on the airfield from the ramparts. A month earlier, the group had deployed to Trapani Airfield from Germany. Roedel had promoted Franz to staff sergeant and placed him in Squadron 6 under Rudi Sinner, thinking the humble pilot a better influence than Voegl, whom Roedel had dispatched to lead a detachment in Africa.
Franz ambled along the flight line where the new 109s of Squadron 6 sat in gray brick blast pens held together by white mortar. Squadron 6 was nicknamed “the Bears,” because they had made the Berlin Bear their mascot and painted it on their patches. Franz saw his comrades lounging in the grottos behind their planes. The pilots sprawled in white lawn chairs and sipped herbal tea and iced limoncello. Franz felt the cool breeze of the ocean and thought how Sicily seemed a far better place than Africa.
Franz stopped in his tracks. The wind carried a rumble that Franz had come to dread in the days before. It was the deep hum of a swarm of metal wasps high above. Thump! Thump! Thump! Three bursts of anti-aircraft fire exploded on the edge of the airfield, the si
gnal for “Air Raid!”
Pilots ran from the grottos for their 109s. Franz sprinted toward his plane. His heavy, fur-lined flying boots pounded the dry earth, and Franz wished he wore slim cavalry boots like the pilots had in the Battle of Britain days.
The droning grew louder. Franz glanced up between strides and saw twenty or thirty little white crosses at fifteen thousand feet on the southern horizon, flying toward him. His fears were confirmed—they were the Four Motors—the planes the Americans called the “B-17 Flying Fortress.”
Still running, Franz neared the mechanics’ grotto. He saw the lead mechanic emerge, waving his arms. “She’s not ready!” the mechanic shouted. Franz cursed his new 109. Wheeling, Franz decided that if his own plane was down, then he could borrow someone else’s. At the first blast pen, he found a 109 fueled and ready, its cockpit open. A crewman waited with the starter handle, ready to crank the plane to life, while another waited on the wing root to help a pilot strap in. Franz grabbed the handhold behind the cockpit to haul himself up, but another hand pulled him back down. A voice shouted at his back, “She’s mine, Franz!” Franz turned to see Lieutenant Willi Kientsch pull himself up and onto the wing. Willi looked more like a pale Italian teenager than a fighter pilot. His black eyebrows drooped like arches over his lazy eyes. Short, slight, and scrappy, Willi was just twenty-two years old but already had seventeen victories, the same as Franz. Franz cursed and ran to find another plane. Although Franz and Willi were tied for victories, they were not rivals. Willi was Franz’s best friend in the squadron, and Franz knew he had the right to claim his plane. At the next 109, Franz got as far as the wingtip when another pilot shouted, “Don’t even think about it!” as he tossed his helmet up to the crewman and climbed aboard.
A red flare arced through the sky across the airfield, the signal for everyone to hide in a bomb shelter. From a slit trench behind the blast pens, a mechanic shouted for Franz to take cover. Franz could see the trench was full already with mechanics who watched the sky.
Franz kept running. The next 109 that Franz reached had taxied out before he could commandeer it. Farther down the line, another 109 taxied away. Beyond that, one pilot cut his motor, hopped from his plane, and ran, his self-preservation instincts kicking in. Another pilot saw this and followed, then another.
Franz looked up—the B-17s were now large white crosses in a line. He counted twenty-six bombers. Slowly they turned to make a run over the airfield. They were almost overhead. Franz swore he could see little black holes in their bellies, their bomb bays open. Willi and his wingman took off down the runway past Franz, adding insult to injury.
It was too late to get to a plane. Franz knew he needed to get as far from the airfield as possible. He spotted a distant patch of trees where he had seen men digging a shelter the day before, and he ran in its direction. He spotted the slit trench and slid in, knocking away a round wooden pole that spanned its length. When his boots squished into the earth, Franz knew why the trench was unoccupied—it was not a shelter. It was a latrine. The pole had been there for the men to steady their rears upon. Luckily, the latrine was new and only looked to have been used a few times. Repulsed, Franz tried to climb from the latrine, but the sound of bombs whining from above chased him back in. He scurried to the end of the trench and peered over the edge.
The earth shook as the first plane dropped its bombs on the runway. A second barrage followed. A third. A fourth. Franz buried his face into the island’s sandy dirt and clutched the rosary in his shirt pocket. Explosion after explosion detonated, each a brilliant five-hundred-pound flash. Fighters along the flight line evaporated in bursts of flame that erupted from the revetments. The earth upheaved, spitting dirt. Steel fragments flew in all directions, chopping trees in ragged halves.
Franz clutched his ears, but this only made the concussions hurt worse. He grabbed his throat as each blast sucked the air out of his lungs. He closed his eyes from the painful flashes of light. He wanted to vomit as his equilibrium spun. The bombs cracked, time and again, each a supersonic wave that pounded Franz like a lightning storm slapping the earth.
Then, just as suddenly, the earth stopped shaking. Silence arrived. The B-17s had dumped their payloads and droned away. The attack was part of the Allies’ new offensive, Operation Flax. The Americans and British knew that Hitler had refused to evacuate the Afrika Korps from the desert and that the only thing keeping Rommel from collapse was his supply line from Sicily. Operation Flax was the Allied plan to slice that umbilical cord of bullets, fuel, and food.
Franz’s ears rang. As he pulled himself from the trench, he lost his balance and fell facedown. Through his orbiting vision, he saw fires on the flight line. In the blast pens, cracked wings and upturned tails protruded where 109s had once perched. Squinting through the spins, Franz peered toward the mechanics’ grotto. There through the smoke Franz saw Yellow 2. His Gustav still sat, proudly intact and on its gear, while others all around the field burned. Franz slapped the earth with joy.
THAT SAME EVENING
Franz and Willi drove the Squadron 6 kubelwagen up the winding road that climbed the side of Mount Erice. The road was rough and full of hairpins. Franz kept the car in low gear, its tires kicking up yellow dust. Below the summit, the mountain became smooth. Franz pulled into a small roundabout where other kubelwagens sat at the mouth of a cave, with camouflaged netting draped over them. Rock piles spewed from the cave, a sign of “home improvements” to the unit’s mountainside headquarters. Franz and Willi walked to the cliff to soak in the majestic view. On many nights the pilots congregated there to smoke. They felt more at home above the earth than on its face.
At their feet lay Milo. Farther south sat the airfield, with its runway shaped like a bone and a circular turnabout at each end, where planes could warm their engines before takeoff. Above them loomed the stark walls of Venus Castle. To the east lay clusters of Mediterranean farms and olive groves that vented from the day’s heat. Beyond the farms lay brownish-gold fields of durum wheat, still golden in the fading sunlight. To the west lay the ancient coastal city of Trapani. It was built around a half-moon bay, and the city came alive at sunset as Mediterranean villages did when their oil lamps were lit. Willi always acted unimpressed by the scenery and instead bragged about the skiing near his hometown, Kisslegg, where he had been a master skier before the war. When he wasn’t bragging about the mountains, Willi boasted about his small town’s domed church. It was built along a lake where people would stroll after Mass. Franz sensed the innocence of Willi’s hometown pride as he looked at the young pilot, whose white officer’s crush cap always looked like he had borrowed it from his father.
“Welcome to Olympus,” Roedel shouted as he sauntered from the cave that doubled as his headquarters. Franz had known he would be there. The airfield below was Roedel’s kingdom and the mountain and its castle, his estate. His squadrons—4, 5, and 6—were now the “Knights of Sicily.” Outfitted with new planes and refilled with new pilots, the squadrons’ new mission was to defend the island and the supply convoys to Africa. With only forty-two planes, II Group was shouldering a mission meant for all of JG-27. Due to the broadening war front, the wing had splintered and would never operate as one again. Instead, Neumann, who operated from an airfield in the center of Sicily, was dispatching some of his squadrons to France and others to Greece. For support, Roedel had the Italians, whose pilots were brave but known for their outstanding aerobatic flying rather than their fighting prowess. He also had the three ghost squadrons of Fighter Wing 53 (JG-53), whose battered planes sat derelict at the northern end of the airfield, their pilots at home, resting from African duty.
Relaxing around the kubelwagen, Franz, Willi, and Roedel lit up and swapped stories. Franz pulled out his pipe and bag of tobacco, a new habit. He tamped the tobacco into the pipe with the brass of a spent machine gun shell. Roedel and Willi lit cigarettes. They talked about the raid that day and lamented the loss of eight fighters, bombed on the ground. Willi had
caught up to the Four Motors north of the island and knocked one down, a significant accomplishment. A bomber victory carried bonus points that brought a pilot much closer to “magic 30” and the Knight’s Cross. A fighter victory was worth one point, but a bomber victory was worth three points because a bomber was a more challenging adversary.
Invariably, their conversation steered back to the old days in Africa. Willi had barely known Franz there, but he knew of the “Voegl Flight.” Roedel explained that he, himself, had been dragged into the controversy. Just days after his return, Roedel had scored his fifty-third victory, when someone started a rumor that he, too, had inflated his victories.
Secretly, Roedel had taken action. When Voegl and Bendert claimed new victories, he sent out the unit’s camera-equipped 109 and Fiesler Storch reconnaissance planes to the spots where they said their vanquished foes had crashed. When the searches found nothing, Roedel confronted Voegl and Bendert. He knew they had entered combat; there were witnesses to that much. But both claimed victories that could not be verified.*
Roedel could have hung Voegl and Bendert out to dry. But he knew that exposing them could have turned JG-27 into the laughing stock of the Air Force. So Roedel dealt with them privately. He kept them on the flight roster and gave them a second chance to repair the damage they had done. He allowed Voegl to retain his leadership of Squadron 4, and he did not interfere with Bendert’s Knight’s Cross nomination. But as punishment, Roedel kept both men in the desert as long as he could. After Roedel confronted them, Voegl scored only once more and Bendert stopped scoring altogether. But Voegl and Bendert became team players once again, flying mission after mission without victory claims. They fought harder than before, as if driven to make amends for what they had done to Swallisch. By the time JG-27 left the desert, their month of bad judgment had been forgotten.