by Adam Makos
Without fail, Franz’s evening talks with Roedel took on a negative tone. It seemed that the longer Roedel looked at the horizon, the more haunted he became by the vision of the horrors still happening in Africa.
“We’re next,” he said between drags on his cigarette. “It’s impossible to succeed here.” Franz drew deeply from his pipe, its embers glowing. They all had heard the rumor that the enemy now had five thousand planes in Africa. In silence, the men looked past the beautiful Sicilian sunset and to the southern horizon, where darkness overtook the skies.
THREE DAYS LATER, APRIL 16, 1942
Spiraling upward in their 109s through scattered clouds above the airfield, Franz and Willi saw smoke rising on the other side of Olympus. The gray plumes bellowed from the port of Palermo on the island’s north coast. The Four Motors had bombed the docks and power station there, sinking two ships. Franz, Willi, and twenty-one of their comrades had scrambled too late. The skies were otherwise empty. It was 4:30 P.M., and the Four Motors had just spoiled the dinner dates Franz had lined up for him and Willi in Trapani.
From Olympus, the controllers radioed the flight to alert them that P-38 fighters had been sighted above the Gulf of Palermo. Franz had never seen a P-38, but he had heard the name the boys in Africa gave the new American fighter—“the Fork-Tailed Devil.” The P-38 was rumored to spit a hose of fire from five machine guns and a cannon, all packed in its nose. Supposedly it could snap from level flight into a loop in a blink.
From his fighter, Yellow 3, Willi radioed Franz and said he had a hunch where the bombers were. Two days before, after the B-17s had obliterated the airfield, Willi had caught them north of Sicily, turning west to reverse course and skirt the island on their way home to North Africa. Willi wagered that now the Four Motors would be flying the same route. He told Franz they could intercept the bombers west of the island if they hurried.
Franz liked the idea of pursuing “the herd,” as the bombers were called, instead of “the Fork-Tailed Devils.” The call was Willi’s—he was leading the flights because their squadron commander, Sinner, had been banged up several weeks earlier after a crash landing on the airfield. Despite the fact that Willi was younger than him, Franz respected Willi’s rank and courage.
Willi steered the flights west and poured on the coals. Their G models seemed to surge with joy at the chance to run open-throttle. As the flights motored across the island and over the sea, the clouds revealed their speed. The G’s new motor had 120 more horsepower than the F, its propeller blades were broader, and it was faster, capable of four hundred miles per hour at altitude. The G was still poor for dogfighting. Its faster speed made its turning radius even wider. And the G was a killer on takeoff. If a pilot applied too much power too quickly it would torque roll, flipping onto its back and into the runway.
“There’s the herd!” someone shouted across the radio. Willi was right. Ahead, Franz saw them: the Four Motors. Like a black cloud they flew at twenty-four thousand feet over a tiny fishermen’s island called Marettimo. They were B-17s of the 97th Bomb Group. Willi led the squadron in a gentle turn behind the bombers until they were flying in the same direction at the same altitude. The pack of 109s spread out into a trail formation, each flight of four following the one ahead of it, as they gained ground on the heavies.
Franz squinted through the illuminated ring of his gun sight. The Four Motors were several miles ahead, flying toward the late-afternoon sun. He could make out their mustard-brown bodies and white bellies. They flew in a box formation, an arrangement of twenty-one planes that stacked diagonally like steps toward the heavens. This allowed the bombers’ gunners to lend fire support to one another.
Franz’s heart pounded. He found his plane rising and dipping with the shaking of his hand, and he noted the irony that he was flying like a rookie again. Through his bulletproof windshield, a welcomed improvement of the G model, Franz watched Willi lead the 109s ahead of him into their attack run. Franz’s flight was next in line.
Although the bombers were lighter and faster without their bombs, the fighters slowly crept up on them from behind using their one-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour speed advantage. As Willi’s flight approached the bombers at six hundred yards’ distance, gunners on all twenty-one bombers opened fire. A stream of tracers converged around and in front of the tiny fighters. Willi’s flight panicked and returned fire too soon, leaving a dirty gun smoke trail in their wake. They broke away and dove for safety, all too eager to let Franz’s flight try.
Suddenly there were no 109s in front of Franz, just smoke-stained air between him and the bombers. He had no experience in attacking bombers and was unsure of the right way to go about it. Franz radioed his flight, instructing them to fall behind him. They would simply attack one after the other. He was too scared to think of any last advice or words of bravado. “Let’s go,” he simply said. One of his pilots confirmed his transmission. The other two said nothing, too scared to speak.
Starting at one thousand yards from the bombers, Franz turned onto his gun run. He was alarmed to discover that attacking from tail was agonizingly slow. He knew to fire at a hundred yards then break away. But flying the first nine hundred yards to reach that point would take eighteen long seconds.
Franz aimed for the lowest bombers so he and his flight could make the quickest getaway possible. He passed nine hundred yards in two seconds. Then eight hundred. Then seven hundred. At six hundred yards he could see that the bombers’ flanks displayed white American stars surrounded by yellow circles. The bomber crews could see him, too, and their tail and ball turret gunners opened fire, eighty-four guns, tracking him in the lead like a spotlight on a stage actor.
Each gun spit seven sharp .50-caliber bullets per second. At five hundred yards, with tracer bullets zipping past his canopy, Franz realized the awful truth of the tail attack. You cannot do this and not be hit.
At four hundred yards he saw the massive wingspan of a B-17 fill the ring of his gun sight. He squeezed a burst of his cannon for one second before he lost his nerve, snap-rolled his fighter inverted, and broke away. The pilots behind him did the same, some firing, but others too scared to squeeze a trigger.
When Franz pulled out of the dive, he looked up through the canopy roof and saw the bombers’ white bellies high above him, motoring upward and away, unscathed. Franz wondered how he had missed the bombers—the enemy’s wings had filled the ring of his gun sight. But, like Willi before him, Franz had failed to recognize a new variable. The massive, 104-foot wingspan of a B-17 was far different than the 40-foot wings of a fighter—it filled the gun sight faster although it was farther away. That day all of the 109 pilots’ shots fell short. They had yet to learn that a bomber’s wingspan needed to extend beyond the ring of the gun sight before it was time to shoot.
For the young American bomber crews, it had been a resounding although exaggerated victory. They would report being attacked by “40 enemy planes” without loss and would later write simply: “Enemy aircraft fired at bombers from distance.”
WILLI PULLED UP on Franz’s wing as their flights re-formed behind them. Willi jokingly asked if Franz wanted to try again. “I’d rather be a coward for seven seconds than a long time dead,” Franz said. So Willi radioed the others: “Mission complete, return to base.” The attack had carried them southwest of Marettimo Island, so Willi steered northeast toward the island.
Not a minute had gone by before someone radioed, “Fighters! Eleven o’clock low!” Franz leaned forward against his straps and peered ahead of his left wing. He saw green silhouettes just two thousand feet below him. At sixteen thousand feet they motored in the opposite direction, toward Africa. Franz’s eyes went wide. Each fighter had two engines, one attached to each large wing. The engines’ booms extended back like fork blades connecting to a small tail. They were P-38s, ten of them, the Fork-Tailed Devils of the 82nd Fighter Group. The Americans called their planes “Lightnings.”
Eager to redeem himself from his botched run
on the bombers, Willi radioed Franz to say he was attacking. Willi knew no bounds when it came to pushing his luck, so Franz agreed to cover him. Willi dismissed his flight, as did Franz. It was like the desert again, two experts against many.
Franz followed Willi into a dive toward the P-38s. Both knew they had to hit them from astern or from behind, anywhere but from the front. Head-on, the Lightnings had them outgunned.* The P-38 pilots spotted the 109s too late.
With height, speed, and surprise on their side, Franz and Willi swept across the P-38 formation from above, their guns blazing. Willi riddled a P-38 from wingtip to wingtip. Franz’s bullets stitched the right engine of another. Round and round they danced with the P-38s. Willi’s bullets hit another P-38 that spun from the sky. But the P-38s seemed reluctant to duel. After each joust they steered back onto their original southward course. All at once, they leveled their wings toward Africa and ran from the fight.
Convinced he and Franz had routed the P-38s, Willi began to chase them. But Franz warned Willi that the P-38s would only lead him out to sea, where he would run out of fuel. Willi reluctantly abandoned his pursuit.
Franz tipped his wing and looked down on the P-38 he had wounded. It was circling downward, its engine coughing black smoke. Suddenly the hood of its canopy tumbled away in the slipstream. The pilot stood in the cockpit then dove toward the rear of the wing. The draft sucked his body under the forked tail. He free-fell from twelve thousand feet, passing through the clouds. “Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps.
Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial beacon to steer a boat to the spot, but he shook the thought from his mind. It would put him at risk. If a prowling flight of enemy fighters found him, Franz knew he, too, could be shot into the sea. Franz and Willi departed the scene, leaving the pilot in his raft to fate. As they flew away, Franz wished the man a strong westerly wind.
The American who looked up from the raft was Second Lieutenant Conrad Bentzlin, a young man from a large Swedish-American family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was quiet and hardworking, having taught himself English in high school. He had paid his way through the University of Minnesota by working for the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, cutting firebreaks in the forests of northern Minnesota. Among his buddies of the 82nd Fighter Group, Bentzlin was known as “the smartest guy in the unit.”
Far from shore Bentzlin floated alone. A day later, another flight of P-38s flew over him and, through a hole in the clouds, saw him waving his arms from a raft. But he was in the middle of the sea and they could do nothing. Bentzlin would never be seen again.*
When Franz and Willi landed at Trapani, they hurried to fill out their victory claims in the operations shack. Willi claimed two P-38s and Franz one. Willi was cheerful because they had chased away an entire flight of Fork-Tailed Devils, but Franz felt a sense of regret. He had seen his enemy in the raft. He mentally put himself in that man’s shoes, floating alone as the sea grew choppy and storm clouds rolled in, without water or food. “That’s war,” Franz told himself as he lit a cigarette, another new habit. With each drag of smoke, he put the American pilot farther out of his mind. He scrawled his signature on the paperwork so he and Willi could go celebrate in Trapani, where black-haired “bella donnas” and bottles of sweet Marsala wine were calling.
* * *
* Roedel would remember, “I do not think that it was a matter of intentionally lying about their victories, but it was proven to have been gross negligence in claiming victories simply because a pilot shoots at an aircraft, maybe getting hits, but not confirming the crash or the pilot getting out. The situation stained all involved in the Group and that flight, and even Stigler and I were questioned. Bad business really.”1
* Franz would remember, “One cardinal rule we never forgot was: avoid fighting a P-38 head-on. That was suicide. Their armament was so heavy and their firepower so murderous that no one ever tried that type of attack more than once.”2
* Conrad Bentzlin had a younger brother, Carl, who would become a navigator on a B-24 that would be shot down over Vienna. Like Conrad, he became “missing in action” and never would return. When Conrad was shot down, his sister, Betty, was sixteen. For years after the war, Betty always looked for him in crowds.
9
THE UNSEEN HAND
TWO WEEKS LATER, LATE APRIL 1943, TRAPANI, SICILY
FRANZ AND WILLI waited nervously in the courtyard of the villa on a hillside overlooking Trapani Bay. The high noon sun cast sharp shadows on the dried fountain that languished in the courtyard’s center between a cluster of palm trees. Willi flicked his cigarette nervously. All Roedel had told them was that General Adolf Galland had ordered that they report to the villa, the general’s new headquarters. Franz and Willi knew Galland’s face from postcards, the news clips before cinema films, and from the boxes of cigars he endorsed. He was a national hero, a ninety-four-victory ace and Germany’s youngest general at age thirty-one. All of Germany’s fighter pilots fell under his command.
Franz and Willi had pressed their tropical dress uniforms—tan blazers with white caps—and had assumed Galland either intended to decorate them with some awards or wanted their report on the disastrous supply convoys to Africa. In the week prior, Franz and Willi had flown to Africa daily, escorting transports with supplies for the doomed Afrika Korps. They had seen the Allies’ aerial blockade and had watched as the seas grew covered with the burning wreckage of German transports and floating men. Allied fighters were shooting down thirty Ju-52s per week, and the Germans had begun naming days after big losses, such as “the Palm Sunday Massacre” followed by “the Holy Thursday Massacre.”*
Roedel opened the tall wooden doors of the villa and ushered Franz and Willi inside. Roedel nervously raised his eyebrows to Franz, as if to say, “Be prepared.” Franz had not seen Roedel since the shakeup when Galland had named him the new leader of JG-27. Neumann was gone. No one knew if he had been promoted or replaced, but he had had to leave his beloved JG-27 to work on Galland’s staff in Germany. Roedel chose Schroer to take his spot and lead II Group.
Passing through a vast room beneath a high ceiling with wooden beams, they found Galland outside on a patio, relaxing after his lunch at a small, circular table. The sea lay behind him. Galland’s thin smile beamed from beneath his black mustache. His slicked black hair and black eyebrows gave him a dark, menacing quality. A bad crash had made his face more rugged. The crash had flattened his nose and sunken his eyebrows over his eyes. Still, Galland remained a dashing lady’s man and unrepentant bachelor. He wore a tan, short-sleeved shirt that made his black Knight’s Cross dangle boldly.
Across from Galland sat his deputy, Colonel Gunther Luetzow, also a legendary pilot at only thirty-one years old. Luetzow was known as “the Man of Ice” because he showed little emotion, on the ground or in the air, where he had scored 104 victories and earned the Knight’s Cross. Slender in build, his face was scrunched by a thick nose and his small eyes always looked serious, either deep in thought or piercing with worry. Only a few people had ever seen him smile. Luetzow had another side that few witnessed, in which he was a family man who cherished his wife, small son, and daughter.
Franz and Willi saluted the seated general and colonel and remained at attention as Roedel took a seat at Galland’s table.* Roedel and Galland were old friends, going back to the Battle of France, where Roedel had been Galland’s wingman on the day when Galland scored his first victory.
Galland lit up a thick cigar, a trademark affectation he had discover
ed while flying in the Spanish Civil War. Galland loved cigars so much he had an electric cigar lighter installed in his 109. Galland’s 109 was legendary for other reasons. Franz had never seen the plane, but Galland was said to have customized it with extra machine guns and had his personal nose art, a custom-designed cartoon of Mickey Mouse, painted alongside the cockpit.
Turning to Franz and Willi, Galland told them in his soft, proper, voice that he had come to Sicily to manage the African debacle and more—to investigate a threat far greater to Germany—the Four Motors. Galland confirmed what all the pilots knew, that American heavy bombers were pounding Germany from one direction—England. But if they attacked from the Mediterranean, too, such a two-pronged attack would be impossible to defend against.
“They have to be stopped, here,” Galland said.
Galland turned to Franz and Willi.
“You are the pilots who shot down the P-38s on April 16—yes?”
“Yes, General,” they replied.
“Then why did you run from the bombers to go and battle against fighters?” Galland asked.
Franz and Willi were lost for words. Galland reiterated the record for them. The heavies had bombed Trapani on April 11, 12, and 13, yet only one Four Motor was knocked down. On April 16, the heavies returned, and twenty-three pilots flew against them and scored nothing but P-38s. Galland told them that Goering received every mission report by teletype and had seen their claims himself. “The Reichsmarshall always asks for the victory figures first and losses second,” Galland said.
“This says what he thinks of his pilots.” Galland’s voice carried a tone of disdain. Galland and Goering had been at odds since the Battle of Britain, when Goering first accused the fighter pilots of cowardice. Goering had once asked Galland what he needed to improve his pilots’ fighting spirit, and Galland had replied, “An outfit of Spitfires for my squadron.” It was a verbal insult that Goering never forgot.