by Nick Cook
Something made him shift his gaze beyond the river and into the haze above the horizon. An almost imperceptible movement to anyone whose senses were not on full alert for the slightest sign of danger. With the sun rising off the right-hand side of his aircraft, Kruze easily saw the glint of silver off the last of the five Mustangs as they swept in finger formation across the countryside about three miles in front of him.
He slid the Arado down lower, ever lower, conscious of the mountain backdrop which would shield him from the scrutiny of the American fighters as they swept from right to left across his nose. Sanctuary, he realized, lay between the banks of the River Alz itself. The chances were that this was not the only Allied fighter patrol in the district.
The Mustangs ploughed on towards the west, as Kruze watched them carefully out of the corner of his eye, as if even a slight movement of the head would be enough to give his position away.
Kruze brought the Arado down to tree-top height. He looked left and right and noted with some satisfaction that he was actually below the tops of the tall, leafless trees that lined the river. Beyond his rudder pedals, through the clear nose, he could see the dark, muddy waters flashing by fifty feet below. He was careful not to look at the boiling water directly. It would be easy to become disorientated, hypnotized, and plough in, he and his aircraft vaporized with the water as his 3000 lbs of bombs exploded on contact with the river’s surface.
He flew the Arado down the Alz’s invisible centre line at 560 kph, exhilarated by the speed and the agility of the fighter-bomber. As he twisted and weaved through the gradual meanderings of the Alz, he was overcome by a strange feeling of tranquillity.
He saw a group of people rushing crazily towards him on the left-side bank. It was ironic that he found serenity there of all places, in a juddering, hurtling piece of machinery, flashing through inhospitable countryside at almost 350 mph. He caught a momentary impression of the young peasant girl’s face in the midst of the party on the bank, little more than forty feet below his wing-tip, her features frozen as the menacing shape of the Arado headed for her. He thought back to Penny, tried to picture her face, her hair, recall how she felt to his touch. But he could see or smell nothing, save the leather of his seat, the oil lubricating the moving controls and the paint primer in the cockpit. She seemed a lifetime away from him now. Try as he would to visualize her, he saw only the terrified face of the peasant girl on the banks of the Alz.
Penny’s place was with Fleming now.
Rapids ahead of him. Angry water whipped white by the rocks below the surface. Plumes of water rising into the air, lashing the Arado as he flew through them. A curious, bending motion in the pattern of the white water, reminiscent of. . .
Not rapids, but bullets, machine-gun fire snaking across the surface of the water.
He put his eye to the periscope, swearing at his lapse in concentration, knowing exactly what he would see through the optic sight.
Mustangs. One on his tail and two on either side of the river, hemming him in, waiting for the Arado to pop up so that they too could get their guns to bear on him.
.50 calibre bullets punched into the wings. He fought the inclination to take evasive action, for short of pulling up, away from the river and the danger of the trees and into the gunsights of the American’s wingmen, there was nothing he could do. If he increased speed he would fly into the ground or the river.
Another snatched glance in the periscope. The lead Mustang was right on his tail, two hundred feet behind. He saw the flickering lights along its wing leading edges and felt the Arado buck once more as bullets hit the fuselage behind him. The American was getting closer.
He pulled the 234 round a bend and immediately saw it, the height and length of a hangar, its two lanes crammed with vehicles, arches spanning the river in front of him. For a moment, he froze, thinking that it was too late, that the Arado would be shredded by the great steel girders of the bridge, to fall and plummet through the two columns of retreating Wehrmacht armour before hitting the river in a sea of spray and fire. But with an animal roar he pulled back on the yolk, his whole body sensing the reluctance of the Arado, weighed down by bombs and drop tanks under the wings, to come up.
The pilot of the Mustang that was locked on to Kruze’s tail never even saw the bridge. In almost one moment, the fighter’s wings were pulled off at the roots by the girders and its 1380-hp engine buried itself into the armour-plated turret of a King Tiger tank, the metals almost fusing as one in the explosion. Kruze saw the orange ball of flame in the eyepiece of the periscope and was up to five hundred feet before he even realized he had missed the bridge.
A bullet pierced a Plexiglass panel above his head, narrowly missing the Lotfe sight as it exited somewhere between his feet. Kruze pushed the aircraft back down, knowing that the Mustangs would be queuing up for a chance to pull into the narrow river valley and avenge their comrade who had died hugging his tail. A check in the periscope confirmed his worst fears, a second Mustang sticking like glue. He recalled Staverton’s words, the ones about the 234 being able to outrun anything. What the bastard should have said was the 234 could only go into its greased lightning routine at altitudes approaching its service ceiling, halfway to the stratosphere. At tree-top height and with 3000 lbs of bombs below, a Mustang could still pace him.
The left-hand side of his instrument panel, housing the artificial horizon and rate of climb indicator, exploded with a crash, the tumbling .50 calibre bullet tearing a hole the size of his fist through the Plexiglass. A sharp pain in his arm pulled his left hand off the control horn.
He stared in rage at the periscope sighting system for the rearward firing 20mm cannon. Useless, bloody useless at this altitude, with trees and water rushing around his aircraft. To take his eye off the galloping scenery in front of him would spell the end in a fraction of a second.
Kruze held his breath, waiting for the stream of fire that would end it all. In front of him, the river narrowed, then dwindled into little more than a brook as the hard bedrock split the water of the Alz into small tributaries. He was running out of protection. He started to pull back on the control column as a line of trees rushed to meet him. The nose of the bomber came up, exposing it to the combined guns of the fighters behind; and he realized bitterly that he had never even made the Russian lines.
At two hundred and fifty feet he could see the smoke and flames stretch the length of the horizon and it made him gasp. If he hadn’t been facing the last moment of his existence, it could have been awe-inspiring, magical almost.
He knew what it was and the reason for his stay of execution all in one cogent moment.
The Soviet offensive had been launched.
He looked into the periscopic sight and saw the Mustangs peeling away to the west. Had they crossed into Soviet airspace, some thirty miles in advance of where it had been the day before, they would have been fired upon by the Russians as surely as he would at any moment.
As the pain caused by the shard of metal from the instrument panel began working its way into his body, a sudden thought, a moment of raging doubt, held it in check.
The smoke and flames of battle that rolled towards him like a tidal wave. The first cries of Shaposhnikov’s baby? The birth of Archangel?
It was not too late, he had to tell himself. If the Marshal had launched his offensive against the West, there was even more reason now for ensuring that each of his bombs found their mark.
He pushed the throttles forward and caught the first whiff of battle-smoke on the slipstream that rushed through the broken Plexiglass on the left-hand side of the bomber’s nose.
* * * * * * * *
The Yak 9s of Colonel Anatoly Putyatin, Military Pilot First Class, and his wingman, Lieutenant Mikhail Samsonov, swept the sky at three thousand metres a few kilometres behind the Red Army’s advance. It had been an uneventful patrol, but that had been the pattern of things over the last few months, with the Luftwaffe all but destroyed on the Eastern Front.<
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Putyatin glanced beyond his starboard wingtip at Samsonov, who was only six weeks out of the air academy at Tanyarsk. He caught his wingman looking admiringly at his own piston-engined Yakovlev 9 ‘Ulutshshennyi’, a masterpiece of Soviet engineering.
Putyatin jabbed his finger downwards, the signal that they were to return to Grafen, forward air base of the 13th Guards regiment, Soviet 5th Air Force, Frontal Aviation.
The colonel watched as Samsonov pointed his older Yak 9D towards their base. He soon spotted the airfield, clean and untouched by the war, beneath the first line of ridges that gave way gradually to the mountainous region beyond.
He followed Samsonov’s aircraft, White 15, as it slipped into the landing circuit, lowering its wheels about a kilometre downwind of the runway threshold.
He was just thinking how easy his first patrol of the new offensive had been, when he saw the German bomber pop up over the trees, its mottled camouflage momentarily stark and conspicuous against the blue dawn sky. He shouted a warning to Samsonov whose aircraft had slowed to a few kph above touchdown speed as it slid over the edge of the airfield, and banked his Yak 9U sharply on a course to intercept the intruder.
* * * * * * * *
Kruze was wrestling to keep the Arado 234 on a low-level flight profile parallel with the ground, fighting the waves of pain from the injury to his arm, when he spotted the Yak beyond the next line of trees, its wheels lowered to land. It was too late to change course, or for remorse at his stupidity. Fleming’s words about the Soviet fighter base at Grafen were still echoing through his head as the Arado crossed the boundary fence of the airfield.
A row of pristine, single-engined fighters, their fuselages adorned with the red star and white identification numbers of Frontal Aviation, filled his vision. His first reaction was to bank the bomber so that it was lined up on the row of
Yaks, his second was to realize the futility of the manoeuvre because of the Arado’s lack of forward-firing armament.
With only a few seconds to think through the consequences of his impending action, but knowing that to do nothing would be to invite the Yak fighter unit to intercept his bomber on the return leg west, he punched the uppermost button on the left-hand horn of his control column. The Arado lifted a little as the 1000-lb bomb on the centreline dropped away from the aircraft.
Kruze was so low that the fusing mechanism could not compensate for his height, turning the bomb into a delayed-action device. It skipped once on the concrete in front of the line of fighters, ploughed through the first and second aircraft, missed the third, bounced thirty feet above the ground and then exploded in an air burst over the last five fighters.
The Rhodesian turned the Arado violently away from the destruction in front of him and found himself staring directly into the red propeller spinner of Samsonov’s Yak 9D as it wobbled in to land. Both aircraft veered sharply in opposite directions, Kruze narrowly missing a hangar, Samsonov unable to stop his wing tip catching the ground and sending the Yak into a violent cartwheel across the runway.
Putyatin watched helplessly from eight hundred metres as the German jet bomber, within the space of a few seconds, achieved the almost total destruction of his unit. Then his attention shifted to the wild acrobatics of his wingman’s fighter as it rolled, one wing tip after another across the ground, finally disintegrating in a fireball on the edge of the airfield.
The Colonel steepened his dive towards the Arado and watched his airspeed hit 640 kph. He uttered brief thanks that he had been allocated the new Ulutshshennyi - improved - variant of the Yak 9D, with its boosted 1875 hp engine, for otherwise he would have had no chance of catching the fascist bomber.
* * * * *
Kruze had no time in which to marvel at his lucky escape. Somehow he had veered off course and stumbled upon Grafen. Knowing his exact position now, he eased back on the stick, looking for the Vydra.
For a few long seconds, his airspeed dropped.
Immediately, a line of tracer rose to meet him from some unseen flak emplacement and he nosed the aircraft back down to earth, but not before he had glimpsed the last waypoint, or as good as earmarked it.
Ahead, in the distance, the twin peaks of Leek and Zalednik thrust their way skywards, towering above the other mountains in the range. Trickling between them, though unseen to him, was the Vydra River, winding its way up the valley all the way to Branodz.
Although flak burst around him intermittently, neither the anti-aircraft fire nor the fighter activity was as bad as he thought it would be. With mixed feelings, he realized he had been granted a reprieve from the full wrath of the Russians’ air defences because of the offensive. Frontal Aviation would be busy supporting ground operations with Yaks turned into fighter-bombers. Few Russian fighters would be given over to straight interception duties. Those that had, he had wiped off the map with his bomb run over their airfield.
Kruze winced and looked down at his arm, the blood caked thick around the ripped cloth of the shirt where the metal shard had entered.
“Not bad for a cripple,” he said to himself.
Except you’re one bomb shorter than you were before.
There was nothing else for it, but to make each shot count. The thought of missing the target now, when he had come so far, chilled him far more than the thin blast of icy slipstream that whistled through the cockpit.
With his eye on the peaks ahead and maintaining a steady altitude about a hundred feet above the trees, he leant forward and found the switch for the Lotfe.
Then he saw the shadow pass across the face of the sun off the right side of the Arado. Putyatin hurled his Yak round in a tight turn and came in with the light behind him, having taken full advantage of the drop in the Arado’s speed to press home his attack from Kruze’s front starboard quarter. Kruze never even saw the tracer from the Russian’s 20mm ShVAK cannon that tore through his fuselage, cutting a four-foot gash in the Arado just forward of the tail. The controls seemed to slacken in his hands, indicating immediately that his hydraulic pressure was down. A glance to the gauge told him that it had dropped significantly and the needle was still moving. He peered round, expecting to see a fiery trail pouring from his fuselage, but there was none. Suddenly, the rear tank low fuel warning light on the right side of the cockpit began flashing in red, angry pulses. One of the shells must have punctured the cell, miraculously failing to explode on its way through the fuselage, but now giving him a serious shortfall in fuel.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the Russian fighter coming in from the rear, half a mile behind, for another pass. With the bombs weighing him down and his controls at reduced effectiveness, there was little he could do to evade the Yak. He climbed, pulling as hard as he could on the stick with his good arm, suddenly banking the bomber away from the stream of fire that spewed out of the Yak’s propeller hub, the bright tracer racing past his cockpit and exploding in the trees five hundred yards in front of him.
Realizing that he could still outpace the piston-engined fighter, Kruze shoved the throttles forward and watched his speed creep up to 650 kph. He decoupled the Lotfe and peered into his periscope, watching with relief as the Yak began to slip away. In front of him, the mountains loomed, large and impenetrable, except for the gap between the two peaks, where he would point the Arado and fly it up the valley till he hit Branodz and punched the buttons that would release his bombs.
When he looked back to his instruments, the cockpit seemed on fire, so bright and so many were the warning lights illuminated on the right side of the control panel.
His starboard engine oil-pressure was dangerously low and his exhaust gas temperature gauge told him his right-hand turbojet was about to explode. A glance in the periscope. The Russian was still receding, leaving him with a choice: try and outrun it to the mountains and risk having his right engine ripped off, or shut it down and wait for the 20mm to knock him out of the sky.
The starboard jet unit fire-warning temperature gauge lit up, making the
decision for him. He was a moment away from a catastrophic turbine failure. He willed his injured arm to make haste as it crept perilously slowly towards the throttle. At last he reached it, pulled it back and shut down the ailing engine.
He looked in the periscope and saw the Yak bound forward.
The Rhodesian reached out to his left, groaning with the stabs of pain to his arm, and hit the first of the three-position flap selector buttons and then pushed the undercarriage selector lever forward.
There was no reaction from the Arado.
Kruze’s eyes raced over his instruments. He lunged for the flap and undercarriage emergency hydraulic selector switch and then grabbed the large standby handpump by his right knee, pulling and pushing it furiously until he saw the needle on the hydraulic gauge creep back towards its true position in the centre of the dial.
The crippled jet bomber bucked as the flaps and wheels lowered into the airstream.
Putyatin was some way behind the 234 when he saw its wheels lower and the wings waggle. The Russian smiled. With holes that size in his fuselage, the German was finished, his tail looking as if it would fall off if the aircraft made any kind of violent manoeuvre. The Arado would make a glorious prize, a final testimony to his three years of fighting the fascists. It would also give Soviet scientists a long-awaited insight into the workings of the advanced German aircraft.
Kruze saw the Yak slide in behind his tail through the periscopic gunsight. He waited until the cross centred on its nose and he could see the form of the pilot in the cockpit, before hitting the button. Behind him the rearward-pointing Mauser MG 151 20mm cannons fired a controlled burst, striking Putyatin’s aircraft first in the engine, then in the fuel tanks as the Yak veered sharply upwards, exposing its soft, blue underbelly. There was a flash in the bowels of the Yak and then it plummeted earthwards, its rear fuselage lost in the surrounding fireball.