This Fog of Peace (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 4)

by William Peter Grasso

  Sean found the sturmbannführer huddled with a group of his men, all enjoying the fresh, steaming hot coffee. It was real coffee, too—nothing ersatz about it—probably the first they’d drunk in quite a while.

  “Hey, Major,” Sean called to him. “I don’t think all your guys ate. What’s the story?”

  Irritated, the German replied, “I am a sturmbannführer in the SS, Sergeant, not a major in some ordinary army.”

  “Yeah, swell,” Sean replied, decidedly unimpressed. “But how about answering my question? I’d hate to have to throw out good food.”

  “That’s unfortunate, Sergeant, but some of the men are refusing to eat.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It is in protest for the disrespectful treatment they are receiving.”

  He expected an argument from the American. He got none.

  Instead, Sean walked back to the field kitchen, which had been set up on higher ground at the edge of the bivouac area. From that vantage point, he and the mess steward could see a steady trickle of civilians walking toward the encampment.

  “What do you make of that, Sean?” the steward asked. “You think they’re looking for a black market or something? You know, cigarettes and stuff?”

  “Forget the cigarettes, Jack. I think they’re hungry, like just about every other Kraut civilian we’ve come across.”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Yep. Let me just get Colonel Abe’s blessing, and then you go ahead and feed them. Fuck the SS. Let the bastards starve if they want.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The briefing officer’s announcement left the pilots of 301st Squadron surprised and confused, just like it had every other pilot in 9th Air Force when they’d received the same notice. The officer stated—nonchalantly, as if it was no earth-shattering deal—that the rules of engagement were changed, effective immediately. The Directive, as he referred to USFET Special Directive 45/8-1, established a new rule: Soviet forces may be engaged if they present an imminent threat to Allied forces.

  To these pilots—and all American Occupation forces, for that matter—who had been told ever since VE Day that they could only fire if fired upon, this was the Earth shifting beneath their feet…

  And not in a good way.

  Tommy Moon’s voice rose above the bewildering clamor: “How do we define imminent, sir?”

  The briefing officer’s reply: “It is General Eisenhower’s determination that the definition is self-explanatory.”

  The unanimous feeling of the pilots was expressed loudly in a variety of ways. But the gist of each frustrated outburst was the same: Bullshit. It isn’t self-explanatory. Not even close.

  “Imminent’s one of those weasel words, sir,” Tommy continued. “It can get you in trouble for bad judgment if you do something you shouldn’t. But it lets someone else off the hook for not doing something they should’ve.”

  “The general has no doubt his combat leaders will make the proper decisions.”

  Tommy wasn’t buying it. “Maybe in the general’s world, everything’s always black and white, sir. But in the real world, all we see is a whole lot of gray.”

  Jack Parrish, Butternut Flight’s number four pilot, proposed a solution. “How about this definition?” he said. “If it makes us crap our pants, it’s imminent.”

  Everyone in the room laughed but the briefing officer. “I don’t think you’re taking this with the proper seriousness, gentlemen,” he said.

  Tommy replied, “With all due respect, sir, what we appreciate the seriousness of is that any of us could start a war by making a snap decision over whether something was an imminent threat or not.”

  Like an imperious school teacher, the briefing officer said, “In that case, Captain Moon, I’d advise you not to make snap decisions.”

  The cluelessness—and idiocy—of that remark stunned the room to silence. Unbeknownst to any of his pilots in the room, Colonel Pruitt, the squadron commander, had entered silently by the rear door and was standing against the wall behind them. It was he who finally rebutted the briefing officer. “I guess you don’t realize, Major, that just about every operational decision my men have to make is a snap decision. It’s the nature of the beast. But I suppose you don’t have to worry about that much when you fly a desk, do you?”

  It took a few moments for all the snickering to die down. Then Pruitt asked the red-faced briefer, “I’m sure you were about to get to this, Major, but this directive is a secret, not to be shared with anyone. Correct?”

  “Yes, sir, I was just getting to that. Yes, the directive is absolutely a secret.”

  Tommy had a question for Colonel Pruitt. “Sir, in your opinion, if we ran into another situation with Red ships closing on us head-on, would you consider that an imminent threat?”

  Pruitt didn’t waste a second replying. “Yes, Captain, I definitely would. Wouldn’t you?”

  “In all honesty, sir, I’m not so sure.”

  “So you still think it’s just a scare tactic?”

  “That’s all it’s been so far, sir. Nothing more.”

  The sky above the Soviet zone north of Berlin was full of hiding places. The cumulus clouds of fair weather—flat-bottomed heaps of cottony white that seemed like flocks of sheep grazing in a vast meadow—were scattered across the sky at altitudes from 10,000 up to 15,000 feet. “Let’s get on top,” Tommy told Butternut Flight. Above the clouds, at least, no one could dive down on you unseen as long as you kept your eyes peeled.

  They climbed to a new perch at 17,000 feet. Below, they could see the Russian fighters easily, four of them, dark flecks moving in the opposite direction as the jugs, passing in and out of the clouds below as if playing peek-a-boo. The Americans reversed direction with a sweeping left turn to keep the Russians in sight.

  Classic cat and mouse stuff, Tommy thought. They’re some type of Yak. Can’t make the model yet.

  But the game didn’t last long. The Russian fighters began a steep, spiraling climb toward the jugs.

  That’s a stupid move, Tommy told himself. We’re so damn high above them, they’re killing all their airspeed trying to climb up here. We can get on their tails anytime we want…

  Provided nobody else gets on ours.

  He called to Jack Parrish, flying tail-end Charlie in Butternut’s trail formation. “How’s our six, Jack?”

  “All clear, boss. Are we feeling an imminent threat yet?”

  “I’ll let you know when we are. You just keep our asses out of trouble.”

  “Roger. That’s my job.”

  To keep the Russian ships where they wanted them, Tommy’s flight would have to reverse direction again by turning left, a move that would put the morning sun in their faces. Halfway through the turn, Tommy saw another flight, just dots at first. Then those dots grew steadily into winged adversaries. There were six or eight ships, still far off but closing quickly, headed straight toward them at their altitude. The exact number was hard to tell. There was no time or room for lateral maneuvering.

  Going up would cost them their speed.

  That left only one workable option.

  “BREAK DOWN, NOW,” Tommy commanded.

  As if at the hands of a single pilot, the four jugs rolled rapidly onto their backs and then plunged straight down…

  And right through the spiral column of their original quarry, the four climbing Russian fighters.

  Somewhere in that brief co-mingling of the two formations—lasting just a matter of seconds—Tommy felt the sickening THUNK of metal against metal; he could feel the quiver that passed through Eclipse with his whole body.

  Whether a Russian pilot meant to pull his trigger or had just reacted in a spasm of fright, the result was the same:

  The Russians had shot first.

  We just went way past “imminent.” Hell, we could engage even under the old rule.

  They were still going almost straight down…

  And that was a good thing at the mom
ent.

  “Take it down to angels five,” Tommy told his flight, his voice taut but businesslike, “then break left. Anybody else get hit?”

  Three terse negatives were spoken in rapid succession.

  He asked his wingman, “Tony, how’s my ship look? I got hit somewhere aft.”

  “Affirmative, boss. There’s a fair-sized hole in your rudder. Looks like it’s hanging on just fine, though.”

  Tommy tapped the pedals, gently deflecting the rudder left and right while watching it in his rear-view mirror. Sure enough, it looked like something the size of a softball had passed through it, leaving behind two aligned, jagged-edged holes, one on each side.

  He told himself, If it stays on through this dive, it’ll probably stay on forever. My turns might be a little sloppy, and I probably won’t side-slip or fishtail real well.

  No big deal, right?

  Parrish asked, “Are we going to call this one in, boss?”

  Tommy had already thought that one over. The last time we called for help, not one swinging dick—American or Brit—showed up to pitch in. And you know the Russians are monitoring our frequencies. How much you want to bet they’ll show up in droves once they figure out no one else is coming to the party?

  And we’re too far away from any friendly ground station. They’re not hearing any of this.

  He told Parrish, “Negative, Jack. Let’s keep this to ourselves for now.”

  Eclipse was the first of the jugs to reach angels five—5,000 feet. In level flight now, Tommy began breaking left as he’d prescribed. Tony Jansen, his wingman in the number two ship, was pulling up on his right wingtip when Parrish came back on the radio.

  “I don’t know where Bobby is,” he said.

  Bobby: Lieutenant Bobby Lescault, flying the number three ship.

  Lescault should have been in front of Parrish.

  “Hang on,” Parrish said. “I think I see him…way north of us.”

  If the flight held that tight left turn, they’d be on a northerly heading in seconds. Hopefully, they’d be able to scoop up their errant member and run for home before the Russians could make their numerical advantage felt.

  They’ve got us maybe three to one.

  But two Russian pilots had seen Lescault’s ship first, a straggler perilously on his own.

  Tommy called to him: “Bobby, you’ve got two Reds on your tail, keep turning hard left.”

  Just turn: that lesson had been drilled into jug pilots when they were still flying out of England, before the D-Day landings. A jug could dive away from anything, but she couldn’t climb to save her—or her pilot’s—life. When you were too low to dive, just turn—hard—and keep turning.

  Lescault’s reply was a high-pitched shriek: “I’m trying, I’m trying. Oh, God…”

  But Butternut Three wasn’t turning…

  And Tommy came to a sobering revelation: This is where I find out what my guys don’t know. If he’d just turn tight like I told him, for cryin’ out loud, they’d never get a bead on him…and it would buy us some time so we could get them off him.

  But he wasn’t turning. He was too low to dive.

  And then he did something that made the voice in Tommy’s head yell, NO!

  Bobby Lescault had pulled the nose of his ship sharply up, as if trying to climb away from his pursuers.

  But all it did was make her a slower, easier-to-track target.

  Before the rest of Butternut Flight could come to his rescue, Lescault’s ship was sprouting flames and plummeting to the ground, a thick trail of black smoke in her wake.

  There was no parachute.

  He was too low to jump, anyway.

  Tommy had a strange sensation, one he’d had a few times before. The experience of watching a ship hit the ground without being able to hear the explosion became surreal; it gave him hope, just for a fleeting moment, that the crash might’ve been survivable.

  But then he thought better of it. He’d seen too many planes crash like that, a miraculous and beautiful machine instantly reduced to a twisted and smoldering heap of scrap metal.

  Few men had ever walked away from a crash like that.

  It wasn’t too late to avenge Bobby Lescault, though. Tommy and Jansen closed on the two Russians—who apparently had forgotten to keep checking their six—and knocked them out of the sky with measured bursts of .50-caliber machine gun fire at close range.

  The other Russian ships were orbiting above the fray, wanting to retain the advantage of altitude while, no doubt, plotting their attack.

  Eight or ten of them versus three of us, Tommy thought, and they’ve got the height.

  We’ve done all we’re going to do. Let’s stay low and get the hell back to Bremen. If we push everything to the firewall, we can still outrun them.

  He’d had pilots of his go down before. But that was during the war. This was the first time Tommy had lost a man in what was technically peacetime, however tenuous that term seemed to be at the moment. It hadn’t been his fault: Bobby Lescault had committed a cardinal sin of air combat. Fear had taken control of his aircraft, overriding all the lessons and all the warnings the Air Force and its combat leaders had tried to instill in their pilot. The punishment had been quick and merciless.

  But still, a commander feels responsible for what happens to his men, and the officer conducting the post-mission debrief was doing his nasty best to make sure Tommy felt that responsibility.

  Once the formalities were out of the way, the debrief immediately took the tone of an inquisition, with the Deputy Commander, 9th Air Force, playing Torquemada. He was a brigadier general named Dowling who, the word was, had never commanded or even flown with a fighter outfit during the war. The highlight of his qualifications seemed to have been serving as a staff officer with an 8th Air Force bomb wing. Whether he’d ever left the comforts of England for hostile skies was a matter of conjecture.

  Dowling’s first question: “Just what in hell did you think you were doing, Captain Moon? You’ve already said that first flight of Reds posed no imminent threat, so how on God’s green Earth did you get yourself into a shooting match that cost the United States Army Air Force a perfectly good airplane and pilot?”

  He pronounced United with the accent on the first syllable, a speech pattern rampant throughout the service. It had never bothered Tommy all the times he’d heard it before; he always figured it was just the way some people from the American South spoke, accenting the first syllable of words regardless of their proper pronunciation. But hearing it now, it amplified the insulting tone of the general’s question tenfold.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Tommy replied, “but I need to emphasize that the first group of Yaks—the ones below us—did not pose an imminent threat to my formation. The second group, the one that approached from the east at our altitude—they did. We followed the directive to the letter.”

  Dowling shook his head and said, “Sounds to me like you and your men weren’t scanning the whole clock very well. And by the way, the directive’s not in question here, Captain. But your tactics are.”

  “Begging your pardon again, sir, but I—I mean we—took evasive action as soon as that second flight of ships became visible.”

  “And let me guess, Captain…they came at you right out of the sun, right?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “And that evasive action, as you call it, Captain Moon, took you right into the damn hornet’s nest, didn’t it? Put a hole in your ship, too.”

  “It was the best way to avoid putting my entire flight into a vulnerable position, sir.”

  Before Dowling could say another word, Colonel Pruitt stood up and said, “I agree with Captain Moon’s assessment, General. If he’d taken any other action, his whole flight probably would’ve been dead meat, caught between two groups of hostiles. The directive just says we can engage. It doesn’t say we must engage. That’s still up to the commander. The loss of Lieutenant Lescault was due to an unfortunate error on his p
art. The rest of Butternut Flight came out of the scrape just fine following Captain Moon’s lead…even shot down two Reds in the process.”

  “That’s yet to be confirmed, Pruitt,” Dowling replied. “And don’t you dare go painting any red star kill markings on those ships of yours.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it, sir,” Pruitt said. “Not until we’re officially at war, anyway. What are we hearing from USFET on that score?”

  “Not a cotton-picking thing, Colonel. If your boys here just blundered into starting the next war, nobody’s talking about it yet.”

  Then he added, “And outside these four walls, none of you better be talking about it, either.”

  George Marshall hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. The news from Germany had been too upsetting—yet so ambiguous—that he’d climbed out of bed at 0230, put on his uniform, and called for his car. His groggy driver deposited Marshall at the War Department at 0315.

  In the big conference room—the War Room—the sparse duty staff tiptoed around him; he looked too deep in troubled thought for them to disturb him with the mere administrative details that had, so far, consumed their night. The general sat by the teletype machines, waiting for Eisenhower’s HQ to provide an update on the crucial situation in the skies over Germany. The only message of any priority to come off the printer, however, was one from the British Prime Minister, now Clement Attlee, who urged the United States to exercise extreme caution in approaching the Soviets. No pledge of continued support, no intelligence that might shed some light on a very confusing situation; just a plea for extreme caution. As he laid the cable down, sarcastic words came to mind that his reserved and dignified nature would never allow him to say out loud: Gee, no shit, Mister Attlee. Tell us something else we already know.

  But Marshall was sure the telex carried an implied message: The Brits are telling us to count them out. All Churchill’s belligerent talk is out the window. We hung our necks out to support him, but his own people have had enough of his wartime policies and showed him the door. And right in the middle of the Potsdam Conference! The minute that happened, Stalin knew he had us over a barrel. We got nothing but empty promises.