How will the Amis receive her and the BPO? Lottie imagines the nightfall bus ride, all the men in suits clutching their instruments, their passports to life. There will be challenges at roadblocks, but the trucks and buses will be waved through when the German guards learn who the passengers are. Every minute will be another mile away from Berlin. Finally, an English voice will bark in the dark. Halt! The convoy will stop and the musicians will climb off and kiss the ground. We are world-class musicians, not combatants, we’ll be honored by the Amis. Perhaps we’ll assemble right there and play for them.
But these are the Americans right now in the sky, lashing Berlin. Maybe to them, all Germans are bad. No Germans are to be honored.
How will the people of Berlin react when they learn we have escaped? What happens to the BPO’s proud name? Cowards?
A particularly loud report makes Lottie jump on her windowsill seat. She is shaken from her reverie. Her eyes return to the skies.
Something different is taking place overhead. The American bombers have not broken their close ranks, but there is a new presence in their midst, a new handwriting in the vapor trails behind them. Some of the lines are curved, like chalk in a fainted hand; these planes are shot down, falling out of the crowd. What could do this, with so many fighters to protect them?
Lottie hears a new sound join the morning war chorus, not the thump of explosions or the drone of propellers but a rocket ship’s whoosh. She catches a glimpse of things up there moving faster than the bombers and their escorts. They are airplanes, but flashing silver, diving and cutting new crazy, fast patterns.
Jets! Luftwaffe jets! For months Goebbels has been promising to unveil them, a secret weapon in the skies over Germany to make the cities safe from Allied bombers. Lottie, like the rest of Berlin’s civilians, began to believe the rumors were just bold hype, wishful thinking by the Nazi propagandists. But here the jet planes are. Lottie watches their debut.
This is awry from her fate. This is dreadful. The German superplanes, the jet fighters, are taking a toll. Another American bomber skews out of line. It falls seeping fire and white billows. It will crash. No!
Lottie’s stomach knots. Is it possible that she’s watching the moment of a German turnaround in the fortunes of the war? A dozen parachutes drift over the city, American airmen out of dead planes. The jets slash, the American fighters counter. Lottie balls her fists. The sky, already concentrated with plunging bombs and black-winged flecks, thickens now with even more tumult, a swarming smoking dogfight. There seem to be only two dozen jets against vastly superior enemy numbers. Lottie wants nothing to interfere with her fate. These German fighters risk altering the outcome.
Without moving or speaking, she cheers for the German pilots. This is against common sense. But if the jets can swipe a few bombers out of the sky, maybe the attacks will come less often. Maybe the Americans will learn a little more respect. But nothing more will come of this day. Lottie’s sense of her deliverance has reasserted itself. The end of the war cannot be stopped. It will come when the Russians bring it. Lottie will be long gone. Everything is on track.
And nothing will stop the bombs. Lottie watches the impact of the jets. They shoot down fifteen American bombers, the flak claims another seven. She sees two of the bombers fall into the Tiergarten only a mile away. Dozens of parachutes descend, white wisps of failure. But twenty-two bombers out of a thousand is a drop in the ocean. The American might is overwhelming. Goebbels’ secret weapons withdraw. The bombers’ formations spread out. For another hour Berlin continues to be rocked, it teeters and crumbles. Lottie in her window surprises herself; she begins to despise the Amis. Berlin is defenseless. The bombs are like pummeling a man after he’s down. Those four sounds she heard so distinctly at the beginning of the raid now blend into a single shriek. Lottie leaves her sill and closes the window. She throws herself on her bed, covering her ears with her pillow.
When the all-clear sirens sound, Lottie rises. She walks to her window and looks again at the sky. It’s not there. She looks at a black mist, like an iron pot clamped over Berlin. Fires belch an eclipse of greasy clouds into the air. Fallen structures leave whorls of brick and mortar dust as ghostly markers where they stood minutes before. Steam breaks into the wind from fire departments trying to stem blazes with their little efforts. Lottie has seen all this before. But this morning, because she will soon be leaving Berlin, because she will not share the city’s doom, she’s outraged at its treatment at the hands of the Americans. Tonight, the British Mosquito bombers will come and add to the agony. In her heart Lottie has left Berlin. She looks at her home now with the protective and chauvinistic eyes of the expatriate.
She hurries down the stairs and darts for the front door. She moves quickly to avoid encountering the Jew, should he be returning to his basement lair. She slams the door behind her. Out in the street, Lottie heads in the direction of the city center and the destruction.
The air in her lungs is acrid. The people of her mother’s neighborhood return to their homes. They all glance into the smoke wafting low overhead. Many women bring their hands to their breasts in relief that it is not their house on fire or lying in shards. Lottie scoots through the trudging crowds. The closer she gets to the Charlottenburger Chausée, which travels through the heart of the Tiergarten, the more the atmosphere thickens to an almost velvet shroud.
Inside the park, the trunks of trees are aflame. The trees themselves have long ago been hewn by shrapnel down to mangled staffs. Far off, across a sward of stripped earth where there once were grass and shrubs, parasols and artists, the sheared wing of an American bomber lies, the propellers on the huge engine are bent back like dry and dying petals. Lottie finds herself running.
She speeds through the park. Berliners wander on all sides hefting bundles and babes, in bowler hats and scarves, some wear gas masks, they all seem nomadic in their own city. Lottie jogs farther. She dodges a crater, then a fallen tree. An elderly couple sitting idly on the cold ground watch her fly past, there is nothing on their faces, they seem stunned like the park.
She runs for five, then ten minutes. At Hermann Göring Strasse, along the eastern boundary of the park, she slows to a walk. The Brandenburg Tor, the triumphal arched gateway to the park, is chewed badly and smirched with soot, but intact. On top, the winged goddess of victory in her two-wheeled Prussian chariot is still pulled by her four horses, but her journey looks to have been through hell.
Lottie comes to a stop at the foot of the gate. Her lungs are seared from her haste and the soiled air. A charred bicycle rests on its side in the street. Mixed up with the frame of the bike are leg bones; above the melted seat a rib cage nests in cloth tatters, a skull is in an air raid sentry’s helmet. The remains will have to be collected with a shovel and a broom, like street litter. This was an old man, a brave old man, riding his bicycle to warn Berliners off the streets, the Americans are coming. The Americans rewarded him, proved him correct, by dropping a firebomb on him.
Lottie is rooted beside the skeleton, under the loom of the scorched Brandenburg Tor, beneath a sky rippling past in black sheaths. In the streets around her, rescue squads begin to pump air into basements to trapped survivors. The newly homeless sit because there is nowhere to walk. Already women and more old men appear with shovels to clear avenues through the rubble. Food stations are being set up on card tables to hand out soup and bread.
Tonight, the British will come with more bombs. Tomorrow, perhaps, the Americans again.
Lottie sits on the curb near the air raid warden. He has no smell.
She hates the Amis. She tries to fight it because they will be her salvation. But they have left the old man on the bicycle nothing, not even his flesh.
~ * ~
* * *
March 24, 1945, 1020 hours
In a C-46, 600 feet over Holland, with the
U.S. Seventeenth Airborne Division
Nearing Wesel, Germany
the crimson get-ready light flashe
s on.
Bandy stands. He’s steady on the flooring, even loaded down as he is. The morning air is clean; the fat transport plane’s flight has smooth all the way, nobody puked. There are two lines, Bandy’s at the rear of the right-hand one. Fifty paratroopers ahead of him check their gear and weapons. The twin doors are open on both sides of the plane and all Bandy can hear is the roar of the wind and engines. Some soldiers pound hard on the helmets and shoulders of the men around them, jacking each other up for the jump and the fight.
Bandy reaches down to his legs to make sure that his cameras are strapped on securely. He doesn’t trust them in his backpack or across his chest, in case his landing is rough. He’s only had one other jump before this, into Spain six years ago, and that didn’t go too badly, he only separated his shoulder. He thinks, you can’t get injured every time you jump. This one ought to go easy.
The first burst of flak shakes the plane. They must be nearing the Drop Zone. Men shuffle toward the doors, the two queues tighten. Bandy at the tail end pats his breast pocket. A metal flask of Tennessee whiskey answers his knock. His last letter to Victoria, the one in the plastic wrap he keeps with him always, hides behind the liquor.
In another few minutes he’ll be leaping out over the east bank of the Rhine. He’ll land just north of the town of Wesel, about fifty miles north of Jülich. To get on this plane, Bandy had to hitchhike last week all the way from Jülich back to northern France, to the staging town of Arras, where he pulled a few “famous-photographer” strings and got permission to join the Seventeenth Airborne for this jump. Yesterday the entire division shaved their heads in Mohawk fashion, leaving just a thin pelt from their napes to their foreheads. Bandy turned down the offer of a similar coif. But he is reassured to know that he is jumping into battle with the best kind of soldiers, berserkers.
The Seventeenth’s mission is to land behind enemy lines and push westward, the direction they come from, to stop the Germans from retreating in the face of Montgomery’s infantry assault across the river, under way right now. The paratroopers will take all the wooded high ground they can find in the Dierforderwald, overlooking river crossings and paved routes in and out of Wesel. As soon as they can, they’ll link up with Monty’s charging infantry and turn east together.
The airborne operation is code-named Varsity; the land operation, Plunder. Together they are the twin prongs of Montgomery’s gigantic push for Berlin. The land offensive started last night. This is the biggest assault on enemy forces since D-Day, aimed through the north rim of the Ruhr valley, then set to roll across the north German plains to the Elbe River, stopping only once they get to Hitler’s front yard. Monty sent the troops off with a final preattack message: ”…The enemy has in fact been driven into a corner, and he cannot escape. Over the Rhine, then, let us go. And good hunting to you on the other side.”
At 0100 hours this morning, a solid sixty minutes of artillery barrage plastered the east bank of the Rhine. Thirty-five hundred field guns plus two thousand antitank guns and rocket launchers poured more than a thousand shells per minute over the German positions. Fourteen hundred B-17s bombarded the DZ until daybreak. Throughout the night and into the morning, Plunder shoved eighty thousand American, British, and Canadian troops across the Rhine in eight-man assault boats at ten crossings along a twenty-mile front. Right now, on all sides of Bandy in the air over the Dutch-German border, Varsity wings east with seventeen hundred transport planes and six hundred and fifty tug planes towing two infantry-bearing gliders apiece. Over the DZ and Landing Zones, two thousand fighter planes patrol for enemy activity.
In Bandy’s plane, the jump master raises a balled fist, the hand signal to hook up static lines to the wires overhead. Bandy clips in. He gives his lanyard a good testing tug. The soldier in front of him turns to give a big, American cornfield grin and a thumbs-up. The kid has freckles and a little caterpillar moustache.
Bandy pats the boy on the shoulder.
In the din, the soldier mouths the words, “You take my picture when we get down. Okay?”
Bandy hoists his own thumb in answer.
The flak worsens. Black smoke sweeps in the doors from a blast off the starboard wing. The plane jumps. Bandy hears a rattle like hail on the fuselage. Another thump sounds close by. The paratroopers in line clench fists around their static lines, they bunch toward the doors, they want to get the hell out of the plane.
A few other photographers will be on the ground with Montgomery’s infantry, dozens more are in a B-17 at this moment circling the DZ. Hundreds of civilian and military journalists are spread out across Eisenhower’s broad front facing the enemy all along the Rhine. But Bandy has made up his mind that the northern route with Monty is still the best bet to get to Berlin. Two weeks ago, the breakthrough at Remagen in the middle sector had been dramatic, but Bradley’s bridgehead on the east bank has been bottled up by a remarkably fast German response. In the south, Patton is going great guns; his Third U.S. Army crossed the Rhine two days ago, scooping Montgomery’s bigger operation. When Patton himself walked across the river on a pontoon bridge, he unzipped his fly and pissed in the Rhine, calling it the “pause that refreshes.” But Patton’s not a realistic threat to reach Berlin from down there. Too much territory to cover and occupy. Besides, Ike will probably send him south to make sure the Nazis aren’t gearing up their rumored National Redoubt in the Bavarian Alps. In a few minutes Bandy is going to parachute in with the men and machines of the Seventeenth Airborne at the farthest point east of any Allied army. Again, Charles Bandy will be at the vanguard of the war.
The C-46 comes in low and slow, altitude six hundred feet at one-twenty knots. The gush of air coming in the open doorways is fresh against Bandy’s face, the black flak stink has cleared out. Spring invades Germany.
The jump master yanks his balled fist up and down, a pistoning motion that says, Get ready! He kneels by the door and raises his index finger. The first soldier moves to the opening, the rest shuffle and tighten up behind him. Stepping forward, Bandy looks down; it’s required paratrooper style to tuck their pants legs into their jump boots. Bandy has too.
Bandy thinks Vic would brain him if she knew where he was and what he was about to do. She’d tell him in no uncertain terms he should be on a tractor tilling soil for seed, not falling out of a plane at six hundred feet into gunfire and artillery. He should be home, in green hills and the first budding azaleas. Cool nights on the porch swing. Warm wifely arms and crisp bedsheets. The cameras wrapped to his thighs jiggle with the flak-dancing airplane, snatching his attention away from home, hugging at his legs like children from a second and competing family, telling him, No, stay here with us! This’ll be great!
The red ready fight goes out and the green light under it flashes on. The jump master drops his arm like a checkered flag and aims his finger now at the ground. The first soldier without hesitation skips out of the door. The jump master’s pointing hand goes up, pauses, then down, a metronome marking the two-second pause between leaping men. Bandy can’t hear him, but he sees the man’s mouth go round, his neck tendons bulge, shouting, “Go!”
The flak thickens over the DZ. The plane bucks, the men stagger and hold on to the static line. Bandy allows some space between him and the young soldier ahead. The lashing of shrapnel against the fuselage intensifies. Sabers of light dice like a magician’s swords through the cabin ahead of Bandy where hot metal has pierced the plane’s skin. Bandy tells himself he wants to get the hell out of here too, but the rest of him isn’t quite as certain as that voice in his head.
He doesn’t let himself think. His turn to jump is only four men away, eight seconds. The voice warns, this is no time to start reviewing your life. No regrets to Victoria or promises to the Almighty. Just step forward, pause, step again, pause, step.
Bandy’s toes are inches from wide-open destiny. Everyone else is gone except the jump master, who lifts his gateway hand, smiles up behind his goggles to Bandy, salutes, then points down. This time
Bandy hears him through the wind and heartbeat and fear, clear as a bell: “Go!”
What is extraordinary to Bandy is the emerald of the world. Below him are trees and fields peacefully verdant and endless in all directions. Above him and all around in the sky are olive drab airplanes almost wing to wing everywhere he looks, an unbelievable armada sent from free, green nations. Companies of men in battle fatigues float down under white chutes, like pearls set around the emerald.
Bandy thinks of spring pollen and tobacco blossoms. Mountains. Rain-dappled moss. And Victoria.
“Go!”
Bandy’s yell, “Aaaaaaaah!” disappears in the boom of the engine wash and the rush of nothing catching him.
The static line yanks the chute out of his pack. The canopy unfolds with a wonderful swish above his head. His crotch and armpits jolt. His teeth clack when his fall is broken and the blue sky goes blank and he’s under the shade of a white firmament. For a few seconds he sways in his harness, then he only dangles and drifts. Everything worked. Bandy is glad.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 27