Col saw himself in the people he met; the footsteps he followed were those of his kin. This process of recognition was undiminished to the end, even as personal links were severed by the death of many of his friends. His last letter to his mother, received by her after his death, evokes this love of England as strongly as any he sent home during the two and a half years he lived there. When he wrote it in February 1944, Col had just arrived at Oakington, between Cambridge and Ely, to begin a second tour of operations.
The names of the hotels, the country inns, I mean, continue to intrigue me. In Ely, for example, there is one called ‘The King Charles in the Oak’. Another I saw, miles away from anywhere, was called the ‘Lock and Keys’. The ‘Hart and Hounds’ was another. Some of them are set just in the back o’ beyond. Goodness knows what they do for custom. They are thatched and tumbledown, but surprisingly warm and cosy inside. After dinner the locals come down and play the odd game of darts. Sometimes, if we drop in the evenings, we challenge them, to their delighted amusement. These old chappies, with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin, who are tottery about the knees when they walk, and who seem scarcely able to see, have eyes like hawks when it comes to throwing the dart in the right place. Probably they could not multiply three by four, but they are razor-edged when it comes to adding up their score at darts.
Some of these inns are very old. In some, a tall man would have a job to stand upright, while he would certainly hit his head on one of the rafters. We went into one in the course of a cycle ride last summer in which the rafters were the original roughly squared oaken beams, black with age. I could not understand what my host was saying at all. He might honestly have been speaking a foreign language. I don’t think the war has changed their way of living a bit.
I visited the Ely Cathedral again the other day. It is a magnificent old place. Inside the flag stones are worn and pitted with the marks of over hundreds of years of people just walking over them. The roof is lost in shadows, and the light comes so faintly through the stained glass. It just depicts the age of this ancient land. Each little village in this part of the country has its tremendous church built of stone, themselves hundreds of years old. The churches are in size out of all proportion to the number of people who attend; but there they are, and there they will remain for hundreds of years yet.
I felt a breath of Col’s delight while wandering through the coolness of Ely Cathedral in the summer of 2007, the low angles of the late afternoon sun enlivening the stained glass windows. During vespers in the Chapter House, the young choir’s expressive faces provided a curious counterpoint to the headless, shattered figures around the walls, vandalised on Henry VIII’s orders during the anti-Catholic violence of England’s Reformation. On my way out, and with a lurch of surprise, I came upon the stained glass windows commemorating the airmen who flew from the stations dotted about the surrounding countryside. What a lonely, welcome sight this grand cathedral must have been to so many returning bomber crews, straining to make out their airstrip as the new day rose like Ely’s twin towers in the early morning mist. Col would no doubt have found some solace in knowing he has an enduring place in Ely Cathedral: his name is entered in an elegant, calligraphic hand in the four-volume Roll of Honour recording the 14,820 airmen of 2, 3, 8 and 100 Bomber Command Groups who died while serving at airbases in the region.
CHAPTER 5
A LUCKY ENEMY
By the time Col wrote of his last visit to Ely Cathedral, Otto Fries was only starting to become a truly dangerous adversary. Though he had begun pilot instruction a year before Col, they had both completed their training at the same time, December 1941. Although 10 years younger, Otto shared with Col an energetic intelligence, a devotion to family, a fierce patriotism and an unstinting dedication to the job. In other times, different circumstances, the two men might have become the most natural of friends rather than the best of enemies. It is hard today to reconcile this time of killing with a relative who lives for me through his writing and with his former enemy, whom I came to know so well.
Professor Otto-Heinrich Fries always greeted me with warmth and a gentle whimsy that made the reason for my visits to his Berlin home seem unnatural, almost rude. But during more than two dozen conversations over 18 months he never shied away from what it had meant in human terms to shoot down at least 18 bombers and the people in them – people like Col Jones. One night Professor Fries’s grandson joined our conversation as part of a school project on the ‘morality of killing in war’, and I observed him grilling his Opa in a way that made even me squirm. Younger Germans appear to have few qualms about passing judgement on the wartime generation. But the elder Fries took all questions in his stride, rolling many of them back gently with the implicit counter, ‘What would you have done?’ Otto saw he had a job to do, one for which he had received two years of the best training in the world. Using this great skill, and in control of a sophisticated killing machine, his task was simply to prevent enemy bombers from destroying his country’s cities and the people who lived in them. Usually he tried to shoot down the bombers in a way that improved the crews’ chances of getting out, but they rarely escaped. He lived with this knowledge, even while taking pride in his service to his country.
Otto was blessed with resilience from an early age. As a 17-year-old he was working in his school holidays at Ludwigshafen, at the chemicals company, IG Farben – later the makers of Zyklon B gas, used in the extermination camps. He kept his drinking water in a fridge with several similar bottles, randomly placed there for cool storage. When he rushed down to the cafeteria for a break one day he grabbed what he thought was his drink. One big gulp made his error devastatingly clear: He had swallowed calcium hydroxide, which burned his oesophagus and stomach so badly that he spent the next year in a clinic and had to receive special treatment intermittently for years afterwards – into his seventies. Even in peacetime, Otto was a survivor; and it was his luck as much as his skill that enabled him to make it through the war.
Otto Fries frequently talked about his childhood village, Herxheim am Berg, which sits on the rolling hills west of the Rhine, south of the cathedral city of Mainz. I travelled there one perfect autumn day in September 2007 to add my own impressions to his descriptions – and to put a scenic backdrop to the wines he always served when I visited him in Berlin. I was quickly seduced by the village charms: the vineyards the Fries family had owned formed a crossword-puzzle of small Weinlage (vineyard) allotments straddling the main road. I strolled through these and down the narrow streets to a point where I looked east from a stone-walled terrace, dappled by broad, rusty-leafed chestnuts, towards the twin industrial cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, which straddle the Rhine. Two hot-air balloons drifted north above carpets of golden vines. The idyllic scene was worlds away from the infernos that raged in these two cities – and most others along the Rhine – as Bomber Command relentlessly struck back at Germany’s westernmost cities from 1940 onwards.
Otto grew up there between the wars, when Herxheim am Berg was in a part of Germany patrolled by the French, who were keen to rub German noses in their First World War defeat. His grandfather always pulled him away from the fence when French military convoys passed along the town’s main road in front of the family home. The French were the Erbfeind – the hereditary enemy. Otto Fries recalled how every autumn of his childhood a pig was slaughtered for a feast. The men gathered around the large table had all served on the Western Front – Otto’s father near Verdun, where he was once buried in his bunker for three days after the French detonated an underground mine. For the men of the village the central topic of conversation at these annual feasts was always the Schmach von Versailles – the humiliation of Versailles. Otto grew up knowing there was an historical score to settle with the western powers.
This was typical of the simmering anger and a growing delusion across Germany that it had not lost in 1918, but had merely agreed to end hostilities. By this reasoning, the Armistice on 11 No
vember had been twisted into an ‘unjust’ defeat by the vengeful western allies, aided and abetted by the German left – the Communists and the Social Democrats. This resentment gave rise to the Dolch-Stoss-Legende, the myth of being stabbed in the back. A malign weed took root and strangled the new seedling of Weimar Republic democracy. The resentment was made worse by vicious war reparations, particularly to the French, which deepened the humiliation of defeat and aggravated shortages of all essentials. Malnutrition was commonplace and was exacerbated by the Royal Navy blockade of German ports, which continued even after the Armistice. Hyperinflation during the 1920s and the mass unemployment of the Depression that followed opened fresh wounds. The sense of grievance and betrayal played into the hands of a demagogue like Hitler, enabling him to unite behind him the extreme elements on the right, ingeniously to paper over their contradictions and to portray his evil ends as consistent with restoring national pride – and reclaiming Germany’s rightful seat in the dress circle of nations. ‘Hitler meant something to us,’ Professor Fries told me. ‘He created jobs, trust in the future, he fixed the economic crisis. We had the feeling the country was going upwards and forwards.’ Much has been written along these lines, but when Professor Fries spoke of these times in his childhood and adolescence it was heart muscle contracting, not a turning of photo album pages to show a neat ordering of events long past. Even in July 1944, with Germany headed towards inevitable defeat, he remembered being angry at the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler with a briefcase bomb planted in his military headquarters near the eastern front – the ‘July Plot’. Otto felt it was too late in the piece to be taking such ‘dilettantish’ actions. What could these fools be thinking of, with Germany’s back against the wall?
As an 18-year-old, Otto had celebrated along with other Germans when their troops marched across the Rhine in 1936 and restored ‘honour’ to their lands on the west bank. Under the Versailles Treaty of 1918, the year Otto was born, these lands were placed out of bounds to the German military. Germany was also forbidden an air force under the Versailles Treaty, but the Nazis created the Luftwaffe in secret once they came to power in 1933. The Luftwaffe’s later role in such Spanish Civil War outrages as the bombing of Guernica, in the Blitzkrieg victories of 1939 and 1940 and in the bombing of England during the Battle of Britain in summer 1940 quickly proved why air power in the hands of Germany had been seen as such a threat.
By the end of 1938 the new Luftwaffe had cut its teeth in Spain, and Germany had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. Otto was by then a student of chemistry at the famous University of Heidelberg. In going on to higher studies, he was a rarity from his village, which did not even have a high school. His mother, armed with proof of his academic potential, had presented herself at the high school in the larger neighbouring town, Bad Dürkheim, and insisted they admit Otto to continue his education. Her boy was bound for the headwaters, and it seemed that the stronger the opposing current, the more determined Otto became. Bad Dürkheim’s school did not extend to the upper forms but, at 17, Otto was among a handful selected to go on to Gymnasium, or grammar school, to sit the Abitur university entrance exams. This would have been beyond the means of his family, but the Nazis had made it possible, opening a separate tributary into the academic stream to children not tagged for higher learning by a privileged family background. Given the humble surroundings in which he had grown up, his elevation by the Nazis to view wider horizons, and his indoctrination through the Hitler Youth, Otto’s loyalty was hardly surprising. When Germany triggered a Europe-wide war by attacking Poland on 1 September 1939, Otto was keen to become part of the élite Luftwaffe and volunteered immediately, even though it meant cutting short his university studies. When, however, he said he was a chemistry student at the university, the recruitment officer in Heidelberg told him to go back to his studies, as Germany would need plenty of chemists. As Otto left, disappointed, the woman secretary advised him to return in a couple of weeks and say instead he was studying law; lawyers were expendable. The advice worked a treat and by October 1939 he was in uniform.
The postcard scenes that greeted me at Herxheim am Berg were no less picturesque the day Otto flew over his home for first time in late August 1942. His squadron had been scrambled the night before to intercept bombers bound for a target in southern Germany. Otto and his Bordfunker, or radar and radio operator, Fred Staffa, finished their flying for the night well south of their own base of St Trond, or St Truiden, which is near Brussels on the road south-east to Liege. They landed at the large Luftwaffe airfield of Echterdingen, near Stuttgart in the south-west of Germany, and turned in at the barracks there, flying back to their own airbase the next morning. At this stage, before the introduction in 1943 of a more sophisticated and demanding version of on-board radar, and before RAF night fighters began attacking the Luftwaffe fighters over the continent during the hours of darkness, Otto and Fred flew without a rear gunner as third man. They were firm friends by then, having entered training at the same time. Although the two were schooled for different roles, each quickly recognised in the other a reliable partner, which was a prerequisite to success and sometimes survival. Fred was from the German-speaking Sudetenland, the Bohemian part of today’s Czech Republic, and it was he who gave Otto his nickname, ‘Otakar’ – after a 12th-century Bohemian king, Otakar Przemyszl.
That August morning in 1942, after taking off from Echterdingen to return to St Trond, Otto followed the Neckar River past his old university until he reached the Rhineland Palatinate Wine Road that runs from north of Karlsruhe to just south of Worms, on the Rhine. Herxheim am Berg lies roughly at the halfway point of this Pfalz Wine Road. Cruising at an altitude of 200 metres, which was normal then for overland flights, Otto could easily make out his fellow villagers working among the vines. As he circled three times – strictly against Luftwaffe regulations – he saw the vineyard workers flourishing their headscarves. Otto could see his mother waving to him from the front step of their home.
Otto’s aircraft, a twin-engined Messerschmitt ME110, was the aircraft used most widely by the German night fighter force and the type that attacked Col’s aircraft several times, including the night he ditched in the Channel.[1] The ME110 had been savaged by the faster, nimbler Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, but the German aircraft’s range, stability and capacity to deliver a fatal blow to the much larger bombers made it an ideal night fighter. It was also the plane in which Otto Fries was first shot down and later scored his first victories.
That first shooting down came only weeks after his low-level flight above his village. Otto was stalking a bomber returning from Nuremberg – a raid Col Jones took part in. It was the first time Otto had come into contact with a Stirling. Crammed into the metre-wide cockpit of his ME110, Otto was aghast at the bomber’s size – its fuselage high-sided like a ship and the length of two tennis courts. The size belied the Stirling’s agility, which Otto experienced when he closed on the bomber too quickly. He was forced to veer away so sharply that he exposed the flat undersurface of his wings to the bomber’s gunners, who shot him from the sky. He and Fred parachuted to safety. It was the first of many duels in which Otto’s respect for the enemy’s skill grew.
For a full year after this first encounter in August 1942, Otto had not a single contact with a bomber. Each lost opportunity merely confirmed his sense of impotence, compounded by the practice at that stage of scrambling Luftwaffe pilots in order of seniority. This gave a select few officers first claim on being guided in to a target by the combat leader on the ground, whose radar system and target plotting table were set up to direct individual pilots to the vicinity of single bombers. Frustrated at being, in effect, grounded because of lack of seniority, Unteroffizier (Corporal) Fries applied in writing to his commandant to become an officer, so that he would have the chance to do what he had been trained to do – attack bombers. In early 1943, after 14 weeks of intensive training
, Otto was promoted to sergeant. Finally, in August 1943, he became a Leutnant, an officer. But by then the growing pressure on the German air defences from the massive build-up of RAF Bomber Command strength – compounded by the daylight raids by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) – had forced a fundamental rethink of the Luftwaffe night-fighting strategy: to have a chance of combating the bomber stream, every available aircraft would need to be deployed.
On 11 August 1943 a newly promoted Leutnant Fries got the chance he had been waiting for. Just after 1a.m. he took off from St Trond and headed east. Initially he was sent on a wild goose chase, hunting a machine that turned out to be another German night fighter coming in to land. Around 2.30a.m., however, the ground control directed him towards a new object detected by the regional radar. Otto almost repeated his previous error, again closing too quickly in his enthusiasm and overrunning his slower quarry, which initially disappeared into the darkness before Fred was able to pick it up again on his radar 10 minutes later. The three screens of Fred’s Lichtenstein radar console showed an object some 700 metres ahead and above them and slightly to the left. Otto reported the sighting to ground control: ‘Parsival from Eagle 98 – I have contact with the enemy, over.’
In a single co-ordinated action, Fries activated his guns by retracting the covering of the two undernose 20-millimetre cannons, levered up his seat to bring his line of vision to the level of his reflector-gunsight and adjusted its illumination in preparation for bringing it to bear on the target. Fred guided him closer, to 500 metres; Otto slowed to avoid overrunning the bomber.
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 6