May was on his feet dusting himself off and saying, “That would be Pilot Officer Dean, sir. He’s very keen about flying very low.”
Whittle turned over on his back, watching the Meteor disappear, concentrating on the circles of flame held so tightly within the jet orifices, outlining the black streams of exhaust pouring from the engines that he had brought into being. Tears poured from his eyes as he looked up and said, “Hooker, I don’t care if they did steal my damn engine! Seeing that V-1 go down made it all worthwhile.”
Hooker reached in his sleeve, handed Whittle a handkerchief, then moved to block the view of May and the chauffeur. They did not need to see the man who had started a new age in aviation cry like a child.
October 20, 1944, Burbank, California
Vance Shannon sat in Bob Gross’s expanded and far more luxurious reception area, remembering how austere the offices had been only ten years before. He sipped a cup of coffee as he read an internal Lockheed bulletin that summarized the world events of the previous weeks. For the most part, the news was good. The Allies had long since broken out from their invasion beaches. The Germans had suffered catastrophic losses, with fifty divisions being destroyed on the Eastern Front and another twenty-eight on the Western Front.
Shannon shook his head. How could they keep fighting with such losses? Only fanatics would continue when the war was so obviously lost. The Bulgarian and Rumainian forces—for whatever they were worth—had defected to the Soviet side. The Allied advance was continuing in the Pacific, with the Caroline Islands operations moving forward as well. The only bad news was in China, where the Japanese had unexpectedly mounted a big eleven-division offensive intended to capture U.S. Fourteenth Air Force bases at Kwelin and Liuchow.
In the air, the news was much better than it had been a year before, when the Luftwaffe had wrested control of the air from the Eighth Air Force. Now the long-range North American P-51s were able to escort bombers all the way to their targets and back, and he was grateful, for it made Harry’s job safer. The German jets and rocket planes had begun to appear, but in much smaller numbers than expected. The Allies tried to minimize their threat by maintaining combat air patrols over their airfields, so they could catch them landing and taking off.
Vance was a little put out. He’d received a call personally from Bob Gross, asking him to come in as soon as he possibly could. Vance had made an appointment for nine o’clock, it was now eleven, and he was still waiting. The last thing he needed was idle time to think—for thinking meant worries about Madeline, about Tom, and about Harry. The “two boys” were grown men now, warriors, and he still felt for them as he did from the time they were born, wanting to make things go well for them and, most of all, keep them safe from harm.
The delay was very unlike Gross—something very important must have come up. He hoped Gross was not ill—like everyone else, he had been working long hours and was not really taking care of himself as he should.
The door opened and Gross flew in, ashen faced, his coat off and sweat beading on his brow. “Forgive me, Vance, a terrible accident. Milo Burcham just crashed in the gravel pit off the end of the runway. He was in a P-80 and it flamed out. Didn’t have a chance. Poor Milo! He was a wonderful man.”
Shannon tried to express his sympathy. It was a major loss. Burcham was a top test pilot and a magnificent asset for Lockheed. “Bob, would it be better for you if I came back? I can arrange another appointment with your secretary.”
Gross shook his head. “No, just give me about ten minutes alone, to pull myself together. I’m going to go out and see Peggy.” Vance knew her well. She and her two sons would be devastated. Once again it occurred to him that jet aircraft were going to take a toll of many pilots before they were perfected. Jets were clearly the coming thing—they were even talking about jet airliners now—but lots of lives would be lost in perfecting them. Including, perhaps, one of his sons’. It was a horrible thought.
A few minutes later Gross poked his head out of his office and signaled Shannon to come in.
“I never get used to this, Vance, and I always blame myself.”
“I know the feeling, Bob. My two boys are flying now, and if something happens to them, I’ll never forgive myself for inoculating them with the flying bug.”
Gross pulled a crystal decanter from his desk and poured a minute amount of brandy into two glasses. They clicked glasses and Gross said, “To Milo.”
After carefully storing the decanter—it was the first time Shannon had ever seen Gross take a drink, even at parties—the Lockheed executive pulled out a leather folder and handed it over.
“Vance, you’ll remember that I had some contacts that I wasn’t too proud of in Germany?”
Shannon nodded.
“Well, this is the latest thing he has sent me. All the translations are paper clipped to the original documents. It is pretty disturbing, for it shows the blasted Germans are somehow increasing their jet aircraft production despite all the bombing we’ve done. He has the full dope on the new Arado jet bomber, and gives the specifications for both the V-1 and the V-2.” He was quiet, thinking of Milo again. He shook his head and resumed. “More than a year ago, I told Hap Arnold about my sources of information, and after he chewed me out at the top of his lungs, he calmed down and told me to keep doing it.”
Shannon riffled through the papers. The Arado was a beautiful airplane, judging by the drawing, and its performance was sensational, almost as good as that of the Messerschmitt jet fighter. He knew quite a bit about the V-1, but the V-2 was fascinating, and this was the first official information he had seen.
Gross tossed over one more paper, obviously from the same batch. “This is the most distressing part. It is sick.” As Shannon read it, his heart sank. At a huge underground plant, the Germans were using slave labor to build the V-2, killing thousands of people in the process. There were even a few photographs attached, obviously taken covertly and smuggled out of the camp. They showed ragged skeleton-like creatures working on assembly lines.
“This is grotesque. How can they be so cruel?”
“It is monstrous. Hap called me on a secure phone and said he planned to lay on bombing raids on the rail lines to the camp—Nordhausen, they call it—but he’s afraid to bomb the camps themselves because it would kill so many of the prisoners.”
“Bob, this is fascinating, but what is it you’d like me to do?”
Gross walked to the window. “The war in Europe will end pretty soon. Perhaps even by the first of the year. I know that Hap intends to send a flying squad of top officers and scientists into Germany to scavenge all the information and the equipment they can, before the Germans destroy it, or the Russians get their hands on it. I told Hap that you should be on the team. Do you want to go?”
Shannon did not hesitate for a second. “Absolutely, Bob. Put me down. And put Harry down, too! He’ll be finished with his tour, for sure, and he would be a big help to me.”
Gross smiled for the first time that day. “I cannot promise that, Vance, but I’ll try. They’ll probably be using C-47s or C-54s to make the trip in; maybe he can go along as a copilot or something.”
Shannon rose to go and said, “Bob, it is none of my business, but what is going to happen to your informant when the war is over?”
Gross flushed, angry with himself, angry with a war that forced him to soil his hands working with people like this unnamed informant. “With the amount of money we’ve paid him, he can go to Argentina and live for the rest of his life. I sent word to him that our arrangement was terminated. He’s on his own now.”
November 8, 1944, Achmer,
outside Osnabrück, Germany
Adolf Galland took off well before dawn in his special Messerschmitt Bf 109, so that he could land at Achmer at sunrise, too early for the ever-present American fighter-bombers that dominated the air over Germany. It was his first flight as a lieutenant general. At thirty-two, he was by far the youngest man of that elevated rank in
the German armed services. He was probably also the most severely fatigued, from his overloaded combination of work and romances.
Two airfields, Achmer and Hespe, were the home of Kommando Nowotny, a service test squadron. It had been established early in October, equipped with no fewer than forty Messerschmitt Me 262s. The airfields were positioned perfectly to oppose the almost daily flights of Eighth Air Force bombers. The arrangement would have been ideal if swarming British and American fighters did not orbit the area, waiting for the jets to take off and land. Some measure of relief was afforded by a four-mile-long corridor of anti-aircraft guns set up off the ends of the runway. They were designed to put up an umbrella of flak, creating a safe corridor for arriving and departing jets. In addition, the very effective Focke-Wulf 190D aircraft of Jagdgeschwader 54 flew protective patrols, fighting off the enemy while allowing the Me 262s to gain speed after takeoff, when they became virtually invulnerable to piston fighter attack. The 190s performed the same service when the jets returned, low on fuel and forced to give up their great speed advantage to slow down for a landing approach.
Major Walter Nowotny had scored 256 victories before being appointed commander of the unit that bore his name. In one month of operation, his pilots had shot down twenty-two enemy aircraft—but lost twenty-seven of their precious jets, most of them in accidents. Galland’s mission was to find out what was wrong with the operation, but to do it in a way that did not destroy what remained of the pilots’ morale.
In the primitive operations shack, Nowotny introduced Galland to his senior people, then took him into his office, where a surprisingly sumptuous breakfast had been prepared by the Russian cook Nowotny had brought back from the Eastern Front.
Nowotny did not hesitate. “I know you must be disappointed with our results. So am I. I thought that we could do far more damage than we have. And we’ve lost so many good people.”
Galland shifted his cigar and bowed his head. “The Luftwaffe has lost almost ninety percent of its experienced pilots since January. And the sad thing is that it did not need to happen.”
Relieved at the slight turn the conversation had taken, Nowotny piled plum preserves on a piece of bread and looked inquiring.
“That pig Göring started it all, as far back as November 1940. He thought the war was won, and stupidly ordered that all new weapons that could not be put into battle within a year be canceled. That ripped the guts out of jet engine development.” Galland pawed at his flying suit, looking for his lighter. Nowotny handed him his own, and Galland relit his cigar. “If we had only pressed on with research just in the metallurgy needed to withstand the high temperatures in jet engines, everything would have been fine. We could have had a thousand 262s by late 1942, with plenty of time and fuel to train the pilots. But no, that all had to be left until two years later. And, if that were not enough, we had all the changes, and all the experimental models. It didn’t help that Milch and the Air Ministry were suspicious of Messerschmitt, and would not give him the people or the resources he needed.”
“Afraid of another 210 fiasco!”
“Exactly, and blind to what they had in the 262. If everyone had reacted properly, we would have stopped the bomber offensive, day and night. There would have been no invasion, believe me. And we might even have held our ground in Russia. We have had less than five hundred fighters on the Eastern Front for the last two years; we put thousands of our 88mm guns to use in flak batteries when they should have been used to knock out Soviet tanks. They even frittered away our conventional fighters, wasting them.”
Galland had long begged to be allowed to build up a huge reserve of day fighters and hit the incoming American formations with a massive attack, using a thousand 109s and 190s in a single Great Blow, as he called it. But every time he had the airplanes gathered, Göring would order them out on some useless task. When the invasion came, the Reichsmarschall had wasted aircraft in such a profligate manner that only two airplanes were available to strafe the invasion beaches on June 6. Now he was going to use Galland’s carefully husbanded resources for a big attack on the Western Front in December. Galland started to mention this, then caught himself; it was so top secret that he could not even tell Nowotny, a loyal hero of the Reich if ever there was one.
“What about this making the 262 a bomber?” Nowotny asked. “I hear people blame the Führer for the decision; they say he insisted that it be produced only as a bomber, not a fighter, that pilots couldn’t endure the g-forces at high speed.”
Galland nodded. “That’s only partly true. He did ask to have bombs fitted, and saw the airplane as a fast bomber, but he knew that it would be a fighter, too. On balance his support helped the program more than his ideas about making it a blitz bomber hurt it. But the real problem was engines. We did not begin to get production engines until June of this year, all because we did not do the necessary research. The irony is that when the research was finally started, they quickly found a way to solve the problem. Instead of rare metals, they formed hollow turbine blades that could be cooled by passing air through them. Ingenious.”
He reached over and placed a huge slice of ham on his plate. “Where on earth do you get ham like this? And this coffee—it is real!”
Nowotny smiled for the first time. “Your fans send you cigars; mine send me food. This came from a firm in Westphalia; they manage to get one to me every month.”
There was a pause as Galland chewed; then in a low, kindly voice, he asked, “And what is happening here, Nowotny? We’ve got the airplanes we wanted at last. Why are they not working as they should?”
Nowotny flushed, accidentally banging his coffee mug down on the table, spilling it. He apologized as he mopped it up, then said, “You know the answers as well as I do. First of all, the pilots don’t have sufficient training in the airplane. It’s far different from flying a 109 or the 190. It doesn’t turn as tightly, it’s slow to accelerate, and the engines are very tricky, have to be handled with extreme care, or they will flame out. You know all that. But all of these shortcomings wouldn’t really matter if I could get them to fly the airplane correctly, using its speed and climb to fight. Yet, despite all I tell them, despite what the manuals say, when a fight starts, they forget everything and try to maneuver with the Mustangs. Fatal! We stress over and over that they have to use their speed to engage and disengage when it is to their advantage, but when the guns start shooting, almost all of them start turning! Crazy.”
Galland shook his head. The British and the Americans trained their pilots in perfect safety, some of them thousands of miles from combat. They had all the oil and gas they wanted, so they could give a pilot three hundred hours’ flying time and more before sending him into combat. German cadets could get shot down on their first solo flight, and there was so little fuel that they were sending green pilots, with fewer than one hundred hours’ flying time to frontline fighter units.
It was only a little different with the Experten, the veteran pilots who had survived years of battle and could fly anything. They might get from one to twenty hours’ instruction in the 262 before being sent into combat, but there was no time to teach tactics, gunnery, or even formation flying. It was a murder mill, pure and simple.
“Any ideas on what you can do to improve things? We’ve got to start killing hundreds of the Allied bombers—to hell with their fighters, we’ve got to stop the bombers. They are burning up what’s left of the Reich.”
Nodding, Nowotny was walking toward a blackboard on which he had written half a dozen ideas for improving the situation when air-raid sirens blared. Nowotny said, “Sorry,” grabbed his helmet, and ran toward his aircraft, parked at the side of the runway. Nowotny and three other pilots took off, their Messerschmitt jets leaving a trail of smoke as they disappeared through the low overcast.
Galland returned to the operations shack, where a radio was tuned to the frequency Nowotny was using. The Americans were apparently in force over Lake Dummer, and within minutes Nowotny calmly c
alled that he was starting his attack on the bomber formation. A minute passed, and he reported that he had blown up a Liberator, and then moments later, a P-51.
Galland smiled. The 262s’ armament package was lethal; the four 30mm Mk 108 cannon chewed up everything before them. And better things were coming, R4M rockets that could take out a formation of B-17s in a single pass.
An excited young pilot turned to Galland and slapped him on the back, saying, “That’s numbers two fifty-seven and two fifty-eight,” before realizing what he had done. Galland smiled, shook his head, and listened intently.
Nowotny’s voice came back on the air. “Right turbine has failed; I’m returning to base.”
Moments later, his emotions now not under control, he screamed, radioing, “Over the field. Right engine on fire. Mustang attacking.”
Galland burst through the doorway of the shack and ran the hundred yards to the runway. Through the clouds he heard machine-gun fire, identifying it immediately as 50-caliber. The Mustang was shooting and Galland knew that Nowotny was a sitting duck. Then, through the low clouds scudding across the field, Nowotny’s jet came plunging straight down, impacting the ground a little over a kilometer away, the raging smoke reaching up to the cloud cover.
Galland turned and trudged slowly toward his own aircraft. Nowotny was dead, and so was Kommando Nowotny. Someone else would have to create the tactics for the jet fighter. As if it made any difference now.
January 2, 1945, Eglin Army Airfield, Florida
Lieutenant Colonel Tom Shannon almost never drank and absolutely never drank to excess. But there had been a wild party at the Officers Club on New Year’s Eve, where he met Ginny, an agreeable, attractive secretary at Base Headquarters. She had been standing at the club door as if waiting for someone; when Tom walked in, she grabbed him by the arm and said, “Let’s go have some fun,” by way of introduction. Ginny was blond, with a great sense of mildly ribald humor, if not a great mind, and she tossed off the dreadful club drinks as if they were water, which they mostly were. Best of all, she was definitely romantically inclined, pressing close to him on the dance floor when they played “Sentimental Journey,” kissing his neck and responding to his clumsy comments as if he were Errol Flynn.
Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age Page 13