EAGLES AT WAR
WALTER J. BOYNE
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Copyright © 1991 by Walter Boyne
Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where the names of actual persons, living or dead, are used, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. To request permission, please write to: Permissions, IPS Books, 1149 Grand Teton Drive, Pacifica, CA 94044.
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BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE
Non-fiction:
The Jet Age ( With Donald Lopez)
Flying
Messerschmitt Me 262: Arrow to the Future
Boeing B 52: A Documentary History
The Aircraft Treasures of Silver Hill
Vertical Flight (with Donald Lopez)
De Havilland DH 4: From Flaming Coffin to Living Legend
Phantom in Combat
The Leading Edge
The Smithsonian Illustrated History of Flight
The Smithsonian Book of Flight for Children
The Power Behind The Wheel
Flight
Weapons of Desert Storm
Gulf War
Classic Aircraft
Art in Flight: The Sculpture of John Safer
Silver Wings
Clash of Wings
Clash of Titans
Fly Past, Fly Present
Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story
Air Warfare (With Phillip Handleman as editors)
Aces in Command
German Military Aircraft
The Best of Wings
Aviation 100, Volume I
Classic Aircraft
Aviation 100, Volume II
Aviation 100, Volume III
The Two O’Clock War
Encyclopedia of Air Warfare (Editor)
The Influence of Air Power on History
Chronicle of FlightRising Tide (with Gary Weir
Operation Iraqi Freedom, What Went Right, What Went Wrong and Why
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Air Force
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Navy
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Army
The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Marines
Today’s Best Military Writing (Editor)
World War II Aircraft: Great American Fighter Planes of the Second World War
Beyond the Wild Blue: The History of the USAF, 1947–2007
Moving America Safely: 50 Years of the Federal Aviation Administration
Soaring to Glory, The United States Air Force Memorial.
Fiction:
The Wild Blue ( with Steven L. Thompson)
Trophy for Eagles
Eagles at War
Air Force Eagles
Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of The Wright Brothers
Roaring Thunder
Supersonic Thunder
Hypersonic Thunder
Visit Colonel Walter R. Boyne’s website: http://www.air-boyne.com/
***
To my inspiration, my wife Jeanne,
and children Molly, Katie, Bill, and Peggy plus Max and Minnie
and Duke and Spike-pets are family, too.
***
PROLOGUE
Over Germany/April 24, 1944
The B-17s came from the northwest, locked in formation as precisely as migrating geese, their target the Dornier aircraft factory near Friedrichshafen. There were no escorting fighters and the bomber crews sweated with fear, their nervous young gunners probing the hostile sky for bogies, seeking cold comfort in the heft and wicked oily smell of their guns.
The Bomb Group Commander repeated his call to close up the already tight formation. He had flown Flying Fortresses through the blood baths of Schweinfurt and Regensburg and knew the chilling odds against them.
The crews crouched in their frozen aluminum tubes, swaddled in zippered leather suits, bodies kept barely mobile by electrically heated garments, deafened by the unremitting roar of slipstream, the prairie-fire crackle of their headsets, the pounding of propellers and engines. Their fingers itched to add to the din with the reassuring thunder of their . 50-caliber Brownings, to do something other than passively wait for a random burst of flak or the quick slash of a fighter.
From the southwest, a single North American P-51 fighter turned parallel to the distant bombers, its pilot watching the flickering images of B-17s projected against the towering silver cumulus clouds behind them. The Mustang was free-lancing, briefed to seek out and strafe anything moving—a train, a truck, a wagon, even a soldier on a bicycle. One of its mates had been shot down, the others were somehow missing. Now the pilot was headed home alone, low on fuel and ammunition.
From the east there came a dot, a single speck that quickly changed into a speeding shark, moving in and out of the line of clouds more swiftly than any airplane he had ever seen before. It banked sharply, an arrow shape curving around the bomber's flank. The American pilot checked his instruments and dove. This was a predator from a new technology, something special that must be reported—after he killed it.
The German pilot focused on his attack. He knew how many hits it took to hurt a B-17 and how savagely a formation of them responded. In the old piston-engine Messerschmitts, he'd had to fly long, tenacious attacks, trying to concentrate twenty or thirty cannon shells in a vital spot, aiming and shooting amid a virtual bath of machinegun fire from the bombers. Fearful and inexperienced pilots would fire from a thousand yards out, fanning their shells into a pattern through which the bombers could slip.
Keeping his turn wide, the German pilot banked around the northern edge of the bombers, wisps of moisture curling from his swept-back wings. He wanted to pass through the formation diagonally, preventing all the guns from being trained on him at once, curving constantly, masking his own plane with those of the enemy. He knew that most of the gunners would fire behind him, unprepared to compute the lead necessary to nail a target moving at his jet's 850 kilometers per hour.
Turning in, he selected the B-17 at the northernmost corner of the formation, noting its graceful shape, the green diamond mark on its vertical surfaces, and the brush-bristle stippling from the machine guns studding it. He didn't see the name Rebel Rose on the nose or the copilot crossing himself.
In three seconds his six cannon hurled ninety-six pounds of lead, the tight cluster of shells impacting near the inner port engine, shredding the aluminum bridge-truss structure of the spars and ribs. The unleashed gyroscopic forces of the overspeeding propeller ripped the engine from its mounts, wrenching the wing apart, sending the Rebel Rose reeling, the dead crew members at peace, the living to face long tumbling moments of terror before the impact. The lone German plane skimmed over the dying B-17 like a track star leaping a hurdle, cutting to the formation's center. Its pilot pressed the trigger again, pouring a terrible fire into the bomb bay of a B-17 named Cloud Duster, the crew on its thirtieth and—truly last—mission. Plunging through the red-black explosion of metal and body parts, the pilot hoped that the jet engines would not suck in the debris.
Exactly ninety degrees from where his first victim still spun toward the ground, he put the formation leader in his sights, a touch of rudder sliding him to the left to rake its forward fuselage. It was the Minnesota Mauler, its crew proud to be ca
rrying the Bomb Group Commander on its twentieth mission. The young colonel commanding was alert, aware of the intruder in his flock, unable to deal with it. The cries of "Bogie at six o'clock" and "B-17 going down" had squirted adrenalin through him, changing everything. A moment ago the mission had been but a stepping-stone to his stars. Now the mission was survival.
The German jet shuddered as it fired, destroying the bodies, minds, and ambitions of the two men at the controls. The dying colonel convulsively hauled back on the B-17's control column, pulling the bomber up into a violent stall, tumbling the remaining crew like dice in a cup and trapping them in the spinning wreck.
Inside the other bombers, the eager gunners were calling off the jet's position, firing randomly.
The German pilot climbed, a hawk circling panicked rabbits. Invulnerable, he glanced down at the black strings of gunfire still erupting futilely in all directions from the formation. Enough fuel and ammunition for one more run, he thought, then home for a drink.
The single American fighter pilot hurled his aircraft toward the battle, ignoring the fires buzzing from the desperate bombers. He roared toward the German plane at top speed, but the distance seemed unchanged as he watched the German plane tear up the bombers. In dreamlike slow motion, though his nose was thrust down, his throttle full forward, he couldn't close and stop that lethal green-black shark from tearing bloody chunks out of the formation.
His Mustang quivering like a reed, he deliberately fired from too far to distract the enemy. All six of his . 50-caliber wing guns were firing at first, then four, then three, as the ammunition was exhausted. As he dove through the formation the bombers' gunners fired frenziedly at him, not recognizing him as a friend, riddling his fuselage with hits. His radio suddenly went dead.
He didn't see the Messerschmitt break off its attack, climbing insolently, the raw power of its jets lifting it faster than any piston-engine plane could follow, the pilot only mildly annoyed at the interruption.
The B-17s clustered together again, closing up the gaps torn from the formation, guns silent now, the Deputy Group Commander's voice coming over the air hesitantly, repeating "Close it up," and then, plaintively, "See any chutes?" There was a quick gabble of responses; no one had seen any chutes. Finally a quiet Alabama voice asked, "What was that that come through us? A rocket?" There was no answer.
Far below, the normally docile Mustang hurtled down toward the green German countryside, controls locked solid by air squeezed to compressibility, battering at the speed of sound, airframe porpoising and shuddering as if it were flying through boulders instead of clouds. The pilot had chopped the throttle and tried to roll the airplane to safety, but the ailerons were as locked by speed as he was by fear as he plunged vertically, insane aerodynamic forces tucking his nose under, ripping control away from him. The rate-of-descent meter pegged as the altitude melted away, clouds whipping past. He placed both feet on the bottom of the instrument panel, leveraging his grunting heave on the stick. It didn't matter if he bent the wings or pulled them off; the alternative was to punch a big black hole in the earth. The ground was looming up, no longer just colors, but now flecked with roads and lakes, crossed by fences and tree lines. He was horsing back on the stick and the houses were getting bigger and bigger, straight beneath him, the landscape scroll was not rolling, he was going to go straight in, bore down thirty feet, become fused with the engine in an amalgam of flesh and oil and fire.
***
Chapter 1
Yankee Stadium, New York/October 9, 1938
The score was 4 to 3, Yankees, but the raucous Cub fans were roaring with expectation—the series wasn't over yet. In the McNaughton Aircraft company box, halfway down the third-base line, four people were gamely trying to stitch together the relationships ripped by the morning's arguments. A fifth person, the man who had done much of the ripping, was oblivious both to the situation and the game. Colonel Henry Myers Caldwell was totally engrossed in the good-looking woman sitting next to him.
Looking a decade older than his forty-one years, with thinning hair and smoke-yellowed teeth, he was an unlikely match for such a pretty lady. Years of squinting out of open cockpit planes had given his broad, high-cheekboned face the look of old leather. At West Point, he'd earned the cruel, accurate nickname "Hank the Hawk," in part because his hooked nose curved down toward an upturned chin, in part because of the bird-of-prey way he constantly swiveled his long neck, quick brown eyes missing nothing.
But now the Hawk's gaze was riveted on Elsie Raynor, drinking in the silky red hair bobbing around her oval face, seeking out the meaning of every expression of her green-flecked eyes, recalling how delectable he found her creamy skin.
The colonel moved with the vigor of a much younger man, despite a paunch that bourbon and a wretched officers' club steak-and-potato diet had added to his wiry five-foot seven-inch frame. A born organizer, he seldom needed to raise his voice, but when provoked he could bring an awkward squad to a halt from a block away. Sometimes his presence was too powerful—the energy channeled into his table-drumming fingers and tapping toes frightened less driven people. It had this morning.
Thirteen years younger and much more worldly, Elsie Raynor was still trying to ease the tension by playing up to Caldwell. She laughed at his jokes and even made him laugh, too—he hadn't laughed often in recent months. The young woman had a full-figured, well-toned body, and she carried herself with the silky grace of the dancer she had once aspired to be, seeming taller than her five-foot four-inches.
The chorus line would have been easy for her—she had succeeded on her own terms in a far tougher arena, the rough male world of aviation. Despite her father's wishes, she had not become a pilot. Instead she'd worked hard to learn what made aircraft factories tick, in the process discovering how to control the men who ran them. At the morning meeting in Troy McNaughton's suite at the Waldorf, she'd shown clearly that she was a person to be reckoned with. Her official title was "Personal Assistant to the President," but Troy McNaughton had not only depended upon her this morning for facts and figures, he'd looked openly to her for guidance at some of the tough management questions he'd been asked. And she had twice saved the meeting from degenerating into a fistfight.
Caldwell, sure of his position and anxious to impress Elsie, had started the Waldorf meeting with an abrupt announcement that Frank Bandfield was being recalled into the Air Corps, with the rank of major, and that Hadley Roget would join him at Wright Field to head up a new program he was calling "Operation Leapfrog."
Caldwell had reason to be sure of himself with Bandfield. He had arranged a commission for him as a captain in the Air Corps reserve and in 1937 sent him under cover to fly with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Flying fighters supplied by Russia against the German Condor Legion had taught Bandfield much, and he'd become an ace in the process. When the war ground down to the bitter end, he'd escaped by flying from Guernica to France, after one last dogfight that still haunted his dreams. Caldwell knew very well that Bandfield was bored with running his aircraft parts factory and was dying to get back into the Air Corps, and had simply presented him with official orders.
It was different with Roget. He was a civilian, and Caldwell had no hold on him—except the job offer of his dreams. Roget was an intuitive engineer—an "imagineer" he called himself—and Caldwell was giving him a chance to run a program intended to force the development of a line of radical new aircraft. It all seemed cut and dry to Caldwell, and he'd moved immediately to discussing McNaughton's new fighter, the Sidewinder, without giving either Roget or Bandfield a chance to comment.
Roget had blown up.
"Goddamnit, Henry, you can't treat me like this, especially not in front of Johnny-come-latelies like Troy McNaughton and his girlfriend."
McNaughton, six feet tall and crackling energy from every pore, was Arrow-collar handsome except for a big nose broken in college boxing. His voice had a soft, cajoling quality, and he normally had the professional gr
in and easygoing manner of a first-rate salesman. But Roget's gibe—not his first—made McNaughton's neck veins bulge, and he moved around the table to confront Hadley. Elsie had stepped smoothly between them, straightening the narrow knot of McNaughton's paisley tie with one hand and thrusting a cup of coffee on Roget with the other.
Later there had been another outburst, over the Sidewinder's design. McNaughton had brought plans and illustrations. It was a beautiful little airplane, its shape obviously derived from his 1936 racer. Small, with a sharply pointed nose and tapered wings, the plane's innovations alone were enough to justify a contract from Caldwell. Unlike any other pursuit in the Air Corps, it had a novel tri-cycle gear. The liquid-cooled Allison engine was equally innovative, mounted in the fuselage aft of the cockpit and driving a three-bladed propeller via a shaft running under the pilot's seat. A big 37-mm cannon fired through the propeller hub, the heaviest armament for any fighter in the world. McNaughton waved four-color drawings that looked like pulp magazine covers, each showing the waspish little fighter shooting down formations of "enemy" bombers.
McNaughton glowed with pride. "It's going to be a world beater! It's plenty fast—four hundred miles per hour, and it's got long legs—it'll fly Nashville to Washington, nonstop."
Roget snorted and planted his gnarled finger on the plans where the fuselage connected to the wings, growling, "Four hundred miles an hour my ass! Goddamnit, Troy, you've made a hell of a mistake with this crate. Everything you gain in drag reduction by putting the engine midship, you lose at the wing-fuselage intersection. You've built a goddamn barn door in there, and you can't even see it. If you get three hundred out of this dog, I'll be surprised."
McNaughton responded savagely. "Look who's talking. You never did design an airplane anyone would buy, and you're telling me how to build them? We've got ten thousand wind-tunnel hours on this airplane, hard data, and I don't have to stand here and listen to your off-the-cuff bullshit."
Eagles at War Page 1