Eagles at War

by Boyne, Walter J.

  Josten held the turbine blade in his hand. "Looks pretty crude; doesn't the air bleed out between the welds?"

  "Absolutely, and that keeps the temperature down. I'm going to have twelve engines built up by the end of this month, and as many as twenty more next month."

  Josten was silent, obviously impressed. "With that sort of schedule, we could start training in June and have a squadron ready to go by the end of July."

  "Have you identified your pilots?"

  "They've all identified themselves; they are either recovering from wounds, been court-martialed, or are persona non grata politically. I've picked twelve, and they are picking their own ground crew, all with the same kind of background, a regular bunch of pirates!"

  "Will 'Unser Hermann let you have them?"

  "He'll never know about it. Galland is arranging for their orders to read Peenemunde—but they'll be amended so they can report to me here."

  "How long will it take once you get the airplanes?"

  "We ought to have two weeks of ground instruction, especially on engine operation. We're ready to start on that. Then there ought to be two weeks of multi-engine training for the 109 and 190 boys—we can use Messerschmitt 110s and 410s. Then a solid six weeks in the 262."

  "Six weeks?"

  "It's a totally different animal than a regular fighter—just navigating is a problem, you're going so fast. We've got to work out tactics, do some fighting against captured enemy airplanes. It will take a week or ten days just to learn how to shoot, throwing all past experience out the window."

  "You'll have to compress the training. It's important that you're ready in July at the latest, while the weather is still good and the Amis are still coming in force. We want to hit a big formation, knock down lots of bombers, make a big splash. Then we can force Junkers to convert to our methods, and get Messerschmitt to stop fiddling around with development and start producing."

  Josten was straightforward as always. "Do you have an interest in those firms?"

  "Messerschmitt yes, Junkers no. But I don't see why I can't license the turbine blade design to Junkers—it would only be fair."

  "Why don't you offer it to them now?"

  "They'd never accept it—not their idea! The last thing they want to do is pay an outsider a royalty on something they think they can develop themselves. Time means nothing to them! We need a big bomber massacre to force Hitler to order them to take it."

  "You could offer it to them, royalty-free."

  "Impossible—you don't know how their minds work. Or mine."

  Josten shook his head. "Strange world—people are dying and companies are worrying about profits."

  Hafner looked at him with real surprise, his twisted mouth stretched further out of shape.

  "Why, Josten, why do you think we have wars in the first place?"

  After Josten left, Hafner wheeled himself to his refuge, a smaller underground facility at the extreme left of the experimental complex. The only sign of life was the steady stream of Wehrmacht trucks driving up to an elevator in the aboveground loading dock.

  In contrast to the bright, noisy underground plant, the inside of the building was dimly lit, with a host of whispering Italian laborers working with enormous microfilm cameras. The loudest sound was the rustle of paper as page after page of documentation was fed into the cameras.

  This was his escape hatch, his guarantee. The arrangement with Caldwell was all very well, but he might need to up the ante. And it was always possible that he might have to go to Russia. The use of forced labor was becoming widely condemned—it might affect his amnesty agreement. The Russians wouldn't quibble about forced labor—they were past masters at it.

  Technical data from all over the Reich—engineering data from Peenemunde, documentation on the atomic experiments, heavy water stations, poison gases, aerodynamics, metallurgy, every product of the engineering genius of Germany, all went before his cameras. It was the single greatest concentration of secrets in the Reich, authorized by Speer and eagerly approved by Hitler, who was intent on preserving the record of his infallible decisions. Speer had authorized the equipment and the film, valuable and increasingly scarce. Hafner was supposed to make three copies of each document, for storage in three different areas. Instead he was sabotaging the program, making only one copy. It saved time, materials, and money—and it ensured that he would have the only copy to bargain with. If, as he still hoped, the Reich should win the war, he could quickly make as many duplicates as he needed.

  *

  Benghazi, Cyrenaica/July 14, 1943

  He was becoming a connoisseur of sand, a gourmand of grit. In Guadalcanal it had been more granular, dusty enough to become mudlike when the rains came, but still substantial, concrete-mix-quality sand. Libyan sand was a corrosive red talc that invaded carburetors, eyelids, and the inevitably tepid lemonade with equal facility; it filled the tents, jammed guns, and filed away at the enamel on your teeth, a groaning, abrading filth, tasting of fly-specked tombs. Its effect upon morale was bad; upon engines, disastrous, cutting the normal three-hundred-hour life expectancy to sixty or less.

  Jim Lee lay in his sack, contemplating a career that had given him enormous exposure yet always cast him in the role of outsider. The iron cot listed in the sand, which quietly, unevenly, swallowed even the empty K-ration cans he'd planted under the cot legs as footpads.

  He reached over and tapped his tentmate's arm. Colonel Willie Westerfield had remembered him from the days in Hawaii and was virtually the only man in the whole operation who had been friendly, gladly taking him on as copilot. Westerfield's eyes followed Lee's finger to the duffel bag strung from the tent roof. It contained their emergency food—cans of Vienna sausage, gum, K-rations, packages of cheese and crackers—and swung under the weight of a desert rat busily trying to gnaw through the sand-dusted fabric.

  "Those little bastards have seen too many Tarzan movies. That's a six-foot jump."

  Westerfield pulled his service .45-caliber out of its holster and fired; the rat looked down and began chewing on the hole made by the bullet, probably thinking that a German officer would never have missed.

  To Lee's amazement, Westerfield fired again, blasting the rodent into bloody bits against the tent wall.

  "Jesus, that's disgusting, Colonel! You've been out here too long! Besides, you could get court-martialed for firing a gun like that."

  "Only for missing him. They'll never hear it in this windstorm, and if they do it only means that I won't have to go on this totally snafued mission."

  Outside the powdery khamsin wind divided its efforts between filling the billowing tents and dropping the visibility toward zero, turning the setting desert sun into an ominous red smear. Shaking his head, his ears still crackling from the sound of the pistol, Lee strode out to the nearest "desert lily," the conical urinals fashioned out of gasoline tins and stuck at random intervals around the base. As he relieved himself, thinking about Westerfield's assessment of the mission, he let his eyes wander around the junkyard that four armies had made of a once peaceful desert. Amid the scattering of palm trees were the oil drum privies, burned-out tanks, an international collection of junked aircraft, scavenged for parts and now capable to serve only as wash lines for the minimum laundry that anyone deigned to do. Even this detritus was coveted by the Arabs, who lurked nearby and stole everything they could, whether it was fastened down or not.

  Back in the tent he asked, "Why do you say this is a snafu? I'd say the planning was better than usual. They've built an exact scale replica of Ploesti and flown a bunch of practice missions against it. The sand table model is perfect, we all know it by heart; Tex McCrary's training movie showed us what to bomb, and the flak defense is supposed to be light. What's going to go wrong?"

  Westerfield sat upright, arms and legs unfolding like the blades of a Swiss Army knife.

  "Look, Jim, you're new here, and everybody's been giving you the business, 'cause you just dropped out of Headquarters and you
're going on the mission. They think you'll go back and be a hero, and they'll be out here to try to live out the rest of their tours."

  "Reasonable enough."

  "Yeah, but behind the gruff exteriors are some pretty mean bastards, and they're not getting along. Old Killer Kane, running the 98th, has been here so long he calls his outfit the Tyramiders.' He likes this kind of stuff, and he thinks he knows how to run the show. Then they bring us in, guys from the Eighth Air Force in England, and we think they know it all. Then we've got some new guys who don't know nothing, no more than they learned on our practice low levels. That includes you."

  Lee shrugged. "So what else is new?"

  "What else is new is that they're kidding themselves that they can come in low and not get caught. I'll bet the Jerries know where we're coming and when already; if they don't, they'll know an hour after takeoff, maybe before. They can buy information from the Arabs for peanuts—they're the only people that like what the Germans are doing to the Jews. You can bet that when we get there, they're going to be ready."

  "Maybe not—Kane thinks we'll do all right."

  "Yeah, he would, he's a Neanderthal, a saber-toothed tiger; he wouldn't tell anybody different. You know what they're saying already—that the mission will be worthwhile if we take out the target, even if nobody comes back. When I heard that I figured they were writing us off."

  Lee watched him closely and finally concluded that Westerfield wasn't scared, depressed, or even worried—he was just being matter-of-fact.

  "Anyway, I believe in low-level attacks. It makes it tough on the fighters to hit you, and whatever flak there is has only a few seconds to shoot. I'll bet we get in and out without many losses."

  Westerfield cocked his head and said, "Would you bet your life on it?"

  *

  Southwest of Budapest/July 31, 1943

  Two gray-green arrow shapes were strung three hundred meters apart, clipping along at 850 kilometers per hour at eight thousand meters altitude, brilliant white vapor trails marking their path across the sky. Helmut Josten leaned his forehead against the cold, crystal-clear canopy to watch. It was a beautiful sight—and it sickened him. Two Messerschmitt Me 262s, the most potent fighter in the sky—and just one sixth the strength he should have had.

  Never before had he felt so deeply that fate was against him, that nothing he could do would change the downward course of events, which in the last few days had shaken Helmut Josten more than anything since Stalingrad. He had spent months bringing the special 262 unit into existence, working closely with Hafner—never an easy task—and calling on every resource he had in the Luftwaffe to get parts, fuel allocations, and personnel. Less than ten days ago he was certain that he had succeeded, finally managing to outfit twelve fighters with the special engines built up with Fritz's new turbine blades. A week ago, his handpicked pilots had flown a successful training mission against a B-24 captured in Sicily. Everything had gone perfectly, and the pilots were bursting with confidence.

  Then a wayward stream of British bombers, driven off course from the main mission against Berlin, had dumped their bombs on Cottbus. The bombs had walked through the factory site as if they had individually been guided by a malevolent genie, destroying nine of the aircraft dispersed in camouflaged revetments. It had been blind luck—a few seconds delay on the bomb release, a slight difference in airspeed, a shift in the wind, and the bombs would have plowed up an orchard. Months had been spent preparing the aircraft with their hand-built engines—and nine were destroyed in a few seconds.

  Then, this morning, he'd lost another, this one a victim of the growing raw material shortages. Instead of the standard forged-steel landing gears of the past, the 262 had been forced to substitute hollow steel tubing. The gear was delicate, and as they were taxiing out, the nosewheel of the second aircraft had collapsed, crashing nose-up on the taxiway, cutting his force down to two planes. It made a mockery of the "big jet blow" he and Hafner had sought, the massive bomber slaughter that would have gotten Hitler's attention and forced him to grant the necessary priorities.

  Josten's headset crackled.

  "Turbo One, this is Turbo Two. I'm losing revolutions on my port engine."

  With smooth, easy movements, Josten swung to the right, placing himself below and to the rear of the second aircraft, already beginning to slow.

  "Turbo Two, watch the temperatures. If they go up, go ahead and shut the engine down. Divert to Budapest."

  There was a momentary silence, then the single word "Scheiss" as Turbo Two's port engine failed completely and the jet banked sharply to the left and dove straight down. Josten watched it until the fighter was swallowed by a cloud layer. He hoped that the pilot would bail out—and knew how improbable it was.

  He flew on in stunned silence. It was impossible; all of the monumental effort was now at the point of dissolution. One aircraft left! It was an abomination.

  *

  Fighter Command Post, Otopenii, Rumania/July 31, 1943

  In spite of all that had happened, Helmut Josten was impressed with the field at Mizil as he supervised the ground crew camouflaging his lone 262. Some twenty miles south of Bucharest, it was a beautiful meadow carefully graded with decent runways. There were fifty-plus Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters revetted around the field, and first-class maintenance and refueling set up.

  A good friend and comrade understood his mood and tried to restore his good humor. Major Douglas Pitcairn of Perthshire—though English named, the descendant of the midshipman who had first seen Pitcairn Island, he was Prussian born and bred—threw a lavish luncheon for him, with roast pig, delicious sausages, local wines, and endless rounds of mind-numbing plum brandy.

  Even better, Pitcairn assured him that for once they had good intelligence. Rommel had left a handful of agents scattered about Libya. Three were reporting the activity from Benghazi, covering the number of aircraft, the practice bomb runs on the artificial Ploesti built in the desert, everything. The signs—bomb accumulation, maintenance effort, all the logistical contortions of a major effort—pointed to a raid by two hundred B-24s in the next two or three days.

  All through lunch, Pitcairn pumped him on the 262. Josten told him the whole sorry story of the buildup and the decline of his jet force—and felt better for it.

  Pitcairn was philosophical. "Look, Helmut, you can't fight fate. You did everything you could—the odds were against you. Tomorrow you'll get a chance at some juicy targets—maybe you can still turn everything around."

  To distract him, Pitcairn took him on a tour of Ploesti's defenses. The beautiful town was straight out of a "Strength through Joy"-style travel poster, with lovely colonnaded buildings, pastel stucco homes—many built around a central atrium—and acacia-lined streets. In the square an abstract Brancusi sculpture seemed oddly out of place until Josten related it to the interlocking net of oil refineries that surrounded Ploesti on all sides, a surrealist twentieth-century wall blocking the Rumanian village. They were laid out like refineries the world over, with long, fire-restraining distances between cracking stations, pumps, and storage tanks. From here went the best oil in Europe, half the Axis's needs.

  "You know we've been bombed by the Americans and the Russians. Best thing that could have happened to us. Generalmajor Gerstenberg used the raids as a threat to pry resources out of Goering. The man's a genius—and no Nazi, either. Let me show you the results."

  Their Horch had passed dozens of cars on the streets; Pitcairn noted Josten's curiosity and said, "No fuel shortage here. There is rationing, but nobody pays any attention to it; they just tap into the nearest tank or line, like a brewmaster in a brewery."

  Leaving Ploesti, they went under a hugh pipe, supported on stiltlike wood and steel columns.

  "It's like a circular highway, a trunk line connecting all of the refineries and storage areas to each other. It's Gerstenberg's idea, as are the flak dispositions. If one area gets bombed, it's hooked up with another."

  Just like H
afner's complex of factories, Josten thought.

  They drove past a forced labor camp, surrounded by the usual barbed wire fences, guard towers, and roving dogs; the sight had become Germany's trademark. A year ago it would have depressed Josten; now he accepted it indifferently.

  Pitcairn, knowing that he was repeating himself, said, "Gerstenberg is a genius. No one could have done more; he's talked them out of fifty thousand troops and more than that in foreign laborers, all to protect his 'Festung Ploesti.' "

  He drove swiftly through the southern defenses. There were conventionally sited batteries, units of six of the marvelous 88-mm guns, good for antitank, antiaircraft, or personnel work, backed up by four automatic 20-mm and four 37-mm batteries. Most had a 180-man German crew to man them, a few were handled by Rumanians. Outside this ring of heavy flak was another, larger circle, of Rumanian-and Austrian-manned light-flak and machine-gun units.

  Pitcairn said, "At my last count we had forty batteries like this around Ploesti; some in flak towers, some in church steeples, the rest camouflaged in haystacks and the woods. Then we've got this."

  He pointed to an antiquated train on a siding, its old-fashioned cars bearing the scars of long service. "It's a flak train, sort of like a Q ship in the first war. The sides of the cars fold down, and the batteries start firing. Another bit of Gerstenbergia."

  Josten felt a black rage consuming him. If he'd been able to get twelve jets here, they'd have given the Americans a hiding they'd never forget, a victory that would have established what he knew so well—that the 262 was Germany's only answer.

  They drove back to the Fighter Command Post in silence, each man preoccupied with the coming battle. Inside the windowless two-story building, Josten watched the Luftnachrichtenhilferinnen, Luftwaffe airwomen, sitting in front of the gigantic glass map that reflected the entire theater of war. Marked off in a grid, the route of all the aircraft being reported by radar or visual spotters was flashed on the map.