Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  What we did not yet have to deal with in any great number was enemy fighters accompanying the bomber streams. I’d tussled with them over Russia, and in areas nearer the English Channel, but never over Germany as we were flying now. Our air marshal and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, insisted that the Allies would never have a single-engine fighter plane with the range to accompany the bombers from their bases in England all the way to Germany and back again. So we thought we’d always have an unimpeded crack at the heavies that were so brazen as to raid the Fatherland in broad daylight.

  But I’ve always had a cautious nature, and so I called out to my wingman over the radio waves. “Mueller, can you see any fighters?”

  “No, Herr Captain,” came his reply.

  “Keep a sharp eye.”

  I glanced over to see Mueller in his cockpit swiveling his head, scanning for any sign of the enemy. Josef Mueller was the man with whom I’d been flying longer than any other. For over two years he and I had kept each other from dying young in the violent skies like mutual guardian angels. We’d come to depend on each other in the air. Once again we were headed side by side into combat against a determined and ever-more-formidable foe.

  At that moment an ominous dark blotch appeared in the sky above Dortmund, which lay somewhere underneath the colorless tarpaulin of thickening clouds below us. At first indistinguishable, then the individual forms of warplanes began to take shape out of the amorphous glob.

  “Boeings at twelve o’clock below,” Mueller reported in the clear with his usual excitement.

  At closure of over five hundred miles per hour, it didn’t take long for me to make out the stacked formations of what looked like three hundred B-17 Flying Fortress bombers. At this altitude their engine exhaust formed long contrails in the sky, white ribbons that led us right to them.

  The ships were a menacing sight. Powerful four-engine leviathans coated in olive drab. The white stars on blue circles painted boldly across their wings and fuselages were instantly recognizable as American markings. As we formed up for the attack like lions preparing to pounce on a herd of wildebeests, I heard young Sergeant Heinz Kluge in my headset.

  “I don’t like those guns up front,” he observed with agitation in his nineteen-year-old voice. Kluge had just joined us from flight school and this was his first mission.

  “Don’t worry, boy,” said Mueller, laughing. “They’re saying the same about you right now.”

  “Alright,” I interrupted. “We’ll attack in echelon, head-on, into their high squadron. Fan out and claim a target. Two and Three Squadrons, follow in order. There’s plenty to go around. New fliers, remember, you’re never as close as you think. Use your guns to sight and then count to five before switching to cannon. And aim for the cockpit.”

  “Jawohl!” I heard several voices click in unison.

  I flipped the safety lid on the control column that covered the gun buttons. Then I switched on the Revi gunsight, and a yellow circle and bars appeared in the sighting glass. I sucked in a deep oxygenated breath and tried to relax.

  “Ready, Mueller?” I said to my wingman.

  “I’m right behind you,” he replied.

  “Good hunting, lads,” I said in a sporty tone that seemed ill-suited considering our prey were aircraft crammed with crews of ten men inside. I put that grisly notion out of my mind as I throttled up and bore in for the kill. We had a job to do. And that was that.

  8

  Texas Totty, the lead bomber of the high squadron, loomed large in my windscreen. Once in position, I went to full throttle, the G-forces pressing me back into my seat like an invisible hand. My breathing grew rapid and heavy. Beads of sweat popped on my brow as I steadied my gunsight to rest over the cockpit of the green monster.

  “It’s yours, Captain,” said Mueller. “Take the shot!” I could see white muzzle flashes, like blinking lights, as both the nose and top turret gunners tried desperately to dispatch me before I opened up on them. The glowing tracer rounds zipped past me, but I was too elusive a target. I rested my index finger over the gun trigger on my control stick. “Hold steady, Ami,” I breathed. Closer…closer…

  Mueller’s fighter dropped slightly behind me. Steady…steady…FIRE!

  I squeezed the trigger and felt my little craft shudder as the four wing cannons thumped away, hurling explosive rounds into the stunned fortress bomber. I watched with fascination as flashes of my shells hitting their mark methodically traced a path from the Plexiglas nose cone up to the cockpit and then top turret. It was at most a three-second burst, but it was on the mark.

  In an instant I sped past the stricken target through a shower of jagged metal bits of debris, zooming beneath it in a snap roll just before we were to collide. Mueller was right behind me.

  “Watch the ball turret!” he shouted with alarm. I saw tracers whizzing by me from behind as the belly gunner of Texas Totty made a vain attempt to clip me as I buzzed past. The tracers stopped abruptly. “Got him!” I heard Mueller call out with satisfaction.

  Mueller and I pulled out of our shallow dive after making the first pass and climbed back to altitude while at the same time executing a wide arching turn towards the now disorganized bomber stream. My squadron followed. We would soon catch up to the Boeings and race in front of the lead element, then turn and come at their noses one more time.

  From my high vantage point I took in the first images of the destruction we’d just visited upon our unwelcome guests. The blinding sun shined down upon a five-mile-high panorama of flashes, black smoke, and wounded bombers trying desperately to maintain their tight “combat box” formations. I could see several of the large aircraft drop out of the pack with engines belching flames and trailing thick streamers of smoke, their propellers feathered or shot off completely. One of them abruptly peeled up vertically, stalled, and then fell back on itself to commence the horrifying death spiral towards the earth hidden somewhere twenty-five thousand feet beneath the undercast. Panicked airmen were bailing out of their doomed planes and taking to their parachutes. Little cream circles, like floating jellyfish, dotted the sky. One chute was snagged on the stabilizer of the spinning bomber—the poor fellow being whipped around like a stone in a sling. Another of the bombers simply exploded in midair, one moment a large war machine, the next a flaming ball of bright orange streamers raining down to the ground.

  “Captain Becker!” The boyish chirping of an excited Kluge crackled through my earphones. “I think I got one!”

  “Keep the airwaves clear of chatter, boy,” I said.

  We leveled off at our original altitude with the bomber phalanx to our three o’clock. We were flying a parallel course to them, careful to stay just out of range of their fifty-caliber guns, and gaining on them.

  Black puffs of smoke began to burst around us, presenting a new hazard of deadly clouds of jagged steel that buffeted bombers and fighters alike. The concussion of the blasts bounced us all over the sky.

  “Keep yourselves intact and stay in formation,” I commanded, trying to settle the younger pilots.

  “What’s happening?” begged Kluge. His voice wasn’t so cocksure now.

  “Flak,” explained Mueller. “Eighty-eight millimeters.”

  “But they’re our own guns!”

  “They don’t care,” I informed him bluntly. “Alright. We’ll come around and make one more pass at the high squadron. Sound off.”

  My headset filled with young, ghostly voices. Each name represented a life abruptly spun off its axis and thrown into the air war over Europe.

  “Mueller here.”

  “Borner here.”

  “Gaetjens here.”

  “Zeller here.”

  “Von Mauer here.”

  “Kluge he—” BAM! Kluge’s plane disintegrated from a direct hit by a friendly shell fired from eight thousand yards below.
I turned away as my stomach wrenched. A promising and enthusiastic boy from Füssen dead on his first mission. Another letter for me to write.

  “Dammit!” I heard Mueller scream in frustration. “Why can’t those fat asses hit the enemy so well?”

  “Who controls the flak batteries anyway?” I heard Borner chime in.

  “Churchill?” added Gaetjens.

  “That’s enough,” I shouted. “We’re almost ahead of them. Continue.”

  “Grislawski here.”

  “Buchholz here.”

  “Osterkamp here.”

  “Schmidt here.”

  “Wittneburg here.”

  “Hoth here.”

  “Speigel here.”

  “Von Freitag here.”

  Then silence. We’d started off with sixteen in the squadron that morning. We were short one.

  “What of Edelmann?”

  Borner chimed in. “He collided with a heavy. I watched him bail out but didn’t see a parachute.”

  Two losses so far. I shook my mind of them for the moment. There was still work to be done. The bombers were now behind us at our five o’clock. Their ranks were noticeably thinner and their formations more haggard. Some had engines blazing and were struggling just to keep up. They would be easy prey. Without the interlocking fields of f ire from their ten machine guns provided by their tight combat box, a lone B-17 had no more chance in a sky filled with butcher birds than did a wounded deer in a field of ravenous wolves. As we were running low on fuel, I would leave them to Two Group winging in to relieve us.

  “Indians!” Borner suddenly called out over the radio. Enemy fighters.

  A wave of adrenaline surged through me. Dammit! I spun my head left and right. Where? Where? “Mueller, do you see them?”

  “Not yet. Borner, where are they?” Mueller demanded, annoyance and strain coming through his voice. Then: “Three o’clock. Thunderbolts.”

  I whipped my head to the right to spy what looked like twenty of the heavy fighters winging in to hit Two Group. They were also painted olive with bright red cowlings around their huge radial engines. At almost twice the weight of our nimble aircraft, the American P-47 Thunderbolt had a clumsy appearance, like a fat milk jug. But it was very fast and deceptively agile.

  “After them!” I heard a young voice call out. A 190A roared past me, with another on its heels.

  “Who the hell was that?” I demanded.

  “God dammit, Von Mauer, you young turd, get back here!” screamed Gaetjens. He was in the plane chasing after the spirited young man who was heading straight for the formation of P-47s. Four of them banked off and rolled in to intercept him.

  “Von Mauer, get out of there!” I ordered him.

  “Jawohl,” said the young voice. He’d lost some of his bravado upon seeing the radial-engine monsters with eight wing-mounted heavy machine guns spraying bullets at him and closing in fast.

  “You get yourself killed and I’ll kill you!” shouted Gaetjens, who zoomed in around him and set up to engage the Americans. Only later at the Offizierkasino, the officer’s mess, would we laugh at that phrase. But right now one of my junior pilots was in a fix, and I debated whether to lose the squadron to save him. But it all happened so fast that the decision was made for me. Von Mauer dived away, headed for the clouds with the Jabos, “hunters,” as we called them, quickly gaining on him.

  The squadron didn’t break formation and join the melee, which was a testament to their discipline. We needed the fuel to get home, and a dogfight would have quickly burned it away.

  “Von Mauer, don’t dive!” Gaetjens cautioned him. “Pull up and corkscrew.”

  I saw one of the Jabos throttle up hard and quickly close the range. He managed to lay a well-placed burst square into Von Mauer’s wing roots, effectively sheering off the boy’s right wing and sending him spinning into the misty layer of clouds.

  “They got him, sir,” reported a distraught Gaetjens.

  The Amis made a vain attempt to jump Gaetjens, but the veteran pilot knew better than to make Von Mauer’s mistake. He pulled his fighter up and corkscrewed to altitude. The heavier Thunderbolts soon gave up the chase.

  I shook my head and roared at the rest of the squadron. “Listen to me, all of you! Never dive away from the Amis. They’ll chase you down and kill you over the treetops where you can’t bail out. Am I clear?”

  “Jawohl,” answered a smattering of voices, humbled by what they’d just seen.

  Apparently the rest of my squadron went unnoticed by the prowling P-47s, who had fuel problems of their own. We saw them breaking off and heading west for England—leaving their bomber crews to fend for themselves during the last leg of their hazardous trip into Germany. Two Group then swung in for the hunt. This was our last chance to do some damage. We made one more attack, as we had to break through the bombers to get back to our base in Belgium. I spied my original prey, Texas Totty, chugging along in an erratic flight path. It had dropped out of the lead bomber position. Mueller and I bore in for the kill. As we dove, I felt myself floating in the cockpit, the straps holding me over my seat.

  On this day, the B-17 Texas Totty, having survived fourteen of its required twenty-five missions, would not return from this trip over Germany. With one more pass, Mueller and I raked the stricken bird with explosive twenty-millimeter shells until she broke into smoking pieces and fell from the sky. As we sped off, I caught a glimpse of the port wing fluttering to the earth like a falling leaf. I didn’t see any parachutes.

  I was credited with one B-17 destroyed when I called “Horrido!” to ground control, in our token salute to fighter pilots’ patron saint, Horridus. “Sieg Heil,” I then continued more officially. “Nebel-One to Bodo. One Fortress bomber destroyed.”

  I glanced at my fuel gauge and realized it was time to head for home. I called in the squadron, and we plotted a course away from the air battle still raging and back to Belgium. If we were lucky, we might be able to re-fuel and intercept the bombers on their way back to England, assuming we could find them again in this sea of clouds.

  As we made our way home, our ranks thinner by three, my pilots began calling in their kills. Despite our losses, there was a sense of exuberance among the men. The ground below us was littered with flaming, twisted hulks of destroyed B-17s—and dead crews. The American commanders across the channel had to know this was a black day for them. Some of the more naive men in my command, at ease now for having survived another row with the dreaded heavies, even speculated over the radio whether the Yanks would just give up and go back to the United States. I knew better. They’d be back. That was the only thing about our lives that was not uncertain. The Amis would always come back. And no matter the odds, we would always be there to meet them, come what may.

  “O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum / Wie treu sind Deine Blätter / Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit / Nein auch im Winter wenn es schneit…” Mueller’s boisterous crooning filled our headsets, and some of the men joined the chorus as we made our way back to Andeville.

  I was too sullen over the three pilots I’d lost to sing. There would be letters to write that evening to the families, which I would include with the standard “black note.” Such was my officer’s custom when men under my direct command were killed. Curiously, I didn’t give any thought to the ten young men aboard Texas Totty—or for that matter any of the lost American crews that were signified by the kill bars on my oil-streaked tail rudder. They, too, had families back home—wherever home was. Each boy whose life I’d cut short mattered to someone somewhere. And that someone’s life was forever darkened by the simple act of my squeezing a trigger. Such is war.

  9

  I was the last to touch down. I taxied the fighter off the snow-dusted runway and onto the frozen ground near the hangar. My ground crew rushed onto the tarmac with arms waving and hats twirling. Martial music blared from the
loudspeakers that bordered the runway.

  My plane slowed to a halt, and I cut the engine. The slowing propeller swished to a rest. I slid open the canopy and removed my gloves and leather cap, rubbing my fingers over my itching scalp and tousling my golden hair. As the crew surrounded my craft, I ran my hands down my face in a gesture of utter exhaustion. The adrenaline rush that gave me the essential emotional turbo boost in combat had worn off on the flight home somewhere over Krefeld, leaving me drained.

  I glanced around at a jubilant scene. The ground crews rejoiced in their pilots’ successes. Other members of the squadron with jostling mechanics in tow made their way to my little fighter like a mob of vigilantes converging on a hanging. Broad smiles as they approached me. I weakly hoisted myself out of the cockpit—from somewhere I heard the pop of a flashbulb—climbed onto the left wing, and leapt to the frozen ground with my boots making a muffled thud.

  Standing up straight, I found myself staring at the collar of Sergeant Ohler. Kurt, a native of Polzin, was a bare-knuckle brawler who sported a shaved pate and bushy handlebar mustache in a throwback to the days of Ludendorff and Bismarck. He looked older than his twenty-one years. This mountain of a man was a true tinkerer, having learned auto mechanics in his father’s shop. His was the linear outlook of the Prussian man. Ohler’s devotion was to the Fatherland and the Luftwaffe aircraft he serviced.

  He stood over me twirling his kaiser-like mustache with one hand and carrying a “victory stick,” a gaudily decorated baton symbolizing a significant score, in the other. “Herr Captain,” he began as other members of the squadron gathered around for the informal ceremony on the frozen airstrip. “On behalf of the squadron, I salute you on your one hundredth victory.” He handed me the wand. The men gave a quick cheer, and then the pilots dispersed while the maintenance men descended upon their aircraft like termites. “ I’ll decorate your rudder, sir.”