“Sergeant,” I said in a low voice. “Did my letter go out?”
He nodded. “I took care of it personally.”
I pulled my yellow inflatable life vest over my head and handed it to him. “Can we get turnaround in time to catch them on their return leg?”
Ohler shook his bullet head, turned candy pink in the icy wind. “No sir. There’s more snow bearing down on us from the northwest. I’m surprised the Yank even tried his luck today. We need to get the birds into the hangars.”
I nodded in disappointed resignation. “Carry on then.” He saluted and turned towards his crew. “Please check that fuel line,” I told him. “I think I heard it rattling again.”
“Jawohl.” He headed around to the still-cooking engine cowling and began to bark orders to his crew to manhandle the plane into the camouflaged hangar and out of the way of the approaching snowstorm.
I stood for a moment watching the maintenance men in their soft field caps haul my aircraft out of the open and into the protection of the hangar. Already I could feel the wind slicing at my face with noticeably more fury than before. I stared up at the lowering mantle of granite clouds bearing down on us and knew this day’s work was over. I’d survived another battle to defend the Reich. At least one, and maybe three, of my men hadn’t been so lucky.
“Well, well!” I turned to see a beaming Mueller strutting towards me, an unopened bottle of wine in his hand. “So you made centurion. Congratulations.” He playfully patted me on the shoulder with the bottle. “I see you have your victory stick,” he observed.
I glanced down at it, having forgotten I was even holding it. It was a yard-long finely polished piece of mahogany carved into a snake coiling up a branch. The number 100 and the emblem of JG 32 were crudely carved into the bulbous handle. “I kill ten more men and they give me this?”
“They do those things from time to time. Good for morale.” He grabbed it in his hand and began flailing it around like a fencing sword. “You should come to the Kasino and drink with us.”
I grabbed it back and gave him a reproachful glare. “I’m not in a mood to celebrate, Josef. Kluge, Edelmann, and Von Mauer were just boys. Barely even learned to shave.”
I tried to push past him, but he gently blocked me with his arm. I turned to face his disarming brown eyes. “But we still live, Harmon,” he reminded me poignantly.
I nodded and managed a faint grin. I took hold of the wine bottle in my free hand and read the label.
“I don’t know which you like more, French wine or Walloon women.”
“Can’t I have both?” he said, laughing and jerking the bottle away from me. Then, looking past me, he groaned. “Ach! Here comes our fearless leader.”
I pivoted around and a blast of frigid air mixed with ice crystals sliced anew at my fair skin. Trailing behind the wind, as if it were a trumpeter heralding his approach, I saw the object of Mueller’s disdain.
“Oh Christ, I do hate politics,” I muttered.
Major Hans Seebeck, our commander of Three Group, strode towards us with a slight hobble. A black leather patch hid an empty socket where his left eye had once been. His flying days were over, courtesy of a friendly-fire incident. I knew fighter aces like Günther Specht who continued to fly quite well with one eye missing, but the major was not in his league. Yet Seebeck’s wounds didn’t in any way diminish his carriage. He marched towards us smartly clad in his immaculate blue uniform and greatcoat. His braided visor cap stood high and straight. His long boots shined bright even in the dreary light of mid-December. A walking stick held in his gloved hand supported his uneven gait. To his face we called him Herr Major. But privately we called him “Berlin’s bitch.”
And he hated me.
10
“Well, maybe we’ll see you later then?” said Mueller as he saluted me. The snow was now starting to fall in earnest, painting our shoulders a virgin white. The aircraft were by now safely under cover. I could hear the echo of Ohler barking orders to the men over the metallic ringing of their tools.
“Maybe,” I answered noncommittally. The lieutenant turned on his heels and retreated as the commander advanced towards me. My wingman couldn’t abide Seebeck. Perhaps it was because he knew of the animosity between us. My enemies were his, I imagine. Plus, he too thought Seebeck a poor pilot.
“Captain!” beamed the major as he limped over to me through the mounting carpet of white powder. “There you are.” His tone was too friendly, as it always was after a successful mission. As much as I threatened him, he was smart enough to know that the group’s victories would put him in good standing with Berlin. I stood at attention and saluted.
“Herr Major.”
Seebeck returned the salute, and we stood facing each other on the windswept field.
“I’m hearing good things about the mission. And the men seem happy. What is the tally?”
I did the math in my head, recounting the men’s animated young voices on the way back to base. “Unofficially five heavies destroyed. Three probables. All from my squadron. We left them for Two Group to finish, as we were running low on petrol.”
He ecstatically whacked his gloved hand on his thigh. “That’s splendid!”
I smirked. “We couldn’t have done it without you, Herr Major.”
He gave me a sharp glare but otherwise ignored the slight. He’d been wary of me ever since I came here, on his orders, to breathe life back into his demoralized command. He knew he needed me. With him grounded, I commanded the group in the air. But his mark was still on the reports.
“I must make another request for the replacement belly tanks,” he said, more to himself.
“Do you want to know our losses?” I asked grimly.
His smile faded some. “Berlin is more concerned with what we do to them, Becker. Not the other—”
“One confirmed dead, two missing,” I snapped.
He heaved an annoyed sigh. “A terrible thing for a man to die. But, it may provide some comfort to remember that he died for the New Germany.”
“Comforting to you perhaps.”
He raised the tip of his wooden stick to my chest and leaned into me ever so slightly. “It should be to you as well since you are an officer of that new nation. Or do you doubt our Führer’s cause?”
I gently eased the stick to one side, not taking the bait. “I couldn’t fly for a cause I don’t believe in.”
He studied me with his remaining eye. “What else is troubling you, Captain?” I hesitated. “Come on, man, out with it.”
“Very well,” I said. “We lost a man to fighter escorts.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. I understand you hit them on our side of the border. Over the Ruhr. Well beyond their range, no?”
“Tell that to Von Mauer,” I said coldly.
The major’s face was blank. “Von Mauer?”
“The boy your non-existent American fighters blew out of the sky today.”
“Oh.” He thought a moment, as if working out an equation in his head. “Well, I won’t mention them to Berlin. No need for us to be the bearers of bad news to the Führer. Besides, if they were so far out I’m sure they ran out of petrol and crashed. We could even record them as enemy destroyed.”
I said nothing. This was a man who did not wish to face reality. I, on the other hand, didn’t have that luxury. But he was my superior officer, so I held my tongue and nodded.
“I have nothing more to say on this,” the major concluded. “I expect your report by tonight.”
“You’ll have it after I finish the letters…sir.” I made a motion to salute.
“Letters,” he said quizzically. Then he realized. “Oh yes. Of course.”
Two armorers suddenly appeared out of the snow with belts of twenty-millimeter shells draped over their shoulders, rescuing us from the awkward moment.
“Congratulations, sir!”
I acknowledged them with a slight bow while raising my victory wand. Then I turned back to Seebeck, who was covetously taking stock of my new prop. He was not amused. His eye followed the two privates until they disappeared in the shadows of the hangar.
“The men like you,” he observed bitterly without facing me directly. “More so than they do me.” I remained silent, studying the jagged lines of his scarred face. “Remember, Becker. This is still my group.”
I suddenly grew very tired. It was time to bring this little conference to an abrupt end. “How can I forget, Herr Major? You remind me every day.” Then I added: “I don’t want your command. Heil Hitler,” I said, throwing my arm up straight.
He turned without answering my salute, leaving my arm floating in the air. I could hear him muttering under his breath as he hobbled away: “Good. Because you can’t have it.”
So I lowered my arm and traipsed off the field, baton in hand. As I made my way to my little cottage just beyond the barracks, I passed by LeClaire, the abandoned château that served as both the Kasino and general mess as well as housed most of the pilots. The concrete airstrip was constructed around this elegant stone manor, as the acreage provided a broad, flat field for a runway, as well as various other estate buildings to serve a variety of functions, from administrative to senior officer housing to hospital.
As I passed by the main entrance to LeClaire at the crest of a circular gravel drive, I could hear the boisterous sounds of music and laughter within. Fighter pilots led a life of extremes. Compared to our foot-sore Landsers, the foot soldiers, suffering on the windswept steppes of Russia or in the stifling heat of North Africa, we lived in luxury. Hot food, fine wine, warm beds, staff cars, women, dry socks. Life on the ground was ideal. It had to be, for we would eventually count our life expectancy in the air in weeks. My younger pilots were especially vulnerable, as many were now being sent to us with inadequate training due to lack of flying time. Fuel shortages were to blame. You cannot train pilots in planes that don’t fly. The Allied bombings were having an effect.
I was, in fact, heading to my cottage to write letters to several of those young pilots’ families now. My men were in the château eating, drinking, and smoking cigars. They would party the night away and, if only for a fleeting moment, try to put the battles to come out of their young minds. I didn’t join them yet, as I had other thoughts to gather. Perhaps Mueller was right. Maybe I should have celebrated my life more. But I couldn’t. Not when I had to pen the final chapter in the lives of so many others.
11
Frau Kluge:
It is with deep regret that I must write to you of the death of your son, Heinz. He flew under my personal command and I can tell you that he died fulfilling his duty to the Fatherland. Perhaps you can take some comfort in this…
I leaned back in my chair and stared up at the grimy lightbulb hanging over my battered wooden desk. I couldn’t write another line. Three letters sat fanned out before me. Each one said the same. Your son or husband is dead. Be proud. Deutschland Über Alles.
A wave of frustration coursed through me. I closed my eyes and could hear the sound of Kluge’s boyish voice: “Herr Captain, I think I got one!” I opened them again and considered the pen in my cramped hand. With one motion I whipped the instrument at the wall. It careened off the stone and spun to the floor like a ricocheting bullet.
“Damn,” I muttered aloud. I gazed through the dark square of my cottage window and saw the snow had finally stopped. It was pitch black outside. All was eerily silent. I could close my mind to the war and think about Amelia, who sat in her dirndl seated on a piano stool smiling playfully in the portrait on my desk. The memories of lying in her arms on stormy winter nights in the Alps were so much a contrast to the violence of my days now that if I dwelled on them for too long, they might drive me to madness.
By 1943 Germany knew no such peaceful nights. The setting sun meant only that the Americans stationed on the unsinkable aircraft carrier of Britain passed the bombing baton to the Royal Air Force (RAF), who preferred to raid my country under the protective shroud of darkness. Unlike their optimistic Yankee allies, who believed in daylight precision bombing, the British subscribed to the philosophy of carpet-bombing the general vicinity of a target and hoping in the darkness that they hit something of value. They brought to Germany a whirlwind of fire. As I stared into the ink of the night sky, I knew that, at other bases, the night fighters were scrambling. And now it would be my nocturnal comrades’ turns to parade in the death pageant. Another batch of letters would go out in the morning to unsuspecting family members.
There was a light tapping on my door, and I swiveled in my chair to face the noise.
“Come,” I said.
The door creaked open and a haggard young pilot in a filthy and torn flight suit, his face pelted by bruises, stepped in with his head bowed in embarrassment. He swallowed hard and then slapped his heels to attention. “Heil Hitler!” he barked with his arm raised.
I returned the salute and stood up to face him. A warm feeling of satisfaction eclipsed my sour mood, drowning it like water douses a smoldering ember. “Von Mauer,” I said, putting my arm on his shoulder. He winced, and I realized he must have been banged up all over from his ordeal. “Welcome back. I’m glad you’re alive.”
His eyes flitted nervously, not making contact with my own. “I managed to bail out in the clouds. A farmer found me. He gave me a lift on his cart back here.” I nodded as he continued in the tone of a Sunday confession. “I’m sorry, sir. I lost a good fighter today. I guess I got a little ahead of myself.”
“Yes, you did, Sergeant.”
He closed his eyes. “I just wanted to do my duty to the Fatherland.”
“By getting yourself shredded by Thunderbolts?” I admonished him in a fatherly tone.
“It won’t happen again, sir. I promise.”
“Well,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose in exhaustion. “I think you’ve been punished enough. It isn’t often we get to commit suicide and live to tell about it.” I smiled at that. “Besides. It’s one less letter for me to write.” With an exaggerated motion I grabbed the letter to his father from my desk (his mother had died of typhus when he was five) and tore the paper in two as a broad grin traced across his bruised but otherwise intact face. This was a happy ending to a difficult day. I should relish it. So I donned my visor cap and leather American flying jacket. “Now. I hear there’s a party in my honor at the Kasino.”
“There is,” he said, relaxing some. Von Mauer could tell that I was too happy to see him to bring the disciplinary hammer down.
“It would be impolite not to attend, don’t you think, Sergeant?”
His smile widened across his purple cheeks. “It would, sir.”
“Then let’s go,” I said. “Only pigs drink alone.” And we left my cottage together, leaving the two unfinished letters on the desk while we joined our comrades for a celebration of the gift of one more night alive. Tomorrow could wait.
That night the squadron gave young Von Mauer his “ birthday party,” which we called the receptions we gave to downed fliers who had lived through the ordeal and were, in a sense, re-born. They doused him with beer while taking him in their arms and swaying back and forth to drinking songs that were reflective of a simpler, happier time. We all yearned for the pre-war days when we stumbled about blindly from beer hall to beer hall, with no looming shadow of death to subdue our celebrations. But now the reminders of our peril were everywhere. Tacked up on the far wall of the mess was a collage of photographs of young boys in their flier’s uniforms. Each one a beloved comrade who never returned. An obituary of the flower of German youth. The wall was now covered with so many faces that the photographs were starting to overlap in a macabre competition
for a space in which to be remembered, like vines groping for sunlight. While the men puffed cigars and sang songs to their women back home, I ducked away from the crowd and sullenly pinned the photograph of Sergeant Heinz Kluge up on the board. After that, my dour mood returned and I had no desire to re-join the party.
It was just as well. The bookish Lieutenant Thomson, Seebeck’s polished adjutant, approached me deferentially. “Beg your pardon, Herr Captain, but Major Seebeck wishes you to report to his office.”
“Now?” I said, taking a final gulp of beer.
“Yes, sir. Sorry to disturb you.”
I sighed. “It’s okay, Lieutenant. I won’t kill the messenger. Take a drink before you return to your desk. It’s been a long day.”
He smiled gratefully. “Thank you, sir.”
I patted him on the arm and slipped unnoticed out the back into the dark night.
12
“You wanted to see me, Herr Major?”
Seebeck sat at his desk, his nose buried in paperwork. A cigarette smoldered in his ashtray, the blue smoke curling into the stale air of his dank office. His expression turned when he heard me enter, as if he’d bitten a lemon. He glanced up at me. “You have special orders on the desk.”
I looked down. There was a piece of official-looking stationery lying on the mahogany desktop decked out in Gothic lettering with an emblem of the Knight’s Cross as its letterhead. I grabbed it and quickly scanned the document. “Special Jagdgeschwader (Day Fighter Wing) Order of the Day.” My knees grew weak. It announced that I was to be personally awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross…by Adolf Hitler himself.
“I’m to meet the Führer?” I asked incredulously.
Of Another Time and Place Page 4