I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.
“Fuis, mon fils! Fuis!” I reared up in my cot, breathless. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. Looking around me, panting hard, I struggled to get oriented in my surroundings. Quickly my dreams reliving the last moments of Sainte Laurie-Olmer faded and I lay back on the wet sheets, embracing the comfort of the dark hospital ward. I stared up at the cracked ceiling, barely visible in the dim light of the nurse’s station lamp, and cursed my mind for forcing me to relive the horrors of yesterday. My breathing returned to normal. I rolled onto my good side, trying not to open the stitches in my scalp or agitate my bruised and stiff shoulder. Glancing over to the Ami’s cot, I saw they must have taken him away while I slept.
Despite my fears of what nightmares waited for me on the other side, I knew I needed rest, so I forced myself to sleep by employing an old trick. I closed my eyes and soon I was sitting before a piano, on a great stage, with a mesmerized crowd shrouded in darkness as all the lights fell upon me. But then Krup’s bearded face invaded the soothing imagery. Now it was him playing and gazing with fear up from the piano bench as I ran towards him, but I kept slipping farther away as if pulled by a powerful undertow. The stage grew dark and the music stopped and suddenly the lights burst wide and bright. Now I saw his family, hanging by their necks from scaffolds, and there too was Amelia with her blackened face and lolling tongue. Mama, Papa, even Paul twisted and writhed in the air with them. Only I remained. “This I need not explain to Berlin,” cackled Johann Keitel somewhere out of my line of sight. And then I too felt the abrasive rope around my neck and my throat contracting…
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe! I snapped open my eyes only to see more blackness, and in my hysteria I panicked, fearing my head wound had somehow blinded me! Then I realized a pillowcase was stuffed over my head, and I could hear men giggling like naughty schoolboys. I struggled and fought, but they laughed all the louder. Pain fired through my shoulder and I went still. Through the black and the heat of my sticky breath I smelled beer and stale cigarettes. My assailants lifted me up like a carpet roll and carried me away, ignoring my muffled protests. I heard Nurse Helena’s rasping Prussian voice: “Doctor Kraus would not approve of this!” But there were more mischievous guffaws in response. I relaxed, figuring out that this was Mueller, Borner, Gaetjens, and others who were up to no good.
After feeling a blast of cold and then warmth again, I heard their boots clopping along on hardwood while my prone body bounced roughly in their drunken arms.
Suddenly I was hoisted upright onto my stockinged feet, and they released me. I immediately whipped off the pillowcase and gulped in air heavily saturated with cigarette smoke. When my eyes adjusted, I saw I was in the Kasino, facing my entire squadron standing at attention with beers in hand. Some of the men were so drunk they swayed on their feet, their eyes mere slits. Their uniforms were disheveled. I’d missed quite a party.
“Squadron, Achtung!” belched a red-faced Mueller.
“Now!” shouted Borner, and the men fell upon me pouring what felt like a full keg of thick beer and sticky foam over my head. I screamed and then laughed as an unrelenting train of my comrades doused me. They all roared and I could do nothing but be a good sport about it.
Mueller leapt up on a table while Gaetjens held him steady. Someone handed him a full stein.
“Friends! Squadron mates! Comrades! I welcome you to Captain Harmon Becker’s birthday party!” They all cheered. “I say ‘birthday’ for yesterday he was as good as dead. And now he is born again!”
They clinked their glasses and put their arms around each other in a gesture of physical support and camaraderie that comes only with men who have experienced battle together.
“A toast!” shouted Borner. “To you, Captain! Happy birthday! Do not do that to us again!”
I bowed my head in gratitude and put a fist over my heart. It was a touching tribute. Young Lieutenant Stahl, who’d carried himself so well in the melee with the Amis the day before, handed me a glass. There was laughter followed by cries of “Speech! Speech!” Then the hall grew quiet as the men gathered around. Mueller extended his hand and with Big Werner’s help pulled me up next to him on the rickety wooden table.
I fought off a wave of dizziness. “Well.” I cleared my throat. “That’s one way to get Nurse Helena to give me a sponge bath.” They all roared. I thought about Krup…about Hitler…and Keitel. Then I grew somber: “Seriously. There was a time when I thought I knew what this war was about. Now? I don’t know anymore. So all I can say is it will be my sublime duty to look after you, my men, and try to shield you as much as I can from the coming tempest. And I see all the signs here. The world often presents a bill for the havoc we wreak. I sincerely hope that you men, my beloved fliers, do not pay the price for our nation led astray. So I say drink up, for tonight we toast the Germany that we all know and love. That good nation of our youths…and long may she endure in our hearts. Come what may.”
The men stood before me and raised their steins in uneasy silence. Was I doubting the Führer’s cause? I wondered the same myself.
From the back of the hall Mueller spied a figure leaning against the door well with his cane at his side.
“Achtung!” my wingman shouted, drawing himself to attention and giving the Nazi salute.
The men all turned and went straight, smacking their heels in unison; the spit and polish of the moment was lost as we pilots stood with one palm outstretched in a salute while the other hand grasped a mug of ale. That I was still in my socks added to the silliness of the matter.
“At ease,” said the major. The squadron relaxed and parted as our group commander hobbled towards the table upon which I was standing with Mueller by my side. With his good eye Seebeck surveyed the men, who looked back at him with unease. The tension rose with each limping step he made towards me.
I looked down on him as he stared at my stockinged feet. “Well spoken, Captain.” He made a motion to Stahl, who quickly handed him a beer. “Yes, let us raise our steins to the Fatherland.” The men did so. “And toast our beloved Führer, who has led our people so far out of the oppression of Versailles and the Weimar stain.”
“Hear! Hear!” shouted my squadron mates, relieved that Seebeck sought only to join in the revelry. But I sensed there was more to his appearance than camaraderie, and though I put the mug dutifully to my lips, I saw over the rim his eye fixed upon me.
The group spontaneously entered into a rousing chorus of “So Leben Wir.” We drank to life. To love. To friends still among us and those whose images lived only as fading photographs on the wall.
Borner helped me down and I stood soaked in stale beer, facing the major. The men swaying arm in arm were so boisterous and loud that no one heard what Seebeck said to me under his breath.
“You’re lucky I need you, Becker. A year ago I’d have had you arrested for what you just said.”
I returned his steely glint with my own in a moment of clarity that had eluded me until that moment. “A year ago I wouldn’t have said it.”
39
The tempest came at last.
Although my near-death experience at the hands of the P-38s in late December should have been a harbinger, the new war, in my mind, began on March 6, 1944. It began like any other day. Clear with the heatless sun of late winter low in the western sky. The alarm sounded, and we scrambled to our fighters and leapt into the air.
When we were vectored by ground control, the significance of the bombers’ path became clear. For the first time in broad daylight, the Americans were headed to Berlin. Over six hundred bombers filled the sky. And the Luftwaffe threw at them every fighter we had from the English Channel to Poznan.
We were well over Germany by the time we caught up to the formation of Boeings and, I thought, out of escort range. As usual, Mueller, now a first lieutenant, spotted them first. I’d never seen so
many enemy planes before. Like the fabled Persian cloud of arrows thick enough to blot out the sun. And as we lined up and swooped into the olive phalanx of determined Yanks, I spied multi-colored aircraft moving very fast and banking in to take us head on. These weren’t the twin-boom Lightnings, but rather shark-like single-engine fighters. At first I thought they were a flight of BF-109s turned around in confusion with so many aircraft jockeying for space in the crowded sky. But when they approached us I heard Mueller shout with genuine surprise: “Indians!” This was followed by Borner to Gaetjens: “Oh shit. Come on, Werner,” he said to his paunchy wingman. “We’re going to earn our Reichsmarks today.”
The enemy fighters jettisoned their drop tanks with gasoline to spare, and I realized that these fellows weren’t leaving like the big P-47s had back in ’43. All we had to do then was stalk the bombers from a safe distance until the escorts, low on fuel, peeled off for home. Then the Yank smorgasbord would commence. Not today. The bombers would never again be without fighter protection. The devil himself had sent the Americans P-51 Mustangs. It was a remarkable aircraft. Not only could it do what the dreaded Thunderbolt could do, it could do it anywhere over Germany. Mustangs would eventually appear in enormous quantities, and be flown by well-trained pilots. We had nothing to combat this threat. And our war would never be the same again.
That winter and into the spring of 1944, the Allies effectively took control of the skies over my country. Göring, ever the fat, pompous, hopped-up fool—and rapidly losing favor with Hitler as the capital city thundered and rocked and burned under the merciless pounding of Allied bombers—railed about pilot “cowardice.” Even when Seebeck privately pleaded with his family friend for more fuel and better-trained pilots, the air marshal’s only answer was, “You must fight harder!” After the war I read that Göring admitted to his American captors: “When I saw Mustangs flying over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.” But no one ever told us that.
Meanwhile, our good men were being chewed up in the meat grinder that was the air war over Western Europe. It became grimly apparent that these unrelenting deep penetration raids, which would grow to over a thousand bombers strong and accompanied by clouds of Mustangs, ranging far ahead of the bombers to break up our formations before we could mount coordinated attacks, had only one strategic purpose: to draw the Luftwaffe up to battle and with their overwhelming numbers kill us off in a war of attrition. So dangerous now had the skies become, it was said that every Luftwaffe pilot was destined to be awarded either the Iron Cross or the “wooden cross.” Still, we flew on.
And so, I began to lose old comrades whom I’d thought were invincible. The dashing Lieutenant Gerhard Borner was killed on April 6 when he was jumped by P-51s over Aachen. No one saw him go down in the melee, but I saw three Mustangs on his tail as his smoking plane was diving away. His charred body was eventually found in an orchard among the burnt wreckage. Gaetjens burst into tears when told the news. I’d never seen the big man, barely able to squeeze into a cockpit, so unglued. “I couldn’t save him,” he lamented bitterly. “There were just too many.” That night we had a raucous party in Borner’s honor with Big Werner stumbling like a mule, challenging anyone foolhardy enough to pass near him to a fistfight. The next morning I found Gaetjens sitting alone in the Kasino, staring up at his best friend’s photo as the newest addition tacked to the wall. He’d been drinking most of the night and was in no condition to fly. “Too many. I’m so sorry, Gerhard. Too many…” he repeated again and again. He asked to write the letter with the black note, and I had no objection. By the time it reached Borner’s devastated family, the man who penned the letter would be a ghost. Just two weeks later a ball turret gunner raked Big Werner’s FW-190 as he passed underneath it, and his bird blew to pieces. I wrote that letter. Still, we flew on.
It was now June and though all hell was breaking loose on the French coast, our sector farther inland finally experienced a period of relative quiet. Although we welcomed the respite, the eerie peace unnerved us for two reasons. First of all, it told us that the Allies were concentrating their efforts around tactical bombing, isolating the French beach heads. Secondly, that the high command didn’t want us up to the front to challenge Allied airpower, as it would have been futile. So we bided our time and waited for the final chapter of the war to play out. France would decide the issue in the West. If we didn’t win there, we had no chance of holding back both the Russians hordes and Anglo-Americans. A blind man could see that. But I vowed, like many of my countrymen, to fight on. In that time I tried to put the Krupinskis out of my mind. But they would soon come roaring back to me.
Debate in the squadron raged about whether the recent landings in Normandy represented the much-anticipated invasion or were a mere diversion for the real landings yet to come farther up the coast at Calais. We engaged in these lively military punditries while sitting in folding chairs, sweating in full flight gear, our planes at the ready on the runway. Myself, Mueller, Stahl (who by now had racked up twenty kills), and Ohler were seated around the flimsy card table playing Skat and waiting for the alarm. I was just watching the three-hand game, while contemplating the unusually empty skies. We’d each allowed ourselves the luxury of one glass of beer. The glasses sat warming in the sweltering summer sun.
Mueller slapped his cards down in frustration at the hand he was dealt as much as at our situation. “Five-minute alert!” he said, taking a swig. “How many hands can we play? The heavies haven’t hit us in weeks.”
“Where’d they go?” asked Ohler as he rearranged his cards and smiled conspicuously.
I shrugged. “Normandy I guess. That’s where the invasion is.”
Stahl was skeptical. “Not Normandy.”
“You don’t agree?” I said.
“No, sir. My cousin’s in an SS Panzertruppe in Calais, and I know for a fact they haven’t moved from that spot. The Führer certainly wouldn’t keep them there throwing pebbles into the English Channel if the real show’s farther south.”
“Who the hell knows?” I said, studying Mueller’s hand.
Ohler offered his thoughts: “I hear that gangster Patton ain’t even in charge of the landings. Why would they use that pansy Montgomery instead of him? Unless the real blow hasn’t fallen yet.”
Mueller chimed in. “I heard he slapped a soldier. They say he’s going home.”
“Doubtful,” I said. “He’s their best general. It’d take more than a slap to send him home.”
“I heard it’s true. No one’s seen that arrogant bastard in weeks.” Ohler grinned. “The fools.”
My wingman’s face brightened naughtily. Then he turned around and suddenly hauled off and whacked Stahl, open palmed, across his young face. A red handprint swelled on his freckled cheek. Stahl leapt to his feet, furious. “What the hell!”
Mueller mused. “You all saw it. I confess. I slapped this little turd. I deserve nothing short of being shipped home as punishment. Fair’s fair.”
After the initial stunned silence, Ohler and I burst out laughing. Even Stahl calmed down after I ordered him to take it in stride and play out his hand.
“You think it’s all a diversion then?” asked Stahl as he rubbed his stung cheek, giving Mueller the evil eye.
“This whole goddamned war is a diversion…from my life,” I said.
“You seem pretty good at what you do for this to be a diversion,” Mueller reminded me, fanning his cards in his hand.
“I’m good at flying, First Lieutenant. Not killing.”
Mueller looked up. “I fancy there’s a lot of Allied families who disagree.”
That comment struck hard, completely missing the levity intended. I stood up, insulted. “You go to hell, Josef.” Then I stormed off to my waiting aircraft in a huff.
Mueller looked around at the others. “What’d I say?”
“Don’t ask me,” shrugged Ohler, who filled me in later on what followe
d. “That’s an officer’s fight.” He looked up from his hand and spied a young sergeant wearing a field cap over his cropped hair and an unsullied holdall slung over his shoulder approaching the table hesitantly. The three remaining men looked up at him coldly.
“Excuse me, sirs,” he said. Although eighteen, he spoke with an almost feminine voice that sounded just barely out of puberty.
“I ain’t no officer,” said Ohler scornfully. “But these men are. I think a proper salute is in order.”
The young sergeant’s face lost what little color there was; the oozing pimple on his cheek glowed a contrasting ruby red. He dropped his bag and clicked his heels, staring blankly ahead. “Heil Hitler!” he shouted.
Mueller raised up his fanned cards. “Heil Hitler.” He cupped his hand over his forehead to block the sun. “Move over. As much as I would love to get out of here, I prefer not to let blindness be the reason.”
“What do you want, Sergeant?” asked Stahl, returning his attentions back to his hand, already losing interest in the latest walking dead man. “If you’re looking for the adjutant, Lieutenant Thomson’s in that hut over there.”
“No, sir. I’ve been processed already. Thank you, sir.”
“Well?” said Mueller, taking a swig of warm beer and belching loudly. “Can’t you see we have a very important strategy session going on here?”
“Beg your pardon, First Lieutenant. I was hoping to find Captain Becker.”
Mueller gestured with his beer to my plane. “This probably isn’t the best time to introduce fresh meat to him, Sergeant. Who are you anyway?”
When the young replacement pilot introduced himself, the three men just sat there, mouths agape. Finally Mueller exclaimed: “You don’t say! Well then come with me, young pilot.” The first lieutenant abruptly stood up, chomped an unlit cigar between his teeth, and briskly took the boy by the shoulder.
Of Another Time and Place Page 20