The sun, a blood-red disk in the sky, was just peeking over the woods to the east. Robins caroled from poplar branches above a heavy mist that shrouded the airbase like a translucent quilt.
The NCOs slept in a barracks in the east wing of a château that had once served as a library. It was strange to see two lines of cots, lockers, coat racks, boots, and uniforms piled into a room with rows of leather-bound books lining the high walls. The men were asleep, snoring loudly. They sounded like a petting zoo.
Paul lay in his cot curled up securely in his sheets, unaware of the jolt about to come crashing down on him. Mueller and I stood above his sleeping form. It was 0500 hours, and we were already in full flight gear. I held a full bucket of ice water. Both of us reeked of booze from the night before and were fighting off mind-crushing hangovers. At one point Paul rolled over on his side and mumbled, but then retreated back into his dreams. My wingman and I fought off an attack of the giggles.
Mueller looked at me and nodded. One, two, three! SPLASH! A wall of water cascaded down upon my unsuspecting brother, who lurched upright and thrashed his arms with a frenzied gasp. “What the bloody hell!”
I waited for him to get oriented and recover from the shock. He shook his head, flinging water off his matted hair. He patted his soaked uniform. “Oh great,” he snarled, leaping out of his soggy cot. “Just wonderful!”
I dropped the bucket and tossed him his field cap.
“Let’s go, Sergeant Becker,” I commanded. “Your training begins now. Meet us at the dispersal point in ten minutes.”
Startled junior pilots sat up in their cots to watch us pass. A wave of guffaws swept through the room when they saw what we’d just done to the new recruit. Paul, on the other hand, was not so amused. I didn’t care if he hated me for life. If I was going to bring him home to Mother and Father in one piece, then he’d need at least rudimentary training from experienced fighter pilots. And an early-morning flight, hopefully before Allied patrols swept in from the channel, would be a good beginning.
Mueller and I strutted to the airstrip, where Ohler had three FW-190s armed and ready.
Our purring aircraft brought us to ten thousand feet, and I gazed east towards Germany and a glorious dawn. The morning sun cast knife-like shadows on the fertile ground below. I’d been flying for several years, over terrain varying from the flat yellow Russian steppe to the jagged North Sea coastline to the snow-capped Alps, but still the views never ceased to astonish me. The interwoven tapestries of emeralds and ochers, the spider veins of sun-dazzled rivers, the little clusters of houses, each representing a separate life with a story to tell. There were worse ways to fight a war.
But there were better ways to fight an air war. And being properly schooled to battle a highly skilled foe who vastly outnumbered you and flew superb aircraft was one way to start. With his inadequate training Paul couldn’t survive for long. And so he flew at the apex of a V in his little Focke-Wulf, with two experts with a combined one hundred seventy-eight air victories flanking him.
Even though the American fighters had such a long range, I assumed they wouldn’t be on this leg of their sorties from bases in England so early. Believing we had a window of safety, I vectored us east into clear airspace.
“Alright,” I said over the radio. “We’re two miles up. Time to make a fighter pilot out of you, Sergeant Becker.”
“Fine,” said Paul. “What now?”
“First some basics you learned in flight school to see your form. Lieutenant Mueller will act as leader. You’re his pack wingman. Follow him through a split S.”
The first lieutenant’s voice crackled over the radio. “Let’s go, boy. Cover my ass.”
Mueller’s plane suddenly banked hard into a half roll and promptly disappeared towards the ground in a screaming half loop. The other 190 whipped over and wobbled after him. I could only cringe. Paul had no chance of following him, and quickly fought off a stall. When he recovered control, he was over a mile in the opposite direction of his leader.
Mueller made a chandelle and throttled up to regain altitude as I circled over them both and banked slightly to peer down on the pathetic spectacle.
“Congratulations, Sergeant Becker,” barked Mueller acerbically. “You’ve just left me an easy mark.”
“Sorry, Herr First Lieutenant,” Paul mumbled weakly.
“Where the hell are you, Sergeant?” I called to him.
“At your four o’clock low. I’m trying to get back up to you.” He sounded like a frightened child now, all bravado stripped by the knowledge of his perilous position as an untrained fighter pilot in a violent air war.
“Good God, boy,” said Mueller as he leveled off at my three o’clock. “What the hell’d they teach you besides takeoff and landing?” He waved to me. “Let’s go around again.”
“Any day now, Sergeant, you can come back and join us,” I said snidely.
His plane eventually leveled off with ours. I made mental notes. The first thing I noticed was that Paul had a hard time keeping formation, and his plane bounced and weaved as if caught in a typhoon. He was having difficulty handling his crate in general, which I knew to be a forgiving plane to fly. At lower airspeed he tended to bank too hard and slip into a stall due to the high wing loading. The little plane recovered well though.
“So much to learn,” I mumbled to myself. “I don’t need this shit.” He kept his wobbly machine about two hundred yards away. “Let’s go,” I said. “That’s all I need to see.”
“I’m sorry,” Paul said again. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“That’s what scares me,” I said coldly.
I observed him encased in that cockpit, bobbing along as he concentrated on the most elemental of tasks. To a passive observer he looked like the typical fighter pilot with his scarf and goggles. A fearsome knight of the air. But to me he was not Sergeant Becker of the Luftwaffe. He was Pauli, my kid brother. Vulnerable, impressionable, completely out of his element in a cruel world that had abducted him too soon. I couldn’t accept him as a warrior, even in his sun-drenched fighter plane, cloaked in camouflage, bristling with cannons and machine guns ready to do battle. I saw only a boy who tipped my hat off my head when he scampered past me on the Wilkestrasse. The little nuisance who spilled milk on my sheet music. Who climbed trees and fell out of them. He should have been skipping school to splash in the Main on a warm spring day. I yearned for the Paul I had grown up with. His Hitler Youth days still ahead of him. An innocent mind unencumbered by the weight of Nazi dogma that taught him to hate that which he did not understand. But as Karl Becker had lamented to me over a drink by the fire, that boy was gone. Those days, like Germany’s former goodness, had passed. He was an archetype of my country. So instead he and I flew as warriors in a lost war. As I looked at him I thought: You should never have come here.
No one saw them this time. Not the hawk-eyed Mueller. And not the hyper-cautious captain who swiveled his head so much scanning the sky, his muscles ached after each mission. And certainly not the boy pilot with just twenty-five flying hours to his credit who was too preoccupied with keeping his powerful aircraft level to watch for any threats.
At fifteen thousand feet, a squadron of Mustangs, an abundance of gasoline sloshing in their wing tanks, was stalking us. Patiently maneuvering into the perfect attack position at our six o’clock high with the sun at their backs.
I didn’t see them jettison their tanks and wing over to scream down upon us. What first even alerted me to their presence was the familiar POP! POP! POP! of fifty-caliber rounds slamming into my fuselage. They hit Mueller at the same time.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted my stunned wingman. “Where in bloody hell did they come from?”
He and I immediately broke right and instinctively went full throttle to gain altitude. Our sudden leap skyward bled off our airspeed while putting us in a steep climb. This must have caught the Ami pi
lots by surprise, as they had built up so much momentum in their power dives that half of them blew right past us. Both of our planes had been hit, but neither seriously. Ironically the Mustang’s blazing speed had been our savior in this case. They closed too fast to get in well-placed shots.
Four of the silver P-51s ripped past me, and I could make out their sleek lines with the conical snout propeller hubs and the black-and-white bands on the wings. Through the Mustang’s Plexiglas teardrop canopy I saw one of the Amis eying me with frustration as he passed. Four more aircraft banked into the engagement as Mueller and I corkscrewed higher, and I realized that we’d have to use every trick in the book to get out of this scrape alive. Swiveling my head I spied yet two more climbing up after me. My adrenaline went into overdrive as I saw the white blinking on their wings, which meant they were firing their six heavy machine guns at me. But I made an elusive target as I pulled back hard on the stick and looped over towards the ground. Twisting and turning as I fell, I lost contact with Mueller as I threw my FW-190 across the sky. I looked back and now, briefly, my six was clear.
Then a cold shudder ran though me. “Josef!” I shouted above the din of my straining engine. “Where’s Paul?”
Mueller’s voice crackled through my headset. “I can’t see him. But I see you. Four Indians on your tail. Break left. I’ll get in behind them.” Somehow, they were on me again!
“Shit!” I yelled, and slammed the stick hard left with full left rudder as well. It was everything I could do not to spin, but the rugged plane stayed true. Tracers zipped over my right wing. And then in my mirror I saw the Mustangs. They effortlessly followed me this time, making sure not to accelerate too fast. They were glued to me, firing away. Then I saw one burst into flames and drop like a stone. “Horrido!” shouted Mueller over the radio.
The other three scattered to get out from behind Mueller’s guns. We’d been doing this long enough that no thanks were needed. My main concern was, where was Paul?
“Do you see him?” I asked again.
Mueller pulled up next to me and we banked up again to regain altitude. Several of the Mustangs actually passed between us, as we had them confused enough to be going down as we went up. They had reckoned on three easy marks before breakfast. They didn’t expect two Experten to be among their prey. But that left a third who was indeed an easy kill. I had to get to my kid brother before the Americans.
Paul’s voice suddenly burst through the airwaves, panic resonating in his high pitch. “Harmon! Where are you? They’re coming after me!”
“I see him,” reported Mueller. “Eight o’clock low.”
I whipped my head down and to the left and kicked over into a dive. There he was, plummeting away in a vain dash for home while hugging the treetops at full throttle. I’d given him stern orders before takeoff that if we ran into any trouble he was to get to altitude or find a cloud and then head for home. And now with a gaggle of Mustangs in the area, his one plane couldn’t have tipped the balance in our favor but rather hindered my wingman and me from taking proper evasive action.
He tried desperately to get escape the dogfight. He didn’t make it. The Amis apparently tagged him as the least threatening of the three marks and purposefully concentrated on me and Mueller first, hoping to dispatch us in an ambush. But now all was chaos, and a lone enemy plunging away desperate to disengage was too tempting a target. With their powerful in-line Merlin engines, those Mustangs could fly over thirty miles per hour faster in level flight than Paul’s Focke-Wulf. And now Paul was doing the exact thing that I always cautioned my new pilots against. The very foolish maneuver that had gotten young Von Mauer shredded by P-47s last winter. He was acting on a primal instinct that said: gain airspeed. Go faster. Dive away and head home. Many a German pilot would end up a charred patch of earth as a result of this tactic.
“Paul, come around one hundred eighty degrees,” I commanded him, trying to maintain my cool so as not rattle him further. “You won’t get away like that.”
But my brother, probably frozen in terror, didn’t respond. I saw four Mustangs bearing down on the lone 190, which was still doing nothing but gunning full throttle for home. “Dammit, Pauli!” I now said with animation. “Pull up and come around. They’re all over you!”
Realizing the trouble he was in, I called out to Mueller, whom I had left in the sky behind me.
“Josef, can you get to him?”
“I’m bailing out actually,” said Mueller in a resigned voice.
“What?” I pulled up slightly to peer at the sky a half mile above my head and witnessed a disheartening sight. An FW-190 spinning towards the ground flaming from nose to tail. Mueller’s lone parachute floated down gingerly as silver P-51s circled overhead like agitated sharks following a feeding frenzy.
In my zeal to save my brother, I’d left my wingman alone to face the Amis. But he’d stayed up there, risking his own hide to act as a decoy luring them away from our young apprentice.
I was frantic to get to Paul before it was too late. I gunned full throttle, risking overtaxing the BMW engine. There were bullet holes all over the fuselage, I could hear a cylinder rattling in an engine that could have seized at any moment, and I wasn’t high enough to bail out safely. But the fighter ran smoothly, and I was making some progress. I leveled off at less than two hundred feet. The ground below me sped by in a blur of olives and browns. An invisible hand forced me back against my seat, and I groaned to fight the g-forces as my airspeed indicator hit four hundred miles per hour and the Mustangs in front of me grew larger in my windscreen. I was gaining on them. And more important, they didn’t see me.
The trees whizzed underneath me now as I just cleared the highest branches. “Hang in there, little brother,” I called out to him again. The familiar tone seemed to shake him out of his dread.
“Please hurry!” he begged.
“Listen to me,” I instructed him calmly. “Slowly ease back on the stick. I’m almost there.”
He did as I said and pulled up slightly. The relentless Mustangs edged up with him, which in turn closed the gap between them and their hidden Luftwaffe pursuer creeping up behind them. The one in the rear of the chase suddenly fell into the yellow circle of my gunsight, and I opened fire. The Focke-Wulf buffeted as my four-wing cannon pumped out explosive rounds while the machine guns directly in front of me flashed and rattled as they fired through the propeller arc right into my brother’s tormentor. White flashes riddled the silver machine in my crosshairs and it instantly caught fire, broke apart, and spun into the trees.
“That’s one!” I called to Paul.
“Hurry!” he pleaded again.
I flew through a large fireball as I continued to follow my brother’s tormentors in this odd three-way chase. The Americans stayed focused, however, either oblivious to or unfazed by their squadron mate’s death.
I quickly learned why. POP! POP! POP! Dammit! I looked up in my mirror to see three of them right up on my tail. Their intercooler intake slot under the red propeller nose gave the impression of demoniac grinning faces. As if they knew they had me. Now it was them chasing me chasing them chasing Paul. My plane began to shudder violently under the hammer blows of the heavy machine guns. Between the P-51s and the undulations in the hilly terrain, I had many a peril to contend with. But I tried to stay on Paul’s hunters.
Then my heart sank. I saw puffs of smoke from the leading edges on the wings of the three Mustangs in front of me, which meant that they were all firing on my brother. The sparks on his unevenly ascending aircraft told me they were scoring hits too. Black smoke began to belch from Paul’s engine and cockpit.
I dreaded what would come next over my headset.
“Oh God, Harmon!” he was screaming “I’m taking hits. I’m burning! I’m burning! It hurts!”
POP! POP! My stick grew sluggish, and I knew my plane could take no more pounding. “Pauli,” I crie
d out. “Get up to altitude and bail out! Do you hear me?”
My fighter, though riddled with bullet holes by this point, still gave me good manifold pressure, but I had to face the diabolical mathematics of war. Paul was going down no matter what I did at this point. If I didn’t take evasive action within seconds, then two black notes would be arriving for my parents, who were unaware of what was happening to their children at this very moment.
In an agony of frustration I fired a long burst towards Paul’s pursuers in a forlorn attempt to spook them off. But they were still too far out of range and my spent rounds fell harmlessly behind them. The Amis must have been talking to each other, and I’m sure the planes to my rear told them that I was no threat at this point.
“Get the hell off him, you bastards!” I raged and pounded my fists against the glass, but my protests fell only upon my dying kid brother’s ears.
“I’m sorry, Harmon,” he coughed. More rounds slammed into the burning Focke-Wulf, and his screams filled my ears. Then I wrenched my stick to my groin with both hands and soared away from the ground. The force slammed me back against the seat as I made for a lone cloud that could shelter me until I figured out what next. Climbing hard up to get away from the fighters behind me, I looked back one last time and watched in anguish as Paul’s bullet-riddled plane rolled over and spiraled towards the trees, a thick trail of dense smoke and flames behind it. “I’m so sorry,” I heard Paul gasp one last time as his plane became an inferno.
“I’m sorry too,” I said back, as the tears clouded my vision.
The radio went silent and Paul Becker, my only sibling, slammed into the trees of some nameless woodlot on the German border, and his plane burst into flames.
The Mustangs, fairly pleased with their work, immediately climbed to altitude. I still faced a flock of enemy fighters, and through my sobs I forced myself to concentrate. I disappeared into the cloud and used it to shield me. The Amis’ blood was up, having shot down two of us in as many minutes, and they were on the prowl for more kills.
Of Another Time and Place Page 23