I used my instruments to navigate in the blinding fog. Turning a one eighty and leveling off, I burst out of the cloud where they least expected—exactly where I’d disappeared into it. They waited for me on the other side, circling in futility. I gave one last look back at the silver devils and gently opened as much throttle as I thought my crate could handle. I prayed that my limping machine, shot half to pieces but trailing no smoke, wouldn’t break apart on me. Gently descending to one five hundred feet to blend into the terrain, I could clearly make out below Mueller’s cream-colored parachute, flattened out on the green grass like a deflated balloon. I thought I saw him sitting down, probably in shock. I would send a recovery team to get him the moment I landed.
Four planes, two German, two American, were ablaze in the rolling fields, gouging deep black scars in the ground as testaments to the force of the impacts. Plumes of oily black smoke fingered up into the morning air.
I grew physically ill as I passed over the last crash site containing the almost unrecognizable remains of Paul’s fighter. My little brother was in that mess. Half my parents’ legacy erased, and with him all generations of Beckers from his line, forever more. His first combat mission, not even a real mission, had been his last. The Americans had made fast work of him as they had so many of the other novices. My dear brother was just the latest chapter in the lengthening tragedy that was the story of the Luftwaffe in 1944.
Finally out of danger, I felt my heartbeat begin to slow, and as the adrenaline rush faded I contemplated what had just happened. The deep heartache of the moment all came rushing at me like the trees just below my wings. The flood of pent-up emotions that the levies constructed by duty, honor, country, love of Fatherland, even belief in the Nazi cause had kept in check finally broke through and drowned me in overwhelming grief. As Paul’s final moments burning alive as his plane hurtled towards the ground ran through my mind, I ripped off my mask and bawled aloud. But beneath my anguish, a resolve began to rise in me. In a moment of lucidity that often comes on the heels of trauma, I realized that I’d had enough of this war. I vowed to turn my back on a country that so willingly sent untrained boys like my brother before the guns of the Allies to be picked off like small game. I thought about Amelia. She’d been right all along about this New Order. She’d been right about me. Right about everything. And then I knew….
It was time to make a difference.
43
I touched down to find the base in a state of pandemonium. Upended aircraft smoldered on the dispersal field, their landing gear groping up into the air. Fires blazed in one of the hangars near the château, sending a river of smoke into the otherwise clear morning sky. Ground crews and other personnel raced back and forth, while fire control technicians operated hoses that fed from water trucks. Medical staff were loading wounded men, some unconscious, others covered in blood and writhing in pain, into ambulances and carting them off to Doctor Kraus’ hall. The château itself was pockmarked with fresh bullet holes. Blood-spattered horse carcasses littered the circular drive that looped in front of the main entrance to the Kasino.
My wounded fighter bounced along the runway and slowly came to a standstill near my still intact hangar, the spinning propeller swishing to a stop. When I slid open the canopy, I was overwhelmed by the din of men barking at one another in confusion and the choking smoke and smell of cooking metal and burning wood and gasoline. Few even noticed me, so frenzied was the scene. I could guess what had happened but called out to Ohler, who was trotting up to me.
“What happened here, Sergeant?”
“Captain!” he cried. “Thank God you’re okay.” I leapt down from the wing and leaned against the shot-up fuselage. “You just missed them. Mustangs came down on us. They shot us up pretty bad.”
“I didn’t miss them,” I said grimly.
Ohler looked the plane over again. Bullet holes covered it like a mass of freckles. “No, I guess not. This crate should have broken apart.”
I looked around for the rest of the squadron. There were no aircraft other than those destroyed by strafing.
“Where is everyone?”
Cooking ammunition inside the hangar suddenly exploded in an ear-splitting blast, and we both ducked. An angry fireball curled up into the sky. Some of the firefighters were knocked off their feet but looked okay. They stood back up and resumed spraying the inferno to keep the flames from spreading beyond the obliterated structure.
“The survivors took off after them,” he told me as we rose to stand upright again.
“Did we lose any people on the ground?”
He pointed to an upended 190 sprawled on its back, engulfed in flames just beyond the lip of the runway. Its landing gear was still extended as if caught on takeoff. It crackled and hissed like a broiling roast. Only one of its charred wings with the black cross still defiantly visible on its surface was recognizable. Occasionally overheated rounds from its guns would pop like firecrackers.
“Lieutenant Stahl, sir,” Ohler said quietly.
I nodded. I’d grieved all I could today.
“Where are the other two?” asked my crew chief.
I removed my flying cap and gloves and handed them to him. “Lieutenant Mueller bailed out somewhere in sector R-N. See to it that Thomson sends a party for him.”
Ohler shook his head. “I’m afraid Lieutenant Thomson’s dead, sir. Caught out in the open when they dove in on us.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt nothing by this point. “Well, whoever then.”
I started towards Seebeck’s hut, which was still intact but for a few superficial bullet holes. “Herr Captain,” called out Ohler. “Where’s Sergeant Becker?” I turned to face him. His voice trailed off when he saw my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
It pained me too much to speak of my brother. “See to it that someone gets Mueller. He bailed out but he may be wounded.”
“Are you okay, sir?” Ohler said.
I just turned and walked away. I didn’t want him to see me cry.
Through the haze of my tears, even as chaos reigned outside, I saw my trembling hands perform a ritual that up to now I’d only observed from a distance in the past. In a way, I still felt as if I were a spectator watching a stranger performing this ghoulish ritual. An image. His wide eyes and goofy, if naive, grin. A young sergeant in his fresh Luftwaffe uniform, so blissfully unaware that burning to death while spiraling helplessly to the ground awaited him in a fortnight.
“Goodbye, Pauli,” I muttered as my whole body weight shoved the tack holding his photo through the wall, plastered with so many images of the slain before him. At that point I broke down and fell to my knees, no longer giving a damn who saw me.
I soon composed myself and stepped out of the Kasino and into the open, where the chaotic scene of our demolished airbase was still playing itself out.
I ran into Seebeck as he was strutting aimlessly in front of his quarters, hobbling along on his cane, unable to grasp all that had just happened to his shattered command. The war, which he thought he’d left behind along with his eye, had returned to find him. His face was ashen. But I felt no pity for this man, for he’d come to represent all that I despised about the war. Men were fighting and dying for the “New Germany.” Yet, though some of the players had changed, my country was still governed by the same old rules of hierarchy and privilege and old money. An unholy alliance between monocled Prussian generals, fat Burgermeisters, and wealthy barons desperate to hold on to the past on one side…and Nazi gangsters determined to erase it while growing rich through mass murder and plunder on the other. And in between stood the businessmen and profiteers like the Keitels, as grease in the machine, willfully ignoring the savagery of Hitler’s assault against the world, so long as the lucrative orders from the front for bullets and ball bearings and grenades and helmets and uniforms and pots and pans rolled in. Major Hans Seebeck was to me like that band of delusion
al henchmen I’d seen high on the mountaintop at the Berghof. Detached, aloof, ready to believe anything the Führer said, regardless of what that map told him. I blamed my group commander for obsequiously genuflecting before Berlin, and fielding pilots completely ill-prepared for what they faced, only to be sacrificed on the altar of the Third Reich.
But for me it was a personal animosity as well. I had enough of his petty jealousy and his threats while brave men died before my eyes. And I saw in him the personification of what killed my brother: arrogance, delusion, a fanatical belief in a state that followed a madman to its destruction. In my mind the Americans did not kill Paul Becker. The Nazis did. And one of my least favorite Nazis of all stood ten feet in front of me.
“You!” I shouted aiming an accusatory finger in his direction like a gun. “Do you still say that there are no Allied fighters out here? Do you still believe your puppeteers’ bullshit? Did you ever?”
Seebeck stood straight, shocked at my tone. “Obviously there are American fighters, Becker.”
I stepped to within an arm’s length of him. “Do you know that my brother is dead! You killed him, you son of a bitch!”
He smirked. “I killed him?” Even amidst all the mayhem, he could still find it within himself to act smug.
“You and all your Nazi thugs who send boys up to fight your war.”
Men dropped what they were doing to gawk at this curious scene. This was the Wehrmacht. It wasn’t too often that a captain shook his finger in the face of a major. There I was, sweat-stained and haggard in my flight suit, confronting a perfectly groomed major in his blue-gray uniform, visor cap, and shined boots.
“That’s quite enough, Captain Becker!”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m only beginning.”
Seebeck grew uncomfortable at his authority being challenged so blatantly in front of the men. Especially by an officer so established on his airbase.
“You will hold your tongue!” he commanded with less inflection than he’d aimed for. Though the fires still raged, and screaming wounded were still being carted away, several corporals dropped what they were doing to observe our little theater. One of them was sitting in the driver’s seat of an open Kübelwagen, temporarily distracted from the turmoil all around him.
“I will not!” I said. “You’ve had your last free ride to glory on my coattails. On the blood of my men.”
“Your men?” he said, repeating an old line.
“Yes. My men!” I shot back. “I’m the one who takes them into battle while you sit back here twirling your cane and writing reports and speechifying on the glory of the Third Reich. Look around you, Major. This is your Reich!”
Your Reich. Not mine. Amelia had tried to warn me that day we sat together on the edge of the Main. She feared for the future…and the future had arrived with a vengeance.
Seebeck cocked his head. Suddenly there was silence between us. Only the ambient noise of the shattered base trying to recover. The onlookers waited to hear what their group commander would say next.
“Well, Captain,” he said. “Perhaps next time you’ll not be so careless in taking one of your new fliers into the teeth of Allied fighters on his first flight then, eh? So clever you were sending him here. Who do you think you are, Saint Horridus? A lot of good you did him by bringing him under your wing. I’m sure your parents will be grateful.”
The corporals gasped. And I just stood dumbfounded. Seebeck seemed pleased with that and he smirked. Amidst all the bedlam and destruction, despite the fact that his out-gunned and out-trained squadron was off chasing after Mustangs minus two of its most experienced pilots, what mattered most to him was putting me in my place.
I stepped towards him until our noses practically touched, and looked with darkness into his good eye. “You’d better be very careful what you say next…Herr Major.”
“Becker,” he stammered while taking a step back. “You’re relieved of your command. I’m placing you under arrest.”
I didn’t really care anymore. “Very well,” I said. “You can find me at home.” I turned my back on him and approached the stunned corporal in the Kübelwagen.
“Step away,” I barked. The startled enlisted man obeyed immediately, and I slid into the driver’s seat.
The major’s eye widened. “Becker, don’t you dare!”
I ignored him and started the engine. Seebeck shouted: “Stop that man!”
I didn’t even look back. I threw the car into gear and sped off in the direction of sector R-N, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust and defiance in my wake.
Before anyone could really process what just happened, I left the grounds of the wrecked aerodrome behind me. After a few twists and turns on the country lane heading east away from the château grounds, it was as if the base no longer existed. Only the high columns of smoke rising from beyond the trees into the sky and the soft thud of distant secondary explosions offered even the slightest hint of the violence just visited upon Andeville.
As far as I was concerned, my war was over. All I wanted was to get my little brother, what was left of him, and bring him back home for a proper burial. It would have broken my parents’ hearts to know their son’s final resting place was a charred metal hulk imbedded in a field of the country he’d loved so much and died for, because in the end it cared so little for him.
The dumbfounded corporal I’d left standing in the dust of his commandeered Kübelwagen looked over to his furious commandant. “Shall I call the Feldgendarmerie, sir?”
Seebeck shook his head no. He wanted to leave the military police out of this. “I’ll take care of it.” He limped into his office and closed the door, smothering the din of the devastated airbase behind him. He needed to make a phone call.
44
It took me two hours to find the crash site. Bouncing along dirt lanes, my flight suit soaked with sweat from the midday sun drilling down on me, I homed in on the last wisps of smoke floating just above the crest of a grassy ridge. The ground undulated like waves on the ocean, and I marveled that I’d been able to fly so close to it without slamming into the side of one of these deceptively high ridges.
My heart tightened as I pulled up to the mangled wreckage. The fire had all but spent itself. Not much of the broiled FW-190 was recognizable beyond a bent wing root, the twisted propeller, and the tail plane with the swastika on its gray-green surface as if to taunt me.
I stopped the car about thirty yards from the blackened mess of twisted steel and aluminum. I cringed as I slowly approached the plane, afraid I wouldn’t be able to bear the site of my brother’s charred remains. I expected to find what I can only describe from past experience as a charcoal briquette suggestion, with any true resemblance of the person seared away to reveal nothing but a humanoid form in ash. It was a queer relief then when I found Paul’s body, not strapped and broiled black in his cockpit, but lying in the grass some fifty paces away. He’d been thrown clear of the wreckage from the force of impact.
Still, his body was contorted in an unnatural pose, twisted like a discarded rag doll as he’d smashed into the ground. With a churning stomach, I walked up to him and gazed down. I’d seen dead men before. But he wasn’t a faceless combatant. Nor was he even a passing comrade-in-arms whose image would adorn the wall of honor in the Kasino and fade in time to be just another on the list. He was my baby brother. His lifeless, half-closed eyes stared sightlessly at the blue sky from whence he’d come hurtling down. Dried blood was smeared across his face like brick-red clay. His flight suit was soaked in fluid from the fire extinguisher he’d frantically sprayed in a futile attempt to snuff the flames gnawing through his blackened legs…the only real desecration of his otherwise well-preserved form.
I knelt down in the grass and laid my hand over his face. Even then I thought he might only be wounded. It’s funny how you cling to hope when there is none. My brother was dead. I gently clos
ed his eyes and tried to wipe the blood from his young face, but it had hardened. Then I removed his flying cap. With his tufts of dark brown hair, matted and still parted on the side as if ready for church, all semblance of a warrior drained away from him. He was just a boy.
“Come on, Pauli,” I said softly, as if he were merely resting. “Let’s take you home.”
I scooped up his body, limp as a blanket roll, and hoisted him in my arms. With a huff, I carried him back to the Kübelwagen. I tried to lay him gingerly in the back seat, but I lost my grip and he fell into it with a sickening thud, his blackened legs dangling over the door as if he were a drunkard. I cursed my clumsiness for inflicting such ignominy on him. It didn’t dawn on me that I hadn’t eaten anything but a roll and a cup of black coffee before taking off this morning and was probably weaker than usual. I heaved his damaged legs into the car and rearranged his body until he lay curled up on his side. Looking him over, I was struck by how peaceful he appeared. But for the caked blood on his face, it was as if he’d merely crawled into the back seat to steal a quick nap. I wondered if death was like sleep. And then I pondered why I’d been so fortunate to never learn the answer for myself, considering that for three years I’d been in the midst of a most dangerous enterprise. Perhaps I was meant to live? But then that would mean that Paul was meant to die. I couldn’t accept that. I hoped that all things would reveal themselves in good time.
But what mattered most to me now wasn’t pondering the questions of life and death but rather getting out of this place before patrols came.
Still, I granted myself enough time to do a quick search for Mueller, who’d gone down nearby. I drove in widening circles around the area for about fifteen minutes before coming upon another crash site in a patch of woods. In the underbrush were scattered the silver pieces of the Mustang I’d shot down. The fuselage that housed the cockpit and pilot, the engine, and the red propeller hub were intact. Below the cockpit were three little black crosses denoting kills. Painted over the engine mount in black script was the sobriquet “BAD ASS II.” The pieces of the striped wings and tail were spread about in the thickets and branches above. The pilot, a young man with red hair sticking out from his cap, was still strapped in his seat, head slumped with his chin on his chest, mouth agape. As with the Yank prisoner, I was struck by how much like us he looked.
Of Another Time and Place Page 24