Eagles at War (32 page)

Lee shrugged. "So what else is new?"

"What else is new is that they're kidding themselves that they can come in low and not get caught. I'll bet the Jerries know where we're coming and when already; if they don't, they'll know an hour after takeoff, maybe before. They can buy information from the Arabs for peanuts—they're the only people that like what the Germans are doing to the Jews. You can bet that when we get there, they're going to be ready."

"Maybe not—Kane thinks we'll do all right."

"Yeah, he would, he's a Neanderthal, a saber-toothed tiger; he wouldn't tell anybody different. You know what they're saying already—that the mission will be worthwhile if we take out the target, even if nobody comes back. When I heard that I figured they were writing us off."

Lee watched him closely and finally concluded that Westerfield wasn't scared, depressed, or even worried—he was just being matter-of-fact.

"Anyway, I believe in low-level attacks. It makes it tough on the fighters to hit you, and whatever flak there is has only a few seconds to shoot. I'll bet we get in and out without many losses."

Westerfield cocked his head and said, "Would you bet your life on it?"

*

Southwest of Budapest/July 31, 1943

Two gray-green arrow shapes were strung three hundred meters apart, clipping along at 850 kilometers per hour at eight thousand meters altitude, brilliant white vapor trails marking their path across the sky. Helmut Josten leaned his forehead against the cold, crystal-clear canopy to watch. It was a beautiful sight—and it sickened him. Two Messerschmitt Me 262s, the most potent fighter in the sky—and just one sixth the strength he should have had.

Never before had he felt so deeply that fate was against him, that nothing he could do would change the downward course of events, which in the last few days had shaken Helmut Josten more than anything since Stalingrad. He had spent months bringing the special 262 unit into existence, working closely with Hafner—never an easy task—and calling on every resource he had in the Luftwaffe to get parts, fuel allocations, and personnel. Less than ten days ago he was certain that he had succeeded, finally managing to outfit twelve fighters with the special engines built up with Fritz's new turbine blades. A week ago, his handpicked pilots had flown a successful training mission against a B-24 captured in Sicily. Everything had gone perfectly, and the pilots were bursting with confidence.

Then a wayward stream of British bombers, driven off course from the main mission against Berlin, had dumped their bombs on Cottbus. The bombs had walked through the factory site as if they had individually been guided by a malevolent genie, destroying nine of the aircraft dispersed in camouflaged revetments. It had been blind luck—a few seconds delay on the bomb release, a slight difference in airspeed, a shift in the wind, and the bombs would have plowed up an orchard. Months had been spent preparing the aircraft with their hand-built engines—and
nine
were destroyed in a few seconds.

Then, this morning, he'd lost another, this one a victim of the growing raw material shortages. Instead of the standard forged-steel landing gears of the past, the 262 had been forced to substitute hollow steel tubing. The gear was delicate, and as they were taxiing out, the nosewheel of the second aircraft had collapsed, crashing nose-up on the taxiway, cutting his force down to two planes. It made a mockery of the "big jet blow" he and Hafner had sought, the massive bomber slaughter that would have gotten Hitler's attention and forced him to grant the necessary priorities.

Josten's headset crackled.

"Turbo One, this is Turbo Two. I'm losing revolutions on my port engine."

With smooth, easy movements, Josten swung to the right, placing himself below and to the rear of the second aircraft, already beginning to slow.

"Turbo Two, watch the temperatures. If they go up, go ahead and shut the engine down. Divert to Budapest."

There was a momentary silence, then the single word "Scheiss" as Turbo Two's port engine failed completely and the jet banked sharply to the left and dove straight down. Josten watched it until the fighter was swallowed by a cloud layer. He hoped that the pilot would bail out—and knew how improbable it was.

He flew on in stunned silence. It was impossible; all of the monumental effort was now at the point of dissolution. One aircraft left! It was an abomination.

*

Fighter Command Post,
Otopenii, Rumania/July 31, 1943

In spite of all that had happened, Helmut Josten was impressed with the field at Mizil as he supervised the ground crew camouflaging his lone 262. Some twenty miles south of Bucharest, it was a beautiful meadow carefully graded with decent runways. There were fifty-plus Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters revetted around the field, and first-class maintenance and refueling set up.

A good friend and comrade understood his mood and tried to restore his good humor. Major Douglas Pitcairn of Perthshire—though English named, the descendant of the midshipman who had first seen Pitcairn Island, he was Prussian born and bred—threw a lavish luncheon for him, with roast pig, delicious sausages, local wines, and endless rounds of mind-numbing plum brandy.

Even better, Pitcairn assured him that for once they had good intelligence. Rommel had left a handful of agents scattered about Libya. Three were reporting the activity from Benghazi, covering the number of aircraft, the practice bomb runs on the artificial Ploesti built in the desert, everything. The signs—bomb accumulation, maintenance effort, all the logistical contortions of a major effort—pointed to a raid by two hundred B-24s in the next two or three days.

All through lunch, Pitcairn pumped him on the 262. Josten told him the whole sorry story of the buildup and the decline of his jet force—and felt better for it.

Pitcairn was philosophical. "Look, Helmut, you can't fight fate. You did everything you could—the odds were against you. Tomorrow you'll get a chance at some juicy targets—maybe you can still turn everything around."

To distract him, Pitcairn took him on a tour of Ploesti's defenses. The beautiful town was straight out of a "Strength through Joy"-style travel poster, with lovely colonnaded buildings, pastel stucco homes—many built around a central atrium—and acacia-lined streets. In the square an abstract Brancusi sculpture seemed oddly out of place until Josten related it to the interlocking net of oil refineries that surrounded Ploesti on all sides, a surrealist twentieth-century wall blocking the Rumanian village. They were laid out like refineries the world over, with long, fire-restraining distances between cracking stations, pumps, and storage tanks. From here went the best oil in Europe, half the Axis's needs.

"You know we've been bombed by the Americans and the Russians. Best thing that could have happened to us.
Generalmajor
Gerstenberg used the raids as a threat to pry resources out of Goering. The man's a genius—and no Nazi, either. Let me show you the results."

Their Horch had passed dozens of cars on the streets; Pitcairn noted Josten's curiosity and said, "No fuel shortage here. There is rationing, but nobody pays any attention to it; they just tap into the nearest tank or line, like a brewmaster in a brewery."

Leaving Ploesti, they went under a hugh pipe, supported on stiltlike wood and steel columns.

"It's like a circular highway, a trunk line connecting all of the refineries and storage areas to each other. It's Gerstenberg's idea, as are the flak dispositions. If one area gets bombed, it's hooked up with another."

Just like Hafner's complex of factories, Josten thought.

They drove past a forced labor camp, surrounded by the usual barbed wire fences, guard towers, and roving dogs; the sight had become Germany's trademark. A year ago it would have depressed Josten; now he accepted it indifferently.

Pitcairn, knowing that he was repeating himself, said, "Gerstenberg is a genius. No one could have done more; he's talked them out of fifty thousand troops and more than that in foreign laborers, all to protect his
'Festung Ploesti.'
"

He drove swiftly through the southern defenses. There were conventionally sited batteries, units of six of the marvelous 88-mm guns, good for antitank, antiaircraft, or personnel work, backed up by four automatic 20-mm and four 37-mm batteries. Most had a 180-man German crew to man them, a few were handled by Rumanians. Outside this ring of heavy flak was another, larger circle, of Rumanian-and Austrian-manned light-flak and machine-gun units.

Pitcairn said, "At my last count we had forty batteries like this around Ploesti; some in flak towers, some in church steeples, the rest camouflaged in haystacks and the woods. Then we've got this."

He pointed to an antiquated train on a siding, its old-fashioned cars bearing the scars of long service. "It's a flak train, sort of like a Q ship in the first war. The sides of the cars fold down, and the batteries start firing. Another bit of Gerstenbergia."

Josten felt a black rage consuming him. If he'd been able to get twelve jets here, they'd have given the Americans a hiding they'd never forget, a victory that would have established what he knew so well—that the 262 was Germany's only answer.

They drove back to the Fighter Command Post in silence, each man preoccupied with the coming battle. Inside the windowless two-story building, Josten watched the
Luftnachrichtenhilferinnen,
Luftwaffe airwomen, sitting in front of the gigantic glass map that reflected the entire theater of war. Marked off in a grid, the route of all the aircraft being reported by radar or visual spotters was flashed on the map.

"How many fighters can you muster, all told?"

"We can put up about seventy 109s, and perhaps twenty 110 night fighters. Then our gypsy cousins the Rumanians have a squadron of Messerschmitts, and about sixty of their own fighters, IAR 80s. They're obsolete, but useful for picking off stragglers."

"You'll have to let me call my own shots about throwing the jet into the fight—I use fuel so fast that I'll have to be sure where the bombers are before I take off."

"You run your own show. I'll have my hands full here."

*

Benghazi/August 1, 1943

A manmade khamsin of wind and sand darkened the sky, tons of the desert shifted by the four propellers on each of 178 B-24 bombers. Jim Lee sat on Westerfield's right, feeling the fat-fuselaged plane tremble beneath them as the Sunday morning heat built, as he ran numbers in his mind. The aggregate fuel load of the bombing force was more than half a million gallons; they would be carrying more than a million pounds of bombs, five-hundred pounders and incendiaries. If they were successful, they could take out the refinery in twenty minutes; it would take a million-man army six months to fight its way inland from some Balkan second front to do the same job—and they might not make it.

Just under eighteen hundred men were poised at their crew stations, each one calculating the odds against them. The padres had had their hands full the night before. Some Christian men went to both Catholic and Protestant chaplains, covering their bets.

A Jeep pulled up in front of their B-24 and a harried-looking major got out. He climbed through the main entrance hatch and crawled forward to the cockpit, shook Westerfield by the shoulder, and said, "Come with me; you've got to fly
Satan's Darling
—the pilot started rectal bleeding, he's too sick with dysentery to go."

"Who's flying my airplane?"

"I guess Lee, here; we're sending a new copilot over. He's just arrived, hasn't got much time, but he'll have to do. We're short-handed, lots of people down with gyppo belly."

Westerfield sat for a moment, face white, then said, "You can do it, Jim."

The announcement didn't go well with the crew, but the mission procedures were rolling like a runaway locomotive and there were no alternatives. The takeoff from the dust-laden runway was uneventful, and Lee was personally comfortable as soon as he was airborne, circling to let the squadron, the 406th, join him. Its Liberators were just off the Ford production line, not camouflaged, their aluminum skin glistening in the rising sun. It was a brand-new outfit, eighteen aircraft strong, and by a quirk of abdominal fate, Lee was aircraft commander of the plane leading it.

All the ships were flying in the unusual V of V-formation, just as the old Keystone bombers had flown in the 1920s, going in so low the usual combat box wasn't workable. Lee's group were the tail end charlies, tacked on to the rear and high behind the 98th Bomb Group's pinkish-colored aircraft, the famous Pyramiders led by Killer Kane. They headed out to sea, five miles of jangling airborne nerves. From his elevated position at the end of the group, Lee could see the entire formation; just ahead was Westerfield's new airplane,
Satan's Darling,
tucked in the rear of the Pyramiders' formation.

After the mandatory intercom checks, the earphones fell ominously silent. The crew had worshiped their former leader, only tolerating Lee while they could make broad fun of his landings, confident that Westerfield could always save them. Now Lee was in the left seat, totally responsible for them and for the seventeen other ships in the formation.

He settled in, trying to ignore the frantic activity of the bright young copilot, Flight Officer Hal Nations, whose hands continuously and unnecessarily roved back and forth over every knob, switch, and button in the cockpit. To soothe him, Lee had pointed to a B-24 ahead of them—just as it feathered a prop and turned out of formation, heading for home. Nations turned to him and put up nine fingers—one for each of the aborts he'd counted, well above the normal rate. Was morale that bad?

The first real trouble started three hours out, just as they picked up their initial landfall, the island of Corfu. The lead ship,
Wingo-
Wango,
carrying the primary mission navigator, began to waver, oscillating nervously, pitching up and down, the movements amplifying until the nose rose up, up, into a stall. Then, in dreamy slow motion, it turned over on its back and dove straight into the sea like a Mexican cliff-diver. There was no radio call, nothing. Flames and smoke burst from the surface, rising higher than the formation. Against all orders, the number two ship, carrying the deputy mission navigator, pulled out and circled down, dropping rescue rafts, as if anyone could have lived through the horrifying crash into the sea. The stupid gesture was a gross violation of discipline, jeopardizing the whole mission.