Eagles at War (18 page)

"No matter what the reason—no ammunition, guns jammed, low fuel, whatever it might be—the Luftwaffe pilots who cannot shoot the hostile aircraft down will ram them."

There was another stunned silence among the Air Force men as
their naval counterparts broke into broad smiles, realizing that the
Luftwaffe had just accepted the ultimate responsibility for the success of the mission.

Driving back to base in
his Horch cabriolet, Josten had time to digest the full meaning of Galland's briefing and to consider how it influenced his own position, already highly unusual. Galland had selected him as an airborne commander during the critical initial part of the operation. That sort of recognition would help him with his advocacy of the jet fighter. And he needed all the help he could get because time was so critical. If Russia were knocked out this year, the Me 262 could be developed at leisure. If Russia fought on, the jet would be absolutely necessary to ward off an invasion in the West, perhaps as early as next year. Then the 262 would be invaluable, perhaps even decisive.

*

The English Channel/February 12, 1942

Galland's plan called for a minimum of sixteen fighters to be over the fleet at all times. For twenty minutes of each hour the relief aircraft overlapped, combining to form a force of thirty-two. The squadrons were to leapfrog along the French and Belgian coasts, landing to refuel at progressively more northern bases until the job was done.

At first the term "over the fleet" was a misnomer. To avoid the British radar for as long as possible, they flew below the mast height of the three capital ships that steamed north at full speed, their bows diving like eager dolphins into the slate-gray ocean, rising to toss back V-shaped spumes of green-white spray. On the day's first sortie, the miserable weather forced the ships to weave in and out of the gray-white frosting that heaped the surface of the sea like whipped cream on a Sacher torte. Josten maintained a constant watch for the destroyers and motor torpedo boats that bounded around the ships like dogs nipping at the heels of sheep.

By Josten's second sortie, the clouds began to lift, and he had a clear view of the extent of the fleet. The three big vessels were in line astern, with destroyers ranging ahead and on each side, and the German E boats scampering about, crisscrossing in a watery gymkhana.

The noise of the engine receded into the background of his consciousness, and there remained only the unremitting crackle of the receiver of the non-transmitting radios. Dolfo must have impressed them; the Luftwaffe was maintaining perfect radio discipline. All of Galland's preparations had been good, from the gradual increase in jamming to confuse British radar to the flurry of Luftwaffe sorties that had been flown in the past few weeks to disguise today's efforts.

The fleet had been at sea for fourteen hours, the last four in broad daylight. It was a February blessing that little more than four more hours of daylight remained. It seemed impossible that the British had not detected them by radar or by the innumerable aircraft with which they patrolled. Was it a trap?

He knew that the fabled white cliffs of Dover were only eighteen miles away; the ships were within the range of the guns there. And where were the bombers and the torpedo planes?

Josten banked sharply as a wall of water erupted in front of him; gunfire from the coast, well behind the stern of the last ship,
Prinz Eugen.
Very well, they had been sighted, and the code words "Open visor" came over the headsets, relieving them of radio silence and low altitude flight. The Messerschmitts quickly broke up into groups flying at one-, two-, and three-hundred meters height.

The bombers would not be far behind. The relief flight of Messerschmitts had just showed up; that meant Josten had ten more minutes on this sortie, then back for fuel and a cup of coffee.

Five minutes later he saw a German E boat swing sharply to engage five British motor torpedo boats approaching at high speed from the west. Where were the British aircraft?

The British were coming, in a balls-up rivaling the Charge of the Light Brigade for both bravery and stupidity. The mighty British Empire, forewarned of the possibility of the German sortie for weeks, had so disposed its forces that only six ancient Swordfish torpedo planes were available when, after incredible delay, the first attack was made.

The open cockpit Fairey Swordfish would have looked at home on the Western Front in 1918. Encumbered with a stiltlike fixed landing gear and laden with drag-inducing struts and wires, it was nicknamed "Stringbag," after the bags made of string netting that women carried when shopping. Designed in 1934, the three-placer—pilot, gunner, and radio man—could drop an eighteen-inch torpedo. Its crews bolstered their courage by bragging that Luftwaffe gunners could never hit it because their ranging devices were not designed to fire at a target that flew as slow as eighty-five miles per hour. And, they boasted, any lucky hits would pass right through the Swordfish's wood and fabric frame without damage. There was some minimal truth to both of these whistles in the dark.

The Stringbag had already done heroic work. Operating from HMS
Illustrious,
twenty-one Swordfish had crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940. The following spring, Swordfish from the
Ark Royal
had launched torpedoes that jammed the
Bismarck's
rudder and set her up for the heavy guns of the Home Fleet. But those attacks had been made without fighter opposition.

Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde flew the lead Swordfish. He had just made a command decision, the last of his short life. The fighter escort had not arrived at the rendezvous point; the German fleet was getting away, beyond the Strait into the Narrow Sea. He elected to attack, knowing that the German fighters were waiting, and that few, if any, of the Swordfish would survive.

As the six Swordfish lumbered toward the target, a flight of ten Spitfires—less than a quarter of the promised escort—suddenly materialized and a brief glow of hope stirred Esmonde—there might be a chance after all.

The red fuel warning light was blinking as Josten saw a sheet of flak erupt from the destroyers on his left. All of them had been fitted with crude welded mounts for extra 20-mm automatic weapons, and the wall of smoke and flame they laid down looked impenetrable. To his amazement, six Swordfish stumbled through the curtain of fire in two flights of three, battered but on course to the main fleet. Banking to engage them he reefed back on the stick to avoid a forest of water spouts blossoming in front of him. The eleven-inch guns of the battle cruisers were firing shells right through his own line of flight to ensnare the Swordfish. He shrugged; he'd never know if one hit him.

The port lower wing of one Swordfish vanished, as if Neptune had reached up from the sea to clutch it. Its nose rose sharply, then bowed to the left before disappearing in a spray of water. Josten's own starboard wing scraped the wavetops he racked around to slow himself enough to pick up a head-on shot at a target. He pressed the trigger and saw his tracers passing behind his target as he whipped through the formation. He blinked as he did so, not believing his eyes. On the third Swordfish a madly brave gunner had crawled out of his seat and was straddling the fuselage like a horse, facing the rear, trying to beat out a fire in the fabric with his hands.

Josten throttled back, slowing down to drop some flaps; there were Spitfires about, but the top flight of Messerschmitts had already engaged them. His targets were the remaining Swordfish.

Other Messerschmitts were attacking, barracuda against bonito, getting into each other's way as the Fleet Air Arm planes lumbered forward. One of the Swordfish disappeared in a huge ball of flame—a shell must have exploded its torpedo; another simply stopped flying, to drop limply into the Channel like a dead fly in a glass of beer.

Josten gained on the formation slowly this time, aiming and firing with care. The wood and fabric of the trailing Swordfish sponged up his gunfire. Smiling grimly, he trod on the rudder pedals, walking his tracers back and forth across the cockpit until the guns went silent. Just as he ran out of ammunition, he saw the gunner throw his hands up and the pilot lurch forward on the stick. The big biplane tucked its nose into a wave and halted, swamped immediately to its aft cockpit by the building sea, then slipping without reluctance beneath the surface.

He had overflown the attackers again, reaching almost to the jaws of the
Scharnhorst's
thundering main batteries when he threw his fighter in a steep bank to reverse his course. The amount of cannon fire roaring past him did not bear thinking about. There was only one Swordfish still flying, gamely headed directly toward the big battle cruiser, torpedo ready to be launched.

The fuel warning light was burning red steadily now. It didn't matter, for Josten knew he would never reach shore. He caught the Swordfish in his sights, the big three-bladed fixed-pitch propeller glistening in the mist, the enormous wings pushing the shell-freighted air aside like a child burrowing in the sand. He pressed the trigger, just in case, but nothing happened. The two airplanes closed. In a single fluid motion, Josten lifted his fighter over the huge upper wing of the torpedo plane, then dipped his port wing so that it sheared off the Swordfish's vertical fin. The Swordfish dropped straight into the sea, the Messerschmitt cartwheeling at its side. A geyser of water covered Josten's cockpit, turning the outside world rapidly from blue to gray to blue again as his tired fighter bobbed up and down before lurching to a halt. Jettisoning the canopy, he pulled his one-man life raft out just as the plane sank beneath him.

Battered, stomach and mouth engorged with the teeth-rattling chill of the seawater, Josten inflated the raft and struggled into it. He looked up to find the last Swordfish directly in front of him, engine sunk deep, water flowing over the cockpit rails. The gunner was dead in his harness, but another man, the radio operator probably, was dragging the unconscious pilot out of the cockpit. He had just freed him when the tailless Swordfish rolled over and plunged out of sight, as if glad to end its embarrassing agony.

Josten choked back nausea as he paddled toward the two British survivors. The radio man was treading water, holding the pilot up and trying to inflate his life jacket as the rolling sea bounced them. Josten knew that he could expect to survive no more than a few hours in his raft; the two enemy crew members would not last for twenty minutes as the chilly Channel sucked warmth from their bones.

A wave crested, dropping Josten's raft next to the British airmen. He reached out and grabbed the pilot's jacket, saying to the radio operator, "Hold on to the raft. I'll take care of him."

The radio man, too cold to be surprised by Josten's English, nodded gratefully. Josten managed to get the jacket inflated and then held his arms around the pilot's head, keeping it from bobbing forward into the water, the long blond hair slicked tight against his skull, veins showing big and blue beneath the translucent skin, deep blue eyes open with pupils fixed.

The radio operator's teeth chattered like a flak battery while his color drained to a gray-blue as, cell by cell, he gave in to the cold.

"Can't hold on, going to let go."

"Nonsense, there are dozens of E boats looking for us. Just hang on."

A decision was forming in Josten's mind as he scanned the water, praying that a German boat would spot them. The unconscious pilot was not going to make it. He could not afford to waste his strength on him. The radio man was a goner unless he somehow got out of the water. The raft was not supposed to be able to hold two people, especially in the swelling chop of the Channel, but he'd have to take the chance. He shook the radio man's arm, forcing his eyes open.

"I'm going to have to let your friend go. I can't hold on to him. When I do, you crawl aboard. You've got to help, I don't have the strength to bring you in myself."

The radio man looked mutely at his comrade and mumbled, "No, hold on to him."

Josten let the pilot go; he bobbed away, disappearing at once, then reappearing, his head lolling back now so that his accusing open eyes stared deep into Josten's soul, seeming to say, "I have died and you are going to live." It was a sight Josten would never forget.

He was still holding him, arms aching with the cold and fatigue, when an E boat came alongside thirty minutes later. Rough hands pulled him on board; the radio operator, dead for many minutes, slipped out of their hands to drift in search of his pilot.

Below deck they wrapped Josten in blankets and forced
muck
efuck
—ersatz coffee—laced with schnapps down his throat. It acted like a depth charge to the seawater he'd swallowed; he vomited and at once felt better.

The E boat raced at top speed back to port, the water pounding the thin planks on which Josten lay. As warmth returned to his extremities, he had time to rethink the battle. It was incredible that the British had thrown antiques like the Swordfish against them. No matter how brave the pilots were, they couldn't overcome their disadvantage in equipment.

The true meaning of the battle dawned on him. It wouldn't make any difference how many airplanes Germany had, unless they were of superior performance. The jet fighter
had
to be built.

*

Wolfschanze, Rastenburg, East Prussia/March 20,
1942

No one could accuse Hitler of ostentatious living. Josten, Galland, and another fighter pilot,
Leutnant
"Bubi" Zink, waited in the paneled tea room, furnished in the varnished pine and padded pillow comfort of a Bavarian rifle club, but by far the most elegant of the buildings they had seen. Situated in the heart of a forest near the Masurian Lakes, the headquarters was a collection of utilitarian single-story wooden barracks and concrete blockhouses, each about twelve meters long and five meters wide, without paint or decoration of any sort, and grouped according to their official functions. Other bunkers, larger, were under construction, and the whole was neatly knitted together by concentric rings of barbed wire.