Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (19 page)

Then his mind drifted back to his father. Tom knew he should call him, but it was difficult nowadays, for he was never certain who would answer and he did not wish to speak to Madeline. He was still debating this when Lieutenant Colonel Bert Swofford, the deputy Base Commander, came in for his own reading of the intelligence reports.

Tom and Swofford had flown against each other often in serious engineering trials of performance and in the inevitable mock dogfights that followed them. They took turns, one flying a captured enemy aircraft one day, the other flying an American counterpart, then exchanging roles the following day. Tom had developed a particular affinity for the German fighters, a Messerschmitt Bf 109F and a Focke-Wulf FW 190A. Both required careful maintenance to keep them in top shape, but each had special characteristics that in the hands of a good pilot made it a deadly adversary. They flew Japanese aircraft as well, and while the Zero was delightful to fly, it was clearly obsolete by current standards. The other Japanese aircraft, a Tony and a George, were more modern but almost impossible to keep in flying condition because of parts shortages and their general lack of manufacturing quality control.

Tom took the bull by the horns. “Bert, I want to apologize for my exhibition the other night. I drank way more than I ever did in my life, and I paid for it, believe me.”

Swofford nodded. “No problem with me, Tom, but I’ll let you in on something I shouldn’t pass on to you. Somewhere along the line here, you’ve made some enemies.” He paused contemplatively, saying, “I don’t know why—you are the easiest guy to get along with in the business. But the incident at the club has been reported by Captain McGuire on up the line to your boss back in Washington. He’s recommending some sort of formal action be taken. The report came over my desk; I noted that I did not concur, but, obviously, I couldn’t stop it.”

Tom flushed. He knew exactly what the problem was. McGuire was the senior Navy officer on base. He had gone through the Academy four years before Tom attended—but had washed out in his first six weeks in Pensacola. He envied all flyers, and had taken a particular dislike to Tom, a Marine ace, in a plum assignment flying enemy fighters.

Although he didn’t plan on making a career of the Marines after the war, Tom hated to have his record sullied by something so stupid. Swofford tossed him a packet of papers. “Take a look at this. They are calling for volunteers for a special project to go into Germany and fly some of their new fighters back for analysis. A friend of mine, Hal Watson, is heading the team. I’ll call him if you want to go. If he takes you, you’ll be sent up to Wright Field, and then overseas. Sounds like a natural to me.”

Tom flushed with gratitude. “Bert, I’ll owe you plenty if you can pull this off. Get me on this; it’s a great way out, and it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.”

April 10, 1945, over Germany

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Shannon considered for the hundredth time the total stupidity of being there, in the left seat of a B-17, on his sixty-first mission over Germany, headed for Rechlin, where German jets were supposed to
be stationed. He was stretching his luck and he knew it, but orders were orders. He was just glad that his friend Joe Mizrahi had come down with a cold. If he had not, Joe would be in flying the airplane and Harry would be stuck between the seats, observing, the most useless feeling in the world of combat. As it was, he had to be very careful of his manner. Crews hated to fly with a strange crew member and detested flying with a strange pilot in command.

Still, Shannon was proud to be leading more than twelve hundred bombers to targets deep in Germany. He wondered how it must look to the battered civilians on the ground, the impeccable boxes of Boeing B-17s and Consolidated B-24s, contrails streaming bright behind them, moving inexorably toward their targets and surrounded by a swarm of more than eight hundred fighters, mostly P-51s, their young pilots thirsting for a fight.

There had been little aerial opposition predicted and none encountered. Flak had been moderate, for the planners had arranged their route to avoid the major concentrations.

The bare minimum of intercom chatter indicated that the crew of his aircraft,
Bouncing Betsy,
was recovering from his displacing Mizrahi. There had been a long delay for takeoff. Fog had socked almost all of England in and they had waited impatiently for four hours for it to clear off. The worst part was, no one had thought to prepare an extra meal or even coffee for the waiting crews, and most of the muttered intercom remarks were references to food.

Harry was not there on some quixotic whim. An additional order had come down from Eighth Air Force, specifically directing him to fly because intelligence had reported that they could expect opposition from a new German unit commanded by the German ace Adolf Galland. The message contained two daunting speculations. The first was that Galland’s new outfit was manned almost entirely by the remaining top Luftwaffe aces. The second was that they were armed with a new weapon, an
unguided rocket that was capable of knocking down a bomber with a single hit. Shannon’s task was to observe and evaluate the rocket fire.

Sixty miles away, Adolf Galland was quietly orbiting as his small group of Me 262s formed up. There were at least another twenty-four 262s in the air, from JG 7 and JG 54. They would attack the long bomber stream farther to the rear. The Me 262s needed a lot of room to operate, to speed past the defending fighters and to line up on the bombers, but the endless parade of B-17s and B-24s and the blue German sky provided more than enough space. The sad thing for Galland was that the sky could have been crowded with Me 262s, if the right research had been done, and then the 262s would have emptied the sky of bombers.

Flying the Me 262 in this fashion, with no one shooting at them yet, was sheer pleasure; the 262 was so responsive, so fast, and so quiet that it somehow made the world seem peaceful. And indeed, the ground below, a patchwork of fallow fields, green hills, and tiny villages, looked as peaceful as it had in 1939. The reason was simple. On the ground, the war was over. The Russians and the Americans had met on the Elbe, and there was precious little fighting still to be done. In Berlin, buried in the ruins of the Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his dwindling coterie of Nazi leaders continued to exist. They were not resisting, just staying alive beneath the barrage of Soviet artillery shells. Their deaths and the final surrender had to come within days.

But in the air it was different. The 262, the Turbo, as the pilots called it, reigned supreme. It had almost matured as a warplane, and its speed and firepower made it easily the best fighter of the war. The engines were getting more reliable, and some would run for as long as twenty-five hours before needing replacement. The four 30mm cannon had been supplemented by a battery of twenty-four R4M rockets. Fired at the right spot, the rockets
arced out ahead to fill a section of the sky almost thirty meters by twenty meters. Nine such salvos covered a huge area and could easily break up an entire enemy bomber formation. Then, when the surviving bombers scattered, the 262s could pick them off with cannon fire.

Adolf Galland, summarily dismissed at last by Göring from his role as the Inspector General for Fighters, was ending the war as he had started it, commanding a small unit. This was Jagdverband 44, the final distillation of the Luftwaffe’s top aces and the war’s best fighter. Galland had called for the best pilots to come to JV 44, and they came gladly, Barkhorn, Krupinski, Steinhoff, Spate, and more. They knew they could not affect the course of the war, but they sought to fight, and die if necessary, with the dignity that only the 262 could confer.

As expert as his pilots were, they were not familiar with the fabulous Me 262 that they were flying. Galland was going to talk them through one mock attack, then lead them westward, where he could already see the first wave of Ami bombers.

Earlier that morning he had drawn out the tactics on a chalkboard. The 262s were so fast that the long-proved tactics gained in four years of air warfare were now obsolete. Today JV 44 could put nine aircraft in the air. The 262s’ engines were still so sensitive to throttle movement that in executing turns they held formation by overshooting or undercutting the turn, rather than reducing or increasing throttle. So, to reduce the time and area covered in turns, they now had to fly in elements of three, instead of the classic “finger four” formation that had been developed in Spain. They flew about fifty meters apart, with about one hundred meters separating the elements.

Galland planned to fly in a wide, high circle and attack the lead group of American bombers from the rear, slicing down from about two thousand meters above the bombers to pull up about fifteen hundred meters behind them, with as much speed as possible, at least 900 kph.
When the wingspan of a B-17 filled the special marker on the Revi 16B gun sight, the range was about two hundred meters and the twenty-four R4M rockets each plane carried would be fired. When the B-17s scattered, each of the veteran pilots would seize upon a victim and shoot it down with cannon fire. Then they would climb away before the enemy fighters came, to return to base.

Shannon had just spotted the nine swift dots on the horizon when a P-51 pilot called, “Big Friends, looks like about a dozen jets coming in to attack from the east; we’ll try to cut them off, but I don’t think we can get there from here.”

As he swung high and to the north of the bombers, moving out of range of any of the escorting fighters, Galland watched the seemingly endless flights of American bombers and remembered another of Göring’s famous gaffes. When warned about the American four-engine bombers, Göring had remarked that he was glad they were coming, for while the Americans could make good razor blades, they couldn’t make good airplanes, and the larger they were the easier they would be to shoot down. Grinning with the thought of Göring’s enormous bulk being squashed in the tight seat of the 262, Galland signaled the attack.

On the intercom, Shannon called quietly, “OK, my friends, let’s look alive; they’ll make a tail attack, so call them off as they come in. Randy, you’ll probably be looking right down their throats, so keep telling me what they are doing.”

Randy was a nineteen-year-old tail gunner from Tyler, Texas; he looked like a saint, swore like a devil, and held the highest gunnery scores of any man in his squadron. Randy called back, “Roger that, sir.”

“Pilot from bombardier.”

“Go ahead.”

“We are about ten seconds from our initial point. We’ve
got the wind drift killed, so keep on this same heading for at least thirty seconds. Then I’ll take it.”

“Roger.” No word from the crew. Shannon thought how perfect the jets’ timing was, making their attack at the one moment when they would be straight and level.

The Me 262s’ long turn now changed into a trail formation, three elements of three jets positioned to cover the maximum area of the formation.

Randy’s voice, cool as a Texas spring, called out, “They’re coming in behind the formation, sir, about fifteen hundred feet low, but climbing. They’ve got something under their wings, looks like little bombs.”

Shannon replied: “Keep your eye on them, and tell me if they fire them off. I think they are rockets, but I’m not sure.”

In the lead Me 262, Galland saw the B-17’s wing grow to fill the marker on his gun sight and fired his rockets. At his side, almost at the same second, the other two aircraft in his element fired theirs.

“They’re rockets all right, sir; they just fired them. They are filling up the sky with smoke and flames; they’re blocking out the whole formation behind us.”

Randy came back on, his voice an octave higher. “Oh my God, they’ve blown up four airplanes already. There goes another one!”

Shannon had seen a large number of the rockets streak ahead of him and blow up; somehow his airplane had made it through. After an interminable wait, the bombardier called, “Bombs Away,” and Shannon began a fifteen-degree bank to the left. As he turned he saw huge explosions in his own formation and in the formations behind him—the jets had hit at least ten, perhaps twelve or more, B-17s with their rockets and now were curving around, their 30mm cannon ready to fire.

Galland had grimaced with satisfaction as his R4Ms took out a B-17, and he swept through the rest of the
formation firing, his 30mm cannon shells literally sawing the nose off of another B-17, sending it into an endless spin to the earth. Pulling the Turbo into a tight turn, he fixed his sights on the lead B-17, its bomb bay empty now, turning and running for home. He pressed the trigger and all four guns gave a short burst before going silent.

Harry felt the 30mm cannon shells ripping through his fuselage and wing, hammering the cockpit and wounding Mason, his copilot, and killing Kennedy, the bombardier, men he had met just this morning. The B-17 lurched to the left, its number one and two engines shot up and burning. Fighting the airplane, he reached up and feathered the two engines. The fires diminished, but he would have to keep an eye on them. The intercom was dead. Nagel, the radio operator, came forward and moved the copilot out of his seat and put pressure bandages on his wounds. Then Nagel leaned over Shannon and said, “Fuel leaking from the left wing.”

Shannon nodded and said, “Go back and see what’s happened to the rest of the crew. I’m going to try to make a field in Belgium or France.”

Like vultures scattering from their carrion prey, all nine of the sleek gray-green Me 262s suddenly left the formation, climbing to rejoin for the flight back to their base outside Munich. Shannon’s B-17 continued its gradual descent, wisps of smoke trailing with a shaken Harry Shannon trying to remember the exact sequence of events. The rockets had done the most damage—thank God the Germans did not have them or the jets a year ago. If they had, the war would have taken a very different turn.

• THE PASSING SCENE •

The United Nations formed; Japan surrenders; Joe Louis defends crown; Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals; Churchill proclaims “Iron Curtain” in Eastern Europe;
Best Years of Our Lives
plays; Marshall Plan called for; India and Pakistan made independent; Juan Peron becomes President of Argentina; “flying saucers” reported; Jackie Robinson joins major league.