Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (20 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

May 26, 1945, Aachen, Germany

The contrast was incredible. Below, the little German towns were strung like pearls on the string of the river, the jumbled houses lining curving cobblestone streets, the irregular fields glowing green with the spring. He had crossed Germany many times before in a B-17 with a cargo of destruction. Now he was flying a cargo of genius, not at a frigid 25,000 feet or higher, but at a comfortable 5,000 feet, with the earth-scented breeze filling the comfortable cabin of the Douglas C-47. Sitting in the back of the aircraft was his father, Vance Shannon, surrounded by some of the most eminent engineers in the United States.

Flying with his father was not a novelty. Harry and his brother, Tom, had learned to fly on cross-country trips with their dad. But never had they flown with so many important people, almost all members of General Arnold’s Scientific Advisory Group. They were the top scientists
and engineers in the United States, commissioned by Arnold to go to Germany and round up all the advanced scientific data on jet engines, rockets, German nuclear experiments, and more. Harry knew that his dad had special reverence for two of them—the famous Dr. Theodore von Kármán and Boeing’s leading aerodynamicist, George Schairer. Now all of them, regardless of their learning, were doing exactly the same thing, pressing their foreheads against the Plexiglas windows like excited kids, drinking in the sad fate that Hitler had brought to Germany and all of Europe. The pleasant breeze was soon tainted with a rank odor, and Harry knew that a major city was coming up, charging the crisp tang of early May with the smell of dust and wet ash. As the C-47 edged closer to a city, the scent grew more pronounced, too often tinged with the death smell of bodies still concealed beneath the rubble.

The navigator passed a note with their position indicated, but Harry Shannon had flown too long not to keep his own map at his side. The route southeast from Hannover had carried them across devastated city after another, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne. In each one, the gutted buildings stood like tombstones, swaying without roof or windows, obscuring the life that stirred below in cellars and makeshift hovels, as families tried to survive in the bitter aftermath of defeat. Aachen was the next major city. He looked back and signaled to his relief pilot, Captain Ron Clendenning. It was his turn to make a landing, and Harry wanted to go back and visit with his father a bit.

“Ron, make a couple of circuits of the city, please, before you land. They will want to get a good look before we set down. Some of them went to school, or even taught here.”

He glanced out the windows as he walked back to his father’s seat. Most German cities had a familiar pattern of destruction; from a distance, they looked like a burst
egg, oval and burned black on the western approaches because Allied bombers had a tendency to walk their bombs back from the aiming points, increasing the tonnage dropped on the western sides of cities. Aachen looked different, somehow, the destruction more evenly arrayed, blackened all around but a gray-brown jumble inside. Then he remembered that Aachen had twice been pummeled by artillery fire—first by the Americans when they seized the city in October, then by the Germans when they tried to take it back in January.

He was talking with his father, thanking him again for getting him this plum assignment, when a hand reached up and grabbed his sleeve.

“Come here, please, both of you. I want to show you something.” Theodore von Kármán’s rich Hungarian accent was choked with emotion. “Down there, that’s my city. Look what we have done to my university, my wind tunnel. Gone. All gone.” He made no attempt to wipe the tears coursing down his face. “What of the people? What will we find of the people?”

Both men felt sorry for him, but not for the people he sought. Kármán had seen what was coming and left. Those who stayed behind and worked for Nazi Germany deserved what they got. Harry’s mind flashed back to his last raid on Germany, just over a month ago, when the swift, predatory Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters had slashed through his formation, firing their rockets first, then closing to hammer the B-17s with 30mm cannon. He still remembered the black smoke boiling from their jet engines and how their arrow-like gray-green swept wings looked like arrows hurtling by. The German jets had destroyed four of his squadron in a single pass, shooting up his own airplane so badly that he had to make an emergency wheels-up landing at a tiny fighter strip in France. As he pulled his wounded copilot from the smoking wreckage he swore that in the next war he was going to be in fighters doing the shooting and not in a bomber being shot
at. The jet engines and swept wings of those Messerschmitts had come from the geniuses resident in places such as Aachen and Göttingen.

His father patted Kármán on the back. Vance idolized the man who had taken him under his wing when he was doing contract work for the Air Corps at Cal Tech. There, in beautiful Pasadena, Kármán had taught him many things, from aerodynamics and the potential of rocket power to the pleasure of sipping big tumblers of Jack Daniel’s bourbon as a way to cut the richness of the paprika dishes that flowed from his kitchen. But Vance could feel no sympathy for Kármán’s former German colleagues or for the destruction meted out to German cities.

George Schairer from Boeing joined them, and Kármán repeated his query. Schairer shrugged. There was no answer to Kármán’s question. The devastation was dreadful, but it could have been stopped at any moment if Germany had done the inevitable and surrendered. Somehow a relatively small clique of desperate men had used fear to control the German people until the very end. Then, when surrender finally occurred on May 8, the entire Nazi apparatus had seemed to wither and die like a punctured balloon, all the swagger and hatred replaced by groveling pleas for American understanding of the need to follow orders.

Their visit in Aachen was uneventful. Kármán toured them around in the lead jeep, showing them where he had lived and taught. But the feeling of animosity was intensified two days later when they visited Nordhausen, the hellhole the SS had created in the Harz Mountains, some fifty miles south of Braunschweig. Nordhausen was a huge underground factory carved out of the region’s soft limestone where the Nazis had used slave labor to build jet engines and V-2 rockets. Quite by chance, Kármán had run into one of his many former students, a Frenchman, Charles Sadron, at Nordhausen.

Vance sensed Kármán’s embarrassment. At Cal Tech, Sadron had weighed more than two hundred pounds; now he was down to half of that.

“Dear Charles, how good to see you.” Kármán handed him a Hershey bar and looked away as Sadron wolfed it down. In the thin sun that bathed the outbuildings of Nordhausen, the two old friends sat down on an abandoned packing crate, Kármán with his arm around Sadron’s frail shoulders. Vance listened carefully. Out of courtesy to him, the two men spoke in a fractured English when both would have been more comfortable speaking French. The words tumbled out. Shannon knew he was missing much but could not interrupt.

“We built rockets here; you called them V-2s. We were all slave labor.”

Kármán nodded, listening intently.

“It was a work camp and a death camp. You came in, they assigned you so many months to live, based on how fat you were.”

“You were heavy at Cal Tech, I remember—about one hundred kilos?”

“Yes, not when I got here, of course, I was down to about eighty kilos, but that was enough for them to give me six months to live. Others got less; if they were thin, maybe they’d schedule them only for three months’ work, or even less, two months, one month . . . it all depended on how much fat you were carrying. The more fat, the longer they thought they could work you.”

Kármán shook his head. “What did they do at the end of your schedule? Put you in the gas chamber?”

Sadron laughed and Vance winced; it was painful to watch Sadron’s poor thin body shake. “No, that was the beauty of it. SS efficiency. When your date expired, they cut your rations until you starved to death. I had just a few days to go before the Americans came.”

Kármán’s face was white with shock and rage. Sadron turned his head and vomited. Kármán, his arm still
around Sadron’s shoulder, offered a handkerchief. Sadron looked at it in amazement—the simple clean white cotton cloth was a luxury beyond his imagination. “Sorry. The chocolate was too rich—and I ate too much of it. What a waste.”

Shannon caught Kármán’s glance and understood; he left to make arrangements with the local commander for Sadron to be hospitalized. They didn’t speak again until they were airborne, on their way to the next stop on their itinerary, Göttingen. The ancient university town was the very birthplace of German aerodynamics. Here Ludwig Prandtl, the most famous name in aerodynamics, lived and worked. Prandtl had been Kármán’s professor, then his somewhat grudging mentor, and later his rival, the rivalry tinged with Prandtl’s contempt for Kármán’s Jewish origins. Not by accident, the U.S. military governor had assigned Kármán the university office that Prandtl once occupied as professor.

“Now Vance, you and your son just stand there and listen. How’s your German?”

“Doctor, you know I can barely understand you when you speak English, so I don’t expect to understand your German.” Kármán smiled, the first time he had done so since leaving Sadron’s side at Nordhausen. It seemed to promise that he would make short work of Prandtl.

When Prandtl came in he was nervous, bowing obsequiously to Kármán, who was dressed in the uniform of a major general, his simulated rank for the mission. Prandtl looked nervously at the other men in the room, then seemed to bristle.

“You are sitting at my desk!”

Kármán merely nodded, then got briskly down to business, pinning Prandtl down on details of advanced German engineering. To the Shannons’ surprise, they could follow the conversation closely, realizing that Prandtl was spilling his guts on all he knew on jet engines, swept wings, and rocket technology. He wasn’t just giving
engineering details; he was doing more, telling who the primary engineers were, where they were located, who could be trusted. Kármán’s hand flew across the tablet, noting in his cramped handwriting everything Prandtl said, occasionally glancing up at them to see if they understood the import of what was happening.

Harry Shannon understood all too well; he had seen the Messerschmitt 262s’ swept wings in the sky, and now he was going to get the engineering details straight from the source. At the end, as if exhausted from talking, Prandtl said, “Now you must go to Volkenrode, near Braunschweig. Most of the papers relating to high-speed aerodynamics are there—or were there.”

Vance Shannon looked at Kármán. No one had mentioned Volkenrode as a scientific source before.

Prandtl, seeing their confusion, said, “It was a completely secret organization, hidden in the woods; I’ve visited there myself only once. But as the enemy . . .” He paused, realizing that he had perhaps insulted them and identified himself as a patriotic German, the last thing he wished to do today. Then he continued, “. . . as the Americans advanced in the south of Germany, much was transferred there. I’ll give you the name of a man you can rely on to take you to the site.”

Vance conferred with Harry. Their C-47 was being refueled and having a tire changed. Braunschweig was only sixty miles away. Harry Shannon asked Kármán and Schairer if they were up to the hazards of a road trip, cautioning them on the possibility of renegade troops holding out and the probable conditions of the road. Both men agreed to go immediately. Shannon arranged to borrow three jeeps from an American armored unit to make the trip, one with three soldiers armed to the teeth for security.

The ride up was a revelation, for while larger towns like Paderborn showed significant damage, there were intervals where entire villages had been spared the
bombing—but not the refugees who crowded everywhere, in barns, schools, and open fields. Shannon was struck by the look of passive indifference on most faces. Here and there he would see a flash of resentment, usually by someone still wearing the remnants of an officer’s uniform. Most of them seemed stoically preoccupied with enduring for yet another day.