Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Patty squeezed in beside him. He patted her hand. "You okay?"
"Yes, but I've had some more bad news. Eleanor Bineau called.
Armand is sinking, and she doesn't think he'll make it."
"God, how awful. Anything we can do?"
She shook her head, and he tried to change the subject. "Char
lotte would have been so pleased to know so many aviation celebri
ties would show up."
Patty nodded. Amelia Earhart was there, clearly as a favor to Patty. There were dozens of other famous flyers—Bernt Balchen, Jimmy Mattern, Bobbie Trout—but Patty was touched even more by something else.
"Look! How pleased Charlotte would have been!" With a small
wave of her hand she pointed to the rear of the crowd, where the
entire work force of the factory, painfully dressed up in their Sunday
best, were on hand.
"She would have loved it!" Bandy replied.
There were dozens of floral offerings which reflected the imagina
tion and taste of the flying community, everything from huge wings
made out of blood-red roses to towering horseshoes of flowers that
would have flattered a Kentucky Derby winner.
The ride to the cemetery turned into a logistic nightmare when
more than a hundred cars followed the hearse. Charlotte and Dusty
had been committed to their last resting place together before the last car had parked. The minister had kept the service mercifully brief.
As Patty got back in the limousine she said, "Now comes the fun
part, the part Charlotte would have loved."
They returned to the house. While they had been at the cemetery
a huge crew had removed all the funeral flowers and replaced them
with flowering shrubs in pots. A band was almost ready to play, and
huge tables, groaning with food, were already set up. In every corner were tubs of ice packed with Veuve Cliquot champagne.
"Mother always said that there was no place like a funeral to really
enjoy yourself, and she always wanted Veuve Cliquot—the widow—served at her own."
Bandfield squeezed her hand and followed her in. The crowd's tone had changed. Gone were the murmured "So sorry" and "You have my deepest sympathy" set-piece speeches. Instead the noise
level began its steady rise as glasses clinked and nicknames were
shouted in greeting.
"You've done a great job, Bandy. Thanks. She would have enjoyed it."
"You too. I hope it's helped you."
Patty was smiling as she drifted off to work the crowd. Bandfield
thought to himself, The only way this could be improved would be to have Bruno's head served with an apple in his mouth.
***
PART III
DESPERATE ODDS
***
Chapter 10
Karlsruhe, Germany/March 26, 1936
He was quietly pleased by the respectful glances the old soldiers were giving his Great War decorations. Unlike the new ribbon around his neck for the Blue Max, they were slightly worn and
made a handsome contrast with his perfectly tailored brand-new
Luftwaffe uniform. Lieutenant Colonel Bruno Hafner settled comfortably back in his seat to watch the master at work once again.
As he had been every night of his whirlwind tour of Germany, Adolf Hitler was engaged in a miracle of oratory. Like a great
conductor, he transformed the multilegged, single-voiced animal of
an audience into a steaming, sweating pipe organ that exultantly played his new tune: honor had been restored to Germany! The
March 7 remilitarization of the Rhineland, conceived by Hitler and
carried out over the objections of his military advisers, had redeemed the glories of Sedan and Tannenberg. The guttural voice, so implicit with threat and promise, sank to a low throbbing, a
masturbatory keening that crawled into the souls of the bright-faced,
cropped-haired Nazis jamming the hall.
Hafner sat in detached amusement. Charlotte had finally per
suaded him that daily baths were essential; she would have had her
work cut out for her here. He held a cologne-soaked handkerchief to
his nose, watching the crowd rather than listening to the speech.
"What I have done, I did according to my conscience." There
was a collective sob. The words
honor, honor, honor
came crashing
down, turning the shabby potbellied listeners into convulsively cheering knights, ready for the Thousand-Year Crusade.
The moment was coming. Hitler closed, as he had each night, with a pious touch: "And should unnecessary sorrow or suffering ever come to my people because of my actions, then I beseech Almighty God to punish me."
The end came with the characteristic flourish of head and arm, the multiple cheers, the endless volleys of
"Sieg Heil!"
Hafner was on his feet cheering with the rest of them, until the sweat-soaked Hitler broke for the wings. As soon as he did, Hafner hustled outside, anxious to see the next part of the spectacle. Right on cue,
mirror-silver in searchlights, the latest triumph of Nazi technology,
the Zeppelin LZ 134, the
Hindenburg,
appeared. It hung, silent, phallic, ominous, a great gray dumpling awash in the rain-soaked clouds, threatening not with its weaponry—it carried none—but with an implicit incendiary threat that it, like the Nazis, might suddenly go up in flames.
Joseph Goebbels, knowing the limited deductive capacity of his
audience, hammered home the association of the old and the new. The whitewash of the searchlights splashed an iridescent set of circles dancing from the huge dark letters forward, spelling out the magic name of Hindenburg all the way aft to the gleaming black-red-and-white swastika insignia on the gigantic tail fins. It said,
more clearly than any poster, that Germany was awake and powerful in the partnership of Reich President Hindenburg's tradition and
Hitler's leadership. Yet the cheers became less frantic; with Hitler gone, a more imperious call came from the beerhalls.
Hafner was glad that the Luftwaffe group seconded to the tour
would have a night's respite. Hitler was going back to Berlin to
orchestrate the plebiscite on his actions in the Rhineland.
As he pulled his boots off in the hotel room, Hafner mused on the
whole crazy business. The man the great Field Marshal Paul von
Hindenburg und Beneckendorff had dismissed as "the Bohemian corporal" had done what no one else had dared to do—rearmed Germany and torn up the Versailles Treaty. And he had done it
with an empty bluff, a few regiments of soldiers, a few squadrons of
mostly unarmed airplanes.
He flopped on his bed exhausted. The business of being an expert
had turned into an endless day-and-night round of backbreaking work and travel.
Hitler's close-run gamble had turned out to be a personal gold mine for Hafner. On three separate occasions, calls had come in to him, one each from
Generalleutnant
Wever—the little man was on a fast track; he'd been a colonel last year!—from Milch, and even from Goering himself.
The Luftwaffe had fielded three
Staffeln
—two fighters and one
dive bomber—to cover the handful of jackbooted troops marching across the bridges into the Rhineland. Hafner had been assigned the
task of getting the flying units on a wartime footing. It had been a
joke; they were so unprepared that Hitler Youth footing would have
been more like it. But when Wever called, worried about ammunition, Hafner had managed to get a truck filled with links for the fighter squadron's guns all the way to the new base near Cologne, Koln-Butzweilerhof. When Milch had called, frantic that the
Heinkel fighters of
Jagdgeschwader
134—the Horst Wessel wing—
needed gunsights, he had stripped the training units and had them installed in eight hours. And when Goering called, needing an answer to the Fuehrer's question whether the Junkers Ju-52 squadrons standing by could fly to Paris with a bomb load, he had been able to tell him yes—just barely!
The result had been this plum of a trip, with its unexpected side benefit. Little Dr. Goebbels had opposed the Rhineland initiative
initially, but had quickly come around when he saw that Hitler was
adamant. To make up for this uncharacteristic gaffe, he had seen to it that Hitler's triumphal sweep around the country was well attended by good-looking young movie actresses.
Hafner had met one, Lili Behrens, and they had immediately fallen into bed and into love. She was not the approved tall blond Nordic type, but instead dark, sinewy, and thoroughly delicious.
Now Germany was complete, for she promised to fulfill all his
needs. She was as good in bed as Charlotte, and might well prove to
be as faithful and useful as Murray Roehlk. Best of all, Hitler
himself had pronounced her an "artiste" and was backing her career.
Hafner suspected that Goebbels might have provided a little career
backing on the UFA casting couches, but that was all to the good. Altogether, a fine week's work.
He took a quick bath and put on a dressing gown, as he tried to sort out whether or not the fast-moving events—the Rhineland,
Italy's fight in Ethiopia, Germany's leaving the League of Nations—were good or bad for him. The pyramidal expansion of forces would
help, but a war before Germany was prepared would be disastrous.
He'd been on the losing side once before. The only thing to hope was that Hitler was as smart as most people said he was, that he'd keep them out of war until 1943. That would be perfect. The big
bombers would be ready, and the long-range fighters, not just built,
but with crews trained to use them.
Hafner shifted his thoughts from the future to the past. He had never really left Germany, never left the military. Versailles had
sent him to America as surely as it had carved western Poland out of
German soil. Now that he was back, he could see that it had been
for the best. He could never have learned in postwar Germany what
he had learned in postwar America. He had kept in the forefront of the Lindbergh boom, and now he had much to offer the Fatherland.
Nor could he have become wealthy in Germany. America had made him rich. He felt a brief sorrow that his parents had not lived
to be with him. He would like to have restored their house and their
fortunes.
He shook his head impatiently at the remembrance of the Amer
ican press's pious condemnations of the Nazis. The Nazi tactics had been pioneered in the gangs that ruled Chicago and New York; they
were different from the Brownshirts in Munich and Berlin only in motivation. In America it was money, pure and simple. In Germany it was politics.
There was a tapping at the door. Lili.
*
Downey, California/September 6, 1936
"It's good to have you back, Bandy, even for a little while. How are
you finding Wright Field as a place to work?"
"I'd work there for nothing, Hadley, if I had to. The bureaucracy
drives me crazy, but the Army people are first-rate. I'm sure you used to feel the same way."
Roget pulled Bandfield over to the window and pointed down
onto the factory floor. "It doesn't look much different from last year,
does it?"
"No. Same old problems, I guess?"
"Yeah—no money, slow pay from the government, and Douglas
beating us out of every order for a transport."
Bandfield shrugged his shoulders. "Nobody ever said that the airplane business would be easy."
"I thought we were getting a little reprieve last year after Char
lotte's accident."
Bandfield silently agreed. The Air Corps had awarded Roget
Aircraft a contract for eighteen RC-3s to be used for military cargo
and passenger service. It was a godsend, but the work was just about
finished now and there didn't seem to be anything else on the horizon.
"Take a look at this." Hadley tossed a copy of the Times over to
Bandy. "That's one record Patty didn't make this year."
There was a two-column spread announcing that Beryl Markham
had flown solo from England to Nova Scotia.
Bandfield nodded. "Patty knows her, you know. She and Stephan
met her when they took a tour of Africa. Patty says Beryl would have
raped Stephan if she hadn't kept a firm hand on him."
The thought bemused him. Had she kept the same firm hand on
Stephan that she used to keep on him, always tucked in his pants?
Probably. Their relationship had changed dramatically since Char
lotte's crash, and it was largely his fault. The obsession with Hafner
was completely destroying his life.