Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (18 page)

“This is grotesque. How can they be so cruel?”

“It is monstrous. Hap called me on a secure phone and said he planned to lay on bombing raids on the rail lines to the camp—Nordhausen, they call it—but he’s afraid to bomb the camps themselves because it would kill so many of the prisoners.”

“Bob, this is fascinating, but what is it you’d like me to do?”

Gross walked to the window. “The war in Europe will end pretty soon. Perhaps even by the first of the year. I know that Hap intends to send a flying squad of top officers and scientists into Germany to scavenge all the information and the equipment they can, before the Germans destroy it, or the Russians get their hands on it. I told Hap that you should be on the team. Do you want to go?”

Shannon did not hesitate for a second. “Absolutely, Bob. Put me down. And put Harry down, too! He’ll be finished with his tour, for sure, and he would be a big help to me.”

Gross smiled for the first time that day. “I cannot
promise that, Vance, but I’ll try. They’ll probably be using C-47s or C-54s to make the trip in; maybe he can go along as a copilot or something.”

Shannon rose to go and said, “Bob, it is none of my business, but what is going to happen to your informant when the war is over?”

Gross flushed, angry with himself, angry with a war that forced him to soil his hands working with people like this unnamed informant. “With the amount of money we’ve paid him, he can go to Argentina and live for the rest of his life. I sent word to him that our arrangement was terminated. He’s on his own now.”

November 8, 1944, Achmer,
outside Osnabrück, Germany

Adolf Galland took off well before dawn in his special Messerschmitt Bf 109, so that he could land at Achmer at sunrise, too early for the ever-present American fighter-bombers that dominated the air over Germany. It was his first flight as a lieutenant general. At thirty-two, he was by far the youngest man of that elevated rank in the German armed services. He was probably also the most severely fatigued, from his overloaded combination of work and romances.

Two airfields, Achmer and Hespe, were the home of Kommando Nowotny, a service test squadron. It had been established early in October, equipped with no fewer than forty Messerschmitt Me 262s. The airfields were positioned perfectly to oppose the almost daily flights of Eighth Air Force bombers. The arrangement would have been ideal if swarming British and American fighters did not orbit the area, waiting for the jets to take off and land. Some measure of relief was afforded by a four-mile-long corridor of anti-aircraft guns set up off the ends of the runway. They were designed to put up an umbrella of flak, creating a safe
corridor for arriving and departing jets. In addition, the very effective Focke-Wulf 190D aircraft of Jagdgeschwader 54 flew protective patrols, fighting off the enemy while allowing the Me 262s to gain speed after takeoff, when they became virtually invulnerable to piston fighter attack. The 190s performed the same service when the jets returned, low on fuel and forced to give up their great speed advantage to slow down for a landing approach.

Major Walter Nowotny had scored 256 victories before being appointed commander of the unit that bore his name. In one month of operation, his pilots had shot down twenty-two enemy aircraft—but lost twenty-seven of their precious jets, most of them in accidents. Galland’s mission was to find out what was wrong with the operation, but to do it in a way that did not destroy what remained of the pilots’ morale.

In the primitive operations shack, Nowotny introduced Galland to his senior people, then took him into his office, where a surprisingly sumptuous breakfast had been prepared by the Russian cook Nowotny had brought back from the Eastern Front.

Nowotny did not hesitate. “I know you must be disappointed with our results. So am I. I thought that we could do far more damage than we have. And we’ve lost so many good people.”

Galland shifted his cigar and bowed his head. “The Luftwaffe has lost almost ninety percent of its experienced pilots since January. And the sad thing is that it did not need to happen.”

Relieved at the slight turn the conversation had taken, Nowotny piled plum preserves on a piece of bread and looked inquiring.

“That pig Göring started it all, as far back as November 1940. He thought the war was won, and stupidly ordered that all new weapons that could not be put into battle within a year be canceled. That ripped the guts out of jet engine development.” Galland pawed at his flying suit,
looking for his lighter. Nowotny handed him his own, and Galland relit his cigar. “If we had only pressed on with research just in the metallurgy needed to withstand the high temperatures in jet engines, everything would have been fine. We could have had a thousand 262s by late 1942, with plenty of time and fuel to train the pilots. But no, that all had to be left until two years later. And, if that were not enough, we had all the changes, and all the experimental models. It didn’t help that Milch and the Air Ministry were suspicious of Messerschmitt, and would not give him the people or the resources he needed.”

“Afraid of another 210 fiasco!”

“Exactly, and blind to what they had in the 262. If everyone had reacted properly, we would have stopped the bomber offensive, day and night. There would have been no invasion, believe me. And we might even have held our ground in Russia. We have had less than five hundred fighters on the Eastern Front for the last two years; we put thousands of our 88mm guns to use in flak batteries when they should have been used to knock out Soviet tanks. They even frittered away our conventional fighters, wasting them.”

Galland had long begged to be allowed to build up a huge reserve of day fighters and hit the incoming American formations with a massive attack, using a thousand 109s and 190s in a single Great Blow, as he called it. But every time he had the airplanes gathered, Göring would order them out on some useless task. When the invasion came, the
Reichsmarschall
had wasted aircraft in such a profligate manner that only two airplanes were available to strafe the invasion beaches on June 6. Now he was going to use Galland’s carefully husbanded resources for a big attack on the Western Front in December. Galland started to mention this, then caught himself; it was so top secret that he could not even tell Nowotny, a loyal hero of the Reich if ever there was one.

“What about this making the 262 a bomber?”
Nowotny asked. “I hear people blame the Führer for the decision; they say he insisted that it be produced only as a bomber, not a fighter, that pilots couldn’t endure the g-forces at high speed.”

Galland nodded. “That’s only partly true. He did ask to have bombs fitted, and saw the airplane as a fast bomber, but he knew that it would be a fighter, too. On balance his support helped the program more than his ideas about making it a blitz bomber hurt it. But the real problem was engines. We did not begin to get production engines until June of this year, all because we did not do the necessary research. The irony is that when the research was finally started, they quickly found a way to solve the problem. Instead of rare metals, they formed hollow turbine blades that could be cooled by passing air through them. Ingenious.”

He reached over and placed a huge slice of ham on his plate. “Where on earth do you get ham like this? And this coffee—it is real!”

Nowotny smiled for the first time. “Your fans send you cigars; mine send me food. This came from a firm in Westphalia; they manage to get one to me every month.”

There was a pause as Galland chewed; then in a low, kindly voice, he asked, “And what is happening here, Nowotny? We’ve got the airplanes we wanted at last. Why are they not working as they should?”

Nowotny flushed, accidentally banging his coffee mug down on the table, spilling it. He apologized as he mopped it up, then said, “You know the answers as well as I do. First of all, the pilots don’t have sufficient training in the airplane. It’s far different from flying a 109 or the 190. It doesn’t turn as tightly, it’s slow to accelerate, and the engines are very tricky, have to be handled with extreme care, or they will flame out. You know all that. But all of these shortcomings wouldn’t really matter if I could get them to fly the airplane correctly, using its speed and climb to fight. Yet, despite all I tell them, despite what the manuals
say, when a fight starts, they forget everything and try to maneuver with the Mustangs. Fatal! We stress over and over that they have to use their speed to engage and disengage when it is to their advantage, but when the guns start shooting, almost all of them start turning! Crazy.”

Galland shook his head. The British and the Americans trained their pilots in perfect safety, some of them thousands of miles from combat. They had all the oil and gas they wanted, so they could give a pilot three hundred hours’ flying time and more before sending him into combat. German cadets could get shot down on their first solo flight, and there was so little fuel that they were sending green pilots, with fewer than one hundred hours’ flying time to frontline fighter units.

It was only a little different with the
Experten,
the veteran pilots who had survived years of battle and could fly anything. They might get from one to twenty hours’ instruction in the 262 before being sent into combat, but there was no time to teach tactics, gunnery, or even formation flying. It was a murder mill, pure and simple.

“Any ideas on what you can do to improve things? We’ve got to start killing hundreds of the Allied bombers—to hell with their fighters, we’ve got to stop the bombers. They are burning up what’s left of the Reich.”

Nodding, Nowotny was walking toward a blackboard on which he had written half a dozen ideas for improving the situation when air-raid sirens blared. Nowotny said, “Sorry,” grabbed his helmet, and ran toward his aircraft, parked at the side of the runway. Nowotny and three other pilots took off, their Messerschmitt jets leaving a trail of smoke as they disappeared through the low overcast.

Galland returned to the operations shack, where a radio was tuned to the frequency Nowotny was using. The Americans were apparently in force over Lake Dummer, and within minutes Nowotny calmly called that he was starting his attack on the bomber formation. A minute
passed, and he reported that he had blown up a Liberator, and then moments later, a P-51.

Galland smiled. The 262s’ armament package was lethal; the four 30mm Mk 108 cannon chewed up everything before them. And better things were coming, R4M rockets that could take out a formation of B-17s in a single pass.

An excited young pilot turned to Galland and slapped him on the back, saying, “That’s numbers two fifty-seven and two fifty-eight,” before realizing what he had done. Galland smiled, shook his head, and listened intently.

Nowotny’s voice came back on the air. “Right turbine has failed; I’m returning to base.”

Moments later, his emotions now not under control, he screamed, radioing, “Over the field. Right engine on fire. Mustang attacking.”

Galland burst through the doorway of the shack and ran the hundred yards to the runway. Through the clouds he heard machine-gun fire, identifying it immediately as 50-caliber. The Mustang was shooting and Galland knew that Nowotny was a sitting duck. Then, through the low clouds scudding across the field, Nowotny’s jet came plunging straight down, impacting the ground a little over a kilometer away, the raging smoke reaching up to the cloud cover.

Galland turned and trudged slowly toward his own aircraft. Nowotny was dead, and so was Kommando Nowotny. Someone else would have to create the tactics for the jet fighter. As if it made any difference now.

January 2, 1945, Eglin Army Airfield, Florida

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Shannon almost never drank and absolutely never drank to excess. But there had been a wild party at the Officers Club on New Year’s Eve, where he met Ginny, an agreeable, attractive secretary at
Base Headquarters. She had been standing at the club door as if waiting for someone; when Tom walked in, she grabbed him by the arm and said, “Let’s go have some fun,” by way of introduction. Ginny was blond, with a great sense of mildly ribald humor, if not a great mind, and she tossed off the dreadful club drinks as if they were water, which they mostly were. Best of all, she was definitely romantically inclined, pressing close to him on the dance floor when they played “Sentimental Journey,” kissing his neck and responding to his clumsy comments as if he were Errol Flynn.

He made one mistake—matching her drink for drink. Things progressed nicely, especially on the dance floor, where, never much of a dancer, he was pleasantly surprised to find that he was able to jitterbug so well that a circle of admiring, clapping friends had gathered around them. The festive mood was dampened when he suddenly began projectile vomiting all over his partner and the dance floor. The clapping ceased as the laughter began.

Mortified, legs wobbly, unable to attend to Ginny, and deeply humiliated in front of his military colleagues, Tom excused himself, realizing that he had forfeited the Marine Corps reputation for holding its liquor forever. He stumbled to his quarters, showered, and spent the next day miserable in bed. A half-dozen fellow pilots dropped by, each with his own special form of humor, which ranged from bringing a plate of pork chops for his absentee appetite to advising him that once she was cleaned up, Ginny turned out to be wonderful in bed.

The rest restored him and when duty called the following morning he reported to the operations building for a twenty-four-hour stint as Aerodrome Officer. The not too arduous duties included checking the quality of meals at the enlisted mess halls and meeting each inbound aircraft to make sure that it was properly serviced. For Tom there was a big dividend. The Aerodrome Officer was allowed to visit headquarters and go through the intelligence
bulletins as they came in. If there was anything of particular importance, he was to alert the Base Commander.

The big news was a massive Luftwaffe attack on Allied airfields in France and Belgium on January 1. As many as four hundred Allied airplanes had been destroyed, most of them on the ground, while it was estimated that three hundred Luftwaffe planes were shot down. His thoughts immediately went to Harry, who had finished his tour in B-17s and had applied to fly another tour in either the B-26 or the P-51. Tom wondered how many jets the Germans had used.