Grumpy Birthday

Leave a Comment / November 22, 2019 November 22, 2019

2012

I’m wishing my best friend in the whole world, who is turning 66, a Grumpy Birthday this year. I know it’s supposed to be a Happy Birthday, but, cynic that I am, don’t birthdays become increasingly less happy the older we get? I mean, with every passing year we have less and less to look forward to.

When we were kids birthdays truly were happy occasions. Birthdays brought you closer to being able to do the things you yearned to do, like being old enough to ride a bicycle, get into the theater to see a movie that wasn’t rated G, another year closer to getting that driver’s license. At my age another birthday brings you another year closer to that next colonoscopy and prostate exam, new aches and pains that just won’t go away, and glaucoma.

Birthday parties were fun and exciting when we were kids. There were balloons, all the cake and ice cream we could eat until we got sick and threw up, and lots of presents from our friends. Now the balloons get inserted into our arteries to alleviate the blockages, we can’t eat cake and ice cream because they either make us fat or we have Type II diabetes, and we get fewer and fewer presents because more and more of our friends are dead. What fun! We can’t even blow out the candles on the birthday cake we’re not allowed to eat because 1) there are too goddamn many of them and 2) the goddamn emphysema.

Unfortunately, because my best friend lives on one coast and I live on the other, I will not be able to attend his 66^th birthday party this year. Too bad, because I would love to see his eyes light up as he opens his gifts. Here are some of them I know he’s going to get:

* Viagra.

* A petition to sign from AARP warning him that if he doesn’t do something immediately his Social Security benefits will begin drying up and he’ll die destitute.

* Funny nose and glasses. Prescription lenses, of course.

* An unexpected call from a grandson he never knew he had begging him to wire $2,000 in bail money to some remote RCMP outpost in northern Saskatchewan.

* A 15% senior discount coupon from Denny’s. (Good only between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m.)

* No fewer than 11 unsolicited and illegal calls from shameless telemarketers during the party.

* More Viagra.

* A telegram from a Nigerian prince offering him 10% of his $70 million fortune if he can stash the money in my friend’s bank account after he’s wired $10,000 in good-faith money to a bank in Lagos.

* A new allergy.

* A senior citizen discount fare from American Airlines. (Good only on the Wednesday night red-eye Yuma-to-Yakima route.)

* A letter from his alma mater telling him about the tax benefits of donating his estate to the school after his death, and if he gives at least $100,000 they’ll fund a chair in his name in the Facilities Management Department.

*A gift-wrapped but unlabeled box full of incontinence products, unlabeled so the recipient can avoid embarrassment until he opens it in front of all his guests at the party.

*Gas.

* An affordable life insurance policy from Colonial Penn for $6.95 a month that can never be canceled regardless of his age or pre-existing health conditions. (Limited benefits first two years.)

* An “Old Bags Fly Free” coupon from Southwest Airlines, which means your wife doesn’t have to pay for her ticket.

* A greeter’s vest from Wal-Mart.

GRUMPY BIRTHDAY!

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Regardless of the political situation, the world still had to eat. Germans, Russians, French, and Poles all loved bread, and it was the rye grown on the Hauser estate that provided one of the staple’s essential ingredients. There was no reason to be afraid. The Russian empress Catherine the Great had invited German-speaking people to repopulate a large swath of Central and Eastern Europe that had been decimated by plagues and the butchers of the Ottoman Empire, even promising them they could keep their language, religion, culture, and customs. After living their way for almost two centuries, why should millions of Volksdeutsche, as they came to be called, think things were suddenly going to change for the worse?

After the Prussian army put down the Kościuszko Uprising’s attempt to free Poland of Russia’s shackles in the late 18^th Century, Prussia gained control of the northeastern territory as its share in the Third Partition of Poland. German tradition dictated that family farms should not be divided among sons but be inherited by the eldest son so that over the generations they would remain prosperous and not be systematically reduced to little more than garden plots. Younger sons who aspired to be farmers either had to marry the daughters of farmers who had no sons or enter the trades or become soldiers. Now those landless young men had an opportunity to grow crops in the vast, underpopulated expanses of Central and Eastern Europe. Many had emigrated to America to realize their dreams, but millions more packed up their families and their possessions and moved to the Baltic countries, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and the Balkans and established German communities.

The family of Albrecht Hauser, along with several other émigré families from Prussia, arrived in Poland around 1803 and established a German enclave on the empty banks of the Orzyc River in and around the tiny village of Sloznowa. With a vast tract of land to farm, the Hauser family prospered, and during the ensuing decades the community grew to around sixty families. While they all learned to speak Polish and got along well with their Polish neighbors, at home the Volksdeutsche spoke German and kept their customs and traditions. And when they married, they tended to marry other ethnic Germans. When World War II began in 1939, more than 10 million Volksdeutsche were living beyond the borders of the Third Reich.

After World War I there had been a growing sentiment among European nations to homogenize their populations and avoid the ethnic strife that had helped trigger the bloody conflict. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the governments of many nations, notably Greece and Turkey, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Romania, Italy and Yugoslavia, and Romania and Hungary, agreed to swap their minority populations. Often these massive movements of people had to be accomplished by force as expatriates who had lived for generations in their homes balked at returning to the “old country” of their ancestors.

Though it had no power to enforce its policies in foreign countries, Nazi Germany beckoned the millions of Volksdeutsche to return to the Fatherland with the Heim ins Reich program, or “Come Home to the Empire,” to be reeducated and purified as Germans. The clarion call was largely ignored by the Volksdeutsche, who were perfectly content where they were and did not think of themselves as an exploited or oppressed minority living abroad. Although they spoke the language and practiced its customs, they had long ago ceased to think of themselves as Germans. When most of the early settlers arrived in Central and Eastern Europe, there had been no Germany in the modern sense. Until Otto von Bismarck unified the nation in 1871, two or three or more generations after the many of the Volksdeutsche had left their homesteads behind, Germany had been a loose confederation of 39 independent states and kingdoms that happened to share a common language, a few customs, and little else.

Most Volksdeutsche were blissfully unaware of their “suffering” at the hands of Eastern European “tyrants” that had become a propaganda tool to inflame the German public and drum up support for the forthcoming war. Hitler had used alleged atrocities by Poles against the Volksdeutsche as his pretext for invading Poland in 1939. Nor did Heim ins Reich make much sense to them, for at the same time Hitler was trumpeting Lebensraum, the eastern expansion of the Reich to create more territory for Germans crowded into cities to live when millions of ethnic Germans were already living there.

Over the strenuous objections of his mystified parents, 21-year-old Gerhard Hauser had heeded the siren call of Heim ins Reich and gone to Germany in 1938. He had joined the German navy and drowned when the battleship Bismarck was sunk by the Royal Navy in May of 1941. When the Wehrmacht arrived in Sloznowa in September of 1939, an officer had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Helmut, then 19, for the Waffen-SS.

“Don’t you believe it is your duty to fight for our Führer, your Fatherland?” the officer had inquired sternly.

“He’s not my Führer, and it’s not my Fatherland,” Helmut had retorted. “My home is here, the home of my father, his father, my great-grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather.”

“You’re an impudent little snot,” the Waffen-SS officer had said angrily. “Look around you. Look at this house. You speak German and you live like a German. You have a German name. You have German blood, whether you admit it or not. And it is your duty – it is every German’s duty – to serve the Führer and the Fatherland. You will fight, boy, willingly or unwillingly. I can assure you of that.”

At that point Anke Hauser had demanded that the Waffen-SS officer leave her house, and he picked up his cap with the death’s head insignia on the hatband and departed. But a year later Helmut was drafted into the Waffen-SS and had no choice except to go. He was fighting somewhere on the Eastern Front now; Anke wasn’t sure where. She wondered if he might be only a few miles away from home right now, fighting where the artillery barrage was going on. If he was, maybe he’d be able to stop and visit. He was her sole surviving son, she had seen him only once in the last four years when he was on furlough, and she missed him desperately.

Anke gazed briefly at the empty, far side of the bed where her husband’s featherbed was neatly folded. Albert had not slept beneath it for more than a year, for he slept beneath the earth in the Hauser family plot in the Sloznowa cemetery now.

His death had made no sense to her. When Albert had not turned up for supper, Anke had sent her 13-year-old daughter, Irmgard, into the rye fields to look for him. She had found her father dead on the ground, shot through the left eye. The police came out from Scharfenwiese – the Nazi-controlled General Government of Poland had renamed Ostrołęka after the Blitzkrieg in 1939 – to investigate the crime and concluded Albert Hauser had most likely been murdered by Polish partisans who roamed the nearby forests. The police told Anke and Irmgard several other Volksdeutsche in the area had been killed recently, and in two cases entire households had been butchered. The partisans had also stepped up their attacks on Wehrmacht vehicles and General Government offices and personnel in Scharfenwiese in recent months. The Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi’s state security service; the Gestapo; and the army had been trying to track down the partisan bands, but the forests of northeastern Poland were vast and deep. When a member of the Polish underground was caught, he was dealt with harshly, interrogated and then promptly executed, the police assured them.

“But why would they murder my husband?” Anke had cried. “We have always been good neighbors to the Polakami, and we have lived here for generations! We have never done anything to offend anyone! I don’t understand why they would want to kill Albert!”

“Probably because his name was on the Volksliste,” the policeman in charge of the investigation had suggested. What he didn’t say, because it would have been defeatist to admit it, was that the Polish Resistance had been stepping up its activities since the fortunes of war had begun to turn against the Third Reich.

“That can’t be the reason,” Anke had argued. “Everyone’s name is on the Volksliste. All of us were required to sign it after the Niemiecki came. It’s the law.”

The Volksliste was a register of all the Volksdeutsche in the lands occupied by the Wehrmacht. Helmut had been drafted into the Waffen-SS because his name was on the Volksliste, as had many other Volksdeutsche boys of military age. Ethnic German Jews who lived in Scharfenwiese and whose names were also on the Volksliste had been quietly rounded up a few at a time during the ensuing years and “resettled” elsewhere. “Resettled” was the euphemism for “exterminated,” though only those few who by chance lived in the vicinity of the death camps – most of them located in rural Poland – knew or even suspected what horrors were actually happening inside the barbed wire.

“That doesn’t matter to the Resistance,” the policeman had informed Anke. “So far as the Resistance is concerned, if you are on the Volksliste you have sworn allegiance to Hitler and are now the enemy.”

“Even if we have lived here for more than a hundred years and have done nothing at all to help the Niemiecki or harm our neighbors.”

“Tak. In the eyes of the Resistance, you’ve all been tarred with the same brush as Niemiecki, I’m afraid. I’m not accusing you, Pani Hauser, but I shouldn’t need to remind you that you have a son in the Waffen-SS and another son who also served in the German navy.”

“Helmut was drafted. He had no choice. What was he supposed to do? Run away and join the Polskie outlaws in the woods who may have just murdered my husband?” Anke argued. “And my Gerhard died at sea, a long way away from here. He joined the navy against our wishes, but he never did anything that should make the Polakami seek revenge on our family.”

In the same room and quietly listening to the conversation had been Józef Olsczewski, who worked and lived on the sprawling Hauser estate. He knew it was true that the Hausers and the rest of the Volksdeutsche living in and around Sloznowa and Ostrołęka – he refused to call it Scharfenwiese – had done nothing to harm their Polish neighbors. But most of them had also done little or nothing to help those same neighbors since the German occupation. The fact was there had always been an undercurrent of resentment toward the Volksdeutsche by the Poles. They were generally wealthier and owned more land than the Polish farmers, and they had never fully immersed themselves into Polish society. Generation after generation continued to speak German, live like Germans, marry into other Volksdeutsche families, and in the larger Volksdeutsche communities even built their own schools and Lutheran and Evangelical Reformed churches, an affront to many Poles living in a Roman Catholic nation. If the Volksdeutsche claimed to be apolitical and didn’t identify themselves with members of Hitler’s “master race,” they certainly acted as if they were superior.

Olsczewski had formerly owned a small farm adjacent to the Hauser estate. The land had belonged to his family for generations, far longer than the list of faded names neatly written inside the cover of the ancient family Bible he now kept in the drawer of a small table in the sparsely furnished bedroom he shared with his wife Agnieszka in the spacious and elegantly furnished Hauser house. Then one day in the early spring of 1940 a German official from the RKFDV, accompanied by two Polish policemen from Ostrołęka, knocked on the door of his modest house. The Reichskommissariat für die Festigung des deutsches Volkstums, or The Reich Department for the Strengthening of Germandom, is confiscating his farm, Józef had been told, and it is being given to a German citizen from Silesia. He and his family have 48 hours to vacate the premises with whatever possessions they can carry or face arrest. Józef Olsczewski would always remember that as the worst day of his life, the day the farm that had belonged to his family for centuries had been stolen from him without reparations, and the sense of impotence and betrayal of his ancestors’ legacy that overwhelmed him. Although it made no sense, he blamed himself more than the Germans for losing his farm, for all the times in Poland’s tragic history that the nation had been overrun and conquered that small parcel of land had always remained in his family’s hands. Until now.

While he had felt singled out, alone, and guilty of some imaginary oversight, he wasn’t. As the Wehrmacht swept across Central and Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of farmers in the occupied zones were also forced to surrender their lands, Lebensraum for settlers from crowded Germany who yearned for land of their own. In and around Sloznowa and Ostrołęka, few, if any, words of protest were uttered by the Volksdeutsche who watched with indifference as their Polish neighbors’ lands were being confiscated by the Third Reich. They weren’t Polish, they weren’t German, and all that mattered to the Volksdeutsche was they were being left alone. Being left in peace to farm their lands was the only thing that had truly mattered to them for nearly two centuries. Quite naturally, the undercurrent of resentment toward the Volksdeutsche bubbled closer to the surface. They were outsiders. They had always been outsiders. And they would always be outsiders.

Józef Olsczewski had been more fortunate than many of the farmers who had lost their lands and desperately sought work for which they had no training and skills or else settled for serfdom on the properties they formerly owned. He had always been on friendly terms with the Hausers, and with Gerhard in the navy they could use an extra and experienced hand on their estate. There was plenty of room at the house, and the grateful Józef and Agnieszka moved in. Agnieszka worked as a domestic in the Hauser household, and while they were treated well by their employers, the rest of their family had been forced to fend for themselves. One son had been in the Polish army and was killed during the Blitzkrieg, but another son had gone to Germany to work in the armaments industry. Their two daughters, both in their early 20s, had found work for German officials in Ostrołęka, one as a maid and the other as a nanny. But their eldest son, Wiktor, had joined the Polish Resistance, and it was Wiktor who was on Jozef’s uneasy mind right now as he followed the conversation between Anke and the police.

Józef had gone out to see Albert’s body after the wailing Irmgard had run back to the house and Anke phoned the police. It had been clear to him that unless a sniper had put a one-in-a-million shot through the eye of his victim from the tree line more than 500 meters away, Albert had been shot at close range. That meant for his murderer to have gotten that close Albert must have both known and trusted him, for there had been no signs of a struggle, no signs that Albert had tried to flee from his assailant. His implements were right next to his body. Józef had been worried that Wiktor had committed the dastardly deed, for Albert had known Wiktor since his son had been born and liked him, and Wiktor could have approached him without raising suspicion. Wiktor had taken the loss of the Olsczewski farm harder than anyone else except his parents, and on the infrequent occasions when he had sneaked out of the forest for a clandestine visit with his parents, he almost always reminded Józef that he should be ashamed that as a proud Polish landowner whose farm had been stolen by the Germans he was working as a hired hand for an arrogant German like Albert Hauser. Wiktor had always been a hothead, constantly getting into fights at school. This time perhaps, Józef feared, his son might have gone too far. But he said nothing to the police, for he loved his son and silently prayed Wiktor was innocent of the crime.

Anke looked at herself in the bedroom mirror hanging above the dresser as she brushed her long hair. Streaks of gray had appeared in hair that had once been jet black, and small wrinkles had formed in the corners of her hazel eyes. She shook her head as if in disbelief at the rapidly aging woman who gazed back at her in the lamplight. Managing the entire Hauser estate by herself since Albert’s death was taking a toll on her features. She switched off the lamp and went downstairs to the kitchen. She had Agnieszka to handle the menial tasks around the house now, but Anke had always enjoyed preparing the meals and continued to do so. The first breakfast of the day was simple, just cold sausage and bread with butter and jam and ersatz coffee. Then she would join Józef and the other two Polish farmhands the Hausers had employed for years outside for a couple hours of chores before going back to the kitchen to cook a more substantial midmorning breakfast of eggs and bacon and then sending Irmgard off on her bicycle to attend the German school in Sloznowa. Anke was usually the first one awake in the house, but when she entered the kitchen she saw Józef and Agnieszka already sitting around the table speaking in quiet tones. While the other two hired men who worked on the estate ate breakfast at home before reporting to work and brought their other meals for the long day with them, the Olsczewskis were privileged to take their meals with the family. Irmgard appeared moments later, yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Good morning everyone,” Anke said in Polish. “The big guns woke you too?”

Józef nodded. “The Rosjanie are coming.”

None of them was overly concerned.

“I’ll be glad when the Niemiecki are gone and things can finally return to normal around here,” Anke said as she placed a thick sausage on the table with a knife. “Maybe you will even get your farm back, Józef.”

“That is my hope,” he replied. “That coal miner living there now couldn’t grow weeds. How he’s lasted this long is a mystery.”

“Do you think Helmut might be in the middle of the battle, Mutti?” Irmgard asked in German.

Anke sighed deeply before answering. “Part of me hopes he is, Schätzchen, and sometime today or tomorrow we will see him whistling and walking up the road like was coming home from another day at school. It has been such a long time since we’ve seen him.”

“Two Christmases ago,” Irmgard remembered.

“But part of me also hopes he is somewhere safe, far away from this battle and all the battles,” Anke continued. “What I hope for most is that the next time he comes home, he’s coming home to stay.”

The thunder of the artillery was constant and became louder and closer as the day wore on. Occasionally a few Luftwaffe fighter planes and Stuka dive bombers buzzed overhead, and once in the distance there was a dogfight high in the sky between two planes that lasted for a couple of minutes before one of them spiraled toward the ground engulfed in yellow flames and marking its trail with a long plume of thick black smoke. It was too far away for anyone to determine if it was a German or Russian plane that had been shot down. It was only a brief distraction, and work went on at the Hauser estate as if it were an ordinary day.

Late in the afternoon a hand cart piled high with furniture and wooden boxes stopped in front of the open gate. A very small man with his left arm permanently bent at the elbow walked up the short driveway toward the house while a woman and little boy about six or seven years old remained standing next to the cart. Anke, who had been making entries into a ledger, saw him through the window of the study, recognized who it was, and hurried outside to meet him before he reached the front door.

“Guten Tag, Herr Gutsohn.” She greeted him with false warmth and did not shake his hand. “Are you leaving?”

“Ja, Frau Hauser,” he replied. “I’m surprised you are not leaving as well. I think it would be wise if you did. Very wise indeed.”

Anke did not invite him or his family inside. She had never liked Werner Gutsohn, and only partly because the Nazis had given the repugnant little man and his family the land that the Olsczewskis had farmed for centuries. He had been a coal miner in Silesia before attempting to become a farmer, and after more than four years living in the open, clean air of the Polish countryside his skin was not tanned but almost black, as if the coal dust from years of working in the mines had etched itself permanently into his pores. It was probably a misconception by Anke, but he presented the appearance of a man who seldom and perhaps never bathed. Gutsohn might have been in his early 30s but looked considerably older. His thin black hair was greasy, and his brown eyes were hollow. His crooked elbow was the consequence of a mining accident and had kept him out of the military. Hilde, his frumpy wife, was a shrew, and their son, Willi, an annoying little whiner. The Gutsohns had repeatedly attempted to befriend their wealthy, established neighbors, but the Hausers avoided them as much as possible. The Olsczewskis understandably had absolutely nothing to do with them and were appalled at the rapid deterioration of their farm during the four-odd years the Gutsohns had owned it.

Upon meeting the Hausers for the first time, Werner Gutsohn had told them it had been his lifelong dream to be a farmer. When Hitler had inaugurated Lebensraum, Gutsohn had been among the first to apply to the RKFDV for resettlement in the East. But his ancestors had been miners for generations and he knew nothing about agriculture, and he and hundreds of thousands of other applicants were poorly trained or schooled not at all by the RKFDV to succeed as farmers. Basically, they were given land and told to go farm it, as if every German had a latent instinct for agriculture that needed only to be awakened.

Gutsohn’s lack of knowledge about running a farm and growing crops had concerned him very little. He was an innately lazy man who had envisioned himself more of a land baron, and his lack of knowledge about agriculture could be overcome by hiring Poles to perform the actual labor. There was no shortage of Poles in and around Sloznowa who had lost their farms to the Ostsiedler from Germany and were desperate for work. He had the luxury of paying them very little or not at all as he sat back and proudly surveyed his little fiefdom while pocketing the profits from other men’s sweat.

But the farm had produced smaller crops and smaller profits with each succeeding year until by the summer of 1944 there were more weeds in the fields than rye. Gutsohn failed to comprehend that men who have little or no stake in what they’re doing don’t work as diligently as those who do. Making matters worse was that he was abusive and cruel to his men, treated them like slaves, and constantly accused them of stealing. Only Poles most desperate to feed their families could endure even one full season on the Gutsohn farm, and no one had lasted longer than one. It had become harder and harder for him to find replacements when his workers abruptly quit. That he had been able to hire new workers at all was because many other Ostsiedler treated their hired hands just as badly, and men desperate for work hoped their situations would be at least marginally improved with a new employer. Many Poles, perpetually mistreated and disillusioned, either gave up and sought work in Ostrołęka or vanished into the forest to join the partisans. More than a few of those came back armed and murdered their tormentors. Werner Gutsohn had learned never to go anywhere without his shotgun within easy reach, and he kept it next to his bed at night.

In fairness, the failure of Gutsohn and so many Ostsiedler as farmers in the Lebensraum program was not entirely their own fault. In addition to being ill-prepared for their new lives and occupations in the East, the RKFDV had failed to follow through on many of its promises. The demands of war – especially one that Germany was beginning to lose – assumed a higher priority. Horses promised to the Ostsiedler were appropriated by the cavalry. Tractors were turned into tanks and farm implements into rifles and machine guns. Nitrates for fertilizer became explosives for bombs and artillery shells. Even sacks of seeds failed to arrive in time for planting season, stuck for weeks in boxcars on railroad sidings while trains rushed fresh troops, ammunition, and weapons to the bloody Eastern Front or delivered Jews to the extermination camps. What little farm equipment was still being manufactured was being prioritized and provided to farmers inside Germany.

Now that the Red Army was approaching Scharfenwiese, many Ostsiedler feared the worst, were packing up their belongings and abandoning their farms, and fleeing to Germany. The Volksdeutsche, however, were inclined to remain in the homes they had occupied for decades and generations.

“We’re staying,” Anke informed Werner Gutsohn. “We have no reason to leave.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what the Russen are going to do to you and your daughter, afraid for your lives?” Gutsohn asked. “Don’t you know what those butchers are doing to the Deutsche when they find them? Don’t you listen to the radio or read the newspapers?”

Anke shook her head. “We’re not Deutsche. We’re just farmers. Regimes have come and gone, and the Hausers have always been here. The Hausers will always be here, Herr Gutsohn. The Russen eat bread too. They need us.”

“Have you forgotten what happened to your husband last year, Frau Hauser? If the army and the government are forced out of Scharfenwiese, there will be no one to protect you – or us – from the partisans. They’ve been growing bolder by the month, and they’ll run amok. I doubt the Russen would do anything to stop them. The Russen and the Polen both hate us, and they will kill every Deutsche they see. It will be a massacre.”

“We’re not Deutsche,” Anke repeated firmly. “There were no partisans before the Deutsche invaded Poland, and the partisans didn’t bother us until we were forced to sign the Volksliste and the RKFDV arrived and began throwing the Polen off their lands to make room for Ostsiedler like you, Herr Gutsohn. Now that you and the other Deutsche are leaving, things will return to normal here in short order. It will be as it was before the war when the Treaty of Versailles guaranteed polnisch sovereignty.”

Gutsohn cackled. “You are living in a fairy tale world, Frau Hauser, if you think things will go back to the way they were. Stalin will not march through Polen and then right back out if Deutschland should suffer the unthinkable misfortune of losing this war. Stalin wants to rule the world, and only our Führer and our heroic Wehrmacht stand between him and his dream. The Englander and Amerikaner were fools to cast their lot with him, for he’ll turn on his allies in a heartbeat if they win this war, and they don’t have the stomach to say no to him. And when the Russen take Scharfenwiese and Sloznowa, my dear Frau Hauser, they will make no distinction between the Ostsiedler and the Volksdeutsche. In the eyes of Stalin we’re just Deutsche, and he’ll slaughter all of us. And that’s why we’re leaving. I implore you to do the same.”

“I do thank you for your concern, Herr Gutsohn, but we’re staying. I wish you and your family well on your long journey home.”

Gutsohn heaved a deep sigh.

“May God have mercy on you all,” he said as he turned to walk back down the driveway to his cart. “For I know the communist Anti-Christ will not.”

The Russians came two days later, on a Sunday morning when Irmgard was not in school. She was in the barn, filling the feedbags for the Hausers’ two horses, when she spotted a half dozen Red Army soldiers moving warily through the rye and toward the house, their rifles at the ready. The rattling of machine guns and the popping of small arms fire could be heard faintly somewhere in the distance, but it was peaceful on the farm. Irmgard frantically dashed to the house to warn her mother, who was in the kitchen preparing a bountiful breakfast. If the soldiers saw her running, they didn’t react.

Agnieszka was in the kitchen with Anke. Józef was at his former and now abandoned farm, trying to determine how much of the meager and neglected crop Werner Gutsohn had left behind might be harvested. The women were alone, and Anke was apprehensive but not concerned enough to fetch Albert’s shotgun from the study. She didn’t want to provoke the soldiers. But just to be on the safe side, she ordered her blond and blue-eyed daughter, now 14 and blossoming into an attractive young woman, to hide in the attic and not make a sound until the Russians were gone.

“I’m sure they mean us no harm, Schätzchen,” she told Irmgard. “But I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances. Stay there until I come get you.”

The Russians approached the house a few minutes later. Three of them went into the barn while the remaining three pointed their rifles at the windows of the house and peered inside. They crept around the entire house, looking in every window and up at the second-story windows while Anke and Agnieszka stood motionless and barely breathing in the kitchen. When she saw one of the soldiers look through the kitchen window, Agnieszka gasped and her knees buckled, and Anke instinctively wrapped her arm around the Polish woman’s thick torso to keep her from falling.

“Stay calm, Agnieszka, stay calm,” she whispered. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us. We’re not the enemy.”

The soldier didn’t appear to see them, for his expression never changed and he moved on to the window in the formal dining room that was used only for Sunday and holiday dinners.

A minute or so afterward they heard the front door that was never locked pushed open, and two of the Russians stepped into the hallway, their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. At almost the same moment the back door to the kitchen opened, and the third soldier slipped inside with his rifle pointed straight ahead. He was a short, squat man, and his helmet almost covered his eyes. Seeing the two women huddled together, he froze for an instant until he determined they were not a threat. Then he relaxed, lowered his rifle, and flashed a smile that lacked any warmth.

“Mężczyźni?” he asked in Polish. And then immediately in German: “Männer?”

“There are no men here,” Anke replied firmly in Polish and shaking her head. “Just us two.”

The soldier nodded and sniffed the air. He smelled the bacon frying in the pan on the stove and saw six unbroken eggs in a bowl on the countertop, and he grinned and rubbed his stomach. Clearly he was hungry, and Anke forced a smile and pointed to a chair at the kitchen table. The soldier nodded vigorously, leaned his rifle against the wall, and sat down, still grinning. A few seconds later the other two Russians appeared in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, their fingers still on the triggers of their weapons. The first soldier said something to them in Russian, and the other two stacked their rifles against the wall, put their helmets on the floor, and sat down, eagerly rubbing their hands together. Agnieszka set plates and silverware in front of them and filled three cups with steaming ersatz coffee while Anke went back to the stove and added several more slabs of bacon to the pan.

The short soldier, who had kept his helmet on his head, took a sip of the coffee, immediately spit it out onto the floor, and scowled. The other two Russians laughed and pushed away their cups. One of them reached into a pouch on his belt, produced a ball of tinfoil, and held it up to Agnieszka and smiled at her. Guardedly, she took it from his hand and slowly unfolded it.

“They’re real coffee beans!” she said excitedly to Anke. “I can’t believe they have real coffee!”

Neither of them had tasted real coffee since the beginning of the war. Maybe everything was going to turn out all right, Anke thought. The Russians seemed friendly. They would eat a hearty breakfast and move on.

“Well, don’t just stand there like a statue, Agnieszka! Grind it and brew it!” Anke blurted out.

She hoped the Russians wouldn’t drink it all and some would be left in the pot for them. Her hopes dwindled when the other three soldiers who had been in the barn turned up in the kitchen, put aside their rifles, took off their helmets, and sat down at the crowded table and began to converse with the others. Agnieszka had to bring one of the chairs from the dining room so that they all had a seat. Anke cut a few more slices of bacon from the thick slab of smoked pork on the countertop, put them in the pan, and told Agnieszka to go to the henhouse in back of the barn and bring in all the eggs she could find. One of the three soldiers from the barn, who appeared to be an officer, saw Agnieszka leaving the kitchen and barked an order to one of his men to accompany her. The man – a boy, really, of about 15 or 16 years of age – grabbed his helmet and rifle and followed her outside.

While the bacon continued to fry, the officer noticed the bowl of eggs on the counter and furled his brow. He got up from his chair and counted them as Anke watched him with curiosity. Six very large eggs seemed like too many for just two women, he thought. He asked the first three men if there was anybody else in the house, and they assured him only the two women were at home.

“How thoroughly did you look?” he asked.

“Very thoroughly, Comrade Lieutenant.”

“Did you look in the cellar? In the attic?”

He was met with sheepish eyes. But his stomach was rumbling.

“After we eat, look again. And look everywhere this time.”

As this conversation was in Russian and Anke did not speak the language, she was oblivious to its subject. Agnieszka returned a couple of minutes later with four more eggs in her upturned apron, the boy soldier following her and retaking his seat. Anke wished there had been more, but the Hausers had only a dozen hens, and two of them hadn’t laid this morning. Ten eggs would have to be enough to satisfy the appetites of six famished soldiers.

The Russians gobbled up all the eggs and bacon, ate a full loaf of bread and a small jar of wild strawberry jam, and drained the coffeepot. The two women got nothing at all to eat and had to be satisfied with the intoxicating aroma of the brewed coffee.

Anke’s hopes that the soldiers would peacefully leave after breakfast were dashed when they began searching the house again. This time the contents of closets and dressers were thrown onto the floor and furniture moved or toppled to see if there were trapdoors underneath. The Russians confiscated Albert’s shotgun and brazenly pocketed jewelry and watches and anything else small and portable they felt might have value. Anke and Agnieszka watched helplessly as their most precious possessions were stolen right in front of their eyes, even small picture frames. Anke was thankful that the photographs of her sons tossed onto the floor were from their childhood and they were not wearing German military uniforms that might have enraged her unwelcome guests. The Russians also spotted bottles of schnapps and wine in the dining room and began to drink. Before long four of them were drunk, and they had not yet searched the attic where Irmgard was hiding. The officer and the boy soldier were rooting through the cellar when the men upstairs became boisterous and menacing. They began beckoning to the two women, now frightened, and saying things in slurred Russian that were clearly unpleasant.

Two of them clumsily approached Anke and Agnieszka with evil burning in their eyes, and the women slowly backed away. Agnieszka turned to run from the house and was dragged down from behind by one of the soldiers. He picked her up, threw her down on the dining room table like a sack of grain, and ripped at her clothes while she screamed in terror and flailed helplessly at her attacker. As badly as she wanted to run herself, Anke knew it was pointless, and she could not leave Irmgard behind. She swallowed hard, closed her eyes as the runty Russian, now helmetless, came at her, and she felt two hands roughly seize her by the shoulders and awkwardly steer her into the living room where they stumbled onto the sofa. She kept her eyes shut tightly the entire time and said nothing. She let herself go limp, smelling the alcohol on his breath and the foul odor of his sweaty body as she let him clumsily undress her. She could hear the other two drunk soldiers laughing and Agnieszka’s screams from the dining room and prayed that Irmgard was too far away to hear what was going on two floors beneath her.

The only time the soldier let go of Anke was to unbuckle his belt and unbutton his trousers, and then he was on top of her. She winced and yelped when he squeezed one of her breasts too hard, and she instinctively grabbed his wrist and rolled over onto her side to break his iron grip. She tried to roll completely over onto her stomach, thinking the rape might be less awful this way if her back was to him. But as small as he was, the Russian was powerfully built and strong and pulled her off the sofa and onto the carpet, spinning her onto her back and pinning her shoulders to the floor. Then he was inside her and grunting like a dumb beast as he pumped with his hips at a furious rate. It was over in seconds, and he rolled off her and onto his back, panting from the exertion.

It was over, but it wasn’t all over. Anke had drawn only a couple of deep breaths, thankful to still be alive, when she felt someone else on top of her, someone much larger and heavier than the Russian runt. It had to be one of the laughing soldiers, but she refused to open her eyes and look at him. He rolled over onto his back and placed her on top of him in a sitting position and fondled her breasts, though not as harshly as the runt. But when the impaled Anke merely sat on his pelvis and refused to cooperate, he swore and punched her in the face. Then he wrapped his brawny hands around her hips and pumped her up and down until he exploded inside her. Finished and disgusted with her total lack of enthusiasm, he roughly pushed her off him, and she crashed backward into an end table, knocking off a lamp that shattered on the floor. He swore again and then began sharing laughs with his friends as he buttoned up his trousers.

Anke sat with her back against the table leg, afraid to move for fear she would unduly attract the attention of one of the Russians and she would be raped again. But the four of them had resumed drinking and were laughing and paying no attention to her or Agnieszka, whom she could hear sobbing in the dining room after also having been raped twice. Anke tried to open her eyes, but only her right eye would open all the way. Her left eye was swollen almost shut from the punch. She slowly opened her jaw to determine if any bones might have been broken – she didn’t want to cry out in pain by opening her mouth too wide if a bone had been fractured and give her attackers something else to laugh about – but it seemed as if she had escaped with no damage to her face except a bruise. Her crotch was a different concern. She felt warm fluid trickling from inside her, and she was afraid to look down in case it was blood instead of semen.

She sat motionless on the floor for what seemed like hours, praying that the Russians who had gotten everything they came for would leave the ransacked house. But they appeared to be in no hurry to leave. She was just about ready to doze off when she heard the voice of the Russian officer.

“Look what I found in the attic, comrades!” he barked. His voice both angry and proud at the same time.

Anke didn’t know exactly what he said, but the tone of his voice instantly aroused her maternal instincts. Her good eye popped open wide, and she stopped breathing when she saw Irmgard standing in the doorway next to the stairs, fully dressed but slumped over in distress and weeping uncontrollably between the officer, who held her by her hair, and the boy soldier.

“Irmgard!” she gasped in German. “Nein! Have they hurt you?”

But Irmgard was too terrified to hear or even see her violated, battered, and naked mother on the floor and slumped against the table. It was the first time Anke had spoken in German since the Russians arrived, and if they recognized the language of their enemies they didn’t care. Their lascivious eyes were fixated on the teenager.

“Let Alexei have her!” one of them suggested loudly, referring to the boy soldier. “He’s still a virgin! It’ll be amusing to watch the two of them figure out how to screw!”

The boy blushed.

“Nyet!” the officer replied immediately and firmly and pulling Irmgard against his body. “She’s mine!”

Irmgard shrieked, and Anke managed to pull herself to her feet. She hadn’t understood anything the Russians had said, but she understood clearly their intent. She slowly approached the officer, her arms spread wide as if she were offering herself to be crucified.

“Nyet! Nyet!” she cried out, using the only Russian word she knew before lapsing into Polish. “Take me! Please! Take me! Take me as often as you want! Do to me what you will! But please, please! For God’s sake, leave my daughter alone! She’s only a little girl!”

The officer looked dumbly at Anke. Obviously he couldn’t understand what she was saying. She brought her arms down, cupped her hands against her crotch, and rapidly pushed her hands upward several times while repeating her desire to be taken instead of Irmgard. It was extremely painful, but for the sake of her daughter she did not cry out or even grimace.

“I am a woman! She’s just an innocent little girl who knows nothing!” Anke pleaded. “Take me, please! Not her! Not her! Please!”

The officer watched her with dispassionate curiosity as she sidled up to him and rubbed her body against him while the four older soldiers chuckled and Irmgard, her face smothered in the officer’s tunic, whimpered.

“Take me, please. I’m yours,” Anke cooed softly into his ear, through the sheer strength of will able to hide the disgust in her voice. “I want you. I will satisfy you like no woman ever has. Take me now.”

She reached down with her right hand and began to fondle him through his trousers. Startled, the officer shoved her backward and swore at her as she fell to the floor.

“Whore!”

“Mutti! Mutti!” Irmgard wailed.

An instant later the butt of a rifle cracked into Anke’s skull, and she blacked out. It was a blessing, because she did not have to witness the violent rape of her daughter.

TWELVE

The Cossack bivouacs were scattered throughout southern Austria, and the occupying British army wanted to keep it that way. While General Helmuth von Pannwitz’s soldiers had been disarmed at Feldkirchen, many of the Cossacks in the other encampments had not. Major Charles Villiers’ promise to von Pannwitz that the British would protect the Cossacks from raids by the Yugoslavs if they surrendered their arms had been an empty one. Although Villiers was the British liaison to Tito, the marshal had ignored His Majesty’s Government’s pleas to cease fighting now that the war was over, and the British Eighth Army did not have the manpower to protect all the bivouacs from attacks. So most of the Cossacks in the other camps were allowed to keep their weapons, at least for the present, to defend themselves and their families.

To ease the administrative task ahead of them of complying with the secret terms of the Yalta Agreement to return the Cossacks to the Soviet Union, the British found it in their best interests to keep tens of thousands of armed men as far away from each other as possible. For when the deportations began, turning them over to Stalin’s NKVD in manageable groups was far preferable to possibly provoking an armed uprising should the all the Cossacks be assembled in one location for mass deportation and learn of their fate. In the meantime it was necessary to let the Cossacks believe the British were their friends and protectors and that as a persecuted émigré people they had a bright future in the West.

The Cossacks wanted desperately to believe all of it. Not knowing if they were going to become permanent residents of Austria or if they would be permitted to emigrate to other Western nations, they began building schools and churches and reestablishing community organizations. Weddings were held, babies were born, and infants were christened. The families of the men who had volunteered for the XV Cossack Cavalry Corps and other Wehrmacht units who had already been living in Austria since fleeing revolution-torn Russia a generation before hoped the newest refugees would be as welcome as they had been, and whenever the newcomers came into contact with Austrians in the nearby towns and villages they were treated warmly. The older generation of Cossacks who had been living well and peacefully in France and other Western European nations for a quarter of a century saw no reason why the newest generations could not assimilate just as smoothly into new societies. Only in Yugoslavia, now under communist control, were the Cossacks no longer welcome.

To keep 50,000 or so Cossacks appeased and hopeful, the British army needed an agent who could earn their trust and perpetuate the myth of their future acceptance into the West. When 34-year-old Brigadier General Sir Geoffrey Musson, the commander of the 36^th Infantry Brigade, was looking for suggestions at his headquarters at Oberdrauburg, Colonel Andrew Malcolm told him he had the perfect candidate for the job, a red-haired major in the Welsh Guards named Rusty Davies.

“What makes him the right man for the job?” Musson asked.

“He’s an idealist and a political naïf,” Malcom replied. “You have read ‘Candide’, Brigadier?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, Davies is the embodiment of Dr. Pangloss. Even after two bloody wars in in this century in which tens of millions have died, he still believes we’re living ‘in this, the best of all possible worlds.’ If God allows evil to exist in this universe, then he must have a very good reason for doing so, and ultimately it must lead to something good, something better than we had before, even if we imperfect mortals are blind to it. Give Davies an order, Brigadier, and he’ll follow it without question. He sees things only as they are rather than what they could be. He’s not inclined to look any deeper than the surface because, after all, things must already be perfect. It’s not as if he sees a silver lining to every dark cloud, Brigadier; he sees no clouds at all! The entire universe is wallpapered with the silver of God’s light! All we need to do is tell him what the Cossacks want to hear, and he’ll spread the word like it’s the gospel. If you’ll pardon the pun, Brigadier, an idealist like Major Davies is the ideal man for the job.”

“Quite,” Musson agreed, nodding and smiling.

As expected, Rusty Davies turned out to be extremely popular among the Cossacks. Although he spoke no Russian, he was eternally cheerful and optimistic, and he always carried candy in his pouch that he doled out to the children. A Cossack lieutenant who had an English grandmother served as his translator. After five long years of killing, Davies viewed the salvation of the Cossacks as one of the war’s rewards, and he relished his new role as their liaison with his own nation. He saw them not as a politically persecuted people but as refugees made homeless by the ravages of war. As he traveled from camp to camp, making certain his charges were receiving adequate food, provisions, shelter, and medical care, he was pleased that they seemed to be assimilating so rapidly to their new surroundings in Austria. Whenever he was approached by a Cossack worried about the ultimate fate of his people, Davies reassured him of Great Britain’s benevolence and that the Cossacks would be well taken care of in the post-war world. He was not privy to the master plan to return the Cossacks to the Soviet Union, and his superiors deliberately kept him in the dark.

Not everyone in the bivouacs shared the easygoing Welsh Guardsman’s unbridled optimism, however. In the first weeks following the official end of the hostilities in Europe, rumors constantly filtered into the camps about Russian POWs, turncoats, slave laborers, and Cossacks who had fought in regular Wehrmacht units being handed over to the Soviets by the British and Americans and then immediately executed or shipped to work camps in Siberia and the Urals.

Von Pannwitz was especially troubled by these rumors. With Leutnant Pyotr Kuklin serving as his translator, he began haunting 36^th Infantry Division headquarters and buttonholing every high-ranking officer he encountered. If there were truly no plans presently to turn on Stalin, couldn’t the Cossacks troops be kept together and absorbed into the British army anyway, kept in reserve for a time when war between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies became inevitable? If there was no place for the Cossacks in the British army, perhaps the US Army would welcome them? He repeatedly asked if he could meet with Field Marshal Harold Alexander, who he knew would be sympathetic toward the Cossacks he had fought side by side with during the Russian Civil War, and he was rebuffed each time, told that the field marshal was far too busy attending to more urgent matters. If remaining together as a military unit in one of the western armies was out of the question, then what was to become of the Cossacks?

Everyone at headquarters smiled benignly and gave him a similar version of the same answer: “You have nothing to worry about, General von Pannwitz. Your men and their families are safe with us. The Cossack issue is in channels, and these things take time. You understand. The situation in Europe is still a tad chaotic, and the war with Japan is not yet over. You just need to be patient until an official decision has been reached.”

His questions about the rumors of Russian POWs and workers being handed over to the Soviets were also met with reassurances that “nothing of the sort is going on that we know of, General.”

The more times he was given the same pat answers, the less inclined he was to believe them. The rumors weren’t petering out. They became more rampant every day, and while he knew rumors had a way of taking on a life of their own and circulating at the speed of light, these had an ugly ring of truth to them. While he was unaware of the secret Yalta protocols, von Pannwitz was cognizant of the October, 1944, edict from Moscow that all Russians in the west were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union regardless of their personal wishes. The words of his subordinate, Oberst Hans Joachim von Schultz, uttered before the Cossacks had left Yugoslavia, also echoed in his ears: “Stalin cannot afford to let a bloody lesson such as the one our Cossacks have been teaching him to stand for the entire world to see. He must obliterate it.” He also vaguely recalled something Schultz had said about Stalin holding “the feet of his Western Allies to the fire.”

The British were typically correct when it came to seeing to the welfare of their Cossack prisoners and their families, and they continued to say all the right things. But von Pannwitz found himself trusting the British less and less. He was also concerned about his German officers. Although they had commanded Cossacks, they were nevertheless soldiers of the Wehrmacht, and under the rules of the Geneva Convention they should have been disarmed and sent home as soon as practicable following the cessation of hostilities. He had requested that for the sake of maintaining military discipline among the Cossacks until the issue of their future had been resolved his German officers remain with their men, and the British had readily agreed. Perhaps too readily. Now he was becoming increasingly worried that the Germans – almost every one of them had volunteered to stay with the Cossacks after the surrender – might also be handed over to the vengeful Russians. There were also rumors that while the Russians were demanding the prompt repatriation of their own citizens, they were not repatriating German POWs held in the East.

Toward the end of May he told those 800 or so officers of his concerns and said if they wished to leave the corps and be treated as Wehrmacht prisoners of war he would understand. A few more decided to leave, but the vast majority of them again chose to remain with their fiercely loyal troops.

On the evening of May 27, 1945, von Pannwitz and senior Cossack leaders Pyotr Krasnov, Timophey Domanov, Vyacheslav Naumenko, Nikolai Kulakov, and the flamboyant Andrei Shkuro, were notified to report to 36^th Infantry Division headquarters the next morning. They were told Field Marshal Alexander, who had been scheduled to enter Russian-held Vienna at the head of British occupation forces, would instead be visiting Oberdrauburg, and after weeks of fruitless attempts they would finally be able to meet with him face to face about their future. Furthermore, they were told, Alexander desired to address the entire Cossack officer corps, and 60 lorries would be dispatched to all the bivouacs in southern Austria to bring the 1,500 German and Cossack officers to Oberdrauburg. Krasnov especially was ecstatic to be reunited with Alexander, with whom he had fought shoulder to shoulder in the White Army against the Bolsheviks during World War I.

“This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for all these years!” the old general cried, tears of excitement welling in his eyes, when the senior leadership had gathered at von Pannwitz’s new headquarters near Althofen early the next morning for the 100-kilometer drive to Oberdrauburg. The British had sent several staff cars for the trip. “My old friend Lord Alexander is going to personally deliver the news that King George is accepting the Cossacks into the British Empire! What better choice, what better man could there be to welcome us than Lord Alexander, a man who fought on the front lines for us and has always championed our cause? I shall be saddened to leave our beautiful and beloved homeland behind forever, but at long last we are to be completely free of the Bolsheviks, once and forever!”

The other old Cossacks, proudly dressed in their finest uniforms bedecked with medals, clenched their fists and shook them, smiled broadly or laughed, and exchanged congratulations. Shkuro began singing the banned Russian national anthem, “God Protect the Tsar,” and the others stood and jubilantly joined in.

“Someday, when the devil Stalin and his henchmen have suffered the same fate as the millions of Russian people they have murdered, perhaps we can go back to our stans,” Kulakov, standing on his two hand-carved artificial legs, mused. “But until then let us rejoice and celebrate our entry into our new world!”

“Why are you not wearing your cherkesska today, Pokhodny Ataman?” Shkuro asked von Pannwitz, who was dressed in his German army uniform and smiling but not participating in the celebration. “You are one of us now, and this is a great day for us! Do you not share our joy?”

“I do, I do, Andrei,” von Pannwitz lied through a reassuring smile. “I just felt it more prudent to dress … well, a little more formally for meeting with an English field marshal.”

While he wished he could join in the excitement shared by the Cossacks, he kept his true thoughts private. He thought the celebration might very well be premature. What if there was no announcement? What if today’s meeting was only a negotiation and the first of many before the fate of the Cossacks was decided? And he still couldn’t quite shake the fear churning deep inside his soul that the ceaseless rumors about the fates of “repatriated” Russians were true and the Cossacks were going to be betrayed by the British and handed over to the NKVD. He desperately wanted to believe that the British were their friends and his doubts were unfounded. But there had been so many disappointments during the last two years since Stalingrad, none more bitter than Germany having lost the war. Defeat had not been difficult to accept because he had been a Nazi, for he was not; but no honorable soldier, whether a professional or a conscript, wants to lose. And now, judging from his many recent conversations with the British officers, he was troubled by the knowledge that the Western Allies had no stomach for going to war against Soviet Union. Of what use could the Cossacks truly be to the British Empire if the English and the Americans were determined to go home now that the Third Reich had been vanquished? He tried to bury these doubts and disappointments, but he could not.

Von Pannwitz and the Cossacks, including translator Pyotr Kuklin, resplendent in their colorful native dress, climbed into the waiting staff cars and were chauffeured to Oberdrauburg. Upon arrival at they were ushered into the conference room, and a few moments later a stern-looking Brigadier General Geoffrey Musson entered and greeted his guests politely but bluntly. He didn’t even sit down at the table.

“Gentlemen, thank you all for coming on such short notice. I’ll be brief. I must inform you that Lord Alexander is not coming today, nor was he ever scheduled to come.”

As Kuklin translated, the Cossacks exchanged looks and words of alarm. This had been nothing but a ruse to get them all in one place at the same time! Only von Pannwitz accepted the news dispassionately, nodding slightly several times as his worst fears were being realized.

“Gentlemen,” Musson continued stoically, “I apologize for the subterfuge and wish it did not have to be this way. But I have strict orders to hand over the whole of the Cossack Division to the Soviet authorities. I regret I’m the one who has to tell you this, but the order is categorical. Good day.”

Musson strode out of the room, ignoring the shouted demands of the Cossacks for explanations and to speak directly to Alexander and their implorations as to what was going to happen to their families. Von Pannwitz expected British soldiers to enter the room and place them all under arrest, but when that did not happen he surmised the British were hoping the old men would accept their fates as professional soldiers who had the misfortune of being on the losing side. Because of the respect and reverence they commanded from their men, they would convince the Cossacks to return to their homeland in a peaceful and orderly fashion, just as the soldiers of defeated armies around the world had done for centuries.

“We have been betrayed!” Krasnov cried, and for the second time that morning he began to weep, only this time he was shedding tears of rage instead of joy.

Naumenko and Kulakov also began to sob, and everyone except von Pannwitz cursed the treachery of their duplicitous British hosts. His immediate concern was what the British were going to do with the German and Cossack officers who were being rounded up and allegedly trucked to Oberdrauburg to hear a speech by a field marshal who was not there. He feared the worst, that they were being taken directly to Russian troops on the Mur River, the temporary line of demarcation between the Soviet and British zones in Austria, and being turned over to the NKVD. In this room, isolated from his men, he felt utterly impotent to do anything to help them. He desperately wanted to run from the room, but, realistically, to where? And what could one man – even a general – do to stop an entire army from carrying out its orders?

At the same time the Cossack leaders had been en route to Oberdrauburg, convoys of trucks and armored cars had arrived at the bivouacs scattered throughout southern Austria and brought squads of heavily armed British soldiers who jumped from the beds and formed phalanxes on the road, their weapons at the ready. That was the first indication to Oberst Kaspar von Trockenau that something wasn’t quite right when the convoy, with an escort of two armored cars, braked to a stop at Feldkirchen. Until now the few British guards who patrolled the camps and mingled casually with the Cossacks and played with the children had been lightly armed with rifles slung over their shoulders or pistols snug in their holsters. But these soldiers had submachine guns, heavy machine guns, and mortars and looked as if they were ready for a fight. The Cossacks sensed something was amiss as well and stopped whatever they were doing and froze in place like wild animals in the forest that hear an unfamiliar sound. Even the smallest children stood motionless in their tracks. When Major Davies, the omnipresent friendly smile on his face, approached von Trockenau, greeted him warmly, and in passable German informed him the German and Cossack officers would have to surrender their sidearms and swords before boarding the trucks, von Trockenau knew something was wrong, perhaps even terribly wrong.

“Why?” he asked. “Do you think one of us is going to assassinate Field Marshal Alexander?”

“No, no! Not at all!” Davies chuckled nervously. “But those are the orders I have been given, Oberst von Trockenau. It’s the same at all the other camps, I assure you. All officers attending Lord Alexander’s speech are to be disarmed.”

“I don’t understand,” von Trockenau insisted. “We have kept our sidearms for weeks, in the other camps our soldiers have not even been required to surrender their rifles, and there has not been one single incident involving your men that I am aware of. So why now all of a sudden?”

“Frankly, Oberst von Trockenau, I have no idea,” Davies replied in total honesty. “I just do what I’m told. It’s not my place to question the decisions of my superiors.”

“Perhaps you should!” von Trockenau blurted out before immediately apologizing. He knew that orders were orders, and questioning them was not within the purview of front-line officers, NCOs, or the lowest private in any army he knew of. Only rarely did soldiers so far down in the ranks get even a glimpse of the larger picture. They weren’t expected to understand the rationale behind their orders. They were given their small roles in the grand scheme, and it was their duty to perform them.

“If we hand them over, will we get them back at the end of the day?” he asked.

“So far as I know, yes,” Davies said. “I have not heard anything to the contrary.”

“So why the show of force? Just look around you. It’s very upsetting to my men and their families.”

Davies shrugged.

“Again, those are the orders, Oberst. A mere precaution, I imagine. We all know how dearly the Cossacks treasure their weapons, and we wish to avoid any possibility of trouble. Technically, you know, you are all prisoners of war and shouldn’t be armed at all.”

“I don’t think any other ‘prisoners of war,’ as you call them, Major Davies, are being hunted by communist Yugs.”

“And that’s why you have been permitted to keep your weapons, Oberst. I know most of your men here in Feldkirchen have already been disarmed, but so far as I know the troops in the other bivouacs are not being told to give up their guns today. Just the officers. I’m sure you will all get them back when you return from Oberdrauburg this afternoon. Please tell your officers to hand their pistols and cutlery to my men when they board the trucks.”

“Why are you collecting them? Why can’t we just leave our weapons with our other belongings?”

“My orders are to collect them, Oberst. I wasn’t told why. Perhaps there are concerns someone will smuggle a weapon into the event. I’ll leave a couple of men here to guard the cache until you get back.”

“And again I ask, Major Davies, why would any of my officers want to kill the field marshal? We want to be on your side. All of us, Deutsche and Kosaken. Your orders don’t make any sense.”

Davies lifted an eyebrow.

“In all your years in the deutsche army, you’ve never been asked to carry out an order that didn’t make sense to you, Oberst?” he asked. “Even in an army as professional and well-disciplined as yours, I find that impossible to believe.”

Von Trockenau laughed in spite of himself.

“Ach, ja! Some of them really ludicrous! Especially during the last few years.”

“But you obeyed them anyway,” Davies said with a satisfied smile.

“Of course! To the best of my ability! Always! But afterward, I’ll admit, most of them still didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Then you should have no qualms about obeying this order, Oberst, regardless of how senseless it may seem. On my honor as a British officer I give you my word there is nothing sinister behind this order.”

Von Trockenau was still suspicious, but he had no reason to distrust Davies or the British who had been so kind and benevolent to the Cossacks these past few weeks. So he told the officers at Feldkirchen to obey the order, and most of them handed their weapons to British soldiers who dropped them into large canvas sacks, some for pistols and others for swords and daggers, before they climbed into the backs of the trucks. A few, however, like von Trockenau still had their doubts about the order and slipped away to hide their weapons inside their rooms or tents or give them to their wives to conceal beneath their clothes. When asked where their guns were when their time came to board the trucks, they claimed to have given them up when von Pannwitz surrendered. After being searched by the guards, they were herded aboard the trucks, and the stone-faced British soldiers sat in the back with them during the journey. The officers, like those in their senior leadership, were proudly wearing their best uniforms and medals for the occasion, though they all felt underdressed without pistols, swords, and daggers in their sashes. Von Trockenau noticed that in the truck behind the one in which he was riding a Cossack had brought the division’s standard displaying the yellow crested flag of Imperial Russia. It was rippling in the wind, and it brought a thin smile to his troubled face.

The serpentine mountain road through southern Austria’s picturesque Gurktal Alps took the convoy southwest along the shore of Lake Ossiacher until it reached the Drau River and turned northwest. It was a gorgeous spring day, the sun was warm upon von Trockenau’s face, and when he closed his eyes the war seemed like a nightmare he had experienced a long, long time ago. He dozed off.

The rapid deceleration and groaning brakes of stopping trucks and the alarmed shouts from the officers jolted him awake. Von Trockenau quickly looked around to get his bearings and within seconds recognized they were not in Oberdrauburg but in the town of Spittal, about 30 kilometers short of their expected destination. British soldiers were jumping down from the trucks, pointing their Sten guns menacingly at the confused Cossacks, and shouting at them in English and gesturing at them to get off. Von Trockenau stood up and saw a field enclosed by barbed wire a few hundred meters away. Cossack officers from an earlier convoy and separate bivouac had been imprisoned and were lined up forlornly behind the wire, watching helplessly as another flock of their unwitting countrymen arrived. His heart sank.

When some of the officers were slow to get off the truck, they were struck by the butts of the British guns and recoiled from the unexpected blows, some falling to the ground with blood running down their faces. Von Trockenau saw several officers from other trucks make a break toward a nearby forest, and the British shot at them. While the Cossacks cheered them on, all but two were hit and fell before they could reach the trees.

Later, when his mind was clearer, von Trockenau would realize that had every one of the several hundred Cossacks in the convoy made a run for it at the same time, many would have made it into the woods. For even though the British had automatic weapons, there were too few of them to have been able to massacre them all before they were out of range. But he and the others who did not run harbored the hope that this was all some sort of mistake, that there was a reasonable explanation for why they were being herded into a prison camp, and that it was only a temporary inconvenience until things were sorted out.

After the shooting stopped, both German and Cossack officers were told to put their hands on their heads and were marched inside the barbed wire enclosure. There were no permanent buildings, latrines, or any shelter at all inside the wire except for a few large tents. It was just an empty pasture that had been fenced off and was being patrolled by British guards walking in pairs around the perimeter.

At 36^th Infantry headquarters 30 kilometers away, the senior Cossack leadership was being ushered back to the same cars that had brought them to Oberdrauburg. Von Pannwitz was intercepted on his way to the door and asked to linger for a few moments because Brigadier Musson wanted a word with him. Accompanied by Kuklin, von Pannwitz was shown into the British commander’s office and offered a chair. A seething but stoic von Pannwitz said he preferred to stand.

“As you wish,” Musson said, remaining seated behind his desk. He eyed Kuklin suspiciously because of his desire to keep the conversation private, but since he spoke no Russian and von Pannwitz spoke no English, he accepted a translator was necessary.

“Speaking as one gentleman and general officer to another,” Musson began, “I understand that while you have been commanding a corps of Cossack cavalry, you are a German and neither a Cossack nor a Russian. As such, I respect your position, General Pannwitz, and I am well aware of your exemplary war record.”

Von Pannwitz had an almost irresistible urge to cuss out the British brigadier for having betrayed his men to the Russians. But he knew the decision had not been Musson’s to make and that it had come from a much higher authority, and Musson was just as powerless over it as he was. So von Pannwitz did not respond but kept his eyes trained straight ahead and stared out the window of the brigadier’s cramped office.

“So there is no reason,” Musson continued, “why you should have to suffer the same fate as your Cossacks. The Russians have demanded the senior German commanders be turned over to them with the rest of the Cossacks as collaborators in the betrayal of Soviet Union, and His Majesty’s Government has agreed. I regret to say there is nothing I can do about that. But frankly, General Pannwitz, if I may offer my opinion, Stalin is right about the Cossacks being traitors. They should be returned to Russia and punished.”

Now von Pannwitz looked directly into Musson’s eyes, his own blazing, and rudely interrupted him.

“If you believe the Cossacks to be traitors, Brigadier, then clearly you do not know them or how they have suffered under the Communists during the last 25 years! They have been persecuted, enslaved, and murdered, and not just the soldiers who were loyal to the tsar but their wives and children! All they wanted was to be left alone to live their lives in peace and preserve their culture, which was why they joined our side to fight against their oppressors!

“Why, I vividly remember riding into a Ukrainian town three years ago and finding hundreds of Cossacks, old and young, men, women, and children, standing on a railroad platform – during a critical time in the war when the Red Army was fighting for its survival, I remind you! – and waiting to be deported to Siberia or some other godforsaken place to await their doom! We saved those people! And now Stalin wants them back? Why? So he can finish the job of exterminating them? I find it incredible – absolutely incredible, Brigadier – that England, one of the most civilized nations in the world, can be so cavalier, so cruel, as to turn over an entire people to a government that hates them so they can be butchered and wiped off the face of the earth! I understand, Brigadier Musson, this was not your decision to make. But I am shocked to stand in front of you and hear that you endorse the extinction of a people and their culture!”

With typical British reserve, Musson had calmly listened to von Pannwitz’s rebuke as Kuklin translated it for him. In response he remained even-tempered.

“I endorse nothing of the sort, General Pannwitz. But as a military man I can appreciate that turncoats jeopardize the security of armies and entire nations, and by their act of treason the Cossacks jeopardized the security of one of our allies at – as you so expertly pointed out – a critical time in the war when the outcome was still very much in doubt and they were needed most urgently. I firmly believe traitors should have to stand in judgment in the countries they betrayed and pay the piper for their actions, and as outsiders it is not our province to interfere. Having said that, I am somewhat familiar with their history, General Pannwitz, and I do hope that Marshal Stalin finds it somewhere in his heart to show some mercy to these traitors. But if not …well, it’s really none of our affair, I’m afraid.”

“And the Cossack women and children? What is to become of them, Brigadier, when their men are all gone?”

“Ah, yes, the women and children,” Musson said softly. “Marshal Stalin wants them back too.”

Kuklin was now despondent over hearing the fate of his people and unable to keep his voice from cracking in a throat that had suddenly gone dry as he translated. Von Pannwitz was outraged.

“And you’re going to hand them over? What for? They are not traitors! They have not taken up arms against the Russians! They have done nothing wrong except to be born Cossacks!”

“No. You’re right. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather sit down, General?”

“Nein … danke!”

“Very well. It is my understanding that Marshal Stalin wants all of his citizens returned, and that has been agreed upon by all the Allies. Men, women, and children. No exceptions. I’m sorry, but those are the terms, and those are my orders.”

“You know they will all be murdered, Brigadier.”

“I don’t know that. What’s more, you don’t know that for certain either, General Pannwitz.”

“I assure you, Brigadier, there is no room for mercy in Stalin’s heart. His heart is as black as the dark side of the moon. He will kill them all.”

“If he does, as I mentioned moments ago that’s his prerogative. It’s an internal Russian affair and none of our business except to ensure that he gets his people back,” Musson said coldly. “Tens of millions have already died in this war, General. Really, if it comes to that, what do another 50,000 or so more matter?”

“They are not casualty numbers on a page, Brigadier,” von Pannwitz pointed out. “They are people – living, breathing human beings – and they matter very much to me! When the rest of the world finds out what the British have done to the Cossacks, your nation will be condemned for this treachery.”

A mirthless laugh that sounded more like a grunt emitted from Musson’s chest.

“I sincerely doubt the rest of the world will even notice, much less care, General. Don’t forget: The victors write the history, not the losers. What happens here will not merit so much as a single paragraph in the history books.”

NINETEEN

Everything the American lieutenant told Kurt Vogelsang in Austria about the terrible treatment awaiting surrendered German soldiers appeared to be the truth. At the end of May he and the men of his Waffen-SS platoon found themselves back in Germany and dumped in an open field surrounded by a two-meter-high fence of barbed wire near the town of Andernach on the western side of the Rhine River. In spite of the sardonic warning he had received from his contemptuous interrogator, Vogelsang was both shocked and overwhelmed by what he saw. There were about 50,000 prisoners of war crammed inside the makeshift enclosure when he arrived.

Thousands of them were in deplorable condition. They looked starved, and their eyes were hollow and lifeless. They were unshaven and unwashed. Their uniforms were grimy, torn, and often in tatters. Uniforms that were still in reasonable condition no longer fit and draped loosely over bony frames. Many of them looked sick, had open sores on their faces and limbs, dirty rags instead of clean bandages covering old battle wounds, and when they moved at all they shuffled rather than walked. Most squatted and remained that way for hours at a time, idly smoking cigarettes and staring into the distance at nothing. They spoke little or not at all, as if they could no longer summon the energy to part their cracked and scabrous lips.

Vogelsang quickly determined that the physical condition of the prisoners and their uniforms dated their times of arrival at Andernach. The weakest, sickest, and filthiest among them had been there the longest, at least since the US Army had crossed the Rhine at Remagen in March, invaded the German heartland, and begun taking prisoners by the thousands as the Third Reich neared collapse. The vast majority of the soldiers, however, had been in Andernach only since the end of the war, or about three weeks, and they were still in reasonably good shape and comparatively clean. Unlike the earliest arrivals who now had thick beards and long uncut and unkempt hair, thousands of those who surrendered at war’s end were boys in their mid to late teens who were barely old enough to shave and displayed mostly stubble on their chins.

The pen provided no facilities or shelter whatsoever, not even for the Americans guarding them. There were no buildings, no tents, not even guard towers. Heavily armed American soldiers patrolled the pen in jeeps and on foot and were billeted in the nearby homes of German citizens who had been evicted by the conquerors. The spring of 1945 had been wetter and colder than normal, and many prisoners lived in foxholes they had dug in the ground and covered with ponchos, greatcoats, and field jackets to keep out the rain and cold and provide shade from the sun. But because the holes filled with water and even collapsed during heavy rains, sometimes drowning the occupants or burying them alive in mud, others felt safer living on the ground, sleeping in sitting positions while pulling their shabby outer garments around them to ward off the cold, wind, and damp.

There was not a tree, shrub, or blade of grass to be seen inside the wire, nothing but dirt and mud. What grass that had covered the earth when the compound was established had long since been trampled into the ground or eaten by starving prisoners. There was no open space anywhere. There was scarcely room to stand, much less stretch out. As far as the eye could see there was only filthy, hungry, and wretched humanity living in abject squalor.

The last time I saw so many soldiers in one place, Vogelsang thought upon his arrival, was in Hungary during Fall Frühlingserwachen when the Ivans attacked us in human wave after human wave.

But these soldiers were not ferocious warriors intent on killing; they were beaten and thoroughly demoralized men just trying to survive from one day to the next.

The ami Leutnant was not exaggerating, Vogelsang thought after living inside the pen for a few days. Compared to this hellish place, the schoolyard where he and his men had been temporarily held as prisoners in Austria was the Garden of Eden.

There was never enough fresh water in the US Army tank trucks parked inside the wire to quench the thirst of 50,000 prisoners, even though the Rhine was only a few hundred meters away. Men were forced to drink from puddles or rainwater captured in upturned helmets and even their own urine in a vain attempt to stave off dehydration. There wasn’t nearly enough food to satisfy their hunger. The prisoners received far less than half the minimum number of daily calories needed to sustain health and life as they tried to subsist on watery soup and bread from the mobile Army kitchens that were staffed by former Wehrmacht cooks and bakers. When tins of US Army K-rations were occasionally distributed, the only meat in their diet, prisoners had to queue up and run a gantlet of laughing American GIs who handed them the small cans as they passed. Prisoners who in their weakened states stumbled and fell or dropped their tins were beaten by sticks and rifle butts.

There were no latrines, and the prisoners had to urinate or defecate into open trenches. In order to defecate they had to shinny out on logs thrown across the ditches, and it was not unusual – especially at night and no artificial light – for sick and starving men to lose their balance, tumble into the cesspools, and drown.

There were a few German doctors in the pen, but they were helpless. There were no infirmaries and no medicines, morphine, anesthetics, or other medical supplies. There was no treatment for men suffering from dysentery, typhus, pneumonia, and other maladies. Wounds, cuts, and sores festered and became infected and gangrenous. The cacophony of men screaming out in excruciating pain was constant, and there was nothing anybody could do to ease their suffering except wait for them to pass out or die. Those who went mad from hunger and thirst howled until exhaustion overcame them and they fell asleep for an hour or two.

Dozens died every day, their bodies quickly stripped of anything useful by their desperate comrades. Prisoners were detailed to carry the corpses to an army dump truck waiting outside the gate and stack them like cordwood in the back. The truck would drive to a mass grave nearby and dump the dead into it.

It wasn’t difficult for prisoners to slip through the barbed wire fence. But jeeps with mounted machine guns patrolled the perimeter 24 hours a day, and sentries were placed within shouting distance of one another with orders to shoot to kill. Germans who attempted to escape were shot on sight, and gunshots could be heard intermittently day and night.

Vogelsang had been in Andernach for about a week when on an uncomfortably hot and cloudless day he was approached by a tall and rangy SS-Hauptsturmführer around 30 years old who introduced himself as Ajax Diehl. He had a scruffy beard, wore a patch over his left eye, had scars from burns on his forehead, and walked with a slight limp. But he otherwise appeared healthy, and except for a missing epaulette and a few sweat stains his uniform with the cuff band of the “Das Reich” Division was presentable. He spoke with a Bavarian accent and offered Vogelsang a cigarette, an American Lucky Strike that he gratefully accepted and lit with the captain’s battered trench lighter.

“I saw you and your men come through the gate a few days ago,” Diehl said as the two men squatted facing each other. “I was curious how it took so long for the Amis to find you since the war has been over for a few weeks. Where were you hiding out? Or were you in another prison camp and transferred to his godforsaken pigsty?”

Vogelsang heard himself laughing involuntarily.

“Honestly, until a few days ago we didn’t know the war was over, Herr Hauptsturmführer.”

“Call me Ajax,” Diehl interrupted with a smile that betrayed unbrushed and yellowing teeth. “We’ve never been much for formalities in the Waffen-SS, and now that the war has ended and we are no longer recognized as soldiers there is even less reason for it. Which division were you in?”

There was no identifying cuff band on a Waffen-SS camouflage uniform, which Vogelsang was wearing.

“‘Hitlerjugend.’ Anyway, we were being chased through the Austrian Alps by the Yugs when we found out the war was over. We hadn’t been able to communicate with division headquarters, so we didn’t know for several days. I don’t think the Yugs knew either. I guess when they found out was when they stopped chasing us. We couldn’t have surrendered to them, or they would have butchered us. We all knew that, so our orders had been to surrender to the Amis when the war was over. But we had a devil of a time finding any! After a few days wandering through the Austrian countryside we finally chanced across an Ami patrol near Salzburg and surrendered. My platoon and I were sent here. We thought the Amis would treat us better than the Ivans and the Yugs, but outside of the fact we haven’t been shot I can’t see any difference. I thought the Amis were supposed to be a civilized and compassionate people, Ajax.”

“We all did, Kurt. Obviously we were misinformed. But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. From what I remember of amerikanische history, they owned slaves until less than a century ago, and they wiped out all the Indians. The only difference I can see between being prisoners of the Amis instead of the Ivans is that here we die a slower, crueler death. At least the Ivans are merciful enough to put a bullet in the back of our heads.”

“Why are they treating us this way?” Vogelsang asked. “Is this even legal under the rules of war? What about the Geneva Convention? Aren’t we, as prisoners of war, guaranteed certain rights?”

Diehl shook his head and chuckled.

“Ja, we are. And I’m pretty much an expert when it comes to the Geneva Convention! While I was recovering from these wounds” – he pointed to his head – “I suffered on the Eastern Front at Kharkov, I was made commandant at a POW camp near Furstenberg, Stalag IIIB, for several months. The POWs were mostly Ivans, and we didn’t do much to keep them alive. Why should we have? Stalin never signed the Geneva Convention, and he murdered and starved our POWs to death. He didn’t even care enough about his own POWs to send them winter clothing or let them get mail from home. He called them all traitors because they chose to surrender instead of die for Mother Russia. If he was willing to let them freeze to death in our Stalag as punishment, why should we do anything to prevent it? We fed them just enough to keep them alive and gave them shelter. They died by the hundreds anyway.

“But we also had some Amis and a lot of Tommis in the camp, mostly fliers who had been shot down,” Diehl continued after taking a puff from his own cigarette. “We kept them separated from the Ivans, and with them we adhered as closely to the Geneva Convention as we could. Ja, ja, there were times when we couldn’t feed them as much as we were obligated to, or keep the barracks as warm as we were supposed to. But our own soldiers in the field and many of the folks back home were facing the same deprivations, and difficult choices sometimes had to be made. And, ja, I confess perhaps we overstepped our authority sometimes when it came to administering punishment. The Amis were especially incorrigible and had no respect for authority!

“But they had a roof over their heads, glass in the windows, and the barracks were dry. We never stopped them from sending or receiving mail or packages from home and Red Cross parcels. We gave them the best medical care we possibly could under the circumstances. There were latrines and showers, and they were allowed plenty of fresh air and exercise. We let the Red Cross visit the camp. We complied with the Geneva Convention as best we could, and the Amis must know that.”

“So why are they treating us this way now? The war is over. Why don’t they just let us go home?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense,” Diehl replied. “I do know Andernach is not the only one of these camps. Sometimes men get transferred to and from other camps, and although the townsfolk aren’t supposed to talk to us or give us anything, sometimes they risk punishment and do. They tell us there are a dozen camps just like this one all up and down the Rhine, maybe more, and some of them a lot bigger. I made friends with one of the guards, a boy who learned Deutsch in high school in Amerika, speaks it passably well, and seems to be disgusted by the way we’re being treated. He told me the Amis do not consider us prisoners of war. He said we are something called ‘disarmed enemy forces’ and not covered by the Geneva Convention.”

“‘Disarmed enemy forces?’ What does that mean?” Vogelsang inquired. “Aren’t all prisoners of war disarmed enemy forces?”

Diehl shrugged and shook his head.

“I do not see the distinction either. But the war is over, they won, and I guess they get to make the rules now. Who is going to stop them?”

“Isn’t the Red Cross supposed to make certain the rules are followed? You said yourself the Red Cross was allowed into your Stalag.”

“They’re not allowed in here. A couple of days after I got here two trucks and an automobile pulled up to the gate. They all had the Red Cross painted on the doors. Some civilians got out of the car – one of them a woman dressed as a nurse – and were met by an Ami officer and several guards. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but the conversation was animated, and there was a lot of gesticulating by the Ami officer. After about ten minutes the Red Cross people got back in their car and drove away with the trucks following them. I found out later from my new Ami friend that the Red Cross wanted to inspect the camp, and the trucks were loaded with food and medical supplies. They were turned away. They weren’t even allowed to leave the food and medical supplies behind.

“But my young Ami friend tells me the Red Cross is allowed in the town,” Diehl continued. “They serve hot coffee – real coffee! – and some sort of pastry he called ‘dough nuts’ to the Ami soldiers. He said they don’t even need it. They have more than enough to eat and plenty of coffee while out here we starve. The soldiers only visit the Red Cross station so they can flirt with the women. The Red Cross isn’t allowed to give anything to the townsfolk either, and it’s almost as bad for them as it is for us. It’s crazy, Kurt!”

“I know they shoot prisoners who try to escape,” Vogelsang said, “but there are 50,000 of us and only a few Amis. With things in here so terrible, why don’t more of us try to escape at the same time while we still have the strength to do so? They can’t shoot us all, Ajax. Most of us would get away.”

“Ja. And where would we go? Most of us are a long way from home – those of us who still might have homes – and no way to get there. The people have been told that to give us food or aid of any sort – or even talking to us – is punishable by imprisonment or even execution. Even so, some of the townsfolk from Andernach sneak up to the wire at night and pass to us what little they can spare. We are grateful for what we get, even though it barely makes a difference and, personally, I don’t think it’s worth the risk. My young Ami friend tells me the jail at the police station is overflowing with people who have been caught trying to help us, and some of them have been locked up for weeks.

“So what is the point of escaping, Kurt? I am sure our people would help us in any they could, even under the threat of punishment, because they’re good people. But what do good people who already have nothing themselves have to give? ‘Das Reich’ was with ‘Hitlerjugend’ in Hungary, so I know where you’ve been fighting, and it has been months since you were last in Deutschland, Kurt. Deutschland is in total ruin. Nobody has anything anymore. Sure, maybe they can offer a little something to one or two Kriegsgefangene who turn up at their doors. But use your head, Kurt! Ja, we are 50,000 and outnumber our captors. But we are just one camp out of many! Imagine what it would be like if everyone broke out of every Kriegsgefangnis at the same time and hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions – of us flooded the countryside! Who could feed all of us? Who could give so many of us shelter?

“Na. We would be no better off outside the wire than we are inside, and as difficult as it is to say it, our people are a little better off with us in here. I think most of us in here understand that, if not consciously then instinctively. Ja, we all want to go home. Ja, we are all desperate to get out of his hellhole. But we are soldiers, we are familiar with how hard that life is, and we – especially those of us in the Waffen-SS – were all prepared to die for the Fatherland. So it is better if we remain where we are and hope and pray things change for the better and someday the Amis let us go home. Only those broken men whose minds are the weakest try to escape from here. I think most of them hope they are shot to put them out of their misery. How else to explain why so many of them slip through the wire in daylight when they would have a much better chance of escaping in darkness? Sometimes they’re not trying to escape at all. Sometimes they’re just trying to reach the Rhine to satisfy their thirst.”

Diehl paused to draw on his cigarette. Vogelsang lowered his head and nodded that he understood.

Then a loud sigh burst from the captain’s lungs along with a cloud of smoke. He swept the field cap from his head with his left hand, grabbed it by the bill, and wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Vogelsang saw that most of his hair had been burned off and his scalp was as scarred as his forehead.

“My only regret,” Diehl said as he replaced his cap, “is that my wife and children do not know if I’m alive or dead. Of all the articles of the Geneva Convention the Amis have broken, the one that pains me the most is that we are not allowed to send or receive mail. Not even the postcard to let our families know we are alive, our state of health, and where we are! It is as if we no longer exist as human beings and have been condemned by the Amerikaner to linger in some sort of purgatory between heaven and hell.”

“We are not allowed to write?” Vogelsang replied in disbelief.

Diehl shook his head sadly.

“I thought at first it was because the postal system broke down after the surrender, along with everything else in Deutschland, and it would have been pointless to write since no mail was being delivered. But the men who have been here for months when the war was still going on tell me they were never allowed to send or get mail or let their families know where they were. To me, denying us contact with our families is the cruelest thing the Amis could have done. Nobody knows if we’re dead or alive. Are you married?”

“Nay. I am only 18, Ajax! But I have a girlfriend back in Hannoversch Münden I hope to marry someday, and I haven’t heard from her since before Christmas. Petra was working in a radar facility in Holland, and I hope she is all right. I have another close friend, also a girl – the three of us are best friends and inseparable – with whom I exchange letters. Sigi was in a school to become an officer in the RAD, and I haven’t heard from her in a long time either. I have written both of them whenever I could find a quiet moment. But ‘Hitlerjugend’ was on the move so much, I don’t think our mail ever caught up to us. I don’t even know if they received my letters. Tell me about your family, Ajax.”

A small smile appeared on Diehl’s scarred face while he gently stubbed out his Lucky Strike. He didn’t throw the butt away. Instead he dropped it into the pocket of his tunic. Later he would extract the last few unburned shreds of tobacco and put them in a small and dented round tin with the remains of other smoked cigarettes. When he had collected enough tobacco, he could either use it to roll a new cigarette or trade it for something he needed.

“My wife’s name is Waltraud, and she is the most beautiful woman in the whole world,” he said dreamily. “I wish I could show you her photograph, but I had it taped to the inside of my Panzer. When my tank was hit by a shell and caught fire, I had to leave her picture behind. I’m lucky, though, because her image never fades from my mind. We have four boys, including twins, aged two to eight, and they are the most precious little children you can imagine. They are all imps – especially the twins – but very smart! We live in Füssen, at the foot of the Alps, and out our bedroom window we can see the magnificent Neuschwanstein Castle built by the mad King Ludwig. I’m sure you’ve seen photographs. It is so peaceful and beautiful there.”

Diehl stopped and sighed again. A tear formed in the corner of his one good eye.

“I do hope I will get to see my family and Füssen at least one more time before I die. I gladly would have died on the battlefield for Fatherland and Führer. But I don’t want to die in this gottverlassen place, not without Waltraud and my sons ever knowing I was even here.”

Vogelsang didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing and left SS-Hauptsturmführer Diehl alone in his reverie. Diehl snapped out of his brief trance a few moments later, reached into the other pocket of his tunic, produced the wrinkled pack of Lucky Strikes, shook one loose, and lit it. He didn’t offer one this time to Vogelsang, who eyed it with envy after having just finished the one he had been given. Cigarettes were too precious to give away indiscriminately, and they both knew it, so Vogelsang did not begrudge the captain for hoarding them. Diehl looked at the butt Vogelsang had dropped on the ground and crushed with his boot.

“I’ll take that if you don’t want it, Kurt.”

“Ach, ja! Of course! How thoughtless of me! Tut mir leid!”

Vogelsang picked up the flattened butt and handed it to Diehl, who added it to the expanding cache in the opposite pocket. Vogelsang was glad he hadn’t ground the butt into the dirt and scattered its contents.

“You haven’t been a Kriegsgefangener long enough to know the value of tobacco, boy,” Diehl said with a thin smile. “But you’ll learn quickly, if you want to survive.”

If he had disintegrated the butt with the heel of his boot, Vogelsang wondered if the captain would have scratched through the dirt for the shreds after they had parted ways. Probably, he decided. Nein, almost certainly! He did have a lot to learn, and if he didn’t, he knew he would die quickly in this dreadful place.

“Where did you get amerikanische Zigaretten, Ajax?” he asked.

“From the Amis. You can trade for them.”

“Trade what?”

“Whatever you have that you don’t need and they want,” Diehl explained. “They mostly want wristwatches, rings, and souvenirs like medals, badges, ribbons, uniform buttons, belt buckles, helmets, and unit patches. The death’s head pin some of us wore on our hatbands, and collar tabs and patches with the SS runes, are the most popular with the Amis. I have to say this for the Amis: As cruel and vicious as they can be at times, at least they aren’t thieves like the Ivans. Sure, a few of them steal; there are bad apples in every barrel. But most of them are willing to trade Zigaretten and food for things that have become useless to us in here. Of what value is an Iron Cross when you’re starving, I ask you? I traded my Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves for half a carton of Lucky Strikes. They’re not supposed to trade with us, of course, and they can be punished if they’re caught. But they do it anyway. Even their officers!”

“But why do you trade for Zigaretten? Isn’t food more essential?” Vogelsang asked.

Diehl laughed out loud.

“Ja! Clearly you are new here and not hungry enough, boy! We can never trade what little we have for enough food. But smoking takes the edge off our hunger, and Zigaretten are the only currency we have inside here. We can’t trade an Iron Cross for something another prisoner has that we might want, for example, half of a loaf of bread he might have stolen from the kitchen. But he will swap some of his bread for a couple Zigaretten.”

Vogelsang nodded that he understood.

“What I don’t understand now,” he said, “is why the Amis would want things from us that they could have picked up for nothing on a battlefield.”

Diehl smiled.

“Our guards and their officers never saw any combat,” he explained. “The war was just about over when they arrived in Europe, and most of them were sitting around in replacement depots in Belgium when we surrendered. So while the seasoned troops are going home to Amerika, the replacements are given duty like this.

“Young fools that they are, many of them are bitter that they never got to shoot any Deutsche,” Diehl continued, shaking his head in dismay. “They don’t understand or appreciate how lucky they were not to have killed anyone, not to have seen men across the lines and standing next to them blown into little bits or bleeding to death in front of their eyes. They will never wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat from the nightmares of combat. You and I know that, Kurt. Over time we become used to seeing the blood and the brutality, perhaps even immune to it. But we never forget it! Those terrible memories will haunt us for the rest of our lives!”

“Every night I try to stay awake as long as I can,” Vogelsang said softly, nodding, “because I know once I fall asleep the nightmares begin. When my eyelids start to get heavy, I think of Petra and hope she remains in my dreams when I fall asleep. But she never does. The dead and the maimed always crowd her out of my mind.”

“When I was your age,” Diehl chuckled, “I used to wake up almost every morning with a glorious erection as hard as an oak tree after a vivid sex dream. Now I wake up every morning trembling and in a puddle of my own sweat.”

He took another puff from his cigarette.

“Anyway, these foolish Ami boys blame us for surrendering before they had their chance to kill us. My young Ami friend says they see photographs and read stories in their army newspaper about Himmler’s death camps for the Jews and think all Deutsche are no better than brutish animals. So when they’re not trading with us, they take out their frustrations and anger on us by beating us whenever the opportunity arises. I shudder to imagine what they will start doing to us when we’ve run out of things to trade! You’ve heard the shots from rifles and machine guns when prisoners attempt to escape. But have you heard shots from a .45-caliber pistol from time to time since you’ve been here?”

“I have. I know the difference between the sounds from a rifle and a pistol, Ajax.”

“I would doubt your combat credentials as a soldier if you didn’t. My young Ami friend tells me his captain sits on the little hill outside the wire with a bottle of wine some afternoons and slowly empties a clip from his .45 into the camp just for entertainment. The other Amis call him Buffalo Bill.”

“Who is Buffalo Bill?”

Diehl shrugged.

“I never heard of him either. But my young Ami friend tells me Buffalo Bill was some sort of cowboy, like Old Shatterhand I guess, who rode around shooting thousands of buffalo just for sport. And now, when there once were millions, there are no buffalo left in Amerika because they’ve all been slaughtered.”

Vogelsang shook his head sadly.

“All these horrible things they are doing here to us … Amerika isn’t the great paradise I read about when I was a little boy.”

The days passed anonymously from spring into summer, and the conditions at Andernach worsened. Twice the rations of the prisoners were cut until they were receiving barely 1,000 calories per day. By early July the German soldiers with the most severe and untreated wounds had all died. Disease was rampant, and the number of dead removed from the camp rose to nearly a hundred some days. Now that the days were hotter, thirst became an even bigger problem. About as many men were dying of dehydration as from starvation and sickness. More and more of them were shot when they slipped through the wire and tried to reach the waters of the Rhine. They were too weak to run or dodge and made easy targets for the gunners.

Things were nearly as bad in the town itself, Vogelsang and Diehl were told by their German-speaking American friend. Diehl had introduced him to Vogelsang shortly after the initial meeting between the two Waffen-SS officers. The GI’s name was Louis Champagne, and he was from a place in the state of Vermont he called the Northeast Kingdom. Private Champagne said the citizens of Andernach were also beginning to starve because Poles, Russians, Czechs, and other Eastern Europeans living in displaced persons camps would drive up in trucks, search the houses, and take whatever food they found. The Americans did nothing to stop them and sometimes, if they were bored, even helped the DPs load the food onto their trucks. The Red Cross did not intervene either. At night hungry townspeople were constantly rooting through the trash and garbage cans outside a restaurant that had been turned into Army mess hall, looking for something to eat until some GI would spot them and chase them away.

“And yet they still sneak up to the wire at night and pass food to us,” Diehl said sadly.

“Not as much as before,” Vogelsang added. “But now we know why. God bless them for sharing with us when they have so little themselves. You would think they would be angry with us for losing the war and bringing all this misery upon them. But they’re not.”

Champagne did not smoke, so he distributed his weekly cigarette ration among prisoners he was friendly with while taking nothing in return. He also purloined food from the Army’s pantry and threw it over the fence whenever he had the chance. He couldn’t smuggle food through the front gate because the guards searched everyone entering the camp for contraband. Champagne always received more scrutiny because of his reputation among the other GIs as “a Kraut-lover.”

In early July the Americans also began loaning their DEFs to the French to be used as slave labor in the rebuilding of their country. The prisoners were chosen by their American captors at random and not for their fitness for work. Over a period of several weeks about 15,000 men were marched out of Andernach, which was located in the region that would shortly become the official French Zone of Occupation, and herded by French soldiers down the road to a new camp about 10 kilometers away. GIs would follow the marchers in trucks to provide support and extra security.

At first the departure of so many Kriegsgefangene was welcomed by the Germans who remained behind, among them Vogelsang and Diehl. There would be more food and water and more room to move around inside the wire and avoid coming into contact with sick men. Their joy was short-lived. More water was available, but rations were cut in proportion to the reduced population. And then thousands of men began flooding back after being deemed too sick or physically unfit for hard labor by the French. If rations were increased to account for the returnees, it wasn’t noticeable to the prisoners, who continued to slowly starve and waste away.

Louis Champagne was assigned to the labor support detail one day and was shocked by what he witnessed.

“I was riding in the back of the truck, which was moving at a crawl because the marchers couldn’t walk very fast. Most of them were so sick and weak I was surprised they could walk at all,” he told Vogelsang and Diehl. “I don’t think we had even traveled a mile when the truck stopped and we heard a commotion on the road in front of us. One of the prisoners had fallen, couldn’t stand up, and was being cursed at by two French soldiers. Then one of the Frenchmen hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. The other Frenchman began clubbing him too, and after several blows the poor man’s head burst open and his brains spilled out onto the concrete. Then they kicked his body and brains to the side of the road with their boots.

“It took us almost eight hours to reach the French camp. Along the way there must have been 20 more prisoners who fell or sat down because they couldn’t walk anymore, and every one of them was beaten to death by the French soldiers and kicked off the road. They could have been merciful and just shot these men, but they seemed to get more satisfaction out of clubbing them until they died. Of course, we did nothing to stop them or even protest. When we were driving back to Andernach, I saw a French army truck coming the other way. I looked in the back when it passed us, and it was filled with the bodies of Deutsche who had been killed along the way.”

After more than two months in captivity, by the middle of July Diehl looked almost as bad as everyone else in Andernach. His hair had gotten long, his beard had thickened, and his uniform was frayed and ripped in places. He was gaunt now, his one eye hollow and the sockets ringed by dark circles. Vogelsang observed the physical changes in his friend and assumed he looked almost as bad. With no mirrors and no scales, he didn’t know what he looked like or how much weight he had lost. But he knew his uniform was much looser on his frame, and the fuzzy blonde stubble on his chin when he had arrived had grown into a genuine beard.

If Petra or Sigi saw me now, he thought, I wonder if they would even recognize me.

At the end of July Eisenhower authorized the release of some ordinary Wehrmacht prisoners from the 18 pens situated along the Rhine. They were mostly men in their 50s and 60s and very young boys who had been dragooned into the Volkssturm as the Third Reich’s last line of defense at the end of the war. Everyone else remained incarcerated and cut off from their families and outside aid, and they continued to starve, get sick, lose hope, and die inside the barbed wire.

Then, in mid-August, Vogelsang, Diehl, and more than a thousand others wearing the remnants of their Waffen-SS uniforms, were rounded up and assembled just outside the gate to the camp. A US Army major, standing on the rear bench of a jeep parked at the end of a long line of trucks and speaking through a bullhorn, addressed them in German.

“Under the terms of the London Agreement signed last week by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Republic of France, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Waffen-SS has been declared a criminal organization, along with the Allgemeine-SS and the Nazi Party. As members of the Nazi Party, Allgemeine-SS, and/or the Waffen-SS, you are all considered to be criminals. Under the provisions of Law Order Number 10 issued by the Allied Control Council, you may additionally be charged with, to wit, ‘Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity.’ As of this day you are no longer considered Disarmed Enemy Forces. You are now war criminals and under arrest. You will face trial and possible execution for these crimes. Waffen-SS officers will be transferred to the notorious former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau to await trial. NCOs and enlisted personnel will be transferred to various other prison camps designated by the Allied Control Council to await their trials. That is all. May God have mercy on your wicked souls.”

SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Vogelsang and SS-Hauptsturmführer Ajax Diehl looked at each other in disbelief through their sunken eyes. Could it be true they were facing the gallows when neither of them could remember having committed a crime of any sort, much less an alleged war crime? The way the American major put it, they had already been found guilty and condemned to death before they had even been put on trial.

After all I’ve been through on the battlefield and survived, Vogelsang thought, is this how my life is going to end? At the end of a rope?

His head began to spin, and his knees buckled. Diehl caught him before he fell and held him upright.

“First, I would like to congratulate you men on a job well done supporting Operation Husky. You all served with distinction and upheld the highest standards of the service. You should be rightfully proud of your contributions to the successful invasion of Sicily. Second, Husky was not the reason you are here. I know you have all been wondering why you’ve been taught to fly heavy bombers like fighter pilots the last couple of weeks, and now you’re going to find out. The real reason the 44^th, 93^rd, and 389^th Bombardment Groups were brought here from England to join the 98^th and 376^th in North Africa is to carry out a single mission we believe will be one of the most daring but also one of the most important and vital ones of this war. Believe me, gentlemen, when I tell you the word ‘audacious’ can’t begin to describe the mission you’re about to undertake: Operation Tidal Wave. If it is successful – and we believe it will be – it could go a long way not only to winning this war but shortening the length of it by months or even a year and saving perhaps tens of thousands of American lives.”

Smart nodded, and Colonel Richard Sanders, IX Bomber Command’s chief of staff, drew aside a curtain that revealed a giant map of the Balkan Peninsula, the western reaches of the Middle East, the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, and the north coast of Africa, pulled down from a reel in front of the briefing room’s rear wall. Smart lifted a long tapered stick and pointed to the Balkans.

“This, gentlemen, is Romania,” he said, tapping the map. “And here is our target, the oil fields and refineries at Ploesti. About one-third of the oil the Germans need to run their tanks, bombers, fighters, and submarines comes from right here. Destroy Ploesti, gentlemen, and you will cripple the Nazi’s war machine. But it’s not going to be easy, or, as you can imagine, it would already have been done. The refineries and oil fields cover nineteen square miles. It would be impossible to destroy all of it in one strike even if we had two thousand bombers. We have only two hundred. So our primary targets for this mission are the refineries, the cracking plants, storage tanks, boiler houses, and rail and pipelines that deliver the oil to Germany. There are nine major refineries that we have targeted, and seven of them are grouped right here.”

Smart ran his pointer around the eastern and southern edges of the city.

“There are two others, one of them up here at Campina, about eighteen miles north of Ploesti, and the other one down here at Brazi, about five miles south of the city. One of the trickiest things about this operation is that we want to avoid bombing the city itself. Yes, Romania has joined the Axis powers. But that was a political decision by a new pro-Nazi government that the majority of the Romanian people do not support. Most of them favor our side, and we don’t want to turn their sympathies against us. So we want to avoid civilian casualties and leave the city of Ploesti as intact as humanly possible. Furthermore, as you can see, Ploesti is a long way from Benghazi – 980 miles as the crow flies, to be exact. Unfortunately, we aren’t crows, and that’s why we chose B-24s for this operation; B-17s don’t have the range to get there and back. To ensure the element of surprise, we’re making the round trip even longer, about 2200 miles. I can see on your faces that you’ve already calculated that’s too far for even a B-24 to fly. But we will be installing Tokyo tanks on your Liberators so that you will have enough gas to get there and back. Some of you may have noticed that these tanks were already installed in your aircraft before leaving England. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they’re called Tokyo tanks because they’re what Colonel – now General – Doolittle needed to get his B-25s all the way from the deck of the Hornet to Tokyo last year.”

Smart walked away from the map and stood at ease, his hands clasped behind his back and the tip of vertical pointer wagging slowly above his head like a dog’s tail.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why you’ve been learning fighter formations for a high-altitude raid. And, no,” he said with a smile and a chuckle, “it was not just one of those Army make-work projects designed to keep you all busy and entertained between missions. We considered a high-altitude raid and ruled it out. For one thing, as I just mentioned, we wanted to spare the civilian sections of the city. For another – and this is really the most important factor – the complex is so vast and spread out, the refineries so compartmentalized with high, thick concrete walls to ward off bomb blasts that are not direct hits, that hitting the key targets with the precision we wanted was too uncertain from high altitude. We would have had to go back time and time again to do the job properly, giving the Germans time in between to rebuild, and each time we went back the defenses would be reinforced and tougher to penetrate, costing us more and more aircraft. Ultimately, in order to maximize the damage, we decided on a low-level attack, using B-24s like fighter-bombers. Gentlemen, we will bomb the Ploesti oil fields from heights ranging from 100 to 300 feet.”

The eyes of the veteran pilots in the room widened in disbelief. They were being asked – no, told – they would be flying the heavy, difficult-to-control B-24 that had been designed for high-altitude bombing missions like it was a twin-engine Douglas A-20 fighter-bomber or single-seat Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. It was madness! And doing it against a heavily defended target while flying only a few feet off the ground and through exploding bombs dropped by the planes in front of them wasn’t only madness; it was suicide!

Smart expected and saw their reactions and addressed them immediately.

“Quiet, please, gentlemen!” he pleaded, and the buzzing in the room ceased. “I told you this operation would be an audacious one, and because it is it will be successful if every one of you and the men under your command does his job. It’s been more than a year since Ploesti was last bombed, and we believe the defenders have become complacent and will be slow to react to the attack, even more so since we plan to attack on a Sunday. We have chosen a route that will avoid detection by the enemy until we’re almost on top of them, and when the enemy sees the B-24s, they’ll be prepared for a high-altitude strike. They won’t be expecting a ground-level attack, and their big flak guns will be useless. This will be a quick hit-and-run mission, gentlemen, over in less than thirty minutes. Each bomber will be assigned a specific target, your bombardiers will be using a bombsight designed for low-altitude missions, and you’ll hit that target and then keep on going all the way back to Benghazi via Lake Balta Potelel. This will be a one-time-only mission, and the key to success – and your survival, gentlemen – is precise timing, accuracy, and formation flying almost wing tip to wing tip. If everyone does his job, we could achieve seventy-five percent destruction of the Ploesti complex and put it out of business for up to a year. We have set up a full-scale practice range for you and your crews out in the desert, and beginning the day after tomorrow you will practice, practice, and practice some more until you can do it in your sleep. D-Day is set for Sunday, One August.

“Now, I remind you gentlemen,” Smart cautioned, “that Operation Tidal Wave is still classified Top Secret, and information is to be shared only on a need-to-know basis. For the present, the only ones who need to know are all in this room. When you and the crews in your group are practicing, they do not need to know where they’re going or when. All they need to know is where their specific target is inside the range and work on finding and hitting that target without colliding with the Liberator next to them and staying tight behind the one in front of them. Colonel Ted Timberlake, whom many of you know, will be in charge of the training program. We’ll start practicing at five hundred feet and work our way down to the actual attack altitudes as the men get more familiar and comfortable with the procedures. Bombardiers, navigators, and the other pilots and co-pilots will be briefed on the mission in a few days. The enlisted men will not be briefed until D-minus One. Security is tight, gentlemen. There are Axis spies out there, and if anyone spills the beans before we leave on the First, it could jeopardize the operation and perhaps the lives of two thousand men. So what you see here today, what you hear here today, you keep to yourselves. Like it says on the posters we see everywhere, gentlemen, ‘Loose lips sink ships.’”

He withheld the fact that the intelligence they were basing this mission on was over a year old.

Smart then began assigning the five groups to their targets with the most experienced groups getting the refineries that would be the toughest to find. Colonel Keith Compton, the commander of the 376^th Bomb Group, was given the Romana Americana refinery on the eastern side of the city, designated as White I. Lieutenant Colonel Addison Baker’s 93^rd Bomb Group was tasked with splitting his Liberators into two sections to destroy White II, the Concordia Vega refinery to the northwest of White I, and White III, the Unirea Orion complex located to the southwest of Compton’s target.

The 98^th Bomb Group, commanded by Colonel John “Killer” Kane, was ordered to eradicate the Astra Romana complex on the south side of Ploesti, White IV. Wiping out Astra Romana, Europe’s largest refinery, was paramount. The Unirea Speranta refinery and Standard Petrol Block, which had belonged to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil before Romania virtually nationalized the oil industry in the late 1930s, were also inside this complex, and Kane had the largest force of bombers at his disposal – 47 Liberators – to get this critical job done.

Colonel Leon Johnson’s 44^th Bomb Group would split up to hit White V, the Columbia Aquila complex on the southwestern edge of the city, and Target Blue, the Creditul Minier refinery five miles south of the city at Brazi. Colonel Jack Wood’s 389^th, with only six missions to its credit, was handed the presumably easiest assignment, bombing Target Red, the Steaua Romana refinery at Campina located 18 miles north of Ploesti. Each bomber would be assigned a specific target within the general targets and expected to find it and destroy it.

“Gentlemen, it is your duty to make certain every man in every crew under your command knows his job and is prepared to carry it out,” Smart said. “I expect each of you to exhibit the highest qualities of leadership, which is why you were chosen. Any officer who fails in that responsibility, who fails to inspire the men under his command, or is judged to be falling short in any aspect of the preparations for this raid, will be immediately replaced. We’re only going to get one shot at this, so we need to do it right because there will be no second chance. My staff has been working on this operation for months, so trust me when I say we have not overlooked a single detail and this is the best way to accomplish this mission and shorten the war. Are there any questions?”

Several hands were raised, and Smart pointed to one of the officers.

“Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Posey,” he said, standing up and identifying himself.

“Yes, Colonel Posey.”

“Sir, I understand the reasons for a low-level attack, and as you said your staff has thought of every detail. So I’m certain you must be aware that the B-24 was not designed for this sort of mission and is, pardon my French, a bitch to fly.”

Smart smiled and nodded.

“My question, sir, is why does the attack have to be that low? Why can’t we bomb from a little higher altitude?”

“That’s a fair question, Colonel,” Smart said. “One of the reasons for flying that low is, as I’ve already explained, some of the key targets are going to be hard to find, especially with all hell breaking loose around you. We can’t afford to miss these targets, and if we fly higher, they’re more likely to be obscured by smoke from the bombs and fires as well as artificial smoke the Germans will send up to camouflage the facility. You need to see your targets in order to hit them. The other reason – and I know this is going to sound strange to you men considering you’ll be flying through hell – is safety. Bombing from any altitude above the ones you’ll be flying, up to a thousand feet, will be more dangerous than what you’ll be facing at a hundred and fifty. The shock waves from the five hundred- and thousand-pounders dropped in front of you will make your bomber turn turtle.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Posey said, taking his seat. “I wasn’t aware of that factor.”

After answering a few more questions, among them concerns that crews of crippled bombers would be too low for them to bail out, Smart addressed the assembly again.

“I know many of you are thinking right now that this is going to be a suicide mission, and, gentlemen, I’m not going to stand up here and lie to you. This is going to be a highly dangerous operation, and, in spite of all the detailed planning that has gone into it, yes, there is a chance many of you will not be coming back. There’s even a small chance none of you will come back. General Arnold is fully aware of that yet has given Tidal Wave his blessing because, gentlemen, destroying the oil refineries at Ploesti is that vital to the war effort. There are always sacrifices in war, gentlemen, and while I’m confident it won’t come to that, if it means sacrificing as many as two thousand airmen to shorten this war and save the lives of 40 or 50 times that number of your brothers in arms, then, by God, it’s worth it! All I can say beyond that is that my staff has worked night and day to give you all the best chance of coming back, and if you learn your lessons well during the next few days and execute the battle plan with precision, I’m confident most of you will come back. But no commander should ask more of his men than he would ask of himself. So if it’s any comfort to you, know that your group commanders, myself, and Generals Brereton and Ent believe so deeply in the importance of this operation that they will be flying this mission with you and taking the same risks each of you will. Now, I believe General Brereton would like to say something. General?”

Brereton approached from the side of the room, wiping the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief before placing them back on the bridge of his nose. Standing on the low stage, hands clasped behind his back, he spoke.

“Gentlemen, I think Colonel Smart has presented his case for this operation better than I ever could. When we began planning Tidal Wave some months ago, I was in favor of a high-altitude raid on Ploesti. But when all the factors were considered, I realized Colonel’s Smart’s plan for a low-level attack gave us the best chance of success and shortening this war by six months to a year. The piecemeal destruction of the Romanian refineries would not have the desired effect. Destruction must be complete and final. Our forces, led by you men, must sweep clean the Romanian oil industry as would a gigantic tidal wave. Hence the name of the operation.”

Brereton paused for a moment and smiled. “As you all know by now, the names of military operations are arbitrary and usually have nothing to do with the purpose of the mission. And, believe it or not, the original name of this operation was Soapsuds,” he chuckled. “It was changed because we thought an operation of such magnitude, one that is destined to make history, deserved more than a frivolous, meaningless name.”

The expressions of the men facing him remained grim, and Brereton’s wizened face became serious again.

“Gentlemen, no more vitally important task has ever been assigned to one single striking force. Two hundred bombers and two thousand men have been given a task that could not be accomplished by a dozen ground divisions in a period of months. You men must do the job virtually in one day. Obviously, as Colonel Smart told you, this operation will not be an easy one. It will be most challenging and difficult. Its success depends upon many factors, the most important of which is leadership. That can be supplied only by you men here in this room. You must do everything within your powers of persuasion to make the operation successful. I can’t stress enough the necessity for absolute ruthlessness! Any commander who shows lack of leadership, aggressiveness, or confidence will be immediately replaced! The nature of this operation is such that the detailed movement of each of the five striking forces must be executed with precision and exact timing, or it is doomed to fail!

“I should also like to point out that this is a one hundred percent American Air Force operation. In their belief that the RAF was better capable of combating the static defenses around the target, Prime Minister Churchill and Sir Charles Portal, the chief of the British Air Staff, both offered RAF Lancasters to comprise the first wave through the defenses. This sincere offer was declined in the firm conviction that the American Air Forces need no spearheads in their encounters with any enemy on the face of the earth or the sky above it! I firmly endorse that view and have all the confidence in the world that the two thousand men here in Benghazi are the best two thousand men for a nasty but necessary job. In all honesty, we expect our losses to be fifty percent. But even if we lose everything but hit the target, it will be worth it.”

The men who would lead the attack were next shown the 45-minute film about Ploesti that had been produced in England back in the spring so that they could become visually familiar with the target. The opening frames with the naked blonde bombshell indeed seized their attention and elicited cheers and applause from the sex-starved officers, just as Tex McCrary and Viscount Forbes had intended. But they settled down and grew increasingly serious as they viewed the rest of the film, which featured pre-war footage of the complex and the amazingly detailed 1:50,000 scale model photographed from the perspective of an attacking pilot, including everything from the Wallachian Plain to the approaches to the refineries and the structures, chimneys, towers, storage tanks, rail and pipelines, and even the blast walls. The officers were told they could review the film at any time and were encouraged to do so. After the film ended the small group was taken into the top-secret Greenhouse to see the diorama, where the men could get as long a look as they wanted at the detailed miniatures of their targets.

“You neglected to tell the men that this mission is purely voluntary, and that there will be no repercussions for any officer and his crew who refuse to fly,” Brereton murmured to Smart during the movie. “Did you forget?”

“I didn’t forget, General,” Smart whispered, shaking his head. “I’ll tell them when I think the time is right. If I told them now it was voluntary, do you think any officer out there in his right mind would fly, knowing his chances of coming back are fifty-fifty even if they execute this mission with precision? And you and I, General, have been in the Army long enough to know that nothing goes exactly as planned, especially on a complicated mission like this one where success depends entirely on surprise and timing. Somebody will fuck up; somebody always does. All we can do is hope the fuck-ups are minimal and the operation doesn’t become FUBAR with nobody coming back. I didn’t mention it was voluntary because during the next couple of weeks of practice I’m hoping the confidence of the men will build to the point where they’re almost begging to fly it, and I think we got a head start when you bucked up their spirits and pride with your speech about noble sacrifice and our air force being second to none. I’m hoping we’ll have enough crews to man something approaching two hundred bombers, because if we try this with fifty or seventy-five or even a hundred, we’re not going to get the job done.”

“Trust me, Jake,” Brereton said. “General Brereton will find a way to scrub the mission if we can’t get enough bombers in the air to pull this off.”

“It’s funny, General, isn’t it, that we all dream of being heroes when we enlist, but none of us wants to die a heroic death,” Smart mused. “No soldier wakes up in the morning vowing to jump on a grenade that day to save the lives of his buddies in the trench with him. But when that life-or-death event does present itself, he makes that sacrifice without a second thought. That’s the state of mind I want these men to have by D-Day, that somebody has to make a sacrifice so many others can live, and that somebody is them. When I tell them that this operation is voluntary, I want the words to pass through their ears without a second thought. I want them to want to fly this mission.”

“I think you’ll be surprised by how many men will want to fly, even knowing how heavily the odds are stacked against them,” Brereton said. “When I was in England for a while last spring, I had an interesting conversation with the director of psychiatry for the Eighth Air Force, Dr. Doug Bond. These fighting men have some sort of unwritten code. Even though they’re terrified of dying, they’re more terrified of being ostracized and branded cowards by their fellow airmen who are no less afraid of being killed, and they draw strength from that. It’s a sort of mob mentality, Jake. A person who would never as an individual, say, lynch a Negro for raping a young white girl, won’t think twice about doing it as part of a mob. Peer pressure, I think he called it.

“Dr. Bond cited the case of a bombardier on a B-17 who had already survived more than half the missions required for rotating back to the States. But the stress had built up so much in him that on this particular mission to a heavily defended target in Germany, he felt like he could no longer breathe and was going to die of asphyxiation and tried to bail out through the bomb bay when they’d crossed the Channel and were over France. The navigator wrestled with him, and the struggle ceased only when the navigator finally convinced him the mission had been scrubbed because of bad weather over the target, which it had. At the Officers’ Club that night his fellow airmen called him yellow and told him they never wanted to fly with him again. No one came to his defense, even though the majority of the officers there were just as frightened of dying as he was. His squadron commander started making plans to get rid of him. The bombardier was both demoralized and embarrassed and desperately wanted to tell his crewmates that it was a one-time incident and would never happen again. But he was afraid it would. He went to the flight surgeon and asked for a recommendation that he be transferred to a non-combat job.

“The doctor assured him that he was not a coward and was man enough to complete his twenty-five missions. Then he pointed out how shame would eventually catch up to him if he stopped flying, that he would be ostracized by his family and friends when they found out he had bailed out on his crew. The choice he had to make, the doctor told him, was to return to his crew and face the risk of death, or quit and face a lifetime of disgrace. The bombardier chose to finish his tour but was certain his crewmates did not want him back. The doctor met privately with the other members of the crew and told them they needed to forgive the bombardier and encourage him to return, and they did. The bombardier finished his twenty-five and returned home a proud man.”

“Well, at least that story had a happy ending. I wish I could be as certain about a happy ending to this one,” Smart said. “But I think you’re right about the men, General.”

“I think it helps that most bomber crews think of themselves as dead men already,” Brereton said. “The prevailing sentiment among them is that none of them will survive twenty-five missions anyway, and they just might rationalize this operation is as good a time as any to leave this world and get it over with, to put the anxiety behind them once and for all.”

“That may be true, General. But I don’t want them to fly this mission thinking like dead men. I want them to fly it like living men who want to stay that way.”

“I hope so, too,” Brereton agreed. “I made ‘Ake’ a solemn promise he’d get his three groups back as soon as this operation is over. General Brereton would hate to tell General Eaker that we lost every one of his goddamn planes.”

As Avenging Angel and the rest of the 389^th Bomb Group poured out of the foothills northwest of Ploesti and began winging 50 feet above the Wallachian Plain toward Campina at 205 miles per hour, the crews could see huge fires burning, bombs exploding, flak bursting, and roiling clouds of thick black smoke belching high into the sky 18 miles away. They could not hear the sounds of the battle, however, over the deafening roar from the powerful motors of their own B-24s, nor could they see the other four groups’ Liberators and the Axis fighters pursuing them.

“Wow! Would you look at that!” Laurel D’Angleterre commented. “What a show! Looks like the other guys have done their jobs.”

“Yeah, but we’re late and now we have to do ours,” Martin Angel replied grimly.

He couldn’t get the knot out of his stomach, and the palms of his hands inside his gloves were sweaty. He hadn’t felt this terrified on any of the previous four missions, and the encouraging words from his co-pilot as he gazed in both wonderment and horror at the havoc happening less than 20 miles away did nothing to comfort him. He wasn’t yet accustomed to witnessing the destruction rained on European cities by high-altitude bombers. The photographs he would later study of the damage he wreaked, photos taken from five miles up both during and after raids, would look benign compared to what he was personally witnessing from ground level this afternoon.

From their vantage point so far away it appeared to the crewmen that, in spite of some difficulties encountered en route, the raid had gone off exactly as planned by Colonel Smart and his team. The center of the city with its neighborhoods seemed to have been spared, an island sanctuary surrounded by a sea of hellfire. The men of the 389^th had no clue that the raid on Ploesti itself had been a fiasco with bombers arriving late, hitting the wrong targets, or failing to hit them at all. They could not see the dozens of B-24s that had been shot down or were struggling to remain airborne after absorbing multiple hits from flak, fighters, and ground fire. Although they had heard the excited radio chatter from crews already involved in the battle in their headphones, it had been impossible to discern what was actually happening because what they mostly heard was high-pitched gibberish and, from time to time, blood-curdling screams. All they could see was what they had been led to expect they would see, what they had desperately prayed to see, and what they wanted to see. The rest was humanly unimaginable.

Target Red, the Steaua Romana refinery at Campina, looked exactly the way it had appeared in the films that Angel had watched so many times he had lost count. He recognized the outline of every chimney, every cracking tower, and every storage tank. Avenging Angel was dead on course for the power station it had been assigned to bomb. Angel managed to break a little smile. Maybe it won’t be so bad after all, he thought, and we all might get out of this alive.

What Angel had not seen on the old peacetime film and the film of the scale model, however, were Campina’s defenses. Now he did, and they were more ferocious than he and the rest of the men in the 389^th had been led to believe. Avenging Angel was skimming the ground over a Romanian farm when a tall haystack suddenly split in half to reveal a .20-millimeter cannon spitting fire. Machine guns fired from chicken coops and barns, and soldiers stood up in the fields and shot at the bomber with rifles. Henry Cruz, Walter Zabriewski, Montgomery Abernathy, and New Boy Claiborne all returned fire with their .50-caliber Brownings.

“Holy Smokes, Marty!” D’Angleterre said after Avenging Angel had passed unharmed through its first skirmish of the day. He was laughing, but there was no mirth in it. “Growing up in Idaho I’ve been around farms and guns my whole life. But that’s the first time I’ve ever been shot at by a haystack!”

“Or a bunch of hens armed to the teeth!” Angel quickly added.

Angel got on the interphone.

“Pilot to crew: Boys, boys! Don’t waste ammo! We may need every bullet for the flight back!”

Zabriewski nudged Abernathy, who was manning the gun in the starboard waist portal. Abernathy shot a glance over his shoulder.

“If we don’t defend ourselves now,” Zabriewski yelled over the din from the motors and the exploding flak, “there might not be a flight back!”

Abernathy nodded vigorously and fired a long burst at a farmhouse that was shooting at him.

Before leaving Benghazi the crews had been admonished not to fire their machine guns indiscriminately. Because every B-24 was fully loaded with bombs and overloaded with incendiaries and extra fuel and water for the extended journey, it had been necessary to remove as much extraneous equipment as safely possible, and amid expectations that the raiders would catch the Germans by surprise to cut the weight even more the crews had been issued only about three-quarters of the usual amount of ammunition for a mission. Many Liberators were overweight anyway because crews had decided to fortify their individual stations with unauthorized planks of armor they had salvaged from crashed German and Italian fighters around Benghazi in hopes they would keep them from being killed or maimed by flak, and the ammo crates filled with sand for relief of the men still stricken with dysentery also added to the load. Crews had been told to conserve their ammo for the long flight back to North Africa, when it was anticipated the B-24s would be harassed by enemy fighters for several hours. But when the adrenaline began rushing through their bodies in the heat of battle and they believed their lives were being threatened, the admonition was largely forgotten. Except for Angel, few pilots were going to remind their crews to save ammo when the security of the aircraft was at stake at that moment.

The flak and ground fire intensified the closer Colonel Jack Wood’s 29 bombers got to the town. Cannon sent up 20-millimeter rounds bunched so close together it was like flying through a rattling hail storm. Remarkably – and amazingly in one instance – although the Liberators were hit repeatedly, they all remained in the air until they were over the target, and the first six waves dropped their payloads. Although the biggest bombs had delayed fuzes, the smaller ones did not and exploded immediately, and the incendiaries set fire to whatever they landed on. Even some of the thousand-pound Reich Wreckers went off ahead of schedule. Someone’s bombs tore apart a set of high-voltage power lines on the way down, creating a blizzard of electric sparks.

The B-24 most badly damaged as it neared Campina was Eager Eagle, flown by Second Lieutenant Lloyd “Pete” Hughes. Flak and machine gun fire had ripped open the gas tanks in the port wing and punctured the auxiliary Tokyo tanks in the open bomb bay. A wide stream of leaking, raw gasoline trailed behind the bomber, which was in the seventh wave of three planes just ahead of Avenging Angel, Blonds Away, and Hitler’s Hearse. As the fuel began to dissipate in the wind, drops spattered on Avenging Angel’s windscreen and left greasy smudges.

“That’s Pete Hughes’ boxcar, isn’t it?” D’Angleterre asked rhetorically. “I wonder if he knows he’s hemorrhaging gas.”

“How can he not know?” Angel said. “But he’s crazy if he tries to fly through that inferno in front of us. He’ll be a flying torch in no time. He’s got to drop out and pull up so they can bail out before that thing explodes under them. It’s a ticking time bomb.”

But Hughes’ Liberator showed no sign of breaking formation, and after a few more seconds Angel grabbed the mike and got on the open radio channel.

“Pete!” he hollered, as if Hughes could somehow hear him without listening to the radio. “Pete Hughes! For God’s sake, there’s a river of gas coming out of your plane! You’ve got to pull out, pull up, get some altitude, and bail out while you still can! Pete! Do you hear me? You gotta get out now! Pete! For God’s sake! Pete! Do it!”

But the leaky B-24 remained in formation as it entered the now-blazing Steaua refinery complex.

“Do you think he’s dead?” D’Angleterre inquired.

“Even if he is, somebody’s flying the goddamn plane!” Angel answered.

The first wave had dropped its bombs directly on a boiler house that exploded. Portions of the blazing roof shot straight up in the air for several hundred feet, rising higher even than the refinery’s tall smokestacks, followed by long spiraling columns of fire. The second wave had bombed the cracking plant deeper inside the complex with the same results. The towers of flame were higher than the bombers, and orange fireballs erupted inside rolling clouds of thick black smoke as rising streams of escaping gases ignited. The B-24s didn’t have time to try and climb above it all and there was no way to get around or under the conflagration. The pilots in the following waves had no option but to stay on course, plunge into the fiery stew, and pray they came through it alive.

A few moments later Eager Eagle disappeared into the smoke, and less than half a minute later so did Avenging Angel. It was impossible to see anything in the darkness of the cloud, and while their goggles kept the smoke out of the airmen’s eyes acrid fumes burned their nostrils. Nearby unseen medium and light flak explosions buffeted and rocked the Liberator. They were through the cloud in a matter of seconds, and a quick glance at the landmarks around him was all Angel needed to assure himself he was still on the right course to bomb the power station. Angel’s peripheral vision detected a tongue of fire racing toward Eager Eagle as the predatory flames latched onto the river of leaking gas, but he was too busy trying to fly Avenging Angel to focus on Pete Hughes’ problems now. Flak bursts continued to jostle the B-24, and Angel, with help from D’Angleterre, wrestled with the controls to keep the nose lined up with their target, now in their line of vision. But Avenging Angel never seemed to be closing the distance, the power station like a carrot forever dangling from a stick in front of a dumb horse. D’Angleterre pushed the button to fire the fixed .50-caliber machine gun specially installed for the mission in desperate hopes of suppressing some of the tracers from ground fire coming directly at the windscreen. It didn’t seem possible that the onrushing fusillade could miss them, but the bullets parted directly in front of them. Logic told the co-pilot it was an optical illusion that made it seem the bullets were going to hit them when they were destined to miss, but he couldn’t help but convince himself it had been a miracle. D’Angleterre kept the button on the gun depressed until the ammunition belt was empty. He had no idea whether he hit anything; the incendiary bullets designed to explode on impact and ignite fires were swallowed up by the flames raging throughout the refinery. The chattering from the guns in rear turret and waist positions was constant as the crew fired at enemy gunners on the ground and roofs and toward the muzzle flashes of guns that seemed to be everywhere now. Rarely was there a sound from Gramps Waverly’s top turret other than the whirring as it moved around; there were no targets of opportunity above the low-flying B-24. Not yet anyway.

Large bombs were going off around them after another wave of Liberators ahead of them dropped their payloads. Some of the bombs landed on a stationary train, and the tank cars filled with gasoline exploded violently.

“I thought those big boys had delayed fuzes!” complained Henry Cruz, who felt very exposed in the glass nose of the B-24.

“They do,” Abel Rubinstein, the navigator, assured him. “They’re going off early because they’re being cooked by the hot fires on the ground.”

“You’d think the jerks who planned this mission would have thought of that!” Cruz griped.

There was a loud bang and a jolt that caused Marty Angel to lose his grip on the wheel momentarily and lifted the left side of aircraft before it leveled off a couple of seconds later. The two pilots, their eyes wide, both glanced fearfully out the cabin window and saw a jagged hole in the port wing near the tip where an anti-aircraft shell had ripped through the metal without exploding.

“Boy, that was close!” Angel muttered.

“Too close,” agreed D’Angleterre.

There were loud pings as bullets struck the bomber and louder bangs as fragments from exploding flak shells caromed off the aluminum skin. More explosions and billowing smoke inside the refinery again obscured the vision of the pilots and bombardier Robert Rhodes. A shell burst cracked the side window of the cabin next to Angel, but the Plexiglas didn’t break. An hour seemed to pass before Avenging Angel finally reached the power station, and during that agonizing, endless time everyone aboard was certain that at any moment there would be a direct hit that would instantly transform the B-24 into a fiery coffin. Rolling up the bomb bay doors allowed the rising heat from the inferno below to permeate the interior of the B-24, sending the temperature inside soaring even faster than it had been rising, and wisps of acrid smoke also began swirling through the aircraft. Where it was thickest the men began coughing uncontrollably. They felt like their lungs were going to blow out through their raw throats.

Rhodes felt like he was trapped inside a furnace. The temperature inside Avenging Angel had to be well above 100 degrees right now. But he kept his sweating hand on the bomb-release lever and his eyes trained on the simple N-7 bombsight. As if on biblical command the sea of smoke and fire parted, and Rhodes could see the power station exactly where it should have been.

“Bombs away! Let’s get the fuck outta here!” he yelled over the interphone, an unnecessary announcement since the suddenly lightened Liberator jumped 40 feet higher in the air almost instantly and continued to rise on a cushion of super-heated air. Blonds Away and Hitler’s Hearse, also relieved of their burdens, rose with Avenging Angel.

Rhodes closed the bomb bay doors immediately, and the smoke inside rapidly dissipated.

Zabriewski and Abernathy, both still coughing, had stopped shooting and were throwing bundles of four-pound incendiary bombs out of the plane through the side portals. When the last of the sticks had been heaved out, they looked back over the refinery and watched them explode with bright, white flashes that quickly began burning red. Through the rising wall of flame behind them Zabriewski and Abernathy, along with Claiborne in the tail turret, watched three more Liberators from the following wave emerge and drop their bombs on their targets.

Bill Jankuscz, his goggles on top of his head and standing behind Abernathy, had the movie camera pressed against his left eye and was filming the entire event from the waist portals, although it was hard to keep the camera steady as Avenging Angel was buffeted on the unstable hot air and rocked by flak bursts every few seconds. By peering through the viewfinder with his left eye and closing his stinging right one and thus extremely limiting his field of vision, Jankuscz felt curiously relaxed, as if he were not in the center of the Campina volcano himself but watching it erupt from a safe vantage point miles and miles away. It was almost like filming high school football games back in Youngstown, Ohio, where he was an impartial observer off the field and had no stake in who won or lost. Only the deafening noise from the B-24’s motors and exploding bombs and buildings, the rough rocking of the bomber, and the occasional violent cough to force smoke out of his lungs reminded him where he was.

Avenging Angel, Blonds Away, and Hitler’s Hearse had hit the bulls-eye with their bombs, and their job was finished. The officers on board the three Liberators would not need to wait for high-altitude reconnaissance photos to prove it, not bombing from this altitude. But none of the crews had escaped the fiery web woven by the Germans just yet. They had gotten inside Campina’s defenses but needed to battle their way back out. They were still over the refinery complex, and just ahead of them was another thick, rising wall of explosions. The heaviest concentration of Steaua Romana’s defenses was in front of them, and they had no choice but to try and penetrate the lethal veil. The B-24 could not fly around it, over it, and certainly not under it. The only way to escape it was to fly through it. It was a black mountain without a tunnel, and the three B-24’s ahead of them, including Pete Hughes’ Eager Eagle that was now wrapped in fire and pulling long streamers of flames behind it, vanished into the black cliff. Angel wondered if any of them had any chance at all of burrowing through it and making it safely to the other side.

Both Angel and D’Angleterre sucked in deep breaths, gently closed their eyes, and hoped for a miracle as they plunged into the hellfire. The din was deafening, and Avenging Angel shook so violently Angel feared the Liberator would pull itself apart. Although he didn’t think he was breathing, thick smoke that swirled through the plane again somehow got into his lungs and forced him to cough, and the unmistakable smell of nitrates was burning in his nostrils. It occurred to him now that he should have ordered the crewmen to don their oxygen masks even though they were barely above the ground, but it was too late to do that now. The coughing fit forced his eyes open, and through his goggles he saw nothing but the darkest black he had ever seen. It was as if he was inside a cave a thousand feet below the surface of the earth without a lantern. So this is what hell is like, he thought.

Angel kept his hands firmly on the wheel and his feet pressed hard against the rudder bars, however, and continued to fly the B-24 more through his training than human will. At any instant he expected either to blindly crash into a brick chimney at 200 miles per hour or be consumed inside a giant fireball. He couldn’t even see D’Angleterre in the co-pilot’s seat next to him; but he could hear him coughing his lungs inside out and knew he was there and still alive.

And then, just when he was beginning to fear he’d be asphyxiated, Angel was blinded by sunlight. Avenging Angel was through and still in one piece! The smoke inside the cabin thinned, swirled, and disappeared in a matter of moments.

“Fuck! Goddammit! We fucking made it!” he shouted with a deep sense of euphoria he had never felt in his life before. His throat was raw from swallowing smoke. “Goddammit, Laurel, we’re still fucking alive!”

D’Angleterre stopped coughing long enough to cry: “I don’t believe it! I don’t fucking believe it!”

They had been over Steaua Romana for just over two minutes, but it had felt like two years.

Angel reached over with his right hand, slapped D’Angleterre hard on the left shoulder, and laughed. They were above the town of Campina now, the shooting had died away, and he looked to see if Hitler’s Hearse and Blonds Away were still with him. They were, although Captain Robert Mooney’s Hearse appeared to be seriously damaged. Its No. 2 engine was feathered, gasoline was spewing out through the crack in the bomb bay doors, and the B-24 was wobbling. All of a sudden Angel saw the legs of a crewman plunge through the closed doors right up to the waist and begin flailing. Angel held his breath and hoped the man had his parachute on, although if he fell out at this low altitude there would have been no time for it to open before he’d hit the ground. He was probably trying to plug the leak in one of the auxiliary tanks, lost his balance on the narrow catwalk, and fell through the thin metal doors. Angel recalled what “Lucky” O’Neill, the crew chief back at Lowry, had told them about the weight of a man falling off the catwalk could rip right through the thin aluminum skin of a B-24. D’Angleterre saw the man, too, and pointed.

“Look at that poor sap!” he said hoarsely. “What a way to go! And after making it all the way through hell, too!”

But someone, or a couple of crewmen, must have been with the dangling man, because a few seconds later he was hoisted back inside the aircraft. Angel and D’Angleterre both breathed sighs of relief.

Now their attention focused on Lieutenant Hughes’ B-24, which was fully engulfed in flames yet somehow still flying, though slowing down rapidly and losing altitude.

“Gadzooks!” D’Angleterre said. “Would you look at that! It’s like a comet! How’s that thing still in the air?”

A few seconds later Avenging Angel pulled even with the slowing, dying Liberator, and neither pilot could stop himself from staring at it in morbid fascination. Feeling no emotion whatsoever, Jankuscz trained his movie camera on the gruesome scene, which looked as if it was happening in slow motion, and filmed it.

“No way anybody can still be alive in there,” D’Angleterre said, almost in a whisper.

“Somebody’s flying the damn thing,” Angel reminded him.

“Are you sure? Maybe it just looks like somebody’s flying it. We hear about ghost ships all the time.”

But Pete Hughes, the 22-year-old second lieutenant from Texas who, like most of the crews in the 389^th was flying his fifth mission, was not a ghost. He was still very much alive, as, incredibly, were eight of the other nine men on the doomed bomber. Only the co-pilot was dead, killed by an exploding cannon shell. While the B-24 was wrapped in flames from the wings to the tail, the fire had not yet begun raging through the interior of the Liberator, although it was unbearably hot inside, virtually impossible to breathe, and the crewmen could not touch any metal with their bare hands without instantly incurring second-degree burns.

Hughes had not needed Marty Angel or anyone else in the 389^th to tell him Eager Eagle was leaking gas as it had approached Target Red. He had not even needed to check the gas gauges to know. His crew had immediately and frantically informed him over the interphone. Hughes had been faced with a difficult decision, and he had needed to make it instantly. No matter what he decided, there was no doubt the Liberator would not make it off the Wallachian Plain, much less all the way back to Benghazi. It was inevitable the flames from the inferno below would hungrily swallow the streams of gasoline and track them to the source long before he could gain enough altitude for the crew to bail out, and crash-landing the gas-soaked Liberator would almost certainly result in sparks that would ignite a violent explosion that would consume them all. It had taken but a single second or so for Hughes to weigh the options. He and his men were dead anyway no matter what he decided, and the only realistic option was to make their deaths meaningful by carrying out his mission. He was the aircraft commander and the decision was his and his alone; there was no time to poll the crew had he sought their input. So Hughes had pressed on, and bombardier John McLoughlin calmly released his deadly cargo directly onto their target.

The job they had come to do finished, Hughes now set his mind on doing everything within his limited power to cheat death. After emerging from the black mountain of flak and into the sunlight, Hughes spotted the wide dry bed of the Prahova River and decided to attempt a wheels-up crash-landing. He was only going to get one chance at this and prayed the burning bomber would hold together long enough to make the attempt and that enough fuel had leaked out or already been burned that the inevitable explosion would be somewhat minimized. He throttled back and began to lose altitude. Hughes was too busy to notice Avenging Angel overtaking him or see Bill Jankuscz in the waist portal dispassionately filming the bomber’s final moments.

As Hughes, concerned about the warping airframe holding together if he made any sudden and violent maneuvers, made a gentle turn to port to set up his approach for the crash-landing, Jankuscz instinctively reached in front of the movie camera with his free right hand and turned the metal disc to switch to a telephoto lens and continue recording the fate of the turning, descending Eager Eagle.

The dry river bed was strewn with boulders, and Hughes looked for a stretch that was reasonably straight and free of large rocks. He found what he was looking for and chopped the power to the four motors which, miraculously, were still running. But Hughes had been so focused on finding the least-cluttered emergency landing strip he hadn’t looked far enough ahead and was still searching for boulders to avoid when he lifted his eyes and was shocked to see a bridge a few hundred yards away. The B-24 was on a collision course with the structure, and it was too low for the bomber to slip under it. As little chance as Hughes and the crew had of surviving the landing anyway, Hughes recognized that crashing into the bridge at more than 100 miles per hour would be unquestionably fatal for everyone on board. He pushed the throttles forward, yanked back on the wheel, and was relieved when the flaming Liberator still had enough aerodynamic ability to hurdle the bridge, clearing the span by less than five feet.

Hughes sighed and chopped power again. The dry river bed narrowed and meandered slightly to the left, and Eager Eagle was just a few feet off the cracked clay bottom when Hughes made another gentle turn to keep the dying bomber on course. But the left wingtip hit the riverbank and upset the delicate balance of the crippled aircraft. The impact pulled the Liberator out of the riverbed, and the out-of-control B-24 cartwheeled wingtip to wingtip three times before breaking apart and scattering burning, molten metal across a meadow.

“Those poor bastards,” D’Angleterre said softly. “They never had a chance.”

“Yeah … but they almost made it,” Angel said solemnly, feeling tremendous admiration for the skills of Pete Hughes or whoever was at the controls and had nearly pulled off an impossible feat.

Jankuscz let go of the operating button and lowered the camera to his chest. The final moments of Eager Eagle and the spectacular crash had been preserved on the frames of 16-millimeter film, but Jankuscz felt no excitement or pleasure in having recorded it. The USAAF had wanted a filmed historical record of the raid, and Bill Jankuscz had done his job. No more, no less, and in his mind what he had recorded was just one more terrible event he was witnessing on this ugly, disastrous Sunday afternoon in August.

No one who saw the horrible crash realized it or even could have imagined it, but minor miracles do happen in war and four members of Hughes’ crew survived the impact. Seemingly materializing out of nowhere, a loose group of Romanian peasants ran through the meadow to the crash site and searched for survivors between the blazing chunks of metal spread over several hundred yards. Second Lieutenant John McLoughlin, the bombardier, and Second Lieutenant Sidney Pear, the navigator, were alive but badly injured. Both were rescued and hospitalized but died within a week. Tail gunner Tom Hoff and waist gunner Ed Smith were both thrown clear in the crash and suffered only minor injuries and burns. They were later taken prisoner by Romanian troops and survived the war.

No longer distracted by the fate of Eager Eagle, Marty Angel needed to take stock of his own situation, and a glance at Lieutenant Bill Nading’s Blonds Away reminded him of his duty to his own crew. Blonds Away had some jagged holes in the fuselage and tail fins and was streaked with soot, and Angel wondered if his own B-24 looked as beat-up. But both Liberators seemed to be unaffected by the damage.

“Pilot to crew: Report,” he said over the interphone.

One by one the airmen checked in. Everyone was healthy, damage was remarkably minimal, and Jankuscz modestly said he had gotten “some pretty good film” of the mission. There were some holes in Avenging Angel, but nothing larger than a bowling ball and nothing vital appeared to have been hit. The gauges on the instrument panel all read within normal limits. They were still almost seven hours from North Africa, but it appeared they were going to make it back to Benghazi. It hadn’t been a suicide mission after all, Angel thought, though admittedly he had no idea what the rest of the armada had endured over Ploesti.

Another B-24 in front of them was belching fire and smoke and failing to gain altitude.

“Who’s that?” Angel asked.

D’Angleterre shrugged. “Dunno, but he seems to be in serious trouble.”

Less than two minutes later Avenging Angel caught up to the crippled bomber, which was now skimming the ground and struggling to stay airborne.

“It’s Sand Witch,” D’Angleterre said. “Bob Horton’s plane.”

Seconds later the B-24 crashed into an earthen dike along the Prahova River and exploded in a huge fireball. The two pilots said nothing and looked away from the carnage.

The planes ahead of them, some of them trailing black smoke, began a left-hand climbing turn to the north and an eventual south-by-southwest heading toward Lake Balta Potelel. Avenging Angel, Blonds Away, and Hitler’s Hearse followed their lead.

“I feel sorry for Horton and Hughes and their men. I really do,” Angel said as he pushed in the rudder bar with his left foot and turned the wheel. “But you know what, Laurel? We’re alive, and I’m not going to allow myself to feel guilty about that. And you know what else?”

“Don’t say it!” D’Angleterre cautioned. He sensed Angel was about to say he had a good feeling about making it back to Benghazi. “Don’t say what I think you’re about to say! I don’t want to jinx us now.”

At about that same moment and several miles away aboard Teggie Ann, its bombs having been jettisoned and blown to bits a garage and filling station on the outskirts of Ploesti, Brigadier General Uzal Ent gazed at the blazing refineries at Ploesti and Brazi and the columns of rising smoke several miles north over Campina and got on the interphone.

“Commander to radio operator: Send the message to Benghazi now. ‘MS.’ I repeat: ‘MS.’”

In his compartment the radio operator went to his telegraph key and tapped out the two letters in unencrypted Morse code – dah-dah followed by dit-dit-dit – that General Lewis Brereton, Colonels Jacob Smart and Ted Timberlake, and Major Gerald Geerlings had been waiting anxiously for hours to receive. An instant later, in the operations room in Benghazi, the radio operator assigned solely to monitor that channel took his headphones off, spun around in his chair, and grinned.

“General Brereton, sir,” he said, “General Ent has just checked in. ‘MS,’ sir. ‘MS.’”

Mission Successful.

The grim faces of Brereton, Smart, Timberlake, and Geerlings broke into wide smiles, and they stood up and slapped each other on their shoulders and backs like members of a football team that had just scored the winning touchdown as the clock ran out.

“We did it! ‘Mission Succesful!’ By God, we fucking did it!” Brereton crowed. “We just choked off Hitler’s oil supply and shortened the war! We fucking did it!”

It wasn’t much of a bullpen. There was only the bench and the fence and no protection at all for foul balls that came screaming toward the pitchers, catchers, and coaches sitting there. Behind the fence were two pitching mounds where relievers could warm up without worrying about dodging foul balls.

Amenities were few at Phosphate Pit Park, where the Clippers trained in the sleepy town of Phosphate Mines. The only things fewer than amenities were trees. It was a barren, remote location, an unsightly played-out strip mine abandoned by the conglomerate C.W. Graves that penny-pinching Clippers owner Honk Cassidy had purchased for eight measures of a song and then hastily constructed a cheap ballpark on the property. It was inarguably the worst major-league spring training site in Florida … or Arizona, for that matter. It was a rare day when more than a few hundred fans turned up to watch a game, and most of them congregated in the top rows of the concrete stands where a small, rusted corrugated tin roof provided a little bit of shade. Only the most zealous fans sat on the hot aluminum benches close to the field, hoping an autograph from one of the Boston players would be the salve for the stinging burns from sitting on a long rectangular frying pan for two or three hours. The more experienced fans brought towels with them to cover the benches and protect the backs of their thighs.

“It’s another scorcher here today at Phosphate Park Pit … I mean, Pospate Phit Park … aaah, you know where we are,” Arthur McConnell, the Clippers’ radio play-by-play broadcaster, renowned for his mixed clichés and fractured grammar, told the tiny audience tuned into the game back in Boston. “And Jolly Pasajero has jumped right from the fire into the frying pan. That’s three homers the Clippers’ ace has surrendered this afternoon, and the Tigers now lead Boston 8-2 in the fifth.”

Baseball protocol was relaxed during spring training. The writers who covered the Clippers were permitted to hang around the bullpen during games so they could intercept the pitchers and interview them on their way to the clubhouse when they had finished their work for the day without having to scramble down from the stifling press box every time Harmon made a pitching change. If there was an empty space or two on the bullpen bench – and spaces always opened up during the game after pitchers had thrown an inning or two and headed to the clubhouse – the writers could sit down on the bench and banter with the pitchers or one of the outfielders who wasn’t scheduled to bat that inning and elected to dawdle in the bullpen instead of walking all the way down to the dugout. Two of the writers, Rob Mackenzie of The Boston Ledger and Alex Forget of The Providence Telegraph, were seated on the far end of the bench. Forget was reading from a paperback book of baseball trivia, and Mackenzie was trying to answer the questions.

“Who was the first 30-30 player in major-league history?” Forget asked.

Mackenzie needed only a second to think of the answer. “Ken Williams, St. Louis Browns, 1922. Thirty-nine home runs, 37 stolen bases.”

“Right! Okay, who is the only pitcher to throw a no-hitter in his first major-league start?”

“Another Brownie. Bobo Holloman, 1953.”

There was another loud crack of the bat, and a vicious line drive curled menacingly toward the bullpen.

“Heads,” someone on the bench said mechanically. But Forget didn’t react quickly enough. He tried to twist his body out of the way at the last moment, but the ball short-hopped him and struck him on the outside of the left knee, then spun crazily over his left shoulder and hit the fence before dropping harmlessly onto the grass.

“Christ!” Forget yelped, dropping the book from his right hand and reaching down instinctively with his left hand to rub his knee. “Damn, that hurts!”

“That’s why you assholes are writers instead of athletes,” chuckled Parsons, leaning out from the other end of the bench, his cap now tipped to the back of his balding head. Sweat – or was it re-distilled alcohol? – glistened on his forehead. “You can’t even get out of the way of a fuckin’ ball, much less hit one or catch one. And I’ve seen you throw, Alex,” he added. “You have the worst arm I’ve ever seen on a human being, male, female, or hermaphrodite.”

“Them that can, play. Them that can’t, write,” Forget chanted, trying to force a smile through the pain and still rubbing his knee. The other pitchers seated on the bench, a couple of whom had been idly spitting sunflower seeds onto the sparse grass, were all grinning.

“You okay?” Mackenzie asked quietly, and Forget nodded. “Jolly’s getting lit up today.”

“It’s spring training,” Forget reminded his colleague and best friend, bending down to pick up the trivia book. “He gets hit like this every spring. Then he goes out and wins 20 games.”

“Yeah, but he’s 38 years old – at least. He won’t win 20 forever.”

Jolbert Pasajero was the ace of a bad pitching staff on a not-very-good baseball team. No one had ever seen a birth certificate for Pasajero, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. It was suspected that he was several years older than he claimed to be, but as long as he kept winning no one cared. Age and injuries had cost him the fastball that, in his prime, had been one of the most explosive in baseball. Unable to throw hard any longer, Pasajero had been released by the Dodgers five years earlier. But the Clippers, always desperate for pitching, had rescued him from the scrap heap, and Pasajero had reinvented himself as a junkball artist who had strung together three consecutive 20-victory seasons in Boston. He was also the most popular player on the team with his teammates and with the media. He had a terrific sense of humor, loved to pull practical jokes, and kept players on the team loose when they were tight after a tough loss or fighting a slump or losing streak. He had a high squeaky voice and a laugh that was comical in itself, and his English was so heavily accented that a lot of the things he said were beyond comprehension. But just the way he said them kept everyone in stitches, even the players with the sourest dispositions. Jolly could help them forget their troubles and relieve the boredom.

Forget leafed through the pages of the book to find the one he had been reading from.

“Okay. Who drove in the most runs in a season without hitting a home run?”

Mackenzie pondered the question for a moment. “I know this,” he whispered. “Monte … no, wait! Lave Cross, Philadelphia A’s, 108 in 1902.”

“What is that?” came a twangy voice farther down the bench. It belonged to Orson Caldwell, a veteran relief pitcher whose best days were long behind him. He had once been an All-Star both as a starting pitcher and a reliever, but as his skills eroded he had become a baseball gypsy, passing from team to team on one-year contracts at a fraction of the millions he had earned in his salad days. The Clippers were his 11^th major-league team. The writers had dubbed him Arson Caldwell and cynically referred to him as such in press box banter whenever he was summoned into a game and likely to blow another lead. But they didn’t use that cruel nickname in their stories, and when addressing the rangy Texan directly they always respectfully called him by his Christian name because, despite his worthlessness as a pitcher now, he was a good guy and never failed to provide them with an entertaining interview.

“It’s a book of baseball trivia, Orson. We’re sampling it,” Forget said.

“Yeah? I’m good at trivia,” Caldwell said brightly, changing positions with the pitcher seated next to the two writers. “Ask me a question, Alex.”

Forget and Mackenzie exchanged dubious glances. They knew from experience that no one knew less about baseball than the players themselves. It was as if they had spent so much of their youth playing the game, they had never bought a pack of baseball cards or read The Sporting News or Baseball Weekly. When it came to the history of the game they played, or its trivia and sometimes even the rules, the vast majority of players were totally ignorant.

“All right,” Forget said, quickly scanning the pages for a question that should be easy to answer. “Who was the last player to win the Triple Crown?”

“Yaz,” Caldwell replied, grinning. “That was too easy. Give me a tougher one.”

“Who’s Yaz?” asked the rookie, Larry Freeman, who had been eavesdropping while continuing to juggle the one ball.

“Before your time, kid,” Caldwell said. “Way before your time.”

Forget found a slightly more difficult question. It concerned a relief pitcher, though, a question Arson might be able to answer.

“Who was the first relief pitcher to win the MVP Award?”

“Dennis Eckersley.”

“No, before Eck. The first reliever to win the MVP.”

Caldwell looked befuddled.

“What kind of name is Yaz?” Freeman asked, taking advantage of the lull in the conversation. “That’s it? Just one name? Like Madonna?”

“Quiet, kid. I’m thinking!”

Another 30 seconds passed.

“I don’t know. Gossage?”

“No.”

“Fuck it. Who?”

“Jim Konstanty, 1950 Phillies,” Mackenzie said.

Caldwell’s eyes widened, and he smiled. “Hey, I know him!”

“You do?” Forget replied, mildly astonished.

“Yeah. When I was a kid he was at a pitching clinic I attended. He could hold a baseball between each of his fingers! Four baseballs in one hand! He had huge hands.”

Mackenzie laughed. “That’s all you remember him for? That he could hold four baseballs between his fingers? That he was a freak? Not that he was the MVP of the National League?”

“Yeah. It was cool, man! You try it sometime. Konstanty is the only guy I’ve ever seen be able to do that.”

“The shit you guys remember,” Mackenzie said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “It never ceases to amaze me what really impresses you fucking guys. It’s almost frightening what passes for knowledge in your insular little world.”

“Hey, there’ve been … what? A hundred guys who’ve won the fucking MVP Award? I see fucking MVPs everywhere. Every fucking day. We even have one on this fucking club. How many guys have you ever seen who could hold four baseballs between their fingers? I’ve seen one. How many have you seen?”

“The man has a point, Rob,” Forget laughed.

“Ask me another question,” Caldwell said eagerly.

Forget scanned the questions and fixed his eyes on one he knew that Arson would have to know. “Who is the only pitcher to win 25 games in one season and save 25 in another?”

A skeptical frown appeared on Caldwell’s face. “You mean somebody’s actually done that? In the big leagues?”

Mackenzie laughed. “Yeah, Orson. And you even know the guy.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. In fact, he’s here today.”

“Shit.” Caldwell quickly glanced around the park, looking at as many pitchers on both teams as he could see in hopes that his observations would trigger something in his memory. Nothing.

A loud chuckle was heard from the other end of the bench.

“It’s you, you nimrod,” Parsons said mirthfully. “You’re the guy.”

“Fuck! That’s right! I am!” Caldwell said brightly. “I did do that!”

After the game Rob Mackenzie and Alex Forget lingered inside the entrance to the clubhouse, waiting for the players they wanted to interview to emerge from the showers. Most of the other writers were still in the press room, listening to manager Roy Harmon critique the afternoon’s performances by his players. Bored, Mackenzie glanced at a list of players posted on a bulletin board, the players scheduled to make the next day’s six-hour, round-trip bus trip to West Palm Beach for another Grapefruit League exhibition.

“Can you see into the trainer’s room?” he asked casually.

“A little bit. Why?” replied Forget, who was idly leaning against the cinderblock wall opposite his friend.

“Is The Matador in there?” Pete Wysocki, derisively dubbed The Matador by the Boston press because of his lack of fielding prowess, was the Clippers’ 12-time All-Star first baseman, the biggest superstar on the team and a veteran of 16 seasons in the majors, all with Boston.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why? Do you think he’s hurt?”

“He will be by tomorrow morning,” Mackenzie laughed, pointing to the list with his thumb.

Forget chuckled. “He’s on the bus?”

Mackenzie nodded, leaning forward and pretending to grimace in pain. “I think his back is stiffening up as we speak.”

“It’s great to be king, isn’t it?” Forget said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why Harm even bothers to try and get his butt on the bus for a trip longer than an hour. He knows he’s gonna find a way to duck it. He’s never made a long trip in all the years I’ve been covering the club.”

“I think he does it just to fuck with his mind,” Mackenzie said. “Oh, oh. Here we go. See ya.”

Q’nard Rodgers, the Clippers’ power-hitting left fielder, had just stepped out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, and Mackenzie went to his locker to interview him. Forget, with no one to talk to and nothing else to do now, made a beeline to the locker of third baseman Spike Moss and waited for him to show up. While he was waiting, a loud “Fuck!” was barked from the vicinity of the clubhouse door. Wysocki was on his way out and had seen his name on the list for the bus to West Palm Beach. Several veteran players dressing in front of their lockers chuckled. Mackenzie looked away from Rodgers for a moment and at Forget, who grinned, bent over, and clutched his back in mock pain. Mackenzie stifled a laugh and went on with his interview.

Forget was not aware that Moss was still on the field, taking extra groundballs. Frankie Martinez, a free agent pitcher the Clippers had signed to a lucrative five-year contract during the winter, came out of the shower, toweled off in front of his locker, then covered his muscled body with fragrant powder and slapped an expensive cologne on his handsome, clean-shaven face. From the other side of the clubhouse a paunchy Jolbert Pasajero, sitting in a canvas chair in his clay-stained uniform pants and a sweat-soaked T-shirt and puffing on a fat Cuban cigar, his back to his locker, quietly studied Martinez as he pampered and prepped himself to meet his adoring public waiting outside the gates of the parking lot. Pasajero was entering the final year of a four-year contract, a deal that had been one of the richest in the game when he signed it but had since been eclipsed by far bigger contracts as teams desperate for pitching were more and more willing to pay almost anything for anyone they believed could win more than 15 games. Martinez had been little more than a .500 pitcher plagued by control problems during his first five seasons in the big leagues. But in his sixth year, his walk year, he had won 22 games and two more for the Athletics in the World Series. Now, despite one outstanding summer out of six, he was the free agent pitcher most in demand, and his price kept going up and up. Honk Cassidy, the Clippers’ penurious owner and a former third-string major-league catcher who had played for the shells of peanuts, hated spending money. But his scouts convinced him that the 27-year-old Martinez had turned the corner as a pitcher, was entering his prime years and would be a big winner for years to come, and was worth the money it would take to sign him. With Pasajero in the twilight years of his career, the Clippers would need a young ace like Martinez to anchor their pitching staff in the future, especially now that their farm system was fertile again and producing talented position players who had the potential to turn the team from a chronic loser into a perennial contender.

For all he had done almost single-handedly for the Clippers, winning 86 games in five years, Jolbert Pasajero did not begrudge Frankie Martinez the money that easily made him the highest-paid pitcher on the club. Pasajero was smart enough and had been around long enough to know that at his age he would not be getting a multi-year extension for anything close to what Martinez would be making. Pasajero had made enough money to live well for the rest of his life, and if he had to accept a series of one-year contracts to keep pitching, he was prepared to do that, especially if he could continue his career in Boston, where he was revered by the fans. But what did gnaw at Pasajero was Martinez’s princely attitude, that he was somehow better than everyone else on the team simply because he made more money than anybody except Pete Wysocki. Pasajero wanted to teach Martinez some humility. He had started calling Frankie Martinez “Fajita,” a nickname Martinez, who had been born and reared in Minnesota and didn’t even speak Spanish, despised.

Pasajero kept his dark brown eyes fixed on Martinez as he sat down on the stool in front of his locker and pulled on a pair of silk socks, then stood up and slipped into a pair of tailored black trousers and patent leather loafers. Grabbing a portable hair dryer from the shelf in his locker, Martinez walked to a row of sinks, plugged the appliance into a wall socket, and spent the next three minutes drying his sleek black hair and styling it with a brush. Satisfied, he unplugged the dryer, returned to his locker, placed the dryer on the shelf, and picked up a tube of toothpaste and a battery-operated toothbrush. Pasajero puffed on his cigar and watched Martinez brush his teeth at the sink, then lean close to the mirror and inspect each tooth when he was finished. Then he was back at his locker, draping several thick 24-karat gold chains around his neck and putting large diamond rings on two fingers of each hand. Martinez put on a form-fitted white silk shirt, buttoned it, and then made one more stop at the mirror to admire himself from three different angles. Pleased with his appearance, he flashed an Erik Estrada smile, turned and began prancing through the clubhouse toward the door.

“Hey-y-y, Fronkee! Fronkee Fa-hee-ta!” Pasajero said in his heavily accented English as Martinez passed by and tried to ignore him. “You lookin’ good, mon. But never forget, amigo! You may be reech, but you steel just another speek!”

Martinez cringed but kept walking, and Pasajero let out a squeaky laugh. Just before departing the clubhouse, Martinez stopped, turned around, and stuck out his tongue at Pasajero, who laughed again. Heartier this time.

Forget, still standing by Moss’ locker, tried hard but couldn’t suppress a smile. With an acupuncturist’s precision, Jolly always knew exactly where to stick his needles.

“Man, why you keep fucking with Fajita like that, Jolly?” asked Rodgers, himself chuckling, as he momentarily broke off his interview with Mackenzie. “Someday you might really piss him off.”

“Aaah, fuck heem if he no can take a joke,” Pasajero giggled, taking another puff on his cigar and rolling his grimy sanitary stockings down to his ankles. “Tight ass!”

Later that evening, after their stories had been filed and they had eaten their suppers at the various Phosphate Mines restaurants – most of them fast-food joints – the writers began congregating in the lounge at the Royal Carriage Inn, the only decent bar in town that also happened to be located in the spring training headquarters of the Boston Clippers. This was fortuitous for several members of the press corps who preferred to drink their dinners and could stagger back to their rooms after last call without fear of being arrested for driving drunk back to a different hotel. There was really no other place to stay in town anyway, so everybody connected with the club stayed at the inn, including many of the players. A few players with children rented condos in the area.

Rob Mackenzie and Alex Forget arrived at the half-full lounge shortly after ten. Two other writers, Paul Talbot and Mike Cox, were sitting at a table and watching an NBA game on a nearby television and issued an invitation to Mackenzie and Forget to join them, so they sat down. Mackenzie, who was single, quickly surveyed the bar, searching for a promising female target. But it was a Tuesday night, and the stools at the bar were barren of talent. The pickings wouldn’t be much better on a Friday or Saturday night, he knew. Phosphate Mines was a small town, and the vast majority of women were, as Jolly Pasajero would have described them, mullions. In Pasajero’s parlance, a mullion was an exceedingly ugly human being. Still, Mackenzie thought, there was always hope. Maybe some night a bus full of college cheerleaders would break down on its way through town. And maybe it would snow, too.

Forget, who was married but always came to spring training unaccompanied because his wife had a job back in Rhode Island, also surveyed the bar. But he was taking a census. He just wanted to see who was there. Only a handful of people were sitting on the stools. One of them was Jimmy Parsons, who camped on the same stool every night. He was in the company of a homely, slightly overweight bleach blonde who appeared to be at least 60 years old. Robbing the coffin, Forget thought. He could see Parsons was already tipsy, and every time the coach looked at his weathered companion it could only have compelled him to drink more. Players, by baseball tradition, were forbidden to drink in the hotel bar where the team was staying. That privilege was reserved for the manager – although Roy Harmon, unlike his pitching coach and best friend, didn’t drink at all – the coaches, and front office personnel. The writers could, of course, drink wherever they damn pleased.

A few stools further down the bar sat white-haired Jocko Callaghan, the veteran writer for the World Press Agency, a wire service. Callaghan had, as was his custom, skipped dinner and reported directly to the bar to begin drinking as soon as his story and the box score from the game had been filed. That had been four hours earlier, and Callaghan’s head was already resting on the polished wood surface. He appeared to have passed out. Early for him, thought Forget, who had no interest in watching the basketball game on TV. Sitting on the stool next to Callaghan was a fan who, judging from his pasty complexion, was a snowbird – probably just down from Boston – who was wasting valuable vacation time watching the no-account Clippers train in a no-account burg. The green uniform top he was wearing with Wysocki’s number 9 on the back and the first baseman’s name emblazoned across the shoulders was also a dead giveaway. The fan and the bartender were engaged in a subdued conversation so they wouldn’t disturb Callaghan. Forget could barely hear them.

“I don’t know how you folks up there can keep electing Ted Kennedy,” the bartender said. “The creep’s a total loser. He ain’t one-tenth the man JFK was … or even half the man Bobby was. Ted’s a moral midget.”

“You don’t understand,” the fan argued. “Sure, his family’s rich and all that, and rich people are only interested in keeping what they have and getting more. But the Kennedys aren’t like that. Teddy really works hard for the common man. You wouldn’t think so, considering all his money, but he truly understands the problems facing people who have to work for a living and sympathizes with them. The man’s a saint.”

“A saint? A saint? A saint – especially one who’s a married man – doesn’t go around partying with college girls and then killing them, like he did with that Mary Jo What’s-Her-Name in Cappa … Crappa …”

“Chappaquiddick,” the fan said. “I don’t mean a saint like a saint. Sure, Teddy’s personal life is a mess, and he’s made a lot of mistakes. That’s why he could never get elected President. But he does a great job of representing the people of Massachusetts, and that’s why he keeps getting elected to the Senate.”

“Yeah? Well, in my opinion, they shot the wrong Kennedys. Ted’s a disgrace.”

Jocko Callaghan suddenly emerged from his stupor, lifted his head slightly from the bar, and chimed in.

“What’s wrong with Teddy Kennedy?” he said. “At least the man got laid that night!”

And then his head thudded back onto the bar.

“He’s got a reporter’s ears. He hears everything, even when he’s not listening,” Forget murmured.

“Who?” Mackenzie asked, shifting his attention from the TV.

“Callaghan. Dead drunk, and he still doesn’t miss a thing.”

“Great ears and great instincts. That’s why he was a great reporter,” Mackenzie said in genuine admiration without knowing exactly what Forget was talking about.

When they had both been new to the Clippers beat, just about everything Mackenzie and Forget learned about covering baseball they had learned from Jocko Callaghan and the other baseball writers from his generation, most of whom had long since drunk themselves to death by the age of 50. Callaghan was one of the last of a dying breed of hard-drinking reporters, and he looked 20 years older than he really was. Still, he had managed to outlive most of his friends. They had tried to teach Forget and Mackenzie and the new generation of writers how to drink, too. But very few of them drank heavily. A beer or two, maybe a glass of wine. The new generation thirsted, all right, but for information, eager vampires who chose to drink the rich blood of a 125-year-old game in lieu of alcohol. If they weren’t alert and vigilant, they might miss some valuable tidbit of knowledge, for even men who had been involved in baseball for a half-century freely admitted that they themselves learned something new about the game every year. Nobody knew all there was to know, but the new generation was determined to try. At first the old guards were resentful that the writers of the new generation wouldn’t drink themselves into oblivion with them every night. They didn’t trust the youngsters, dubbed “chipmunks” by legendary New York baseball writer Jimmy Cannon because of their incessant chattering in the press box during ballgames. But over time, when the old-timers observed just how devoted the chipmunks were to baseball, their attitudes changed, and they helped them in any way they could and let them gather the acorns of knowledge from their rotting brains, knowledge many of the old-timers didn’t even realize they possessed until it was too late to be of use to them.

There was a commotion in the corridor just outside the lounge. It sounded like a fight, and several patrons – including the writers – who had been seated close to the entrance rushed out to see what was happening. Two burly long-haired young men with scraggly beards, attired in checkered flannel shirts and faded overalls, were wrestling on the floor and grunting while three others who looked just like them were standing around and watching with amusement. Standing with the upright men was Dow Bell, a rookie from the hills of West Virginia who was expected to make the club as a reserve outfielder-first baseman. Except that he was clean-shaven, wore designer jeans and a Mettalica T-shirt, and his long blonde hair was a pile of tight ringlets that made him resemble Harpo Marx, Bell looked just like the five hillbillies he was with. He was such a rube the other players had nicknamed him Cowbell. The rookie didn’t seem to mind.

The puzzled observers relaxed when they saw Bell. This was his entourage from back home, a motley collection of cousins and close friends renowned for their rambunctious behavior. The Phosphate Mines police had arrested a couple of them earlier in the spring for skinny-dipping in the pale green water of an abandoned strip mine pit behind the ballpark’s center-field fence.

“Y’all stop now,” Bell drawled, a wide smile on his face as he gently kicked one of the wrestlers with the toe of a cowboy boot. “Act civilized, boys. We’re in a first-class hotel here, not back in the cabin on Shadow Creek. Ya gotta behave, y’hear?”

The wrestlers stopped and clambered to their feet, grinning sheepishly. Bell had a full set of teeth, but the other five men didn’t have enough to make another full set between them.

“Sorry to disturb your evenin’, folks,” Bell said warmly, apologizing to the patrons from the lounge. “You too, Mr. Mackenzie, Mr. Talbot, Mr. Cox, and Mr. Forget. The boys are just feelin’ a little rowdy tonight. It won’t happen again. I guarantee it … or I’ll kick their asses all the way back to the Clarksburg bus station! Let’s go, boys.”

“Sorry!” the five hillbillies said in almost perfect unison, and then they bolted down the corridor, crashed through the double doors, and disappeared into the night. Bell, with all the awkward dignity he could muster, walked after them. Just as he pushed open the door, five loud splashes could be heard from the courtyard. The hillbillies were plunging into the swimming pool, fully clothed. Bell turned around to face the incredulous crowd one more time, smiled broadly, shrugged his shoulders, and then closed the door gently behind him.

“This is like watching a Fellini movie,” Mackenzie said.

“I don’t think even Fellini,” Forget replied, “could imagine anything this bizarre.”

It rained the day the Boston Clippers broke camp, and the final exhibition game of the spring was canceled. The team, as well as most of the media traveling to Milwaukee, was gathered in the VIP lounge at McCoy Airport in Orlando when Alex Forget strode in after turning in his rental car and taking the courtesy bus to the terminal. He was wearing a worn and wrinkled electric blue trench coat, and when Mark Preston, the Clippers’ short-tempered shortstop, spotted the writer, his face screwed up like he was sucking on a lemon.

“You still have that raggedy-ass raincoat from last year? I can’t believe you’re still wearing that fucking thing, Alex,” Preston said.

“What’s wrong with it?” Forget replied.

“It’s fucking ugly. That’s what’s wrong with it. I’ll bet you’ve been wearing that … thing … for years. It hurts my eyes to look at it.”

“Then you’ll have an excuse when you go 0-for-4 on Opening Day, Marco,” chimed in Q’nard Rodgers, who was sitting in a chair next to Preston, and a couple of other players sitting nearby laughed.

Preston, unusual for him, ignored the barb. Instead he reached into the pocket of his sports coat, produced a pair of sunglasses, and put them on. Again some players laughed.

“Jeez, Mark, gimme a break. It’s not like I wear it all the time,” Forget pleaded. “Only when the weather’s bad.”

“It’s so ugly, I can still see it when it’s packed in your suitcase. Man, you’re traveling with big-leaguers here. Show a little style! You embarrass the whole team when you dress like a fucking vagrant.”

“Funny how you’re the only one who ever complains about it,” an amused Forget noted, sitting down in an empty seat. “No one else says anything.”

“They don’t want to hurt your feelings, Alex. And they don’t want you to write anything bad about them. Me? I don’t give a flying fuck. But the old-timers are the ones who told me you’ve been carrying that rag with you ever since you started covering the club.”

“Why are you getting on me?” Forget asked. “Why don’t you go get on Wysocki? Talk about embarrassing! The man’s a walking billboard for skid row attire!”

Pete Wysocki never even took a suitcase with him on road trips anymore. The Clippers all had their uniform numbers stenciled onto their team luggage, and Wysocki’s number 9 was so famous around baseball that baggage handlers and bellboys kept stealing his suitcases and their contents as souvenirs. Providing him with suitcases with different numbers had worked for a while, but two or three of them still disappeared every season. Not that there ever would have been much among the contents worth keeping as a souvenir; Wysocki was a notorious cheapskate who, by comparison, made Clippers owner Honk Cassidy look like Andrew Carnegie. So, except for a small zipper bag in which he kept clean underwear and socks, Wysocki carried no luggage with him whatsoever anymore. He always wore a ragged pair of running shoes and the same pair of jogging pants and the same T-shirt for the entire trip, no matter now many days it lasted. When the Clippers returned to Boston, he’d throw away the clothes. There was no incentive to wash or keep them, because he had never bought them in the first place. Companies eager to be associated with Wysocki in any way possible were more than glad to give him free samples of their products, whether they were expensive laptops, DVD players, or clothes. He cleverly avoided signing any endorsement deals because the free flow of goods would then have to stop. Most of the stuff he was given he simply sold anonymously and pocketed the cash. But he kept a lot of the cheap clothes for his traveling wardrobe. It didn’t matter to him that the T-shirt might have Frigidaire written across the chest and the running pants might have Western Auto written down one leg. He wore whatever was handy. It was amazing that Wysocki had never made Mr. Blackwell’s infamous list of atrociously dressed celebrities. Mr. Blackwell must not have been a baseball fan.

“Pete’s got an excuse,” Preston said. “The motherfucking fans keep stealing his clothes. Nobody would want your fuckin’ rags, Alex. If you threw that raincoat into a Goodwill bin, they’d track you down and make you take it back.”

“Relax, Mark,” Forget urged. “You probably won’t see it again the rest of the season, and I promise I won’t embarrass you further by sitting near you on the plane.”

“You fucking got that right! I don’t even want to be on the same plane with you!”

While Preston was ragging Forget about his raincoat, Clark Moon sneaked up behind the shortstop and spit a small amount of vomit on the shoulder of his sport coat. One of the catcher’s unique talents was being able to vomit on cue, much to the amusement of his teammates.

“Goddamit, Moonie!” Preston shrieked. “This is a brand new jacket! Fuck!”

The rest of the team burst out laughing as Preston pulled out a handkerchief and furiously tried to wipe the little yellow stain off his shoulder. Then he headed for the men’s room.

“I’ll bet you wish you’d been wearing Forget’s raincoat now!” Chip Armstrong called after him.

Without looking back, Preston raised the middle finger on his left hand, and the players in the lounge chuckled heartily.

Rob Mackenzie entered the lounge, carrying a folded Orlando Sentinel under his arm, just as Preston was finishing up his diatribe against Forget and in the nick of time to see Moon throw up. Mackenzie laughed and sat down next to Forget.

“Preston on you about your raincoat again?” he asked.

“Just like Ray Milland in the movie ‘It Happens Every Spring,’” Forget replied. “If it wasn’t Preston, it would be some other dickhead.”

“They’re all right, you know,” Mackenzie said, cackling. “That coat is a public eyesore.”

“Thanks for your support, Rob.”

“Don’t mention it, old son.”

“By the way, nice haircut!”

“Fuck you! That’s what I get for going to a fucking Florida barber,” Mackenzie complained. “What does Berkley call them? Delilahs? I knew I should have waited ‘til we got back home.”

“At least you didn’t try to dye it green,” Forget laughed.

Mackenzie’s dark wiry hair looked like it always did after a haircut, except in the front where it looked like the barber had used a weed-whacker instead of clippers. It was much shorter than the rest of his hair, hacked almost down to the scalp. Mackenzie opened up the newspaper and began thumbing through the sections. Not finding what he was looking for, he thumbed through them again.

“Fucking ballplayers!” he shrieked, bolting to his feet. A few of them looked curiously in his direction. “Motherfuckers making fucking millions of dollars a year and they won’t spend fifty cents on a fucking newspaper!”

“Sports section missing?” Forget asked blandly.

“Fuck yeah! The pricks just walk through the newsstand, pull out the sports when nobody’s looking, and leave the rest of the paper in the rack! Motherfucking penny-pinching ballplayers!”

Mackenzie glanced around the lounge. There were at least eight players reading sports sections without any other sections of a newspaper in sight. They were all grinning.

“That’s right, you assholes! Go ahead and laugh!” Mackenzie seethed. “And then the next time I mention something negative that was written about you or the club, all you assholes can tell me again: ‘Oh, I never read the papers.’ Fucking bullshit!”

“How long have you been covering major-league baseball, and you still haven’t learned to check the paper before you buy it?” Forget said, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shaking his head.

“Hey, Rob!” Wysocki called from across the room. He was proudly holding up the front-page section of the Sentinel, which would have made for an amusing photograph since the first baseman was wearing a USA Today T-shirt. “I’ve got a whole paper right here!”

“Yeah!” squeaked Jolbert Pasajero. “But he deedn’t buy eet! I see heem pull eet out of the fucken trash can after someone threw eet away!”

The players erupted in laughter.

The Clippers arrived at the elegant Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee a few hours later. The players, staff, and media picked up their room keys that had been set out for them in little envelopes in the lobby and scattered. Don Morris and Lance Hedlund collected their keys and went directly to the hotel bar on the other side of the lobby, dropping their laptops and their carry-on luggage at foots of their stools. The regular luggage would arrive later on a truck and be taken to their rooms. George “Gator” Grumman and Rick Davis joined them. Grumman was part of the radio play-by-play team, and Davis was the play-by-play telecaster on TV. They were also heavy drinkers.

Rob Mackenzie and Alex Forget went to their respective rooms, dumped their stuff on the beds, and then went out to dinner. It was after eleven when they returned to the hotel, and with time to kill they stopped into the lounge. Morris, Hedlund, Grumman, and Davis were still at the bar, all of them by now thoroughly drunk. The pitching coach, Jimmy Parsons, had joined their besotted group. Paul Talbot, who had flown in from Boston earlier in the day, and Mike Cox were sitting at a table, nursing beers and watching the Nuggets play the Lakers on TV. Mackenzie and Forget joined them. Mackenzie ordered a beer, and Forget ordered a coke.

Grumman staggered off to the men’s room, and when he returned he started to weave past the table populated by the younger writers and then unexpectedly stopped. The gravelly-voiced Grumman had been doing baseball for decades and was recognized as one of the best in the business. But he had bounced from job to job because of his drinking, and when he drank he became irascible and pissed people off, particularly his bosses. Gator Grumman was admired by everybody and liked by nobody except the listeners who did not know him but flooded the radio stations with protests every time he was fired.

“What’s that?” he growled, trying to focus his eyes on the TV. “Basketball? Why are you watching basketball? There’s only one game, boys, and that game is baseball! The greatest game of them all! And the greatest player in the greatest game of all? I don’t need to tell you boys that! Amos Otis!”

“Amos Otis?” Talbot said in disbelief. “He ain’t even in the fucking Hall of Fame!”

“He should be!” Grumman bellowed. “He would be if he hadn’t wasted his career playing in fucking Kansas City where nobody knew who the fuck he was! If he played in New York, he would have been greater than Mantle! Greater than DiMaggio! Greater than any of ‘em!”

“I don’t think so,” the dubious Talbot said. The other three writers all smiled but said nothing. They had heard the Amos Otis tribute before. Many times.

“You don’t think so?” the wobbling Grumman said, mildly shocked. “You don’t think so? Did you ever see him play?”

“Yeah, when I was about ten years old,” Talbot replied. “I saw him play on TV a few times. He was okay. Better than a lot of players back then. But great? No fuckin’ way, Gator!”

“You just don’t know baseball,” Grumman said. “If you knew anything about the game … anything! … you’d know that Amos Otis was the best there ever was! That stupid song about the center fielders, ‘Willie, Mickey, and the Duke?’ It should be ‘Amos, Willie, and the Mick!’”

Grumman, trying to steady himself on his feet, stopped talking and looked at the TV again.

“Basketball!” he said in disgust. “If the NBA finals were being held in my backyard, I’d pull down the shades!”

And then he weaved his way back to the bar.

“He’s not serious about Amos Otis, is he?” Talbot asked.

The other three writers shrugged.

“I know they were pals when Grumman was in KC,” Cox said. “But sometimes I think he just says that to yank people’s chains. Especially Harm’s. Harm almost goes ballistic every time he hears Grumman talk about how great Otis was. Gator gets perverse pleasure out of watching Harm boil.”

By one a.m. the bar was nearly deserted. Mackenzie and Forget were still there, watching Sports Center on ESPN. Don Morris stumbled out, and they were the only ones left.

“Let’s call it a night,” Mackenzie yawned.

They got up to leave, and Forget made a detour to the bar. The laptops and carry-on bags Morris and Hedlund had brought in with them were still there on the floor. Forget picked up their things and took them with him back to his room. He had been picking up after them for years.

A repeated, loud knocking on his door awakened Lance Hedlund shortly after nine o’clock the following morning. It took him several seconds to clear the alcoholic haze from his eyes and get his bearings. The drapes were drawn across the window, the room was dark, and as far as he knew it was still the middle of the night.

“Who is it?” he barked in the most menacing tone he could muster.

“Sir, it’s a special delivery from the hotel manager,” came a young voice on the other side of the door.

Hedlund was suspicious. He’d been rolled before in hotel rooms while drunk. He and Jocko Callaghan had once regained their senses in a room in Phosphate Mines completely naked. Two hookers had cleaned them out, including their clothes right down to their shoelaces. Hedlund squinted at the door and noticed he hadn’t put the chain on, and the plastic Do Not Disturb sign was hanging from the inside handle.

“I didn’t order anything! Beat it!” he hollered.

“Sir,” the voice persisted, “this isn’t room service. It’s a gift. From the manager.”

“What kind of gift?”

“It’s a fruit basket, sir. Everyone with the ball club is getting one, compliments of the manager.”

“Well,” Hedlund said, his voice wavering, “okay. Slip it under the door.”

“Sir?”

“I said slip it under the door!”

There was silence for a few moments.

“Sir, it’s a fruit basket. It’s about two feet tall. It’s not going to fit under the door.”

“Well, goddammit! Just leave it out in the hall! I’ll get it later!”

“Yessir.”

Hedlund rubbed his throbbing forehead several times, then reached over and turned on a lamp. Except for his shoes, he was still dressed in his clothes from the day before. Unbuttoning and taking off his wrinkled shirt, he got off the bed and went into the bathroom to freshen up. Forty-five minutes later he looked as sober as a Baptist minister, showered, shaven, and dressed in pressed clothes he had taken out of the suitcase left in his room by the bellman the previous evening. He checked his wristwatch. It was shortly after ten, and the team bus for the workout at the ballpark was leaving the hotel at eleven. He looked around for his laptop, but it was missing. He called the front desk and asked to be connected to Alex Forget’s room.

“Alex! Lance here! Do you have my computer? And my carry-on?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ve got Don’s stuff, too.”

“You’re a peach, Alex. Thanks for grabbing our things. I can’t believe we left them down there last night. Must have been really blotto. What room are you in? I’ll swing by and pick them up.”

By 11:30 the Boston press corps – except for the ever-absent Clarence Whitfield – was at the ballpark and hanging around the batting cage, watching the Brewers hit. One of the Milwaukee writers, Pat North, emerged from the home dugout and approached Forget and Mackenzie, who were leaning against the back of the cage.

“Happy New Year, guys!” he said cheerfully.

“Hey, Pat. Back at you,” Forget said.

“Shit, Rob! What happened to your hair?” North asked, chuckling. “Was the hem of some woman’s skirt on fire?”

North’s comment provoked a laugh from Forget.

“Fuck you, Pat,” Mackenzie muttered, glaring at both writers. “I’ll have you know I’m a changed man. I’m not like that anymore.”

Forget arched his eyebrows. This was news to him, too.

“Really?” North said doubtfully. “What? Don’t tell me you’re no longer chasing women in wheelchairs.”

Forget laughed again.

“Ha-ha. Fuck you both,” Mackenzie growled. And then he chuckled. “Well, I’m trying to change.”

“Six weeks in Phosphate Mines with no action makes him think he’s a monk anyway,” Forget said.

“Wow! The Libertine of the Ledger has become celibate!” North said. “Well, we’ll fix that tonight. Have you guys heard of Herman’s?”

Forget and Mackenzie shook their heads.

“New joint, great place, and only a few blocks from the Pfister,” North informed them. “So new even the ballplayers don’t know about it yet. Loaded with women hot to trot. I’ll pick you guys up at the hotel at nine.”

Forget nudged North. “Hey, Pat, who’s that guy?” he asked in a low voice, nodding slightly in the direction of a strange-looking man who was holding a reporter’s notebook and conversing with acne-scarred Brewers coach Andy Strauss, who was hitting groundballs to the infielders between questions. The man asking the questions was extremely tall and nearly bald except for a wreath of scraggly hair in the vicinity of his ears. He also wore coke-bottle glasses in wire frames. When he spoke, he leaned forward awkwardly and swayed, like a giraffe looking for a lost nickel in the grass.

“Him? That’s Allen Neptune. He’s the new baseball writer for the Statesman,” North replied.

“No kidding?” Forget said. “Does he know anything about baseball?”

North nodded. “Don’t be misled by his alien appearance. He’s a little green – no pun intended – but he knows what he’s talking about. And he’s not a half-bad writer, either.”

“They make quite a pair,” Mackenzie said.

“Who?” North asked.

“Neptune and Strauss. Jolly Pasajero calls Strauss the Monarch of the Mullions, and I might have to agree. He looks like a prizefighter who never learned how to get out of the way of a punch. I’d be careful about letting small children see those two together.”

“Jolly Pasajero, huh?” North chuckled. “There’s a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black. I’m sure he’s traumatized a few small children in his time.”

Roy Harmon was holding court in the visitors’ dugout while the Clippers took batting practice. North and Neptune, their work with the Brewers finished, wandered over together to get some notes on the visiting team.

“Hey, Pat, how are you?” Harmon asked warmly when he spotted him in the group.

“Good, Harm, good. How about you?”

“Can’t complain.” And then he saw Neptune towering above the others, and his jaw slackened.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Harmon said, curious.

Neptune thrust a long right arm through the crowd of writers.

“Allen Neptune, Madison Statesman,” he said, and Harmon shook his hand.

“Neptune,” Harmon repeated. “Is that your name or your address?”

The crowd of writers erupted in laughter, and Neptune joined in the mirth.

“Sorry. I couldn’t resist,” Harmon apologized.

“That’s all right,” Neptune said, smiling. “At least now I don’t think you’ll forget who I am.”

“Not much chance of that,” Harmon agreed, and he went on with his briefing of the press.

Down at the far end of the dugout sat Jolbert Pasajero, bundled up in a parka against the early spring Wisconsin chill and a towel around his neck. He was watching his teammates take batting practice and go through their drills. He was excused from the workout because he would be starting the first game of the season the next afternoon. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Andy Strauss walking in his direction, his fungo bat in one hand and a bag of baseballs in the other. Pasajero turned his body away, pretending he couldn’t see the Brewers coach coming. When he sensed Strauss was in close proximity, Pasajero turned around to face him, let out a terrifying shriek, and pretended to recoil in horror. Strauss, surprised by the unexpected outburst, stopped in his tracks.

“Man! You no ever sneak up on me like that!” Pasajero scolded him. “You could be anytheeng in the jungle but the hunter!”

A few players who were within earshot laughed, and a smile even appeared on Strauss’ beaten face.

“They no let you wear a mask when you were catching?” Pasajero squeaked. “Man, Strauss, you one fucken mullion! You so ugly, every time you walk by me my pants wrinkle!”

“Fuck you, Jolly,” Strauss said, shaking his head and laughing. “It’s good to see you again, too.”

Just before heading out to the bullpen to warm up for his Opening Day start the next afternoon, Pasajero stopped in the dugout and looked at the lineup card posted on the wall: Booker, 8; Thayer, 4; Wysocki, 3; Rodgers, 7; Moss, 5; Torino 9; Moon 2; Preston, 6; Pasajero, 1.

“Skip,” Pasajero said to Harmon, who was seated on the bench, “is thees the best you can do for me? Aaiiyeee!”

Harmon laughed. “Just get out there and do your thing, Jolly.”

As Pasajero warmed up on the mound in the bottom of the first inning, the Clippers’ radio play-by-play broadcaster, Arthur McConnell, tried his best to set the stage for the listeners.

“It’s a bitterly cold day here in Milwaukee for the Opener, Gator,” he said to Grumman, his partner, as the radio audience back in Boston eavesdropped via their radios. “My tongue has been chattering all day. But this can be a nice place to play in the summer. On a really nice day, you can see all the way to Wisconsin!”

Grumman shot McConnell a surprised look. “I’m sure you can, Arthur,” he finally answered. “But you can see Wisconsin on a bad day, too.”

Pasajero tossed a three-hitter, and the Clippers beat the Brewers 2-0.

“I told you those spring training performances of his meant nothing,” Mackenzie told Forget in the press box.

“Seems to me it was the other way around. I told you that,” Forget reminded him, and Mackenzie laughed.

Frankie Martinez, the high-priced free agent acquisition, made his debut for the Clippers the following day. His first 11 pitches were balls, he was tagged for five runs in the first inning, and the Brewers clobbered the Clippers 14-4. After the game Martinez explained that he had trouble getting a feel for the ball in the cold weather.

“Are you getting the same sense I am, that Fajita’s gonna be a first-class alibi artist?” Forget said as he and Mackenzie left the clubhouse together.

“He grew up in Minnesota, for chrissake,” Mackenzie replied. “You’d think he’d be used to pitching in cold weather.”

Cameron Berkley was slated to start the final game of the series. But a snowstorm buried Milwaukee, and the game was postponed. The Clippers checked out of the Pfister and went to the airport to catch a plane to Minneapolis, their next stop on the season-opening road trip, for an early-season interleague series. But their flight was delayed because of the storm, and the team spent six hours sitting in the terminal. Some members of the team played cards, others listened to music through their headsets, a couple read paperbacks, Jimmy Parsons camped out in the bar with some of the writers and broadcasters, and everyone else sat bored in their seats. Pasajero decided to liven things up by picking on Pete Wysocki.

The Clippers first baseman had won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award the year before Pasajero arrived, and he had cashed in on his celebrity. One of his idol-worshipping benefactors, who had been supplying Wysocki with a free Cadillac ever since he had won the Rookie of the Year Award a decade earlier, asked if he wanted to come into the dealership as a partner. All Wysocki would have to do was lend his name to the business. He wouldn’t have to sell cars in the winter. He wouldn’t even have to show up at his office. All he’d have to do was a meet-and-greet now and then with customers or business associates. Wysocki signed on.

He did sell one car. The year Pasajero joined the Clippers, the pitcher was broke. The Dodgers, a team for which he had twice won 20 games, two strikeout crowns, and an ERA title, had unceremoniously released him the previous fall following a 9-18 season. Pasajero had broken his right shoulder in an automobile accident in Mexico during the winter, and when he showed up in spring training his blazing fastball was gone. Showing no patience and no loyalty for his past service, the Dodgers dumped him six months later. Pasajero had to accept a minor-league deal from the Astros, who quickly released him in the spring. He pitched in the minors for two other teams that spring and summer, getting released both times, before the Clippers signed him to a minor-league contract after the All-Star break. Although Pasajero was still struggling to master the art of becoming a finesse pitcher and wasn’t pitching well, the Clippers needed an arm in the bullpen and brought him up after three weeks. He pitched in a few mop-up situations, then got a spot start and shut out the Cubs with a complete-game six-hitter. That led to another start, and another, and Pasajero finished the year with a flourish, winning five games in September, three of them by shutout. His future in Boston was assured.

But he was making the pro-rated minimum major-league salary, he had been driving around Boston in a beat-up eight-year-old Hyundai, and he needed a larger, reliable car to drive back to his home in Mexico City after the season. He and his wife had five children, and they wouldn’t all fit in a Hyundai. Wysocki knew of Pasajero’s plight and offered to sell him a car from his nominal dealership, Wysocki Cadillac & Kia.

“I’ll give you a great deal, Jolly,” Wysocki had said.

“I no want no cheap fucken Kia, Pete,” Pasajero had replied. “I need a car that weel get me there. A beeg car. The roads in Mexico are fucken terrible.”

“No, no! I’ll give you a great deal on a Caddy,” Wysocki had promised.

So Pasajero, anticipating a much better contract offer from the Clippers during the winter, bought a Cadillac that he could not afford right then. And now, to break the monotony and break Wysocki’s balls, he decided to tell the story in the terminal at Billy Mitchell Field in Milwaukee.

“So I tell Wysocki: ‘I no have too much money right now,’” Pasajero related as the other players within earshot stopped what they were doing and began listening, Wysocki among them. “’That okay, Jolly,’ he say to me. ‘You my friend. I geeve you great deal on a Caddy.’ ‘Okay,’ I tell heem. So one morning he peek me up at my apartment and drive me out to his dealersheep. Wysocki drive a real nice Caddy. Eet have everytheeng. I say to Wysocki: ‘You have nice Caddy like thees for me?’ ‘Better,’ he say to me. ‘Mucho better. Better than mine.’ ‘But I no have so much money as you, Pete,’ I say to heem. ‘How can I have a better Caddy than you? You fucken reech. I fucken broke right now.’ Wysocki say: ‘You no worry, Jolly. I you friend. I take good care of you. I no gonna cheat you. You my teammate. You my friend. I no cheat my teammates and my friends.’”

A few knowing chuckles were heard from the rapt crowd of listeners, and Wysocki was trying hard not to smile.

“So he show me the Caddy. Big mothafucka. Many options. But eet has fucken dents everywhere! And where there no dents, eet full of scratches! Three of the hubcaps are meesing. I say to Wysocki: ‘What happen to thees fucken car, Pete? Eet beat to sheet!’ He say: ‘Eet’s a demo, Jolly. We let the customers drive eet, and then they buy a new one.’ I say: ‘I know there are a lot of fucken bad drivers in Massachusetts, Pete, and I theenk they all drive thees car. Or use eet for target practice. Eet’s a sad-looking mothafucka! I see cars in Mexico thirty years old, driving on fucken bad roads, that look better than thees piece of sheet.’ Wysocki say: ‘That’s why I geeve you such a good deal, Jolly. It no look too good, but eet have only 14,000 miles. Eet’s a Cadillac! Best fucken car made! You know I no cheat you, Jolly. I you friend!’”

By now the crowd was beginning to double over with laughter, and Wysocki, tears in his eyes, covered his mouth with his hand.

“I look at the Caddy one more time. One of the wheels has only one lug nut holding eet on. ‘Pete,’ I say, ‘what happen to the other lug nuts? Thees wheel going to fucken fall off!’ Wysocki say: ‘I don’t know. But eet’s a Cadillac, Jolly. Best fucken car in America. Eet only need one lug nut. I tell you what. Because you my good friend, I take another one thousand dollars off the price. Eet not good car, Jolly! Eet great car! Eet get you to Mexico City in comfort. No problemo! And because eet look like sheet, you no have to worry about fucken auto banditos stealing eet when you get there!’ I say: ‘I don’t know, Pete. Maybe fucken Kia not such a bad idea after all.’ ‘No, no, Jolly! Kia no fucken good for you. You a Caddy man! Thees ees right car for you! Trust me! I no cheat you! You my very good friend!’

“So I buy the fucken Caddy from my very good friend, Pete Wysocki. And when the season end two days later, I put my stuff in the car, and I start driving to Mexico City. Before I get to Providence, I get a flat tire. I take all my stuff out of the trunk, put eet on the ground, and there ees no spare! Just an empty fucken hole where the spare ees supposed to be! I have to get towed to someplace where I can buy a new tire. And a spare. The man at the tire store tell me: ‘You know, you have only one lug nut on one of the other wheels.’ I say: ‘I know, but eet’s a Caddy, the best American car, and eet only need one lug nut. Pete Wysocki tell me that, and he no lie to me. He my friend!’ The man, he laugh and say: ‘I can sell you some lug nuts.’ But I say: ‘No, that okay. I no can afford to buy any fucken lug nuts, not after buying thees car and two new tires and paying the tow-truck man.’ ‘How far you going?’ the man ask me. “Mexico City,’ I say. ‘Good luck,’ the tire man say. ‘You gonna fucken need it.’”

By now Pasajero’s audience was laughing so hard, the players could barely stay in their chairs.

“I get back in the car, but the fucken tow truck man – he was very tall dude – he pushed the electric seat all the way back. I no can reach the pedals. I push the button, and notheen happen. The seat no move! The fucken theeng ees broken! I take clothes out of my suitcase and put them behind my back so I can reach the fucken pedals! I drive for awhile, but eet’s a hot day. I put on A/C, and fucken smoke come out! Aiiyee! I no can use A/C, only one fucken electric window work, and the fucken radio no work either! I stop in Connecticut to buy gas, and the man, he check the oil, and he say: ‘You down two quarts.’ I say: ‘How the fuck can that happen? I just feel it up yesterday.’ So I buy more oil and starting driving again. But I no can drive faster than 40 because the fucken car is shaking like eet’s in a fucken earthquake! And people are honkeen horns at me and flippeen me the bird because I drive too fucken slow. I want to tell them eet’s not my fault, eet’s thees fucken piece of sheet Caddy my good friend Pete Wysocki sell me. But they no want to listen. No, they all too fucken mad. And then the fucken wheel break off! Aiiyee! I see sparks and smoke and a whole lot of fucken noise, and the fucken car stop in the middle of the fucken highway! Now everybody behind me really fucken mad! The police come and geeve me a ticket for driving a car that ees not safe, and they tow the fucken theeng away. I no see eet again. I no want to see eet again! The police, they nice to me because I peetch for the Clippers. They drive me to the bus station in New Haven. I buy a ticket, and that’s how I get home to Mexico City five days later, riding a fucken bus with fucken pigs and chickens. So I tell you, my friends, when Pete Wysocki tell you he you friend, keep both you hands on you fucken wallet. Fucken Castro, he a better friend to me than Wysocki. Wysocki say he love you, but he only love you fucken money.”

Wysocki was laughing as hard as anybody as Pasajero concluded the tale of his odyssey. The time flew by, and the plane to Minneapolis arrived at the gate sooner than anyone expected. Never had a travel delay seemed so short.

The Minnesota Twins played in the Hubert Humphrey Dome, more popularly known as the Homerdome, so games weren’t affected by the bad weather in the upper Midwest. Cameron Berkley started the first game of the series for the Clippers and surrendered four homers in the first six innings. His long black hair streaming from beneath his cap was flying around his shoulders from the exertion, but baseballs were flying out of the cozy ballpark.

“No wonder he’s a lousy pitcher!” Arthur McConnell complained on the radio. “Look at his hair!”

The Clippers lost the game 7-2.

A few hours before the second game, Alex Forget was sitting in the dugout watching a few of the Clippers take extra hitting, when Rob Mackenzie wandered in holding a newspaper, a smirk on his face.

“What?” Forget asked.

“Fuckin’ Whitfield did it again!” he cackled. He handed a copy of that morning’s Boston Times to his friend.

“Where did you get a Times in Minneapolis?” Forget inquired.

“I found it in the lobby. Someone must have flown in from Boston and left it there. I’m only shocked some ballplayer didn’t find it first. Read it.”

Forget opened up the sports section and read Clarence Whitfield’s lead paragraph from the previous night’s game.

They call it the Homerdome, named for former President Herbert Humphrey. And last night Cam Berkley learned why.

Forget laughed and shook his head. “Herbert Humphrey? Former President? How does that slip by the desk?”

“They were probably on a tight deadline,” Mackenzie said. “But why blame the desk all the time? You should be able to trust your writers to get the facts right … at least some of the time. But it gets even better. Look at the jump inside. The paragraph about Pettigrew’s triple.”

Forget turned a couple of pages, found where the story continued inside, and scanned it until he found the paragraph.

It could have been an even worse night for Berkley in his Clippers debut. In the fifth inning Twins center fielder Bill Pettigrew hit a ball high off the right-field fence that got away from Boston right-fielder Benny Torino. Pettigrew tried to stretch it into an inside-the-park homer but was cut down at the plate on a strong relay by Mark Preston, and it went into the official box score as an inside-the-park triple.

“An inside-the-park triple? Is there any other kind?” Forget chuckled.

“My point exactly,” Mackenzie said. “This guy writes like Arthur McConnell talks. What else?”

Forget re-read the paragraph and laughed again. “He said the ball went off the right-field fence and got away from Torino. It hit the left-field fence and got away from Rodgers.”

“How the fucking guy keeps his job is beyond me,” Mackenzie said.

Forget shrugged. “Affirmative Action?”

“Hey, you got the package?” Mackenzie asked, changing the subject.

“It’s in my bag inside the clubhouse,” Forget said, grinning.

“Okay. I saw Preston in there. Let’s give it to him.”

The two writers went into the clubhouse. Forget retrieved a lumpy gift-wrapped package from his bag, and together they approached the Clippers shortstop, who was just beginning to undress in front of his locker.

“Hey, Mark. Happy Birthday!” Forget said, handing the package to a surprised Preston.

“You guys remembered!” he said, beaming. “This is really nice of you! Thanks!”

Preston tore at the wrapping paper, and when he caught the first glimpse of Forget’ electric blue trench coat, his mood turned 180 degrees.

“You fucking assholes!” he snorted.

“We know how much you secretly coveted it, so we decided to give it to you,” Mackenzie said brightly.

The players nearby looked at the coat on Preston’s chair and began laughing. Preston picked up the coat and wrapping paper and dumped them into a trash can in the center of the clubhouse. A couple players went over to examine it.

“You fucking guys!” Preston growled, returning to his locker. “I’m not going to forget this. I’ll get even with you pricks. You’ll see. I fuckin’ promise you that.”

“Yeah? Well, Happy Birthday anyway,” Mackenzie said, chuckling, as he and Forget turned away.

Benny Torino, who had been one of the players looking at the coat in the trash, went into the trainer’s room and came back out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He poured some of it over the coat, produced a cigarette lighter, and set the coat afire as the players began laughing.

“Are you guys fucking crazy?” shrieked Tom Pollock, rushing over with a bottle of water. “You wanna burn the place down?”

The relief pitcher emptied the bottle and put out the fire. The coat smoldered in the can, several holes burned through the fabric.

“Now I know why they call you guys firemen,” said rookie Dow Bell. “You really do put out fires.”

“What are we going to do with it now?” Torino asked.

“Put it in Wysocki’s locker,” suggested Clark Moon. “He’ll fucking wear it. He’ll wear anything.”

“Great idea!” Torino said.

Chip Armstrong put the smoldering coat on a hanger and placed it inside Wysocki’s locker, next to his uniform.

Some smoke was still puffing from the locker when Wysocki arrived about five minutes later. The other players, their eyes fixed on the first baseman, snorted and snarfed as they fought to keep from laughing. Wysocki arrived at his locker and was momentarily startled. Then he reached inside, took out the coat, and looked it over. Except for several small burn holes near the bottom, the coat didn’t appear to be in bad shape.

“Hey, isn’t this Alex Forget’s coat?” he asked as the players burst out laughing.

“Yeah!” Moon croaked. “The fucker gave it to Preston for his birthday!”

Wysocki looked the coat over one more time. “Well, it’s mine now,” he said, hanging it back in his locker.

The other players were astonished. They were certain Wysocki would have berated them about being the butt of a joke – only Jolly Pasajero had carte blanche to make fun of anybody on the team with impunity – and thrown the coat away.

“The bastard will wear anything that’s free!” Moon said under his breath.

The Clippers lost two of the three games in Minnesota. The only game they won came courtesy of washed-up Bubba Hornsby, who stunned everyone in the ballpark and in the press box by socking a pinch two-run homer with two outs in the top of the ninth to beat the Twins 5-4.

“That’s one!” Roy Harmon chortled after the game. “I told you Bubba would win at least six games for us this year, and that’s one already!”

“I’ll wager that’s the only one,” Mackenzie whispered. “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.”

“That’s one more than I thought he’d have,” Forget murmured.

It was snowing lightly when the bus took the team to the airport for the flight back to Boston. Pete Wysocki was wearing the singed electric blue trench coat over his USA Today T-shirt, and Mark Preston had to bite his tongue. But when he got back to Boston, Wysocki trashed it with the rest of his travel wardrobe.

Three months earlier, when a counter-attack was first being discussed by the High Command, Galland had envisioned it as the greatest air battle in history. In spite of the incessant bombing day and night by the Allies, and in spite of the loss of thousands of aircraft in combat over five years, the Third Reich’s factories somehow managed to build planes faster than they could be shot down. Finding competent pilots, much less talented ones, to fly them was the real problem. Attrition had taken a tragic toll on the Luftwaffe’s top aces, and the sad truth was that Germany could produce planes much, much faster than the Fatherland could train pilots to capably fly them. But Galland, one of the Luftwaffe’s greatest aces with 96 kills to his credit, was convinced his version of the plan would work. He had already tested it in several small-scale attacks, and the results had been positive.

Galland wanted to limit the Jagdwaffe’s combat sorties to the bare minimum for several weeks, allowing the fighter reserves to rebuild their strength while husbanding his dwindling fuel supplies and keeping alive what few experienced pilots he had left. Galland calculated that by the middle of November he would have more than three thousand fighters at his disposal, and on a day when the weather conditions were right, he would throw every one of those fighters at the incoming American bomber stream. By the sheer force of numbers the Luftwaffe would overwhelm the fighter escort, knock down hundreds of bombers, and sweep the United States Eighth Air Force from the skies. Another hundred night-fighters would patrol the borders of Switzerland and Sweden to intercept crippled planes and stragglers trying to reach the safety of those two neutral nations. Galland calculated that five hundred bombers, representing roughly half the strength of the Eighth Air Force, would be shot down that day at a cost of five hundred German fighter planes and one hundred and fifty pilots. By bailing out of their dying air-craft over their homeland, the other three hundred and fifty pilots would survive to fight another day. But five thousand Allied air crew, along with several hundred escort pilots, would be killed or captured, and those would be unsustainable losses. It would take the Allies months to recover, precious time the Germans could use to regain their ebbing strength.

Galland was stunned when he couldn’t enlist the support of Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim, the chief of the Luftwaffe’s Fourth Air Fleet and one of the architects of the Wehrmacht’s counter-offensive, for his plan. Greim would not even con-sider presenting it to the other members of the Oberkommando des Heeres. When Galland learned that the OKH’s plan was an all-out assault by armored and infantry divisions, using every piece of equipment and every soldier the Reich could muster, and it would be launched in the dead of winter, he could not believe what he was hearing.

“Excuse me, Herr Generaloberst,” Galland cried, “but what happened to my plan for the knockout blow against the bombers?’

“It has never been discussed,” Greim replied curtly. “The Luftwaffe’s job will be to provide air cover and ground support for the counter-offensive.”

“What if the weather is bad, as it often is in December?” Galland argued. “How can the Luftwaffe provide air cover if it cannot get off the ground?”

“The meteorologists will tell us when the weather is favorable for air support, and that’s when the counter-offensive will be launched,” Greim explained. “It has all been carefully figured out, Dolfo. The OKH has decided this counter-offensive is our one last chance for victory.”

“So this is it? Is there no way to reason with the OKH?” Galland begged.

“It has been decided,” Greim reiterated.

“Then I must go to the Führer myself and make my position clear! I must convince him to change his mind!” the desperate Galland declared. He had always been one of Hitler’s favorite generals and had the dictator’s ear.

Greim rebuked him sharply. “You cannot! Spare yourself the embarrassment. You will not be received by the Führer … or the Reichsmarschall, for that matter. They want nothing to do with you anymore, Dolfo. I’m sorry.”

Galland knew Greim was right. The prestige of the Jagdwaffe had plummeted during the last three years. Galland’s fighters had been unable to prevent Allied bombers from turning Germany’s cities into rubble. Realistically, what chance had he had of success? Until recently the war on the Eastern Front and in the Mediterranean had left him with a meager force of 250 fighters in the West to combat an armada of a thousand bombers. Given more aircraft in 1942 and 1943, when the Americans and British were still building up their air forces and were at their weakest, the Luftwaffe might have been able to inflict so much damage the Allies would have been forced to abandon their attacks and rethink their strategy that bombers could win the war by themselves. By the time Galland was allowed to numerically strengthen his units in the West, the bombers numbered in the thousands, and throwing his fighters against them was like throwing grains of sand against the tide. Galland had also fostered a reputation among the other generals as a gadfly. Never comfortable in his role as General der Jagdflieger, Galland had avoided attending staff meetings whenever possible, preferring instead to mingle with his units at the fronts. When he did show up at meetings, it was usually to present his own personal agenda and complain either about military strategies or the outdated aircraft his pilots were forced to fly against technologically superior fighters being flown by the British and the Americans. Already in 1940 Galland had infuriated Hermann Göring when the Reichsmarshal, at the end of a tirade during which he accused Luftwaffe pilots of cowardice for failing to annihilate the Royal Air Force in the Battle for England, asked by way of conciliation what his group commanders required to insure a victory. Galland’s impudent response had been: “I should like an outfit of Spitfires for my squadron.” Galland had alienated so many powerful people, he wondered why he had not long since been replaced as General of the Fighter Arm. He guessed he had kept his job because Hitler and Göring could not figure out how to gracefully force one of Germany’s few surviving national heroes out of office.

+ + + + +

Colonel Günther Lützow knew all this because he had been Major General Adolf Galland’s chief deputy. Galland had been fired after the counter-offensive failed. As expected, Galland’s Jagdwaffe was singled out as the scapegoat because his fighters seldom got off the ground. It did not matter to Hitler, Göring, and the OKH that the bad weather Galland had cautioned them about had grounded his aircraft for much of the battle. By the time the weather had cleared around Christmas, the Allies had recovered from the surprise attack and reinforced their own air forces, and they whipped the inexperienced Luftwaffe pilots in dogfight after dogfight above the battlefields. On the night of January 3, 1945 – three days ago – Galland had been summarily dismissed by Göring, a decision that had enraged every fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe.

A barely discernible movement in the woods caught Lützow’s eye, the eye of a natural-born hunter who had shot down more than a hundred enemy aircraft. He turned his head sharply and spotted a magnificent stag, ghostly white in the pale moonlight, standing between the trees, watching the Mercedes roar past. Lützow noticed the absence of an old familiar tingling in his limbs, and a wry smile appeared on his lips. Normally, the sight of such an animal would have triggered an uncontrollable instinct to grab a rifle and hunt it down. But there had been too much killing during the last five-and-a-half years. He himself had been both the hunter and the hunted. And now he could appreciate what it took and what it meant to be a survivor, and that grand old stag knew how to survive. Lützow smiled broadly and returned his gaze to the snow-crusted road ahead.

“Rüdiger, did you see him?” Lützow casually asked the driver.

“See whom?” the driver replied anxiously. Had he narrowly missed running over someone on the road he never knew was there? These fighter pilots could see everything, probably even a chimney sweep in the bowels of a Silesian coal mine. And then shoot the poor fellow cleanly through the heart.

“The stag.”

“Nein, Herr Oberst,” the driver admitted, somewhat ashamed of his night blind-ness. “Where?”

Lützow shook his head and chuckled. “You city boys become blind the moment you’re out in the countryside. You see nothing. The wolves would have you for supper in a matter of minutes.”

Two minutes later the Mercedes pulled up in front of a fabulous hunting lodge. It belonged to Colonel Johannes Trautloft, who until three days ago had been Galland’s Inspector of Day Fighters. Several other automobiles were already parked nearby, their drivers – all of them Luftwaffe non-commissioned officers in their thick greatcoats – lingering next to them, smoking and talking in low voices. Rüdiger hopped out and opened the rear door, and as Lützow stepped onto the packed snow he could hear laughter from inside the lodge. But it was subdued, nothing at all like the unrestrained howling he used to hear whenever fighter pilots gathered for a night of revelry, the macabre mirth of warriors ecstatic to have cheated death for another day and not daring to think that they might not live to see the next sunset. Lützow stomped his feet on the wooden porch in front of the door to knock the snow from his boots and entered. A quick glance around the room, his arrival met by smiles and raised snifters filled with captured French cognac, was all Lützow needed to ascertain that he was the seventh and final guest to arrive at this unusual party. This was the way he had planned it.

As far as the Gestapo might be concerned, this was just another reunion of Kameraden home on leave from the fronts. That’s the way Lützow had wanted it to appear. Trautloft’s hunting lodge deep in the forest outside Berlin, rather than a club in the capital, had been chosen specifically to keep the suspicious eyes and ears of the secret police as far away as possible. Everyone at this party knew about the hundreds of gruesome executions that had followed the failed attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life less than six months before. Everyone in Germany knew. The Nazis had not kept them a secret. They were a very public warning that treason would be dealt with mercilessly.

Lützow handed his overcoat to a servant and tugged at the bottom of his tunic while surveying the half-dozen high-ranking Luftwaffe officers gathered in the rustic great room of the lodge and socializing beneath the trophy heads of various beasts Trautloft and his relatives had killed on hunting expeditions. He was personally acquainted with every one these men, who had been invited because they were both loyal to Adolf Galland and faithful to the chivalrous code of their violent, deadly profession. Every one of them was a great fighter pilot, an ace many times over. But as talented and experienced as they were, every one of them had also been shot down at least once and some of them several times. Luckier than most of their brethren on both sides in this war, they were all here because since the Battle for England ended in failure in the autumn of 1940 the Luftwaffe’s fighters on the Western Front had been engaged in a defensive struggle against Allied air power. When German pilots were shot down, they either parachuted or crash-landed onto the soil of the Fatherland or the occupied countries and were quickly returned to their units instead of becoming prisoners of war. For the top aces in the Allied air forces, to have the misfortune of being shot down just once over most of Europe meant the war was over for them.

Lützow joined the gathering and began shaking hands and exchanging greetings with his fellow aces. He made small talk, one by one, with Johannes “Macki” Steinhoff, Günther von Maltzahn, Gustav Rödel, Edouard Neumann, Hans-Heinrich von Brüstelin, and, of course, Trautloft, their nominal host for the evening. A few of the guests had not flown in combat for several years, and two of them had been sacked from their staff jobs when Galland had been dismissed three days earlier. The handsome 31-year-old Colonel Steinhoff had 170 kills, wore the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords – the Reich’s second-highest decoration for valor – at his throat and had just been relieved as commander of Jagdgeschwader-7, the Luftwaffe’s first active combat unit to be equipped exclusively with the fabulous Me-262 jet fighter. Colonel Trautloft had 58 kills and wore the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, the Reich’s third-highest decoration. The youthful Lützow, who was 33 years old but looked barely half that age, also wore the Swords.

After a little more socializing, Trautloft urged everyone to move into the dining room for a sumptuous feast featuring wild boar and venison, game shot just that morning on the family preserve.

“Dolfo isn’t coming?” Steinhoff murmured as he and Lützow shuffled into the dining room with the group.

Lützow shook his head. “Nein. He knows about this, and he endorses what we’re about to do. But he’s concerned that if he is an active participant in this it will be perceived as a personal vendetta against Fatty and Der Gröfaz.”

Fatty was the corpulent Göring’s nickname among the disaffected fighter pilots, and Der Gröfaz was their derisive moniker for Adolf Hitler. Gröfaz was an acronym for Größster Feldherr Aller Zeiten – Greatest Field Commander of All Time.

“Dolfo feels our own grievances are serious enough to pursue on their own merits,” Lützow continued. “Getting him involved might be a distraction from the real issue, which is to stop these slanders on the Jagdwaffe. Besides, he believes nothing he or we can do will change his status now. It is too late to save him but perhaps not too late to save our own reputations from these smears.”

Steinhoff nodded knowingly as the officers took their seats at the long wooden table.

After the meal, aromatic cigars, and still more cognac, Colonel Lützow rapped his knuckles on the table, calling the officers to attention, and stood up. The sated pilots leaned back in their high-backed chairs, their tunics unbuttoned, and listened to what Galland’s former deputy had to say.

“You know why we are all here,” Lützow began. “The time has come for all the Jagdwaffe commanders who know and trust one another as friends and Kameraden to find a way out of this mess. Dolfo’s sacking three days ago was the final humiliation. But we have all suffered indignities slung at us by Fatty and Der Gröfaz. We all know that this war is lost, and the Jagdwaffe is being made the scapegoat for Germany’s defeat. Ever since the Battle for England, whenever anything has gone wrong Der Gröfaz has blamed the fighter pilots, and Fatty has kowtowed to him and refused to defend our honor. But who was it who made the fatal decision to stop the raids on the English airfields just when we were close to achieving the original objective of destroying the RAF? Not the pilots! Who was responsible for the failure to build a long-range heavy bomber capable of reaching the industrial cities in the heartland and on the western coast of England, and long-range fighters to escort them? Not the pilots! Who was responsible for failing to produce a fighter as good as the Spitfire or the Mustang? Not the pilots! But we, as good and loyal Germans, obeyed our orders and have done the best we could with the kites we were given.”

Heads nodded around the table as Lützow paused to take a breath.

“No one in any other air force could have done more with what we had,” Maltzahn interjected.

“Most would have done a helluva lot less,” noted Steinhoff.

“Jawohl!”

“The fighter pilots did not make the decision to start another front in the East, which stripped our strength in the West to the bare bones and left us severely out-numbered when the Ami bombers began to appear in force,” Lützow resumed. “Nor was it our decision to spread what few fighters we had left in the West throughout France and the Low Countries instead of pulling them back inside the borders of the Reich from where we could attack the bombers in concentrated numbers. And even when it became obvious we needed more and more fighters to defend our cities, who gave the orders to keep building useless bombers instead of fighters? Again, not the pilots! And now the Allied fighters usually outnumber us six, seven, and eight to one in every dogfight!

“Two and a half years ago, when this war was still winnable, the Me-262 Turbo, the fastest fighter plane ever built, flew for the first time. You’ll remember that Dolfo himself flew the Turbo in 1943 and told the Air Ministry that there was no aircraft like it in the entire world. ‘The Turbo could very well win the war for us if we can get enough of them in time. Even a few could make an enormous difference to us,’ Dolfo told them. But the ministry would not give Willy Messerschmitt permission to put the Me-262 into production, and for a year this great fighter languished, ignored, in a hangar. And when Der Gröfaz finally allowed it to be built, he ordered it to be built not as a fighter but as a bomber!”

The officers around the table had heard all this before but shook their heads in disgust anyway. Some of the jets were now being produced as fighters, and in their limited use they had proven to be vastly superior to any fighter the Allies had. But there were too few of them, and they had arrived on the scene far too late to turn the tide of the air war in Europe back in favor of the Luftwaffe.

“Yet I submit to you,” Lützow continued, his voice growing stronger, “that despite the technical handicaps, the shortage of pilots and fuel, the insipid orders, and the backstabbing by Fatty, the Jagdflieger have achieved remarkable results under the most trying circumstances. But instead of honor, we receive humiliation! As good soldiers we have borne these unfair and unjustified criticisms without protest and continued to do our duty against overwhelming odds! And for our valiant efforts we have been branded as cowards and liars, accused of running from fights, and claiming phantom victories! Some of us here flew with the Legion Kondor in Spain in 1936 and 1937. Others have been flying in combat since September 1939. Pilots in the western air forces get rotated home after a few months, but some of us have been flying and fighting for nearly six years, knowing that if we fly and fight long enough, the day will inevitably come when our luck runs out and we can never go home anymore. We have all lost close and dear friends in this long and bloody war. Still, Fatty and Hitler portray us as cowards and gypsies. They are determined to make us – us! – the scapegoats for the defeat of the Fatherland! I say to you gentlemen that we have been good and obedient soldiers long enough. If we cannot get the machines and the pilots we desperately need, at the very least the time has come to set the record straight so that history will not condemn us the way our misguided leaders have.”

Lützow sat back down in his chair to enthusiastic applause.

“So, how do we accomplish this?” Colonel Rödel asked after the applause had subsided. Then he added in a lower voice, as if afraid the Gestapo was listening in: “Are we talking about another coup d’etat?”

“Let’s get one thing straight from the very start,” Lützow said firmly, leaning forward in his chair and placing a fist on the table. “We are not here to plot a coup d’etat or an assassination. It is too late to alter the course of this war. Germany is going to lose. The only issue here is how we choose to lose it. Do we lose it by groveling before our bone-headed leaders and the enemy? Or do we lose it with honor, with the credit due us for the way we have conducted ourselves against insurmountable odds?”

“Franzl is right,” said Macki Steinhoff, referring to Lützow by his nickname. “A coup d’etat is out of the question. Let us not forget that it was a mutiny by our navy that brought the last war to an end and forced us to accept the terms of a cruel armistice. Franzl here knows that better than any of us because his father was an admiral in the Great War. The Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of discontent that led to the rise of the Nazis. The Nazis blamed all of Germany’s problems on the mutineers and traitors who sold out the Fatherland in that railroad car at Compiègne. We certainly do not want to be remembered in the same way, as mutineers who might be held responsible for the next war.”

“I don’t think we can take our grievances to the public,” Trautloft said. “The party controls the press, and even if it didn’t, the people have already been fed so much propaganda about our alleged cowardice and incompetence I doubt they are in a mood to forgive us for their suffering.”

“All right,” Steinhoff said. “As intolerable as it is, we must accept the fact that we cannot rid ourselves of Hitler. So the next-best thing is to get rid of Fatty, who has never backed us up since the Battle for England. And he himself a fighter pilot – and a damned good one – in the Great War, for God’s sake!”

“Well, how good a fighter pilot Fatty really was is open to dispute,” Günther von Maltzahn interrupted. “Some say he took credit for a lot of victories that really belonged to other pilots in his squadron.”

“That’s irrelevant now,” Steinhoff continued, waving his hand. “The point is that Fatty, of all people, should have understood and appreciated the obstacles we have had to overcome. Yet he has sold us out in every crisis. When Hitler hears from Fatty’s lips, the lips of the pilot who inherited the great Red Baron’s squadron, that the Jagdflieger have let the German people down, how can he not believe him? Ja, Fatty is – pardon the pun – our biggest problem. He’s the one who must go. He has poisoned Hitler and everyone else against us. With Fatty out of the way, maybe somebody else can get Der Gröfaz to listen to reason and stop this insane purging of our ranks. Firing and demoting the best airmen we have left weakens us and can only result in even heavier suffering by our citizens. Hitler must be made to understand that.”

“Macki is absolutely right,” Trautloft said. “But how can we convince Der Gröfaz to get rid of Fatty? How do we even get close enough to him to try and convince him? No one in this room – except perhaps you, Franzl – would exactly be welcome at the Chancery or Air Ministry. Hitler would not even see Dolfo the last few months, and Der Gröfaz always had a fondness for our leader.”

“I don’t know,” Lützow admitted. “But we have to find a way. That’s why we’re here tonight. We have to try.”

“What about the new boss?” Edouard Neumann suggested.

It was an open secret that Gordon Gollob, another great ace with 150 victories in just 350 sorties, was scheduled to be named as Galland’s successor as General of the Fighter Arm in a few days. Lützow, who had somehow survived the latest purge, would remain in place as Gollob’s deputy.

“I don’t think so,” Lützow replied. “For one thing, he’s an ardent Nazi. Fatty picked him for a reason, and if I thought Gordi would support our cause with all his heart, he would have been invited here tonight.”

“And Dolfo hates the man,” Steinhoff said. “Dolfo thinks Gordi’s a back-stabber, and he’s right. Gollob is a nasty little man, and the last thing we need is Gordi Gollob stabbing the rest of us in the back.”

“So what about you, Franzl?” asked Major Hans-Heinrich von Brüstelin. “You’re still the number two man in the Jagdwaffe.”

Lützow shook his head. “Fatty knows how loyal I am to Dolfo. He’s suspicious of me. I think the only reason he kept me around was to help ease Gordi’s transition into the job, someone who can help show him the ropes. He would never give me access to Der Gröfaz, not without knowing exactly why I wanted to see him. When it comes to pro-tecting himself, Fatty has a sixth sense.”

Several other names were suggested without eliciting much enthusiasm from the pilots.

“How about Greim?” Gustav Rödel asked.

Lützow thought for a moment before commenting. “Fatty and Greim don’t like each other very much, it’s true, and Greim is high enough in the OKL to have a chance of presenting our case to Der Gröfaz without first going through Fatty.”

“I don’t think he’d do it,” Trautloft said, shaking his head. “Greim is from the old school. He believes in following orders to the letter, even if the man giving them is an idiot and quite likely insane. I can’t see him turning on Fatty. Besides, while he can’t stand Fatty, Greim is still loyal to Hitler.”

“All the more reason to approach him,” Rödel said. “If we can get Greim in our corner, his words should carry a lot of weight with Der Gröfaz.”

Following more discussion, Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim seemed to be the pilots’ best chance to get Hitler’s ear.

“Would he turn on us if we asked him and he said no?” Neumann inquired in a worried tone. “I haven’t survived the war this long only to be hung on a meat hook and strangled by piano wire.”

“Greim may turn us down,” Lützow replied. “But I don’t think he’d turn us in as mutineers. He’s too honorable a man for that.”

“I still have my doubts,” Trautloft said. “These are desperate times, and desperate people do strange things. Let’s think about this some more.”

No one spoke for several moments, and during the silence some of the officers realized for the first time they were hearing the distant, muffled explosions of bombs being dropped on Berlin. It was nothing they hadn’t heard many times before, and by now it had become background noise, like a radio playing softly in another room while you went about your tasks. Maltzahn cleared his throat and spoke up.

“At the risk of sounding like the devil’s advocate here,” he began, “Fatty’s a joke, but he’s not entirely wrong, you know. We must be willing to acknowledge and accept our own shortcomings. Whoever we send must make it clear to Hitler that we will shoulder the blame for our own mistakes. Let us be honest with ourselves, gentlemen. The life of a Jagdflieger isn’t all sackcloth and ashes. What about the Fighter Pilots’ Home in Bad Wiessee? No other branch of the military has the exclusive use of such a resort to which we can retreat from time to time. Can a U-boat commander on patrol in the North Atlantic leave his station and check into a Bavarian spa for a few weeks because he’s tired? Can the commanding officer of a Panzer climb out of his tank in the middle of an offensive on the Eastern Front for a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation in Bad Wiessee? But whenever we have felt the need, we have climbed into our kites and flown in the opposite direction of the action to spend a few weeks in the Alps, far, far away from the war.”

“We deserved it!” Neumann argued.

“Of course we did!” Maltzahn agreed. “That’s not the issue, Edu! But admit it: Some of us – and I’m not referring to the men in this room – have been known to abuse the liberty of long leaves at Bad Wiessee when we didn’t feel like fighting anymore. While the war raged on a thousand kilometers away, we treated ourselves to a very good time, claiming exhaustion as a debilitating wound.”

Many of the pilots looked down at the table and nodded. What Maltzahn said was true. No one in the other branches of the German armed forces could use exhaustion as an excuse to break off combat and escape to an alpine Eden. Courtesy of Hermann Göring, the Jagdflieger had always been a privileged lot, and everyone in the Wehrmacht knew it. To go now to Hitler and complain about mistreatment by Göring would, at worst, brand them as mutineers and, at the very least, smack of ingratitude. The pilots could certainly not expect any support or sympathy from their fellow soldiers and sailors; victory or death was the only avenue of escape from their miserable existences.

“Ja, ja. I know some of us have never even seen Bad Wiessee,” Maltzahn continued. “But others have visited it too often and for too long, and it is the abuse of that privilege that lends credence to the charges of cowardice by Fatty and his friends. All I’m saying, gentlemen, is that the Jagdflieger are not above reproach here. We are not the pure white knights of the air we like to think we are. We are, rather, a light shade of gray, and we must accept that and take that into consideration in all this.”

“No one here wants to hear these words … or admit they are true. But Günther is right,” Trautloft said.

Lützow nodded. “If necessary, we must be prepared to own up to our failures and be willing to change. But our failures are nowhere near as egregious as Fatty and Der Gröfaz want the public to believe. Fatty is fond of saying ‘the poor people are suffering only because of the incompetence and cowardice of the Jagdwaffe.’ Repeat any lie often enough and it begins to sound like the truth, and God knows the Nazis are masters of that! But we are not to blame for losing this war. If to no one else, we are ultimately answerable to history. If we do nothing, history will say that it was all true, that the Jagdflieger were cowards who left our cities and our people helplessly exposed to bombardment. It will do us no good then to go around feeling sorry for ourselves, wringing our hands and crying that we had nothing to do with policy, and it was not our fault. No one will listen to us then. Nein, gentlemen, we must do everything we humanly can to change these insane policies now and salvage something from this debacle, or, at the very least, set the record straight. If we do nothing, then we will indeed not be totally blameless when history calls us to account.”

“Agreed,” Steinhoff said. “But we’re starting to fly around in circles here, gentlemen. We still haven’t solved the problem of who is to speak for the Jagdflieger?”

“I think Greim is our best hope,” Rödel said, and several officers nodded.

“What about Himmler,” Neumann suggested. “Himmler despises Fatty.”

“Himmler!” several officers shrieked in unison. “You must be crazy!”

“Himmler never does anything for anybody unless he sees something in it that will increase his own power and prestige,” Lützow said. “Sure, he’d love to sell out Fatty. And then he’d sell us out as well. The gossip around the OKL is that Himmler pushed Gollob for Dolfo’s job. Himmler would love nothing more than to get his hands on the Turbo and all the other secret new weapons we’ve been using. For what nefarious pur-pose I can only guess. But Hitler has been giving that near-sighted chicken farmer more and more power ever since the attempt on his life in July. Because so many military men were involved in the plot, Der Gröfaz only trusts the SS these days.”

“Can you imagine the Jagdwaffe being run by the SS?” Trautloft said with a mirthless laugh, and groans were heard all around the table. “If we think we have it bad now …”

“Wait! Wait!” Brüstelin interjected. “That may not be such a bad idea!”

“What are you talking about, Hans?” one of the officers said. “Are you mad?”

“Nein! Listen!” Brüstelin said excitedly. “Himmler has unrestricted access to Hit-ler, and I can see no sure way to get to him except through Himmler. Perhaps Himmler can be made to see that we are the last line of defense now, and that it is in the best interests of the Fatherland to have a strong Jagdwaffe. If he can be made to understand the importance of that, perhaps he will intercede on our behalf and not interfere with us or our mission.”

“If you’re talking about appealing to Himmler’s patriotism, forget it,” Lützow interrupted. “Himmler’s sole mission is to establish an SS empire with himself as the emperor.”

“Hear me out!” Brüstelin insisted. “I know someone in the SS who is reasonably close to Himmler. An Obergruppenführer and an old family friend. What if we approach him first? How can that hurt?”

“It could hurt very much if our heads are chopped off!” Trautloft complained. “Actually, we should consider ourselves extremely fortunate if that’s the worst that happens to us! Gentlemen, make no mistake about this: We are discussing a mutiny here!”

After another hour of discussion the officers decided that approaching Greim was their best option. What would come to be known as the Fighter Pilots Revolt had begun.

April 10, 1945

The next day turned out to be a glorious one for JV-44.

Because of mechanical issues – more often than not the short lives of the Jumo-004 turbines – Adolf Galland was feeling fortunate when he could put half his Me-262s into the air on a given day. Fewer and fewer replacement turbines were arriving at Riem, unlike Brandenburg-Briest where there had been so many of them JG-7 Kommodore Erich Rudorffer had expressed his doubts to Galland that he would ever need them all even if the war lasted another year. The Anglo-Americans’ Operation Clarion in late February had changed all that, however. Clarion had targeted bridges, railroads, and roadways with the intent of paralyzing Germany’s transportation system, and since then shipments of everything from replacement parts to consumer goods had slowed to a trickle. Troop trains had priority over everything else in the Third Reich. Trautloft had told Galland there were hundreds of brand-new Me-262s ready for shipment but no way to get them to the units that needed them. Galland was certain there were still plenty of the precious turbines at Brandenburg-Briest, but with the transportation crisis the air base might as well have been a million miles away. He wished now he had loaded JV-44’s trucks with more of them when the Kommando made its move to Riem less than two weeks before. The practical Willy Messerschmitt had designed the Me-262 to be easily maintained and repaired in the field. Whereas an Allied piston-driven fighter needed a day or more to have a motor replaced, Luftwaffe mechanics could exchange a burned-out turbine with a new one in thirty minutes on an Me-262. But what did that matter when there were so few replacement turbines available? Galland had to conserve his resources by limiting the number of sorties the Squadron of Aces could fly on a given day.

Shortly after dawn Sergeant Benno Reiske, Galland’s long-time batman, drove the general from the squadron’s billet in Feldkirchen to the airfield. The ground crews were already at work, getting the jets ready for the day’s sorties, as Galland conducted his daily morning inspection. His own personal mechanic, Sergeant Gerhard Meyer, who had been with him since his days as Gruppenkommandeur of JG-26, was fussing over Mickeymaus in its camouflaged concrete revetment.

“Good morning, Meyer,” Galland said pleasantly.

“Good morning, Herr General!” the mechanic replied, snapping to attention. “We have good news this morning!”

“Oh?”

“Twenty new turbines were delivered last night, Herr General, along with several crates of spare parts. We’ll have twenty serviceable kites today!” Meyer said excitedly.

“That is good news!” Galland agreed, indicating with a flick of his hand that the mechanic should stand at ease.

“And lots of racks for rockets.”

“Real racks? You have a lot of good news for me this morning, Meyer.”

“Ja, Herr General,” Meyer said. “We’ll be attaching them to the wings as soon as the routine maintenance is finished.”

“Danke. Good work, Meyer.” He nodded his head with approval.

“Danke, Herr General.”

Until now the ground crews had been jerry-rigging racks for the rockets with only mixed success. Sometimes the rockets fell from the racks in flight or wouldn’t launch.

Galland, the thick cigar clenched between his teeth, continued his inspection tour. While making his rounds, he heard the powerful motors of American P-47 fighters as they arrived and took up their station near the airfield. No one gave them a second thought anymore as they flew lazily back and forth just beyond the range of the airfield’s anti-aircraft guns. At Haar, Lieutenant Heinz Sachsenberg stood outside the operations shack, his hands clasped behind his back, and with mild interest watched the Thunderbolts circling in the distance. As an ace with more than a hundred kills to his credit, the urge to take off in his brightly painted Fw-190D and scrap with the Amis was almost unbearable. But he could do nothing more than watch them until JV-44 received a message to scramble.

By mid-morning the rest of JV-44’s pilots had turned up at the airfield, waiting impatiently to see which of them would be chosen to fly today’s sorties. They were both surprised and pleased to learn that many more of them would be flying today than usual. Trautloft had telephoned from Berlin to alert them that German radar had picked up large formations of bombers, forcing Galland and his executive officer, Lützow, to make a difficult command decision. Should they hoard the new shipment of turbines, or should they put more fighters in the air to battle a massive American air fleet? Galland thought the rest of the Luftwaffe was going to need all the help it could get, and Lützow agreed. The decision was made to put six Ketten in the air to help meet the challenge.

Around 1100 hours JV-44 scrambled. Only about a dozen jets had been fitted with the racks for rockets, and there was no time to wait for the other ones to be outfitted with the new platforms. Sachsenberg’s Parrots turned up on cue and attempted to drive off the P-47s, but with so many Me-262s going into action, it took much longer for the jets to get off the ground. A couple of Thunderbolts managed to break through the screen and took some shots at the departing jets but could not bring any of them down before they had sprinted away.

Once airborne, the 18 jets split into two sections. The first, led by Pritzl Bär, flew toward Oranienburg. The second was led by Macki Steinhoff and headed toward Magdeburg. Galland wanted to be flying with them, but he had been summoned to Obersalzberg by Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring. He had no idea why the Reichsmarshal wanted to see him.

Bär’s section soon found itself in the company of another two dozen Me-262s from other bases, many of which, he could tell by the sloppy formations, were being flown by novice pilots. Within minutes the large group of jets intercepted a force of 442 B-17s from the First Air Division and engaged them. Close to a hundred P-51 escort fighters pounced around the same time and by instinct went after the Messerschmitts being flown by the inexperienced pilots who broke what semblance of a formation they had and isolated themselves. JV-44’s aces went right to work against the bombers.

Bär raced between the Flying Fortresses, Lucky 13’s cannon blazing, and shot down two on his first pass. Wolfgang Späte also sent one tumbling toward the earth in flames. But by the time the third Kette was commencing its attack run, some of the Mustangs were buzzing around the edges of the stream, waiting for the Me-262s to emerge.

The sky was so thick with Fortresses JV-44 could pick and choose where to enter the bomber stream for its attacks. As potentially murderous as the crossfire between the heavily armed bombers might be, it was safer for the Me-262s to be in the stream because the Mustangs couldn’t risk following them in and being accidentally shot down by the bombers they were there to protect. But whenever one of the jets darted from the stream, the silvery Mustangs were waiting to pounce.

Having finished his initial run, Bär dropped beneath the stream and began a wide 180-degree turn that would take him back for second run at the bombers. Three P-51s immediately converged on his Me-262. Bär sucked in his breath, made a much tighter turn, and plunged back into the stream earlier than he had planned. He careened between the bombers, firing his cannon, and completely shot off the tail of one of them. The B-17 went into a spin from which it could not recover, his third kill of the day and fifth since joining JV-44. He saw two other B-17s going down as he left the stream and wondered which pilots had scored. But in the distance he also saw half a dozen jets in flames and another half dozen or so fleeing from Mustangs that outnumbered each of them four- or five-to-one. Twice he saw a Me-262’s canopy jettisoned and the pilot roll the jet over on its back and bail out when there appeared to be no damage to the aircraft. He doubted, however, that any of those cowardly pilots belonged to JV-44.

“Die arme Kinder,” he said softly. Those poor children.

With fuel beginning to run low and more and more Mustangs arriving on the scene, Bär’s pack of hunters broke off the engagement and headed for Riem.

Near Magedeburg Macki Steinhoff’s pack engaged a force of more than 350 B-17s from the Third Air Division. They weren’t able to shoot their rockets from the flanks because they would be exposed to the heavy presence of the escort fighters, so they plunged into the bomber stream. Krupinski and Lieutenant Klaus Neumann scored kills on their first passes, and Captain Wilhelm Steinmann, Major Erich Hohagen, and Major Karl-Heinz Schnell all shot down bombers on their second passes.

Steinhoff ripped up several Flying Fortresses with his fusillades, but none of them dropped out of the formation. When he peeled off to take a respite from the fireworks around him, he suddenly found himself in a herd of six Mustangs that hadn’t expected him to be there. Steinhoff saw that one of them was going to carelessly pass directly in front of him, a broadside shot he could not pass up. He fired his cannon and had gauged the deflection perfectly. The P-51 flew right into the lethal volley and was instantly transformed into a flying torch. At the same moment Steinhoff felt the ammo strikes from one of the other Mustangs stitching his port wing. It might have been the end for him except that his faithful wingman, Kaczmarek Fährmann, was right where he was supposed to be and unleashed a volley from his cannon that struck the American fighter and forced it to break off. Steinhoff pulled back on the stick, passed through the trail of black smoke from the burning fighter he had just destroyed, and climbed away from his attackers.

Less than a minute later Steinhoff found himself caught in another swarm of

P-51s. This time he leveled off, found an avenue of escape, and outran them only to run right into a third pack of Mustangs. They were everywhere!

Every time Steinhoff turned he saw another nest of fighters in front of him, and they were forcing him farther and farther away from the bombers. Fährmann managed to stick with him, as well as one of the young pilots who was the third member of their Kette, Sergeant Rudolf Nielinger. His fuel beginning to run low, Steinhoff gave up returning to the battle and headed back to Riem. The Mustangs were left behind.

Fährmann, however, was having trouble keeping up with the other two 262s. One of his turbines had failed, and he was trying to limp home on one. Steinhoff slowed down, but Fährmann still dropped farther behind. Fortunately for the Kette, there were no enemy fighters lurking about. The wingman’s other turbine then failed, and Fährmann was forced to bail out. As he floated to earth in his parachute, the dead jet glided into a farmer’s field and broke into pieces. Once Steinhoff saw his wingman safely on the ground, the other two jets flew on to Riem.

The Parrots were on station to engage the American fighters when the two packs of jets returned. After the entire squadron had landed safely at Riem, the tally was ten bombers and two fighters shot down with Bär getting credit for three victories. The only jet lost had been Fährmann’s, and that was due to mechanical failure, not combat. German soldiers retrieved Fährmann and returned him to the airfield by nightfall.

The Squadron of Aces celebrated its finest day in the mess that night. Galland had not yet returned from Obersalzberg and so was not among them to revel in the glory.

“As good a day as today was,” Späte reflected, “just imagine how much better it would have been if we had the Me-262 two years ago and the Allies did not outnumber us seven- or eight-to-one. We’d have swept them from the skies.”

“I doubt it,” Krupinski said.

Späte and the other pilots listening gave Krupinski a curious look.

“They would have stopped coming a long time ago,” Count Punski said with a shrug and a grin. “They couldn’t have sustained the losses. They would have given up.”

“You’re probably right, Count,” Steinhoff said, chuckling. “I don’t know that the war would be over and we’d all be dining tonight at Buckingham Palace instead of an old orphanage in Feldkirchen. But we’d have air superiority over the continent, and the Amis and Tommis would still be on the other side of the channel trying to figure out how they were going to get across. That much I’m sure of.”

Lützow, a solemn look on his face, entered the room and interrupted the pilots with some sobering news.

“What is it, Franzl?” Steinhoff asked.

“I just got off the phone with Hannes in Berlin, and I’m afraid not everyone else enjoyed the same success we had today,” he replied. “The bombers hit the airfields around Berlin hard, and we lost some good men today. One of them was Franz Schall.”

First Lieutenant Schall was one of the most experienced jet pilots in the Luftwaffe. After scoring 117 victories on the Eastern Front in Me-109s, Schall had been assigned to Major Walter Nowotny’s experimental squadron of Me-262s in October of 1944. Following Nowotny’s death, his Kommando had been absorbed into JG-7, the Luftwaffe’s first all-jet unit under the command of Steinhoff. Schall had 16 kills in the 262, the most by any jet pilot so far. His 133^rd and last victory, a Mustang, had been recorded only minutes before his death.

“What happened?” Steinhoff asked quietly. He had known Schall well.

“An accident, of all things,” Lützow said. “He was landing at Parchim, which had just been bombed, and I guess there was a lot of smoke and haze. The visibility was pretty bad. Schall came out of a cloud of smoke and never saw a bomb crater in the middle of the runway. The 262 fell into it and exploded. Schall was killed instantly.”

“What a terrible, terrible way to die,” Steinhoff murmured. “I’m not sure I can think of a worse way. There’s certainly no glory in it.”

“Present company excepted, it was a bad day all around for the Luftwaffe,” Lützow continued. “JG-7 lost 27 Turbos – half its strength – and so far only eight of the pilots have turned up. The OKL is moving what’s left of the group to Prague, along with KG(J)-54. The base at Burg was heavily bombed – obliterated, in fact – and a dozen Turbos were destroyed on the ground.”

Lützow paused to take a breath. All around him saddened men were shaking their heads in disbelief.

“We should consider ourselves extremely fortunate,” Lützow resumed, “that we have a magnificent Platzschutzstaffel with Wimmersal and his Parrots. They have been indispensable to our success. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. We have lost only two Turbos on take-offs or landings with the Papageien acting as our shepherds. Other groups are nowhere near as lucky to have what we do. They’re being massacred whenever they take off or try to land.”

“That’s Fatty’s fault,” Major Gerd Barkhorn grumbled. “He doesn’t want fighters covering the Turbos. “Says it’s a waste of valuable aircraft and fuel.”

“Ja, we’re very fortunate that Jagdverband-44 is autonomous,” Steinhoff said. “We aren’t beholden to him or Gollob or anybody at the OKL.”

The aces solemnly toasted Schall and their other brethren who had fallen that day and then went back to celebrating. They didn’t know if they would have another day as good as this one had been.

+ + + + +

The Allies were determined to see to it they wouldn’t. They knew where Adolf Galland’s notorious Squadron of Aces was based, and while they still couldn’t figure out how the Me-262s were taking off and landing on Riem’s runways that were seemingly damaged beyond repair, they intended to eradicate the Luftwaffe’s biggest menace.

“Just what we feared a couple of months ago would happen is happening. The word’s spreading like wildfire through the aircrews that Galland’s elite unit is on the prowl,” Major General George McDonald told Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle. “It would be almost comical if it weren’t so dangerous to morale.”

“What would?” Doolittle asked the intelligence chief.

McDonald, frowning, held several sheets of paper in his hand from the afternoon’s debriefing of returning bomber crews and shook them at the commander of the Eighth Air Force.

“I’ve got almost a dozen airmen here who swear their aircraft were attacked by Galland personally,” McDonald said.

“How do they know that?”

“They all said they saw Mickey Mouse painted on the side of the Me-262. Mickey Mouse has been Galland’s personal logotype since the Spanish Civil War. Three of these airmen even claim that Galland’s jet passed so close to them they could see him smoking a cigar in the cockpit!”

Doolittle shrugged. “What makes you so certain they didn’t, George? Other than the cigar story, of course. We know JV-44 was in action today.”

McDonald shook his head and grimaced.

“Because, Jimmy,” he said, “Galland was spotted by three men of the First Air Division on the mission to Oranienburg, three men of the Third Air Division on the raid on Magdeburg, and five men in the 100^th Bomb Group on their mission to Berlin. As great a fighter pilot as Galland is, how could he be in three different places at the same time?”

“I see your point,” Doolittle agreed, nodding.

“After tomorrow’s missions we’ll probably have 25 men claiming to have been attacked by Galland personally, and the mission after it will probably be 50,” the exasperated McDonald said. “The guy’s real enough without our boys turning him into some sort of mythical avenger. You know how superstitious most of these boys are, Jimmy, and if we don’t get Galland and his Squadron of Aces out of this war pronto, this could become a panic.”

“You’re right, George.”

Doolittle ordered a bombing raid on Riem for the next day and doubled the fighter patrol around the airfield.

XVIII

April 16-17, 1945

Riem endured two more bombing raids during the next three days but suffered no major damage and only a few minor casualties. The bombings were annoying; but more annoying to Jagdverband-44’s pilots was that there was no other Allied air activity in their vicinity that warranted running the gantlet of USAAF fighters to get their jets airborne. Then, on April 16 three Ketten, with the assistance of Sachsenberg’s Parrot Squadron, zipped through the enemy’s screen with Galland in the lead in Mickeymaus. The Parrots lost two Fw-190s in the combat, but both pilots bailed out unharmed and were back on the field at Haar within a couple of hours.

It was a gorgeous spring morning for flying and reminded Galland of the carefree days of his youth. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles had prohibited Germany from having an air force, and there were strict limitations on civil aviation. But there were no restrictions regarding unpowered flight, and some visionary officers in the Reichswehr, like General Hans von Seekt, along with a few militaristic members of the Weimar government, saw this as a loophole to train young pilots for an uncertain future. Glider clubs sprung up all over Germany during the 1920s, and one of them was based in the Borkenberge, the rolling hills on the edge of Graf von Westerholt’s vast Westphalian estate that Galland’s father managed for the count. Adolf, just turned 15 in 1927, watched the gliders fly and was captivated by them. He knew then that the thing he wanted to do most in life was to fly. He joined the club and mastered the skills it took to keep an unpowered aircraft aloft. Those acquired skills, that ability to fly by the seat of one’s pants, proved to be essential when he wanted to fly powered aircraft and applied to Germany’s commercial flying school, the Deutsche Verkehrsfliegerschule, in 1932. There were 4,000 applicants, and Galland was one of the lucky 100 picked to attend a 10-day course from which only 20 would be chosen for admission to the school that year. He made the final cut, as did two future lifelong friends, Günther Lützow and Johannes Trautloft.

The DVFS at Braunschweig was run more like a military academy than a public school, however. While Galland was training to be a civil transportation pilot, he had no idea the Reichswehr was surreptitiously using the school as a way to identify future pilots and leaders for an air force that did not yet exist and would be illegal when it did, and the regimen was designed to separate the leaders from the followers. The Reichswehr was impressed by Galland’s potential and insured that he was assigned to the aerobatics school at Schleissheim, where he would learn the some of the basic skills necessary to become a successful fighter pilot. One day in 1933 he, Lützow, and three other students were told to report to the Central Airline Pilot School in Berlin, the Zentrale der Verkehrsfliegerschule. There they met with several men dressed in civilian clothes who told them that Germany, with the Nazis now in power, was forming a secret air force. If they volunteered, Galland and the others would get an opportunity not to fly plodding airliners and cargo planes but fast, high-performance, single-seat aircraft. Illegal or not, the temptation was too great, and Galland and the others eagerly signed up. After he graduated from Schleissheim, Galland flew airliners for Lufthansa as his cover while training secretly as a military pilot until Hitler felt sufficiently powerful to formally unveil the Luftwaffe to the world in 1935. And now, ten years later, flying fighters in combat was nowhere near as peaceful as those easy days soaring silently above the Borkenberge in a glider. But Galland had to admit to himself, the corners of his mouth turning up in a slight smile as he clenched the cigar between his teeth, that flying Mickeymaus with its whispering turbines, without the vibrations and deafening noise from a massive, powerful internal combustion engine, was the closest thing to flying a glider.

JV-44 intercepted a formation of B-26 bombers from the Ninth Air Force and got into position on the flank for a rocket attack, just beyond the range of the enemy’s .50-caliber machine guns, before the escort P-51s could pounce. Galland got a Marauder centered in his Revi gun sight and launched the 12 rockets from the rack beneath his starboard wing. Tracers from the guns of the anxious, desperate bomber crew arced toward the Turbo but lost their velocity long before reaching their target and dropped harmlessly to the earth until four of Galland’s rockets simultaneously struck the bomber, which immediately disintegrated in a bright orange fireball. Count Punski, flying off Galland’s port wing, also scored and brought down a B-26. Rockets from other JV-44 pilots hit two other bombers with bright flashes, though they managed to keep flying in spite of severe damage.

“Mustangs. Ten o’clock high,” Major Willi Herget barked into his radio.

Galland glanced in that direction and saw a horde of two dozen or so American fighters, the sunlight glistening against their polished aluminum bodies, descending rapidly. His first instinct was always to meet the challenge and tangle with the enemy fighters. But he reminded himself of the order he kept repeating to his men, that JV-44’s mission was to destroy as many bombers as possible, not single-seat fighters.

“Understood. Break it off,” he commanded, and the other eight aces complied immediately.

Galland, however, lingered in the kill zone for a few extra seconds, a reckless decision he would have reprimanded one of his pilots for making, until another B-26 made the fatal mistake of wandering into his gun sight. Galland fired the remaining rockets from under his port wing and then put the Me-262 into a starboard roll and dived. Looking back quickly over his left shoulder, he saw an explosion that blew the vertical stabilizer to bits and separated the tail gunner’s roost from the rest of the aircraft. The other rockets all missed, and Galland guessed that the pilot of the bomber must have made an evasive maneuver moment the rockets had been fired, but the pilot had not been lucky enough to avoid them all.

Unable to control the direction of the Marauder, the pilot was helpless as it began yawing badly and sideswiped another B-26, its port wing leaving a deep gash in the fuselage of the other plane and sending the waist gunner tumbling toward the earth without his parachute. The collision sheared several feet off the wing tip, and now the doomed craft began tumbling.

Galland saw none of this. Two Mustangs, having built up enough extra speed in their steep dive from above, were fixed on his tail and he was without the protection of both his wing men, Count Punski and First Lieutenant Hans Grünberg, who had obeyed his command to break off the engagement and were now a couple of kilometers in front of him and wondering where the leader of their Kette was. He couldn’t outrun the Mustangs in a dive, so he leveled off. Once his pursuers followed suit, he could outsprint them. He wasn’t the least bit panicked; he had been in far worse predicaments during his combat career. In June of 1941 he had been shot down twice in the same day over France. Another time he was bounced by a Spitfire and thought he was finished when he couldn’t get the British fighter off his tail. Desperate to try anything, Galland fired his machine guns into the empty space in front of him, and the smoke streaked back over his wings, creating the illusion that his Me-109 was equipped with rear-firing guns. The British pilot, undoubtedly new to the war, panicked and broke off the engagement.

This time, however, Galland was unaware just how much trouble he really was in. Within a matter of seconds a third Mustang appeared out of nowhere and dived on the Me-262. Fortunately for Galland, the pilot, probably inexperienced and overanxious, was not much of an aerial marksman, and the burst from his .50-caliber machine guns wasn’t close. The tracers raced harmlessly behind the speeding Turbo, followed a moment later by the P-51 itself. The American pilot had missed his chance to shoot down one of the Luftwaffe’s greatest aces, and he would not get a second. Two minutes after that the other two pursuing Mustangs were mere specks on the glass of his cockpit mirror.

Although the danger was behind him now, Galland kept both his turbines running and soon caught up to Punski and Grünberg and the other two Ketten. The other eight jets were flying on just one turbine to reduce the wear and tear on the engines with their short operational life spans, even more important now that it was not likely JV-44 would be getting any more spares. Galland moved to the head of his Kette and glanced into the bubble canopy of Punski’s Me-262. Although the oxygen mask was covering his mouth and most of his face, Galland could see the mirth in his eyes through his goggles.

“Did you get lost, Dolfo?” Krupinski radioed.

“Why? You weren’t worried about me, Count, were you?” Galland responded.

“Nein. Only the Amis worry about you,” Punski chuckled.

“As well they should!” Grünberg chimed in.

The aces still had to deal with the enemy fighters swirling around Riem. They were all flying on both turbines again and nearing the airfield when one of engines on Major Gerd Barkhorn’s Me-262 suddenly shuddered and flamed out.

“I’ve lost my starboard turbine,” he reported. “I need to land first.”

“Hals- und Beinbruch, Gerd,” Galland said. Break a leg and your neck. It was considered bad luck to wish someone good luck.

Knowing the Me-262 had an operational flight time of little more than an hour, the Focke-Wulfs of the Parrot Squadron were already back in the air themselves and distracting the Thunderbolts and Mustangs as Galland’s warriors approached. Barkhorn, trailing black smoke from his burned-out turbine, landed safely and so did everyone else, although a P-47 got loose from the scrap over the valley and made a pass at Willi Herget’s jet, putting a few bullet holes in the tail but doing no real damage. The Papageistaffel lost another Fw-190, and this time the pilot didn’t survive.

While the aces were celebrating their three victories at mess that night in the former orphanage at Feldkirchen, Barkhorn pulled Galland and Günther Lützow aside.

“I thought my turbine had just burned out on its own, even though it was practically new and there were only three-and-a-half hours on it,” Barkhorn related. “But that wasn’t the problem.”

Galland raised his eyebrows.

“The mechanics told me it was something even more disturbing. Ja, when they took it apart to scavenge for useful parts, they found a chewed-up nail.”

“A nail,” Galland repeated. “Why would there be a nail inside a turbine? Or any motor?”

“That’s what they – and I – wanted to know,” Barkhorn said. “They think somebody put it there deliberately. A saboteur. It’s so small it just laid in there, bouncing around harmlessly until today when it got in the blades and fractured one of them, sending more pieces of metal flying through the turbine and tearing everything apart.”

“It probably was sabotage,” Lützow said. “When I was Dolfo’s deputy at the OKL, I saw reports about this sort of thing. The problem is the forced labor from the East in our factories. They can no longer win the war as soldiers, but they can help their cause by sabotaging our vehicles and weapons. When no one is looking, they poke a pin hole in a hydraulic line destined for use in a 109, stick the torn corner of a rag into the crankcase of a Panzer, or replace the explosives in a torpedo with a handful of sand. It’s more common than we probably think. And now that the tide of the war has changed in favor of our enemies, they’ve become bolder and it’s happening more and more often. There are more duds, more mechanical breakdowns, than ever. An increasing percentage of our materiel losses are due to sabotage, not enemy action.”

“Not to mention the unnecessary loss of lives,” Galland added. “Well, I don’t want that happening here. Not if I can do anything about it. We’re only flying about a third of our Turbos on any given day, which means the other two-thirds are here on the ground and idle. I don’t believe our ground crews are overtaxed. Franzl, I want you to issue an order that the mechanics are to go over every kite with a fine-tooth comb, and every spare part before it’s used.”

“Jawohl.”

“We were lucky today. Gerd is the second-leading ace in the entire Luftwaffe, and we could have lost him today if both his turbines had failed. Gerd, thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

Barkhorn nodded. “Thank you, Dolfo, for addressing the issue.”

+ + + + +

Galland led three more Ketten into battle the following day. The Eighth Air Force was bombing Dresden, and JV-44 was joined by jets from JG-7 to combat the armada. The fighter escort, which heavily outnumbered the Me-262s, prevented Galland from getting into a good attack position, and he spent the entire sortie dodging Mustangs. Macki Steinhoff managed to maneuver his Turbo into a prime attack position against one of the B-17s, but when he pressed the button to electrically fire his rockets, nothing happened. He pressed the button hard several more times, and still the rockets wouldn’t release. He spotted two Mustangs diving on him. Frustrated, he dived away to safety. This had become a regular problem with the rockets, even with the proper racks. But the electrical circuits often failed. That the rockets fired as often as they did was a minor miracle. But they didn’t fire nearly often enough to suit the pilots.

One of JV-44’s other pilots, Sergeant Eduard Schallmoser, wasn’t carrying rockets and made a broadside pass at one of the Flying Fortresses using his cannon. But he got caught in a crossfire from the machine guns of an adjacent B-17 and took several hits, one of which jarred the Turbo so violently Schallmoser lost his grip on the stick. He was on a collision course with the Flying Fortress and was only seconds away from ramming it. Unable to grasp the wildly gyrating stick to make a controlled turn, while he groped for it Schallmoser instinctively kicked in his left rudder all the way to the floor and silently mouthed a prayer, begging God to help him avoid the collision. He had already survived one mid-air crash when he took down a P-38 Lightning two weeks earlier, and he might not be as lucky this time. Suddenly the stick was back in his hand again, and he yanked it hard to the left and straight back. The Me-262 turned until its wings were perpendicular to the ground and began to climb, but Schallmoser couldn’t avoid the bomber entirely. The tip of his port wing sliced through the B-17’s roof, just a couple of meters in front of its broad tail.

The impact caused the Me-262 to begin cart-wheeling violently through the bomber stream. Galland, who witnessed the event from a vantage point below the formation, stopped breathing for a moment and watched in morbid fascination. In the cockpit of the stricken 262, Schallmoser resisted the powerful urge to close his eyes and brace for the inevitable, fatal collision with another bomber. His survival instinct prevailed, and he fought to regain control of his fighter. Miraculously, the Turbo flipped through the entire stream without hitting anything, and the cart-wheeling slowed. Schallmoser got the Messerschmitt under control again and hoped that after having survived that ordeal, which had lasted only a few seconds, he wouldn’t become the victim now of a predatory P-51. It took all the strength he could muster just to keep the Turbo flying; taking evasive action to avert being shot down was out of the question. He glanced out the left side of the cockpit and saw that the wing tip was still there, but it was dangling and flapping in the wind, attached to the aircraft by a few cables that had not been severed in the collision. Schallmoser set a course for Riem, gently began descending so he could use the ground as camouflage but keeping enough altitude so he could bail out if necessary, and was soon happily joined by the other two Me-262s in his Kette, one flown by Steinhoff and the other by Franz Stigler, who shepherded the crippled jet back home.

The B-17 Schallmoser struck was nowhere near as fortunate. The tail of the bomber broke off seconds after the collision and crashed. No one from the crew jumped.

Schallmoser successfully landed his damaged Me-262 at Riem, and his unorthodox victory was one of just three recorded by JV-44 during that mission. Pritzl Bär accounted for the other two.

“Have you decided to join the Rammjäger, Edu?” Galland joked with Schallmoser after everyone else was back safely on the ground. “This is the second time in what? Two weeks you’ve knocked down a plane by ramming it?”

The Rammjäger were young, barely trained pilots – idealistic Hitler Youth boys mostly – whose sole mission was to ram their fighters into bombers like Japanese kamikaze fliers. Unlike the Japanese, if the German pilots survived the collision, they had parachutes and could bail out. Göring and his lackeys, including maverick pilot Hajo Herrmann who dreamed up the idea, thought losing a single-seat fighter and probably its inexperienced pilot was an excellent exchange for knocking down a bomber and its 10-man crew. The rest of the Luftwaffe was horrified, however, by the senseless waste of young lives, and the outcry was deafening. Sonderkommando Elbe, as the unit was known, flew only once. That had been ten days earlier, on April 7. One hundred and eighty Me-109s, stripped of all their armament except for one machine gun, took off that day. The Rammjäger destroyed only eight bombers, and Göring, bowing to public pressure, quietly disbanded the unit.

“I’m not doing it intentionally,” Schallmoser said sheepishly.

“I know. Even so, that was a fantastic feat of flying, Edu!” Galland chortled. “I saw the whole thing! I can’t imagine anybody else being able to gain control of his kite again after a collision like that with a B-17!”

“I was lucky, Dolfo. I had no idea what I was doing. That I did all the right things was purely luck.”

Galland, his eyes twinkling, patted him on the back.

“Lucky? I’d say you’re getting pretty good at it! No one can teach you those things. Skills and experience can only take a fighter pilot so far, ‘Rammer,’” he said, giving Schallmoser a nickname that would be adopted by the rest of the Kommando. “We are the greatest collection of fighter pilots the world has ever seen, the Squadron of Aces! But there’s not a one of us who would be here today without luck.”

“Just because it’s quiet here right now doesn’t mean it will stay that way,” Hicks Carlyle said. “It was only a week ago I’ll bet Oley’s crew was jealous of us when we turned back those bombers while nothing was happening in Rangoon. It’s not like it’s been a month since anything happened here; it’s only been a few days. The Japs could be back here tomorrow.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Kyricos waffled. “But we saw ten bombers here. Third Squadron is seeing dozens of bombers. And fighters! They’re piling up bonus money while we sit here on our buns collecting piles.”

“Are you saying you’d rather stay here than go to Rangoon, Hicks?” Christman demanded.

“No, no! I’m just reminding you guys that we were hired to defend China, not Burma. That’s the RAF’s bailiwick. It’s their colony.”

“And a bloody fine job the limeys are doing too!” Kyricos said. “If it wasn’t for the Hell’s Angels, Rangoon would probably be in Japanese hands right now. And need I remind you, Hicks, that defending Rangoon is the same as defending China. If Rangoon falls, the Burma Road becomes as useless as the Oregon Trail and then China falls too.”

“I can’t believe I once thought the Buffalo was a better fighter than the P-40,” Christman reflected. “Those things are deathtraps.”

“It’s not just the Buffaloes,” Carlyle said. “I heard the Japs have already shot down every Spitfire in Singapore! Spitfires! The plane that won the Battle of Britain is cannon fodder for the Japs!”

“Aha! Now we know why Hicks is afraid to go to Rangoon!” Christman teased. “He thought the Spitfire was the greatest fighter ever built, and he’s afraid the Japs will turn his shark into chum!”

“That’s not it, and you know it, Scorchy!” Carlyle scoffed. “I’d much rather be in Rangoon, just like you. I’m just looking at the big picture through the eyes of the generalissimo and the Old Man, that’s all. For weeks all we talked about in Toungoo was when we were going to China, and now that we’re in China everybody wants to go back to Burma.”

“Rangoon is not Toungoo,” Kyricos said. “There’s action in Rangoon.”

The action around Rangoon ceased for a few days while the Japanese licked the wounds inflicted on them by the Flying Tigers, and Arvid Olson was grateful for the respite. His men and his fighters were fatigued after spending so many stressful hours in the air.

Two days after Christmas Chennault was summoned to a high-level conference in Chungking. He was suffering from another severe attack of bronchitis, was feeling miserable, and slept fitfully during most of the flight from Kunming in the Beechcraft with Christman at the controls. Little of what was said at the conference made him feel any better.

Among those attending the conference were Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, British general Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief of the newly created ABDACOM (American-British-Dutch-Australian Command); and Generals John Magruder and George Brett of the American Military Mission to China. They were curious if the astonishing numbers of Japanese aircraft reportedly destroyed by the AVG were accurate, and Chennault assured them they were.

Wavell wanted Chiang to detail all three AVG squadrons to the RAF for the defense of Rangoon, and Chennault bristled at the suggestion, especially when it meant being ordered around by the obtuse and intransigent E.R. Manning. He lobbied the generalissimo to maintain the Flying Tigers as an independent arm of the Chinese Air Force. Unable or unwilling to make the decision, Chiang tabled the issue. While it remained unresolved, Chennault was relieved to accept the status quo.

Chennault was also having problems with William Pawley again. Pawley had ordered his employees in Loiwing to cease repairing the AVG’s P-40s as of January 1, 1942. CAMCO also had a contract to assemble and deliver Curtiss-Wright CW-21 aircraft, which were to be used as trainers and reconnaissance planes to the Chinese Air Force. With more and more P-40s being transported by rail and truck to Loiwing because of combat damage, CAMCO was falling behind on its delivery schedule of CW-21s, which were more profitable for the company because of Pawley’s 10% sales commission than repairing AVG fighters for which the commission had already been collected at a humbling discount. Chennault argued that operational fighters should take precedence over trainers, and he was still stung over the senseless death of Lacy Mangleburg and the injuries to Erik Shilling and George McMillan, who had crashed while ferrying CW-21s to the CAF as a favor to CAMCO a few days before. But Pawley was adamant on the subject, even when Chennault tried to gain some leverage by telling him his pilots would no longer ferry the trainers to the CAF.

Chennault begged Chiang Kai-shek to intercede in the dispute, and the generalissimo was in a difficult position. He needed the CW-21s for his own air force but also needed to keep the AVG, his most effective combat unit, in the air. Pawley resented Chiang trying to tell him how to run his business, but a compromise was reached. CAMCO’s Chinese employees at Loiwing would continue to repair the P-40s while Pawley’s American civilian employees would be assigned exclusively to assemble the CW-21s. The compromise satisfied no one. The backlog of damaged P-40s waiting to be repaired at Loiwing continued to grow over the next three months, and Pawley finally sold the Loiwing facility to the Chinese government but took his American employees with him to India to open a new aircraft manufacturing plant.

Although he was miserable with bronchitis, Chennault agreed to have drinks with Magruder after one of the grueling conference meetings in Chungking.

“Your boys are the talk of the town – the talk of every town – back in America right now,” Magruder told him. “You’ve made quite a splash.”

“At least now they’re aware there’s a war going on over here,” Chennault replied. “It’s only taken 4 ½ years to get someone to notice.”

“The War Department is being inundated with press requests to visit the Flying Tigers in Rangoon and Kunming. The editors on every foreign desk at every major newspaper in America are hungry for a good story and clamoring to send their correspondents here. Overnight the Flying Tigers have become the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

“Frankly, John, I’d prefer the press stay away from us. They’ll just get underfoot, just like they did when the AVG began training in Toungoo, and I don’t have the time or the manpower to spare to be a wet nurse to these muckrakers. I’ve got a war to fight.”

“I’m sympathetic to your concerns and desires, Claire, but I don’t think I can prevent that. And even if I could, I don’t know that I would. Publicity can be a powerful weapon too.

“Besides,” he added with a smirk, “you’ll be able to say ‘I told you so’ to all those self-styled experts who predicted back then the AVG wouldn’t last a week in combat.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Chennault sighed. “But as I recall, a lot of the gloom-and-doom guys didn’t have press cards in their hatbands. A lot of them had brass on their hats, and I owe you, and I guess MacArthur too, my gratitude for holding the wolves of Washington at bay until my boys were ready.”

“No thanks necessary, Claire,” Magruder assured him. “I’ve believed in what you were doing from the very start, and so has Doug.”

“Well, I hate to impose on you again, John. But I’d like to strike while the iron’s hot, and I wonder if you would endorse a request for 50 fighters – preferably new but even used ones would be all right – and 15 replacement pilots a month. You know the Army commandeered the Hudsons I was supposed to get and pulled the pilots and crews back into the service right after Pearl Harbor, but I also need 36 twin-engine bombers with a minimum range of 1,500 miles, plus pilots and crews and spare parts for the fighters and bombers.”

“No imposition at all, Claire,” Magruder said with a smile. “I’d be glad to do that.”

The next day Magruder sent a cable to the War Department.

IMMEDIATE REINFORCEMENTS IN PERSONNEL AND

EQUIPMENT FOR AVG MANDATORY STOP TIME IS OF

ESSENCE IF SHATTERING DEFEATS GIVEN JAPS ARE TO

BE EXPLOITED END MAGRUDER

Magruder recommended that 54 P-40s be transferred immediately from bases in the Middle East to Calcutta, from where they could be ferried to Kunming, along with 15 pilots every month to serve as replacements and reserves. He also asked for two squadrons of medium bombers to be sent at the earliest possible date and enough spare parts to repair 25% of the fighters and bombers. When Magruder informed Chennault that his request had been received favorably by George Marshall and Hap Arnold in Washington, the commander of the Flying Tigers became suspicious. His two old enemies, he was sure, had an ace card up their sleeves to play.

Three days later, while he was sick in bed in Kunming, they played it. Chennault received a radio message from Madame Chiang urging him to attend another meeting in Chungking to discuss the immediate induction of the American Volunteer Group into the Army Air Forces. Chennault was wise enough to know that with the United States now officially at war and allied with the Republic of China that the AVG’s days as an independent unit were numbered. The US Government would not continue to fund an air force comprised of American mercenaries for the exclusive use of one of its allies. But Chennault wanted his elite unit to be absorbed into the armed forces on his terms, and he used his illness as a reason to stall for time and sent a cable to The Princess.

CONFINED TO BED WITH SEVERE BRONCHIAL ATTACK STOP

BECAUSE OF MANY PROBLEMS INVOLVED DO NOT BELIEVE

AVG SHOULD BE INDUCTED INTO US AIR CORPS STOP AVG IN

PRESENT STATUS IS FAR MORE EFFECTIVE AND PILOTS

UNANIMOUS IN PREFERRING TO REMAIN UNDER MY LEADERSHIP

AND GENERALISSIMOS CONTROL STOP DO YOU DESIRE ME TO

COME TO CHUNGKING WHEN ABLE STOP HAPPY NEW YEAR

FROM AVG END CHENNAULT

Madame Chiang deferred to his poor health, and the matter was dropped for the present. But rumors of the Flying Tigers being disbanded and all personnel being inducted into the Army Air Forces reached Kunming and were bandied about with mixed reactions. Carlyle, Kyricos, Christman, Charlie Bond, Jack Petach, Peter Wright, George Burgard, and Jim Cross were all drinking together in the bar at Hostel No. 1 after another fruitless, boring day of flying patrols without hearing a peep from the warning net when the subject arose.

“Personally, I don’t mind if the Army takes me back … with one condition though,” Bond said. “I want a regular commission. I don’t want to go back in as a reserve officer. I still want to make the Army my career, and reserve officers are the first heads on the chopping block when cuts are made.”

“You’re a fighter pilot now, Charlie,” Burgard reminded him. “What if they put you back in bombers?”

“I hope they don’t. But if they do, I mean, we’re really at war now. I’ll do my part, whatever it is.”

“I would think the brass has reevaluated the importance of fighters after what happened to the Krauts in the Battle of Britain and what we’ve already seen happen to the Japs when they don’t provide fighter cover for their bombers,” Kyricos offered. “At least, I hope so.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Socko,” Carlyle cautioned. “I know it sounds cynical, but the men who run the services got to be generals and admirals based on how they did things in the past, so why tamper with success and change anything? Look what happened to General Billy Mitchell! He preached that air power would make the difference in future wars and criticized the Army and Navy for continuing to build battleships instead of aircraft carriers and was court-martialed for challenging authority! They ran Colonel Chennault out of the Army because he didn’t want to teach World War I tactics to modern fighter pilots like us. And then we saw Mortimer Snerd fly circles around that British ace down in Toungoo.”

“We have carriers now,” Christman pointed out.

“Yeah,” Petach agreed. “But the Navy really didn’t start to see the need for them until about 10 years after Mitchell was disgraced for saying it. Hicks is right. The brass doesn’t trust anything they don’t understand and won’t change until they’re absolutely forced to by circumstances. Look at the Poles when Hitler invaded! Their cavalry was on horseback and charging Panzer tanks with drawn sabers! Don’t you think their generals wished they had built some tanks instead of forging more swords?”

“Socko mentioned what happened to the Krauts and Japs when they didn’t provide fighter escorts for their bombers, Charlie,” Wright said to Bond. “As an ex-Navy guy talking to an ex-Army bomber pilot, I’m curious about your opinion of the Flying Fortress. Everyone says the B-17 is so heavily armed and has all the angles covered that it will never need the protection of fighters. What do you think, Charlie? Do you think it’s true? Has the Flying Fortress made the fighter obsolete?”

“It’s got a lot of firepower, I’ll say that. It’s quite a machine. I liked it. But I guess we won’t find out how good it is until it actually gets into combat.”

“Just because you call it a fortress doesn’t mean it is one,” Kyricos said.

Carlyle laughed. “I don’t know. Judging from how it’s performed so far, the Buffalo seems to have been properly named. The Japs are shooting Buffaloes down as fast as the hunters did on the Great Plains sixty years ago.”

“The Army better hope the Flying Fortress lives up to its name,” Cross said. “If they need protection from fighters, I don’t know where they’re going to get it. We all know they’re building more bombers than fighters, and the fighters we have don’t have the range to stick with a B-17 the whole way.”

“I sure don’t want to be flying one if they were wrong,” Burgard added, drawing a forefinger across his throat.

“My guess is that if the Flying Tigers are inducted into the Army, we’ll go in as a unit, and we’ll all remain fighter pilots,” Carlyle predicted. “That’s what happened to the Lafayette Escadrille in the last war.”

“It did?” Christman replied.

“Yeah, Scorchy. After the US entered the war, the Lafayette Escadrille was disbanded and its American pilots folded into the US Air Service as the 103^rd Aero Squadron.”

“No kidding! I never knew that. They didn’t teach that in history class.”

“No law against reading history books on your own time, Scorchy.”

Christman chuckled. “Who has time for extra-curricular reading, Hicks? I’ve been supporting my mom and two sisters since my old man got killed on the railroad when I was 13. I barely had enough time to read my college textbooks at Colorado A&M.”

“Looks to me like you always found enough time to doodle,” Carlyle ribbed him with a sly grin.

“It’s art. Not doodling,” Christman corrected him with mock derision.

“That’s right! Someday we’ll see a portrait of ‘Scorchy Smith’ hanging in The Louvre right next to the Mona Lisa!” Kyricos cracked.

Everyone laughed, including Christman.

“It’s a nice notion that we could all stay together as the Flying Tigers, and some of you fellas might not mind going back into the Army,” Wright said soberly. “But I joined the Navy because I didn’t want to be in the Army. I still don’t want to be in the Army.”

“Me either,” Petach said, and Christman nodded in agreement. “Don’t the contracts we signed with CAMCO say that our old branches will welcome us back at our old ranks and no loss of seniority when our job is done here?”

“I didn’t read the fine print. Did you?” Christman asked. “As I recall the contract said when our contracts expired or if we quit, the Navy would take us back. I don’t remember reading anything about what happens to us if our contracts got canceled.”

“The contract was three pages long, and I didn’t see any fine print at all,” Wright said.

“You know what I mean, Pete,” Christman said.

“Maybe we should have hired lawyers before we signed,” Petach reflected.

“Who had money for a lawyer?” Wright said. “Except for old skinflint Socko there, you and me only had a few cents left in our pockets when we left the Navy, Jack. Socko had to front us the bus fare home from Norfolk, remember?”

“Speaking of Socko,” Petach said out of curiosity, “you haven’t said anything about whether you’d rather be in the Army or the Navy if the Tigers are disbanded.”

Kyricos shrugged. “I don’t care much one way or the other. Flying is flying, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was ten years old. But if going back into the Navy means flying dive bombers again, I’d rather go into the Army if that’s the only way I can stay in fighters.

“Plus,” he added with a grin, “no way I’d go back in the Navy if I had to fly in that asshole Montgomery’s squadron again!”

Petach and Wright both broke up in laughter.

The men all looked up when they saw Jack Newkirk, the Panda Bears’ squadron leader, enter the bar and approach their table.

“Here comes ‘Scarsdale Jack,’” Christman said jovially. “His dad’s a big New York lawyer. I wonder if he had pop read his CAMCO contract before he signed it.”

But the faces of the pilots suddenly turned serious when they saw Newkirk’s grim countenance.

“Uh-oh,” Petach said under his breath. “Something’s up.”

“Evening, gentlemen,” Newkirk said solemnly. Wright pointed to an empty seat but Newkirk shook his head and chose to remain standing. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news. You Second Squadron boys need to go back to your rooms pronto and begin packing. We leave at dawn.”

“Where are we going, Jack?” Carlyle asked softly, his voice tinged with worry as a series of horrible thoughts raced through his mind. Had Chennault scheduled some sort of desperate suicide mission for the Panda Bears? Maybe the Imperial Japanese Air Force was going to hit Chungking with everything they had in a last-ditch attempt to level the provisional capital and annihilate Chiang Kai-shek and his staff, and the vastly outnumbered Second Pursuit Squadron would be sacrificed in the process.

Newkirk’s face erupted into a huge grin.

“Rangoon, boys! We’re going to Rangoon! We’re going to relieve Oley Olson’s Hell’s Angels!”

“It’s about fucking time!” Christman shouted. “We’re going to war, boys! A real war this time!”

Christman, Carlyle, Kyricos, Wright, and Petach began reaching around and slapping each other on the back or punching shoulders. Bond, Burgard, and Cross, who were members of the First Squadron, looked hopefully at Newkirk.

“Sorry, fellas,” he said, turning up his hands. “Just the Second Pursuit is going. Someone’s gotta stay behind to defend Kunming, I guess.”

The five Panda Bears continued to celebrate, oblivious to their crestfallen friends from the Adam & Eves.

“By the way,” Newkirk said, raising his voice to be heard over the excitement of his men, “happy New Year. The Chinese don’t celebrate their New Year for a few weeks yet, but we got some fireworks from them, and we’re shooting them off over the lake at midnight. Of course, you boys will be in your bunks by then, right? We got a big day tomorrow.”

“Who cares if we miss the fireworks?” Carlyle shouted. “When we get to Rangoon, we’re going to put on a fireworks display like the Japs have never seen!”

SIXTEEN

The Second Pursuit Squadron flew a dozen P-40s to Rangoon, arriving late in the morning on New Year’s Day and relieving the Hell’s Angels, who were grateful for the break. Although they hadn’t been involved a major engagement since Christmas Day, without the early warning network that Chennault had set up in China the American pilots were forced to patrol constantly to prevent more surprise attacks by Japanese bombers. While the Flying Tigers, as they had been dubbed by the international press, had shot down the odd reconnaissance plane or stray fighter during these patrols, the tedious hours in the air were more fatiguing than the few adrenaline-driven minutes they had spent in actual combat. Their sharks were just as fatigued, and with the shortage of spare parts only 11 of them were operational when the Panda Bears arrived. Eighteen-hour workdays by the mechanics and ground crews still weren’t long enough to keep all the P-40s in the air.

Hicks Carlyle, Socrates Kyricos, and Bert Christman flew three of the fresher fighters to Rangoon, stopping in Lashio, Burma, to refuel. The pilots without sharks arrived several hours later on a CNAC DC-3. All but three of the Third Squadron pilots had departed on an earlier CNAC flight as soon as the first 12 Panda Bears and their fighters landed at Mingaladon. Squadron Leader Arvid Olson had left three pilots behind to help smooth Jack Newkirk’s squadron’s transition into to its new role as defender of Rangoon.

The Panda Bears were shocked at how much damage had been done to airfield the AVG shared with the Royal Air Force. The two runways, once smoothly paved with asphalt, were now mostly dirt because of the bomb craters that had to be filled. Burned-out hulks of Buffaloes, Hurricanes, and Blenheim bombers were scattered around the field. Several hangars were in ruins, as was the operations shack. There were huge holes in the roof and both floors of the barracks where an unexploded bomb had fallen through, and it was buried in the soil beneath the building with only the fins protruding. The hole in the ground floor had been cordoned off, and a sign reading: “Danger! UXB!” was hanging from one of the ropes. The barracks was still in use, mostly by the overworked mechanics and ground crew members who were too exhausted to look for alternate and safer accommodations after their shifts and collapsed into the nearest unoccupied bunk. No RAF pilots had the courage to sleep there, and after one restless night worrying that the bomb might have a delayed fuze and go off at any moment, the Second Squadron pilots began to seek other options for their quarters. There was hardly a building on the base that had not at least been strafed, and few windows were unbroken or at the very least not cracked. The teak bar at the officer’s club had been chewed up by .30-caliber bullets, and anyone who carelessly rested his elbow on the bar often yelped and spent the next few minutes extracting splinters from his bloodied joint.

“I know the aerodrome’s an eyesore,” an RAF officer told a shocked-looking Carlyle shortly after he arrived. “But it’s the Garden of Eden compared to some of the neighborhoods in Rangoon. You’ll be pleased to hear that The Greek’s is still standing though.”

“The Greek’s?”

“The Greek’s Silver Grill downtown. It’s where all you Yanks like to hang out.”

“Not the RAF?”

“Oh my! Good gracious, no!” The officer had a look of disgust on his face that suggested Carlyle had issued an invitation to join him on a walk through a London sewer.

Vice Squadron Leader Parker Dupouy, one of the pilots left behind by the Hell’s Angels, explained the procedures to the Panda Bears.

“At the moment we have … let’s see,” Dupouy closed his eyes and paused to silently airplanes in his head before resuming, “23 serviceable fighters. To prevent wearing them all out at the same time, and to make certain we have a reserve if the Japs come while a patrol is on the ground refueling, we put up no more than 16 for any operation. And believe me, when the Japs start coming again, after a few days it’ll be hard to scrounge up that many! If we have 16, we divide them into two squadrons. The first is designated Red Yellow and the second Blue Green, and we fly in groups of four. The RAF’s air raid siren is the signal to scramble. The Brits always take off first, the Buffaloes and Hurricanes using the same runway. The Buffaloes take off first in one direction and the Hurricanes take off in the opposite direction as soon as the Buffaloes are wheels-up, regardless of the wind sock.”

“Why’s that?” Kyricos interrupted.

Dupouy glanced around to make certain no Englishmen were within earshot but lowered his voice anyway.

“We like to say: ‘Follow the Hurricanes because they’re going to meet the enemy head-on while the Buffaloes need a head start to flee in the opposite direction.’”

The Americans grinned and laughed. Even in Kunming they had heard how Japanese fighters were tearing up the Buffaloes in combat.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Dupouy resumed, “we follow the same procedure using the intersecting runway as soon as the Brits are gone. The Red Yellows use one end of the runway while the Blue Greens use the other. The Red Yellows take off first, and as soon as they’ve cleared the runway the Blue Greens take off from the other end. I know it sounds like chaos, but there’s never been a collision at the intersection yet. The system works, and we get more fighters in the air quicker. Then we climb to 20,000 feet and begin patrolling east of Rangoon. If it turns out to be a false alarm – and most of time it is – the tower will radio the message ‘free beer.’ That’s the code to return to base. The code name for the controller in the tower is Orphan. He’ll identify himself that way so that you know it isn’t some English-speaking Jap who’s trying to trick us.

“By the way,” Dupouy added, “we usually end up doing this several times a day. Another reason why we never put up more than 16 at a time. Like I said, most of the time they’re false alarms. Once airborne, the flights of four are color-coded Red, White, Blue, and Green. You all know our radios are cheap junk and crap out all the time. So don’t try to use your radio to alert your squadron mates when you see the enemy. Use your radio only to communicate with Orphan. Waggle your wings if you spot the Japs. And, gentlemen, pay close attention to everyone in your flight so you don’t miss the signal.

“Another thing:” Dupouy continued. “Because Mingaladon is a bulls-eye for the Japs, the RAF has finally wised up and begun constructing several small satellite fields around Rangoon. A couple have already been finished, and they’re going to be primitive. But you can use them to make emergency landings if you’re in trouble or Mingaladon is under attack. One of them already saved Duke Hedman’s life. We’re marking their locations on a map in the alert shack. So study them and memorize them, and look at the map regularly to see where the new ones are. They could be the difference between life and death.”

There were two alerts that first afternoon, but no enemy planes were encountered. After a mostly sleepless night – Carlyle was certain he could hear the timer for a delayed-action fuze ticking in the bomb while the exhausted ground crews slept like they were already dead – the Panda Bears pilots sought out Dupouy in the morning. He had not slept in the barracks and looked well rested.

“Where did you sleep last night, Parker?” Carlyle asked.

“Oh. Did I neglect to tell you? None of the RAF officers or any of the Hell’s Angels who just left stay on the base at night. There are a lot of well-to-do Europeans – mostly Brits – who live just outside the city, and after the attacks on Rangoon began they generously opened up their homes to the pilots defending the city. We all stay with them. Boys, the accommodations are nothing like Toungoo, Kunming, or even where we were quartered in the States. Not even close! These houses are the laps of luxury! We live like kings! The houses are all mansions, and some are more like palaces. Hot baths waiting for us every night. Great food and great company. The best booze. Servants at our beck and call.”

“Cut the jokes, Parker,” Carlyle said with a frown. “I’m serious. Where did you and all the others sleep last night? At a hotel downtown?”

Parker laughed. “I’m serious, Hicks! The fanciest hotel in Rangoon – if there is such a thing in this dump – couldn’t begin to compare to the estates we’re living on. And the colonials are thrilled to have us as their guests!

“Look,” he added. “The RAF’s bad luck is your good luck. Because the RAF has lost some pilots and a few others are missing, some rooms have opened up at these places. Other Europeans are still looking for pilots to share their homes. Believe me, they’re all grateful that their places are still standing after what they’ve seen the Jap bombers do to Rangoon, and this is their way of thanking us. I’ll put you and the rest of the Panda Bears in touch with the officer who’s handling the billeting, and by tonight you and the others will be sleeping in the softest beds you’ve ever slept in with overhead fans to keep you cool and no fucking bugs or snakes!”

Dupouy was as good as his word. After another peaceful day interrupted three times by false alarms, at dusk Carlyle and Christman were directed to a small Burmese man sitting behind the wheel of a waiting Bentley motor car and chauffeured to a lavish estate on the outskirts of Rangoon. Kyricos and Ed Rector were driven away in another luxury automobile, and all the other Second Squadron pilots were similarly paired up and whisked away. In the coming days, after the Americans had learned the routes to their new homes, they began driving themselves back and forth in jeeps the AVG had liberated from the Rangoon docks. There were thousands of tons of Lend-Lease equipment stacked on or near the docks, and the volume was growing daily because the overburdened Burmese transportation system couldn’t move it fast enough to destinations inside the country and up the Burma Road to China.

By the time Carlyle and Christman arrived it was too dark to see much of the estate. All they could see for certain was the mansion was huge, made of brick, and brightly lit. As the Bentley drove around the circular gravel driveway and pulled up in front of a wide stone porch, the two flyers saw a short middle-aged man dressed in a silk smoking jacket waiting to welcome his new guests. He flashed a broad, toothy smile and extended his right hand as the two pilots stepped out of the car and ascended the two broad steps to the porch.

“Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to my humble home! I’m St. John Clayton-Hale,” he said.

He pronounced his Christian name “Sinjin,” and Carlyle’s first thought when he heard the strange-sounding appellation was that his host had been born and brought up in the colonies, probably India. But there was no question Clayton-Hale was a full-blooded Englishman. He looked to be in his mid-50s with a slight paunch and wreath of slightly shaggy white hair around his bald head that gave him the appearance of a Roman senator but without the toga.

“Hicks Carlyle.”

“Allen Christman. But everyone calls me Bert.”

“Two strong Anglo-Saxon names!” Clayton-Hale said, sounding pleased, as he shook their hands. “So glad to have you as my honored guests. You Welsh?”

He was looking at Carlyle, who didn’t know how to respond. Was their host suggesting he was someone who didn’t pay his debts? It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Dupouy if the pilots had to pay rent for these luxurious accommodations and if he could afford it.

“Pardon?”

“Hicks is a Welsh name,” the Englishman repeated. “Did your family come from Wales?”

“I have no idea, sir. My family has been in Batavia, New York, for as long as I can remember.”

“No matter. And no need to address me as ‘sir,’” Clayton-Hale chuckled. “St. John is fine.”

Again he pronounced it “Sinjin.” It would take both pilots a few days to become comfortable saying it.

“Please, please come right in, gentlemen, and make yourselves at home. Everything I have is at your disposal. You just need to ask. We all are so, so very grateful for the wonderful work you courageous airmen are doing shielding us here from harm. Sometimes I can watch the battles right from here! Yes, it’s a brilliant job you young lads are doing up there! Positively brilliant! But you must be tired and famished after a long day.”

The shorter Englishman reached up and clapped the shoulders of Carlyle and Christman with his hands and herded them through the open, wide entrance to the house.

“I’m sure you boys will want to tidy up first, maybe have a libation, and then we’ll have supper. If that’s all right with you.”

The two Americans grinned and nodded.

“Capital! Sudhir will show you to your rooms.”

A tall, dark-skinned servant dressed in a pristine white tunic with gold embroidery and loose-fitting trousers, who appeared to be Indian and in his late 20s or early 30s, bowed toward the guests and led them through the spacious atrium to a wide teak staircase. Each pilot was shown to a large, opulently furnished bedroom with a canopied king-sized bed on the second floor. Casual, tropical clothing was folded and set out on the edge of the bed. Each bedroom had an adjoining spacious tiled bathroom with gold-plated fixtures and an oversized porcelain tub. The tub was already filled with steaming, scented water.

Carlyle couldn’t wait to shed his sweaty khakis and climb into the tub for a good soak and scrub. He turned around to ask Sudhir where he should leave his clothes, but the servant had silently vanished. Carlyle took off his clothes and kicked the dirty pile under the sink, reminding himself to pick them up later. After the best bath he’d had since leaving San Francisco – and maybe the most luxurious bath of his life – Carlyle toweled off and went into the bedroom. The cotton clothes laid out for him fit perfectly, and he wondered if it was just luck they happened to be the correct size. Remembering the soiled clothes he’d left on the bathroom floor, he went back to retrieve them only to discover they had already been picked up by a servant who must have entered through the door to the hall. It then occurred to him that one of the servants – perhaps even the same invisible servant who had collected his khakis – had sized him up and, if necessary, put out a fresh set of clothes that would fit while he was bathing. Carlyle slipped his bare feet into a pair of comfortable sandals and went downstairs.

Christman was already in the teak-paneled study with Clayton-Hale, each holding a tumbler containing scotch on the rocks in his hand and conversing. Sudhir was there too, and without being asked he poured the same drink for Carlyle and handed it to him. It was the best scotch Carlyle had tasted in some time … maybe even ever. Sinjin Clayton-Hale sure knows how to live, he thought.

Clayton-Hale explained that two RAF pilots had been living with him, but both had been shot down on Christmas Day. One was confirmed dead, and the other was missing and presumed dead after being knocked down over the Gulf of Martaban.

“Marvelous chaps, both of them,” he reflected. “I’ll miss them both, even though I had only known them for a few days. I do hope you two can avoid the same fate. I would hate to think of myself as some sort of Jonah, you know.”

“Hear, hear,” Christman said, taking another sip from his glass while Carlyle nodded vigorously in agreement

Clayton-Hale went on to explain that he had made his fortune from teak plantations he owned in the jungles up north and not far from Toungoo, and Carlyle wondered if maybe he had been gazing upon one of his host’s properties the day he bought his bicycle and rode it to the airfield. Christman asked him if there was a Mrs. Clayton-Hale. There was, he replied, but Daphne had returned to England about a dozen years before with their two daughters. He also had a son who had attended boarding school in England, graduated from Cambridge, and was now a lieutenant in the British Army posted in North Africa. He explained that Daphne had found the climate in Burma oppressive and unhealthy.

“Poor Daphne was always sick. If it wasn’t malaria, she was sick of the heat, sick of the smells, sick of me, or just plain homesick. She was quite the sicko-phant!” he joked.

Many European women found Southeast Asia unappealing, he added, and he estimated that about half the wealthy colonial businessmen living in Rangoon and likely everywhere else in the tropics had no one with whom to share their magnificent homes. One of the reasons, other than gratitude, they had opened up their homes to the RAF and Flying Tigers was because they craved the company of westerners.

Knowing their host had a wife and family back in England, both Carlyle and Christman were shocked when they were joined at dinner by a stunning Eurasian woman who was probably in her mid-20s. Carlyle thought she was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, and he had seen many strikingly beautiful mixed-race women on the arms of high-ranking British officers and diplomats during the Boschfontein’s five-day layover in Singapore. Carlyle was certain his heart had stopped the moment he set wide eyes on her. He guessed she was half-Chinese and from the tint of her flawless skin the other half of her parentage was Mediterranean, probably Italian or Spanish, and she had exotic, slightly slanted, long-lashed green eyes highlighted by just the right amount of eye liner and mascara. The men stood up when she entered the dining room wearing an expensive dark green silk high-collared dress ornamented with tasteful gold filigree that accented every curve of her slender body, including breasts considerably larger than the typical Asian woman. Her long, raven hair was tucked behind her head and held in place by a long-toothed, ornamental, black lacquered comb, and her lips were ruby red and luscious. She wore topaz earrings, the gems suspended from short silver loops.

Clayton-Hale proudly introduced her as his “companion” Pearl and held both her hands in his while exchanging cheek-brushing kisses, and he was immensely pleased to notice that his two American guests were just as smitten by her beauty as he had been when he made her his mistress seven years before. If anything, he thought, Pearl had grown more beautiful during the intervening years as she blossomed from an awkward 19-year-old girl uncertain of her place in a racially intolerant world into an elegant, refined woman who was perfectly at ease and charming in the company of the most influential men, both Oriental and Caucasian, in Rangoon.

Carlyle, who stood 5-10, noticed she was only two or three inches shorter than he when he drew close to her during the introductions. He had an overpowering primitive urge to grab her in his arms, pull her body tight to his and her lips to his, yet when he controlled that urge and settled for shaking her delicate hand he was horrified by how limp his grasp was and the sudden stammer in his voice. He tried to convince himself he had been afraid to squeeze her hand too hard and cause her pain, but he recognized the truth that in her presence he was little more than a spineless jellyfish. He despised himself for leaving her with the first impression that he was a man of weak character, and at that moment he equally despised Christman for making her acquaintance with confidence and dignity and making him feel like a foolish Sancho Panza.

Is this what love at first sight is? he silently asked himself. Throughout the sumptuous meal it took every ounce of his willpower to keep from staring at her, and as hungry as he had been when he arrived he barely touched or tasted the food. Had he been asked later in the evening he could not have told you what had been on the menu.

Clayton-Hale made certain Pearl was included in the dinner conversation, and she spoke intelligently in flawless English on whatever subject was being discussed and in a voice that betrayed no trace of her Chinese heritage. Carlyle sensed Pearl, unlike Madame Chiang, had not been highly educated in the West or came from a well-to-do family, but clearly she had been well trained in the social graces.

Although Carlyle was not aware of it, Clayton-Hale considered Pearl’s cultivated image as money well spent, for when they were out on the town together he was the envy of every European gentleman in Rangoon, and she made this short, balding, paunchy middle-aged man feel like a king. He admitted to himself she probably was not in love with him and never had been, but her unwavering devotion to him for rescuing her from the Rangoon slums was satisfaction enough. It was a rewarding arrangement for both of them.

Carlyle was a mostly inattentive dinner guest. He offered little in terms of conversation, and every time he was asked for his opinion on a topic he needed to have the question repeated and then fudged a short and noncommittal response. The only time he focused his attention was when Pearl spoke to him directly and they looked into each other’s eyes, and while her voice was a Puccini aria in his ears, he struggled to hear the words, and his answers were generally ridiculous.

“Well, Scorchy, I guess I made a fool of myself tonight,” he told Christman when both we’re alone on the veranda, smoking and having a nightcap, before going to bed.

Clayton-Hale and Pearl had both already retired, Pearl about an hour earlier than their host. Carlyle wondered if they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. In fact, he found himself hoping they weren’t sharing the same bed.

“I didn’t want to mention it. But now that you bring it up …” Christman laughed lightly before taking another sip.

“God! Here I’m supposed to be a heroic fighter pilot, and right now everyone probably thinks I’m a clown! I’m embarrassed and humiliated.”

“Beautiful women have that effect on men sometimes. They make us act stupid.”

“So you think she’s beautiful too.”

“Of course. What red-blooded man who still had a breath in his body wouldn’t?”

“She didn’t seem to have the same effect on you,” Carlyle pointed out.

“She did. I was just better at hiding it.”

“How? How do you do that?”

“I spent a lot of time in New York before I joined the Navy,” Christman reminded his friend, “and there are thousands of beautiful women in New York. Because I was this famous syndicated cartoonist, you know, I was invited to a lot of hoity-toity cocktail parties and met a lot of these gorgeous women. I’m pretty sure I was just as goofy around them at first as you were tonight, although I must have purged that from my memory. They were expecting to meet the dashing, swashbuckling, international adventurer Scorchy Smith in the flesh and were sorely disappointed to meet unsophisticated hayseed Bert Christman from Fort Collins, Colorado. But after a while I sort of got used to being surrounded by beautiful women, and it became old hat. I mean, when there are so many beautiful women around all the time they begin to look ordinary. Honest Injun! You don’t even really notice them anymore. But you, my friend, coming from the cow pastures of upstate New York, haven’t had the benefit of my vast social experience. So it’s understandable why you’d react the way you did.”

“You’re probably right, although we did have some pretty girls back home, and I never had any problem talking to them,” Carlyle acknowledged.

“’Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?’” he sang. “Not the same thing, Hicks!”

“But don’t you think Pearl is the most beautiful creature you’ve ever seen, Scorchy?”

“No. But even if I did, so what? She’s Clayton-Hale’s woman. It wouldn’t be very gracious of us to repay our host’s hospitality by making a play for his woman. Shit, Hicks! I don’t want to go back and sleep in a barracks with an unexploded bomb in the basement! Do you? Besides, I didn’t see her shooting any flirtatious glances your way or paying more attention to you than me or Sinjin, or however you pronounce his name. Your imagination has run away with you. It’ll pass in a couple of days.”

“I don’t know,” Carlyle said. “When she looked into my eyes when she was talking to me, I’m sure I saw something – a little extra excitement – in them. I swear, Scorchy, she always held her gaze a little too long whenever someone else started talking, like she couldn’t take her eyes off me in spite of my clumsiness. I think she’s attracted to me.”

Christman laughed. “She’s been trained to get men excited, Hicks! That’s her role in life! And believe me, I watched old Sinjin watching you, and he was getting a vicarious thrill out of you mooning over her.”

“He was?” A shocked look crossed Carlyle’s face. “Now I’m really embarrassed! I didn’t think it was obvious. I was trying so hard not to make it obvious.”

“That’s what made it so obvious!” Christman laughed again.

“I feel like such a jerk.”

“I’m sure you’re not the first guy to make himself look like a jerk around her. Nor will you be the last.”

They both drew on their cigarettes and looked at the starlit sky. It was so tranquil. It was hard to believe the entire world was at war.

“I wonder if the RAF guys who lived here before us found Pearl just as enchanting,” Carlyle mused.

“I’m sure they did. Like I said before, what red-blooded man with a breath left in his body wouldn’t?”

“I wonder if it was her image before their eyes they both saw when they took their last breaths,” Carlyle said.

Christman shook his head and laughed as he plunged the glowing tip of his Camel into a large stone urn filled with sand and twisted it several times.

“Boy, you’d better not have her on your mind when you go into combat, or her image will be the last thing you ever see!” he warned.

EIGHTEEN

The Japanese Air Force retaliated for the Flying Tigers’ raid on Tak the next day, January 4, sending 32 I-97 “Nate” fighters on a sweep of Mingaladon Aerodrome and Rangoon. The AVG, for a change, received advance warning of the attack shortly after noon, and Jack Newkirk sent 14 sharks aloft under Bert Christman’s command to meet the threat. The P-40s climbed between high and heavy clouds and began searching for the enemy at 20,000 feet. But no contact was made.

After 10 minutes of fruitless searching, Christman attempted to raise the controller at Mingaladon on his radio to ask if there was an update on the location of the Japanese. The more time they spent flying aimlessly east of the city and the airfield, the less time they would be able to stay in the combat zone before exhausting their fuel.

“Red Shark leader to Orphan, over,” he said into his microphone.

There was no response.

“Red Shark leader to Orphan, over,” he repeated a few seconds later. “Do you read me?”

He heard nothing in his headphones, not even static. The cheap general aviation radios had failed again. Using hand signals, Christman ordered eight of the P-40s to remain at altitude and fly high cover under the leadership of Ed Rector while he and five other pilots would descend and look for the enemy at a lower altitude and possibly reestablish contact with the tower. The six sharks divided into two units of three to widen the search area, Christman leading one with George “Pappy” Paxton and Ken Merritt on his wings while Frank Swartz, flanked by Gil Bright and Hank Geselbracht, led the other. The two separate units tried to keep each other in sight, but they frequently lost visual contact with one another when dodging bulbous cumulus clouds that filled the sky like icebergs floating on a sea of air. The eight fighters flying high cover also had difficulty keeping the sharks they were assigned to protect in sight. Sometimes the planes below them disappeared from view for 30 or more seconds at a time.

Christman’s two flights finally broke free of the clouds at 11,000 feet, and their timing could not have been worse. They dropped right into the midst of the oncoming enemy fighters. The element of surprise was mutual, but the Japanese had all the other advantages. They outnumbered the Americans 5-to-1, they now had altitude, and they had maneuverability. The two AVG units had also been flying more than a mile apart, and now they were cut off and isolated by the swarming fighters. Climbing back into the clouds to escape was not an option because the lighter I-97s could outclimb the much heavier P-40s. As the sharks dived and weaved in desperate attempts to shake their pursuers and stall for time until Rector’s flight pounced from above and broke up the attack, they became scattered and were utterly lost to view of the planes flying high cover. From Rector’s vantage point, 9,000 feet above the battle and with no air-to-air or ground communication, it was as if Christman’s six P-40s had been swallowed up by the clouds.

Christman was beset upon by five Nates, and his P-40 was being riddled by machine gun fire from above and behind. He did everything he could think of to try and elude them with sudden sharp turns and steep climbs, and several times he came close to blacking out as the violent maneuvers tugged at his body with stresses six and seven times the force of gravity, forcing blood from his brain toward his feet, and he could feel the muscles in his face being grotesquely distorted. If the enemy fighters had been armed with more powerful .50-caliber guns instead of .30-caliber weapons, he knew he would have been a dead duck long ago. Fortunately, the rugged P-40 could take an astonishing amount of punishment and keep flying.

Pappy Paxton tried to join the uneven pursuit and damaged one of the I-97s on Christman’s tail. He had three Nates pursuing him and ignored his own perilous predicament until a fusillade tore through the cockpit, shattering the Plexiglas window panes and shredding the instrument panel. Another bullet severed an oil line, and the thin black fluid splattered against the windscreen. He felt a burning sensation in his torso and surmised he had been wounded.

“Sorry, Scorchy,” Paxton whispered as he pushed the stick forward as far as it would go and dived for safety.

One of the Nates followed him and tried to finish him off, but it couldn’t keep up with Paxton’s bird in the steep dive and abandoned the chase only to carelessly turn and climb directly under the guns of a pursuing Ken Merritt, who shot it down with one burst.

Christman was on his own now. Another barrage hit his shark from several directions, and gaping holes appeared in the wings. He saw white vapor streaming from both wings and knew the gas tanks had been hit, but within seconds the leaks stopped. He was thankful the P-40 had self-sealing tanks, or he would probably be sitting inside a flying furnace right now. The window panes were starred, air was whistling through the bullet holes, and he felt a burning sensation on the back of his neck. Then the motor seized, and black smoke began blowing into the cockpit. He had no choice now but to abandon ship.

Christman cranked the canopy open, unbuckled his harness, and with bullets whizzing around him jumped from the doomed P-40. He counted to ten and pulled the ripcord, and the parachute opened and billowed above him. He looked down and was glad he wasn’t bailing out over the sea. But he was far from safe.

He watched his shark spiral into the jungle and explode, and when he lifted his gaze he was shocked to see a Japanese fighter coming directly at him with its machine guns blazing. He froze, then closed his eyes and waited for the bullets to tear into his flesh. The roar of the approaching Nate and chattering of the guns was deafening, and then everything was suddenly silent. Christman dared to open his eyes halfway and saw the sky was empty. Somehow the pilot had missed him at point-blank range, and the I-97 had vanished.

Maybe what they said back in the States was true, he thought. The Japs are blind as bats and can’t shoot worth shit.

After today’s events he knew better, however, and he forced the lie from his head. He had been beaten by the enemy in his first combat experience, having long since dismissed the encounter with the bombers on his second day in Kunming because he never got to fire a shot or be fired upon. He craned his head back and saw the dogfights still raging a few thousand feet above him but now spread out over several square miles of sky. White contrails were mixed with plumes of black smoke, and he saw at least one plane – he couldn’t discern from which side – on fire.

Where the hell is Rector? he wondered. He should have been here long before now to help even the odds.

A Nate, flying without a wingman less than a mile away, attracted Christman’s attention. He thought perhaps it was heading back to Thailand out of ammo or low on fuel when it made a sharp turn and flew directly at him. He looked down in panic and saw he was still 1,500 feet above the earth and had no chance of reaching it before the Japanese pilot shot him in his parachute. Christman didn’t think he’d be as lucky as he was the first time. He thought about pulling his .45 from its holster and firing it at the enemy plane but realized almost instantly he’d probably be dead before the Nate drew close enough for him to hit it with a pistol shot.

What the hell, he thought. I’m dead anyway. So why don’t I just play dead?

Christman closed his eyes and let his body go limp in the harness. The ruse worked. The Nate zoomed past just a few yards away from him without firing a shot. The fighter’s slipstream buffeted his body and caused it to swing back and forth, but he forced himself not to react and show any sign of life just in case the pilot looked back. The sound of the I-97’s motor faded away, and a few minutes later he was safely on the ground in a spacious jungle clearing.

He looked up and the sky was now empty. The dogfights had either ended or the moving battle had shifted beyond his field of vision. The nature of dogfights is that the longer they last the closer the action moves to the ground as planes lose altitude in tight turns and maneuvers to escape that bleed off airspeed, and a ridge blocked Christman’s view to the west. He shed the parachute harness and quickly checked his body to see if he had been wounded, but except for some blood on the back of his neck there didn’t appear to be a scratch on him, which amazed him when he considered how many bullets must have ripped through the cockpit before he bailed out. He touched the back of his neck, felt something sharp, and with his fingers pulled out a bullet fragment. The bullet must have hit the armor behind his head and shattered with one of the fractured pieces lodging just beneath the skin.

There was a paved road about a quarter of a mile away. Christman wound the parachute as tightly as he could around its pack, wondering how it was possible to cram so many square yards of silk into such a small canvas case, and walked to the road. Within five minutes a truck driven by an English-speaking Burmese farmer stopped, picked him up, and drove him to the airfield 90 miles away.

The mood at Mingaladon was somber when Christman arrived. The Japanese had strafed the field, destroying one P-40 that was being cannibalized for parts and two RAF Hurricanes on the ground, and also strafed the streets of Rangoon, killing and injuring scores of civilians. The wreckage of another P-40 was on the grass beside the runway. The Flying Tigers had tasted defeat for the first time.

“What happened?” Christman asked Jack Newkirk.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” the grim-faced squadron commander replied. “We got our asses kicked today. That’s what happened. I’ve talked to Rector. Why did you split up?”

Christman explained that radio communication with the controller had failed, they couldn’t find the Japanese, and they were wasting fuel. He took six P-40s down to see if they could locate the enemy and perhaps reestablish contact with the tower, leaving Rector’s eight sharks as top cover, and dropped right into the nest of Jap fighters.

“We were outnumbered at least 5-to-1,” Christman said. “We kept waiting for Eddie to show, but he never did.”

“There were so many clouds he lost sight of you guys,” Newkirk explained. “He said trying to find you guys again was like looking for a diamond in a field of rocks. He had no idea you boys had engaged the enemy. Eventually they turned around and came home.”

“That’s why the Japs were flying so low,” Christman said miserably. “They wanted to stay under the cloud base so they could stick together. Smart. Sorry, Jack. I screwed up.”

“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known, especially with the communications on the fritz.”

“So how bad is it?”

“Not as bad as it could have been. Everybody’s alive, but we lost three sharks, including yours. Gil Bright had to make a crash-landing in a rice paddy. He got out just in time before it burst into flames and blew up. He turned around when he heard the explosion and suffered first- and second-degree burns on his face. He got back about a half hour before you did. He’s over in the infirmary now, getting ointment smeared on his face by Doc Richards. The pile of junk you saw at the edge of the runway? That was Pappy’s bird. How he found his way back with oil smeared all over the windscreen and how it held together as long as it did is a miracle, because it fell to pieces the moment he hit the runway and the undercarriage collapsed. He’s lucky to be alive. He was shot twice in the right side, once in the left shoulder, and some bullet fragments are lodged in his back. He’s also got burns on his right arm and leg from incendiaries that exploded on impact inside the cockpit. But when he gets out of the hospital he should write a letter of gratitude to the guy who designed the P-40. When he was lifted out of the wreckage, someone noticed a big gouge in that thick armor plate behind his head. If it wasn’t for the armor, that bullet would have gone right through his brain.”

“I know how he feels,” Christman said, turning around so that Newkirk could see the dried patch of blood on the back of his neck. “A bullet hit the armor plate in my bird and broke up. A piece of it hit me.”

“I see that. You okay?”

“Yeah. I pulled the fragment out after I hit the ground. It’s nothing more than a scratch.”

“Well, have Doc Richards take a look at it anyway. You don’t want it to get infected. Not in the tropics.”

“I’ve gotta admit, Jack, the P-40’s a tough old bird,” Christman said. “I can’t believe how much lead my shark absorbed before I finally had to get out. Hell, if the motor hadn’t seized I might have been able to bring it back!”

“As you can see, the field took another licking,” Newkirk resumed. “The Japs shot up Rangoon pretty good, too. Who knows where the limeys were. Wrong place, wrong time, I guess. They never made contact.

“The news wasn’t all bad though. Merritt got the Jap who shot up Pappy, and Hank Geselbracht thinks he might have shot one down. He didn’t see it crash, though, because he was too busy fighting off five or six other Japs. Frank Swartz said he damaged a couple but wasn’t able to finish them off.”

Christman shook his head slowly. “There’s no putting a pretty face on it, Jack. Like you said, we got our asses kicked today. One kill and one probable at the cost of three of our birds? The Old Man won’t be pleased when he sees the report.”

Newkirk put a consoling hand gently on Christman’s shoulder.

“It could have been a lot worse around here, Scorchy,” he said softly. “We can count our blessings that it was only a fighter sweep and the bombers stayed home.”

But the bombers were back that night. Christman, with a small bandage on the back of his neck, Hicks Carlyle, and St. John Clayton-Hale were sitting on the patio at the back of the house following dinner, smoking, drinking scotch, conversing, and dispassionately watching the air raid on Rangoon in the distance. Above the trees that lined the estate they could see a red glow from fires burning in the city, and they could hear the muffled whumps of exploding bombs. Occasionally they saw a bomber caught momentarily in the beam of a searchlight followed by exploding shells of anti-aircraft guns, but the number of searchlights and guns were woefully inadequate to defend a city of a half million people. Only once did they see a bomber get hit and plunge to the earth in flames.

Carlyle had spent his day off exploring the vast estate and wishing the invisible Pearl had seen him and offered to give him the tour. There was a large swimming pool, two red clay tennis courts, a stable with a five fine horses, a garage with bays for six cars, and several exotic gardens surrounding fountains along with a large greenhouse. Behind the garage was a small, plain house where the servants from India lived. The Burmese domestics commuted back and forth to the city. The gently rolling, perfectly manicured grounds seemed to stretch for at least a quarter mile in almost every direction. The nearest house, a veritable palace compared to Clayton-Hale’s magnificent home, was at least half a mile away, and there were other luxurious estates in the neighborhood that he had passed by going to and from Mingaladon. He was aware this was just one of several neighborhoods outside of Rangoon in which wealthy colonials resided.

While he basked in the generosity and hospitality of Clayton-Hale, living a pampered existence he never could have imagined while growing up during the Great Depression in a modest clapboard house in Batavia, New York, without a father while his mother could barely pay the rent and buy groceries with her seasonal earnings as a flying instructor and aerial tour guide, Carlyle felt both a little guilty and resentful. There was something obscene, he thought, about so few people who were fabulously rich while a few miles away hundreds of thousands of exploited people were struggling for survival in abject poverty. Nor were the British and other Europeans the only ones to reap the benefits of this economic absurdity, he reminded himself. The residence of the Sultan of Johor in Singapore practically rendered the homes in Clayton-Hale’s neighborhood shacks by comparison, and the sultan’s riches were derived directly from the bent backs of his own people. Carlyle was certain there were other potentates around the world equally culpable of hoarding the bulk of the nation’s wealth while millions of their subjects eked out meager livings. He didn’t think the rich were necessarily evil. But he was certain that by virtue of their privileged lives and lineage they were insulated against the terrible inequities of an economic system under which so very few thrived and so very many subsisted. No wonder, he thought, Japan’s mantra of “Asia for Asians” was so popular with the oppressed masses, even though as their empire expanded they had proven themselves to be anything but benevolent liberators.

An incident earlier that day had confirmed Carlyle’s belief. One of Clayton-Hale’s servants, an Indian boy about eight years old named Vishal, had spent several hours cleaning and buffing Carlyle’s badly scuffed brown leather flying boots to a mirror-quality spit shine. Carlyle had been so impressed by the boy’s diligence, he rewarded him with a gratuity of three rupees, or about one American dollar. Shortly afterward Clayton-Hale tracked down Carlyle exploring his host’s orchid house.

“There you are, Hicks! Might I have a word with you?”

“Sure, Sinjin,” he replied, wondering why Clayton-Hale had such a disturbed look on his face. “What’s up?”

“It’s my understanding you gave the boy Vishal three rupees for polishing your boots.”

“Yes. He did a fabulous job. It wasn’t enough? I’d be glad to give him a little more money if he was insulted. The job he did is certainly worth it. My boots never looked that good, even back in basic training!”

Clayton-Hale shook his head and grimaced. “To the contrary, dear boy. It was far, far too much! And it’s his father, Sudhir, who’s been insulted. Not the boy.”

Carlyle was confused. “I don’t understand.”

Clayton-Hale sighed and explained. “Three rupees is more than his father, my Number One Boy, earns in two days. How can a hard-working father keep the respect of a son who earns more in less than half a day than he himself earns in two? How can he exert any discipline over the boy if the boy starts to think he’s better than his father? When that happens, Hicks, the whole family begins to break down. And when family breaks down, society breaks down. Understand?”

Carlyle was astonished, and not because he was being accused of overpaying Vishal. He couldn’t believe that Clayton-Hale’s top servant, responsible for managing the entire household staff, probably earned little more than $5 a week. Even with housing, meals, and uniform provided for him, Carlyle’s perception was that Sudhir was little more than a slave! And if Sudhir was the highest-paid domestic on the staff, how little could the other servants be earning? How could anyone survive, much less support a family, on two or three dollars a week? He had to have heard Clayton-Hale wrong.

Clayton-Hale read Carlyle’s face before the American could think of a response.

“I know your heart was in the right place, Hicks, and I applaud your generosity,” he said in an avuncular tone of voice. “But things are different in this part of the world. I can see you’re puzzled by how little my servants are paid, but that’s the way the system works here. And it does work rather well. Superbly, in fact.

“Allow me to illustrate: Sudhir has worked for me for 18 years. He came here from India with his father, who was my Number One Boy then, when he was 12 years old and went to work in the stables. When Sudhir’s father retired – yes, he earned enough money to retire back home in India! – eight years ago, Sudhir became my new Number One Boy. He had been trained for the position by his father during those eight years. And this year Sudhir brought his own son here from India to be trained to succeed him someday. I realize it appears to you that Sudhir and the rest of my staff earn very little money. But the sums are sufficient to care for their families. In Sudhir’s case, he earns enough money to send most of it back to India to support his wife and two other children and still put aside the rest for himself. Every three years he goes back home to India to spend time with his family, and he doesn’t need to work for the entire year he’s there because he’s saved enough money to live in relative comfort. After that year he comes back to Rangoon to work for me for another three years. Someday, when he has saved enough money, he’ll go home and not come back, just as his father did. And if Vishal has proved to be worthy – and there’s no reason for me to believe he won’t – he’ll take his father’s place here as Number One Boy.”

“How is it possible to live – as you say – ‘comfortably’ on so little money?” an incredulous Carlyle asked. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Unlike the vast majority of white people like us, out here the wogs understand the value of a pound, dollar, rupee, or whatever currency you choose,” Clayton-Hale chuckled. “They don’t spend money frivolously. They don’t waste it on trinkets or useless things the way we do. They’re very, very frugal.”

“But what if you paid your servants just a little bit more, Sinjin? From all appearances you certainly afford it, and wouldn’t it make their lives a little bit easier?” Carlyle argued.

Clayton-Hale burst into laughter. “My dear boy, now that would really upset the old applecart! No, no! This is how the system works, and it’s worked perfectly for a hundred years. It would be a mistake to disturb the system, and I shall not become the first to flaunt the rules! Trust me! A little more money would not make the wogs any happier, and it would raise havoc. Even Sudhir understands that. That’s why he was upset when you gave his son so much money.”

So much money. Carlyle didn’t know how to respond except to shake his head in disbelief. Clayton-Hale’s explanation still didn’t make sense to him, and while the Indians, Burmese, Malayans, and Chinese fortunate enough to be working in the employ of Europeans may not have been complaining about their lot in life because their huge populations provided an unlimited supply of labor for a limited number of jobs, he doubted they were truly happy with it. Maybe the old adage was true that you can’t miss what you’ve never had, he mused, but they could see exactly what they didn’t have, which was affluence, and were denied the opportunity to touch it except with a polishing cloth, feather duster, or dishrag.

There was also a double standard to consider. While Clayton-Hale paid his servants pennies without the slightest pang of regret, he lavished huge sums on jewels, clothing, and cosmetics for his Eurasian mistress. Wouldn’t it be natural for the servants to be resentful of the opulence enjoyed by a half-caste woman who was shunned by both her races?

Then again, Carlyle thought, maybe he was simply jealous of Clayton-Hale, who could afford to give Pearl expensive things he never could.

All day long he had yearned for a chance to talk to her, for even a glimpse of her. Clayton-Hale, who never seemed to work, was frequently sighted around the house or on the grounds throughout the day, but not until dinner did Pearl make an appearance. By then Carlyle was so hungry for her, his appetite for food was all but gone and he spent more time stealing looks at her than appreciating the sumptuous meal on his plate. Christman kicked him several times under the table when Carlyle’s gaze lingered too long on Pearl. Clayton-Hale noticed too. But he was not the least bit jealous, especially because Pearl paid no more attention to the mooning pilot than she did to Christman or her English lover during dinner conversation. Carlyle’s desire for Pearl only stroked his ego and reminded him he had chosen his mistress well.

Carlyle had fervently hoped Pearl would join the three men on the patio for drinks, but she had excused herself immediately after dinner and disappeared again. What did she do all day and most of the evening? he wondered. And where?

The conversation turned to the day’s primary event, the rout of the AVG by the Japanese and Christman surviving being shot down.

“I’m still surprised to be sitting out here tonight, sipping fine scotch and smoking cigars,” Christman said, staring off into the distance. “I should be dead. I thought I was dead. The funny thing is the thought of dying never once crossed my mind even when I was surrounded by Japs and bullets were buzzing everywhere around me and through the cockpit.

“I guess,” he reflected with a dry chuckle, “I must have thought I was Scorchy Smith and good ol’ Bert Christman would draw a miraculous escape for me in the next panel. I mean, Scorchy Smith couldn’t die, or ol’ Bert Christman would be out of a job, right? The AP Newsfeatures Syndicate would never let that happen! Scorchy Smith is too valuable to them to let him die!

“Anyway, it wasn’t until I was floating in my parachute harness and the Japs started taking potshots at me that I truly felt helpless for the first time, that I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it except perhaps choose the manner of my death by collapsing my chute and plunging more than a mile to the earth below. Some choice, huh? If I was really in the comics, I would have drawn my .45 and shot the Jap right between the eyes to save myself.

“And,” he laughed, “I actually thought about doing that for a few seconds! But the reality of the situation was that it would have been pointless. No way a man armed with a .45 and facing two blazing machine guns could plunk a Jap between the eyes from a distance of 200 yards.”

“So you thought Scorchy Smith was about to become Snuffy Smith,” Carlyle jokingly interjected, alluding to another popular newspaper comic strip, “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.”

“Yeah,” Christman replied with a smile. “Ol’ Scorchy’s life was about to be snuffed out. That’s when I decided to play dead, the same way ‘Pea’ Greene did when he was strafed after bailing out on Christmas.”

“A brilliant strategy, I might add,” Clayton-Hale said.

“It lacked the drama of an adventure comic,” Christman said. “But it worked. The Jap wasn’t about to waste ammo strafing a man who was already dead, not when the fight was still going on above him. I just can’t believe any pilot would shoot another who was helpless in his parachute and no longer a threat. What happened to chivalry among fighter pilots?”

“Another noble relic of the Great War consigned to the past, I’m afraid,” Clayton-Hale said. “We’ve been reading about what the Nips have been doing in Manchuria and China since ’31. They’re a barbaric people who ignore the conventions of the civilized world and think the rules of warfare don’t apply to them. God help us all if they take Rangoon. They’ll butcher the lot of us.”

“I still feel like I’m to blame for the fiasco today. Thank God nobody on our side got killed because of me,” Christman said. “Why Scarsdale Jack put me in command of the operation still baffles me. I mean, I’m not even a vice squadron commander, much less drawing extra pay for the responsibility. Why wasn’t Eddie Rector put in charge? He’s a vice squadron commander. Or Pappy Paxton? At least he’s older than the rest of us.”

“Older doesn’t mean more experienced,” Carlyle pointed out. “The fact is, regardless of our titles, none of us had ever been in combat before we got here. Who’s to say who’s best qualified for a leadership role among us? I think the Old Man hired us as squadron commanders, vice squadron commanders, and flight leaders based on our experience in fighters or hours in the air more than anyone’s ability to lead. I mean, how could he judge us? He might have talked to some of us on the telephone, but he never met a single one of us until we were in San Francisco and ready to ship out, and a lot of us never met him at all before we got to Toungoo.”

“You’re probably right,” Christman acknowledged. “Look at the Adam & Eves. Bob Sandell is the squadron leader, probably because he was a fighter instructor at Maxwell, and everybody under his command hates his guts. The guys I know all say he couldn’t lead a horse to water, much less make him drink. They’re always bitching to the Old Man about replacing him. Even though most of the guys don’t like him personally any more than they like Sandell, they say Greg Boyington would be the best choice as commander of the First Pursuit.”

“We’ve only been at war for a couple of weeks. Maybe we should think of this, like you Navy guys say, as a shakedown cruise,” Carlyle suggested. “As we all become more experienced, the true leaders among us should emerge.”

“And if they don’t? What if there aren’t any natural-born leaders among us, Hicks? Or worse, we’re all dead before then. That’s another thing that’s beginning to bother me after what happened today.”

“What?” Carlyle inquired curiously.

“What if the Japs have wised up to us?” Christman explained. “I know you’ve read the papers, seen the news dispatches. We all know we’re terribly outnumbered up there. There are a lot of people out there who predicted the AVG wouldn’t last a week. What if they’re right?”

“But we have lasted more than a week,” Carlyle scoffed. “They’re a bunch of newspaper-men, born cynics who think they’re experts on everything from movies to music to military operations. They’re talking through their hats.”

“But what if they’re right anyway?” Christman argued. “What if all our victories up until now were just beginner’s luck, and our luck has started to run out? What if the Flying Tigers just aren’t that fucking good? Or there just aren’t enough of us to turn the tide?”

St. John Clayton-Hale swallowed hard.

“Gentlemen, please don’t say that!” he urged, the fear evident in his eyes even in the low lantern light. “The British Empire is depending on you boys. If you don’t win, we – I – lose everything. And I can’t bear even the thought of that.”

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