Bomber

‘It will be wonderful, August.’ She stroked his head.

‘We will walk everywhere, Anna-Luisa. Everyone shall see us arm in arm.’

‘I love you, August. I shall always love you.’

The room lit up bright pink.

‘One thousand,’ said Anna-Luisa. ‘Two thousand …’ When he puffed at his cheroot he found it had gone out. He reached for his matches and relit it carefully, then he held up the match and Anna-Luisa blew it out but still counted on. When the thunder came she pronounced the storm to be four kilometres away. There was still no sound of rain.

‘Did you know how to tell how far away a storm is?’ she asked.

‘You can never be sure,’ said August.

Chapter Four (#ulink_d74ff71b-bf8a-5987-b2f5-866acc9f0794)

The huge layer of cold air that was approaching Altgarten moved eastwards across Europe at twenty miles per hour. As it moved, the cold front’s sharp edge chiselled under the unstable humid summer air and levered it skywards to form thunderclouds. There was thunder too and lightning and in places rain. Eighty miles north-west of Altgarten the rain fell upon the IJsselmeer, the great inland sea that opened the heart of Holland to the northern storms. At first the rain was light and constant, dropping from the low nimbostratus cloud like black columns that propped up the sky. Then came the rain from the cumulonimbus, falling ten miles, right through the nimbostratus, and crashing in great sheets upon the rough waters of the IJsselmeer. The wind had veered to the north and sudden gusts of it pushed the rain horizontal. It deluged the little lakes near Utrecht. Hundreds of ducks, herons and hundreds of other water-birds sheltered miserably along the water’s edge and under wooden piers from which even the anglers had departed. At Kroonsdijk the rain beat upon the farm-style buildings and the duck pond and hammered the flat cobbled and asphalt causeways, so that fine spray rebounded like tall white grass.

In building number thirty-one the rain awoke Oberleutnant Baron Victor von Löwenherz when even the thunder had failed. He looked at the clock; it was ten o’clock Central European Summer Time and the barometer had fallen dramatically. He reset the barometer, for when the pressure started to rise and the wind steadied and backed he would know that the cold front and its line squalls had nearly passed. Löwenherz took a close interest in the weather, for he was a pilot and Kroonsdijk was a Luftwaffe night-fighter airfield.

The military installations had been designed to look like Dutch farm buildings. The big roofs that sloped almost to the ground and the timber exteriors disguised concrete block-houses. The shutters painted with gay peasant designs were made of six-millimetre steel. Instead of a rectangular fire hydrant tank, here was an oval pond, and upon it the Luftwaffe had installed ducks to complete the illusion. Grazing near the runways were herds of pantomime cows made from lath and plaster. The subject of jokes and derision, they were enough to deceive the air cameras.

Outside the window, motor vehicles and beyond them twin-engined fighter aeroplanes were parked under the trees. Nothing had been left to chance. This site had been selected, surveyed and decided upon, the architect’s plans had been completed and all was ready, three years before Holland was invaded. Now Kroonsdijk had become a key factor in the air defence of Germany. It lay upon the direct route from the bomber airfields in Eastern England to the heart of industrial Germany, as a toll-gate on a dark busy road.

It was not surprising that Oberleutnant Baron Victor von Löwenherz had many times been photographed for the Nazi magazines Der Adler and Signal, for he was the personification of National Socialist propaganda – although they often chose to omit his title, for the new Nazi state had created its own aristocracy. Tall, slim and elegant, his hair was blond and by this time of year the sun had turned it almost white. His face had the sharp-edged, bony look that sculptors invent and his teeth were white and even.

He jumped out of bed and did his physical exercises: twenty press-ups, eight hundred paces on the spot, knees high, stretching, knees bending and arms flinging, watched with deadpan interest by the young bulldog that was lying in its usual spot under the writing-table. Löwenherz’s room was small and rather dark, for windows were kept as small as possible to reduce the danger from blast and shrapnel. In one corner was an iron bedstead with grey blankets which he now carefully remade, folding each corner neatly and expertly as he had done every morning since he joined the Army as an officer cadet in 1937.

For well over three hundred years the Löwenherz family had supplied soldiers to Prussia. A Heinrich Löwenherz had served under the mighty Wallenstein and shared his grim defeat by Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen in 1632. But Heinrich’s son had become a senior officer in the Kriegskommissariat of the Great Elector and had lived to see the Swedes driven from the battlefield of Fehrbellin some forty-three years later.

There was a painting of Heinrich on the staircase of the house in Grawiec. A pale-faced man with the Löwenherz nose and dark, broody eyes. His beard and moustache are trimmed in the Spanish style and he is wearing the broad lace collar and red sash even upon his breastplate and leather fighting clothes. As a child, Victor had been frightened to go past it down the stairs, especially after dark when there were only flickering candles to light the hall and the howl of wolves came from the hills above the village.

In the First World War Baron Hans-Georg von Löwenherz – Victor’s father – had lost an arm at Langemarck, Ypres, serving with the Prussian Guards, and had gone on to become a staff operations officer. After the war he had taken command of one of the secret instruction schools that the Reichswehr formed to replace the Military Academy forbidden by the peace treaty.

It was natural that Victor should go into the Army and although he had never been truly happy as a cadet he could look back upon it with pride and pleasure. Tucked into the corner of a silver-framed portrait of his mother there was a fading snapshot taken in Austria – at the time of the Anschluss. Five smiling cavalry officers, their caps bearing the commemorative Brandenburg dragoon eagle of which they had been so proud. The following day, in Linz, they had caught a glimpse of the Führer himself. A month later Löwenherz had been transferred from the Army to the Luftwaffe and was a part of the intensive aircrew training programme that followed the Munich Agreement.

He looked again at those boys who had been his close comrades through the agonies of cadet school. They’d teased him mercilessly when they heard of his application to become a flyer, but they’d come to the railway station at four-thirty in the morning to bid him goodbye. He looked at their childish faces; the amateur photo was creased and faded. One was buried in Narvik, another had been crippled in an amphitheatre near Sparta, the third was an Oberst on Manstein’s staff at Army Group Don. The fourth was commanding a Bewährungs-kompagnie (a suicide unit for enemies of the régime) near Kharkov.

The group in the small ivory frame was his class at the Neu Bieburg A/B Flying School, with an old Bücker biplane in the background. Only half of those recruits finally got their wings.

Twenty-five men sepia-toned and defaced by youthful signatures: pupils and instructors at Schleissheim Fighter Pilot School. He was blinking in the strong sunlight. He’d just completed two hundred flying hours when that photo was taken. It had seemed a lot at the time. Scowling in the front row was his present commanding officer who, like most of the instructors there, had just returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. To Löwenherz he had seemed a remote and glamorous figure with his four victories over Loyalist Spanish planes. Now, he supposed, the new replacements on his Staffel saw himself as a similarly forbidding figure: distant and cold and expert. Löwenherz hoped so.

He stopped looking at the photos and pulled on his silk dressing-gown before going to the end of the officers’ billets for a shower. He scrubbed himself energetically under the cold water and dried himself thoroughly. He had a catlike grace of movement that fitted his fastidiousness with food and his concern for clean personal linen. When he returned to his room he spent forty minutes ironing the shirts and underclothes that he had washed and left to dry the previous night.

When Löwenherz finished he put away the electric iron and dressed carefully. He inspected his gleaming high boots and fixed the Iron Cross and the German Cross Order to the pocket of his newly laundered tunic. He briefly checked his appearance in the mirror: the white tunic was immaculate and he slanted the white-topped cap rakishly. The bulldog came out from under the table and prepared for the walk through the woodland to the Officers’ Mess.

‘It’s wet outside, Bubi,’ he warned, but, like his master, the dog enjoyed walking through the fragrant grass. The rain had ceased and sunlight shone upon the wet grass. The dog sniffed each patch of it and ran across the road and cocked its leg at the slit-trench bomb shelters. Löwenherz used to scold Bubi for doing that, but since the shelters had never been used from the day they were dug he had ceased to care if the dog fouled them.

As Löwenherz stepped out from his quarters four Dutch civilians arrived carrying mops and brooms. Behind them cycled Feldwebel Blessing, the civilian staff overseer. The Feldwebel dismounted from his bicycle when he saw Löwenherz and saluted him with precision. Blessing was a young, over-weight Bavarian with heavy features and small piercing eyes.

‘Good morning, Feldwebel Blessing,’ said Löwenherz. ‘There’s rust in the water supply again. The same trouble as last March, I suspect.’

‘It will be investigated, Herr Oberleutnant.’

‘Excellent, Blessing, I am confident that it will.’ Although he was unpopular, Blessing’s efficiency was a byword and his civilians kept the billets clean and shining. A few generals like Blessing in the OKW and perhaps we shouldn’t be on the defensive in the East, nor preparing Italy for an Allied invasion, thought Löwenherz. Blessing cycled energetically away towards the main barracks with Bubi barking at his rear wheel. Löwenherz walked towards the Officers’ Mess and soon the dog returned, racing after him, splashing through the puddles.

Along the perimeter fence sat hundreds of sea-birds driven inland by the summer storm. Bubi chased them along the fence, barking and jumping high into the air. Lazily the wet white blobs stretched their wings and circuited briefly before settling back into place.

As he neared the Officers’ Mess, Löwenherz recognized one of his pilots walking towards him through the sunspotted woodland. The boy would probably have avoided a meeting with his Staffelkapitän if he had been looking where he was going.

Christian Himmel was a twenty-two-year-old Unteroffizier. His basic pay was one hundred marks per month plus another forty marks in Wehrsold (war pay) and seventy-five marks Fliegerzulage (flying pay). This, even allowing for income tax and contributions to Nazi funds and winter relief, still left him with more comforts than he had known in civil life and just double what his father earned as a gardener. He was a muscular boy with short untidy hair that he inexpertly trimmed himself. His face was round and his serious mouth full-lipped. ‘Angel-face’ he had been called at the camp where he had done his labour service, and the lack of wrinkles in his clear skin did make him look like one of those carved cherubs that crowd together around the altars and pulpits of the baroque churches near his Bavarian hometown.

Himmel was shy, although no one at Kroonsdijk had less reason to be daunted by Oberleutnant von Löwenherz than he had. In July 1940 during the Kanalkampf (as the Luftwaffe named the early period of the Battle of Britain) the circumstances had been very different. Löwenherz was a young ensign newly posted to a Messerschmitt 109 squadron where Himmel was a very experienced pilot, with a Polish Lós bomber and two Spitfires to his credit and a novel reputation. It was said that Himmel had shot down more enemy aircraft than he claimed, and on at least three occasions he had been more than generous in allowing kills to be credited to others.

Löwenherz’s first two kills – a Hurricane and a Defiant – had a considerable number of Himmel’s bullets in them, as Löwenherz was the first to admit. But Löwenherz had been Himmel’s wingman, and, as Himmel said, a good wingman should share credit for every victory. A wingman flew two hundred yards on the beam of his leader and covered him from stern or quarter attack. The leader navigated, led the attack and made the decisions. Himmel had done that well. Himmel was also a skilled mechanic. His concern for the aircraft on the Staffel amounted almost to hypochondria, an obsession that was his excuse for being shy, silent and alone. When he spoke with his ground-crew men he tried to confine the conversation solely to technical matters. Sometimes Löwenherz could almost believe that Himmel ticked and whined and roared, and made better contact with his machines than with his fellow men.

‘Good morning, Himmel.’

‘Good morning, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said the boy. There was a gust of wind and Himmel, clad in black mechanic’s overalls, shivered.

‘Plugs still oiling up, Christian?’

‘They fitted new rings but that was just a waste of labour, Herr Oberleutnant. There’s only a very slight improvement.’

The dog made playful rushes at the Unteroffizier’s boots. Himmel pretended to punch Bubi’s head and the dog growled and made fearsome open-fanged passes at his fast-moving hands.

‘Kugel won’t be able to do it today. The Major has had trouble with his supercharger capsule. He’s given strict instructions that his plane must be ready this evening.’

‘Then Kugel will be busy,’ said Himmel.

‘Very, very busy,’ smiled Löwenherz, picturing the potbellied old mechanic facing the Gruppenkommandeur’s wrath.

Löwenherz said, ‘I’ll tell him to do a run up when you land tonight. If you’re still getting a drop in revolutions I’ll tell him he must fit a new engine. How’s that, Christian?’

‘Thank you, Herr Oberleutnant.’

‘Are you going to breakfast?’

‘I’m not hungry. I will have coffee when it’s sent out to the dispersal. Shall I take Bubi with me?’

Löwenherz passed Bubi’s collar and lead to Himmel. Bubi barked happily. Löwenherz watched the young NCO and the dog move out of sight through the trees. Himmel was running and the dog chased him until Himmel’s black overalls merged into the patches of shade.

The temperature had dropped slightly in spite of the sunshine and Löwenherz noticed that the gusts of wind were coming from the direction of the HQ buildings to the northwest. The cold front had moved well past Kroonsdijk now, and the great cold air mass was steadying. When he reached the Officers’ Mess he looked at the barometer; it had risen. Everything pointed to a few days of fine summer weather.

Löwenherz was a methodical man. He deposited his peaked cap on the cloakroom counter and picked up a copy of the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung that was set aside for him. He looked up the prices of his Daimler-Benz, Zeiss Ikon and Siemens shares. He believed in good solid companies. He’d bought a few shares of Sachs Engineering because it was owned by the father of his radar operator and, although they had done wonders until a year ago, they had now begun to stick a little. He thought he might sell. He looked at the back page for the annual reports but there was nothing of interest. Neither was the war news of any great importance. The war was at a time of hiatus. He didn’t want to fold the paper and stuff it into his pocket for it would make bulges in his newly pressed uniform jacket. So he rolled it carefully and took it with him. There were no new notices on the board. Glancing at his reflection as he passed, he smoothed his hair and opened the door of the dining-hall.

The Mess Hall was a large sunlit room with long refectory tables and a high ceiling. At the far end there was a patriotic mural covering the entire wall. Firm-jawed soldiers and radiant girls in peasant costume and flaxen plaits marched with flags under a canopy of bomber formations. There were posters that reminded crews of the dangers of careless conversation in public places. Another depicted a gull in flight: ‘Pilots, he too is your enemy!’ A photo of a birdstrike-damaged plane was also shown. A cartoon pilot said, ‘If you are lost, climb to safety height. Don’t descend through cloud, it’s dangerous.’

Over the serving-hatch there were listed the civilian rations side by side with the more generous Wehrmacht issue of the same items. ‘Remember …’ it was headed.