Bomber, p.17
Bomber, page 17
Himmel rolled the little control wheel to close the flaps. He pushed the yellow throttle-knobs and the engine note modulated from baritone to tenor. It was a relief to open up the motors. The Richards were powerful machines but the heavy radar equipment and clumsy aerial array on the nose made them only too easy to stall. He made a wide arc round the little white biplane so that it wouldn’t be thrown around by the propwash. Himmel smiled as they passed, for the pilot had been so closely concerned with holding his horizon steady that he noticed the Junkers now for the first time. He stared in amazement at the huge black machine and its secret radar aerials. Then the white biplane dipped as the pupil began looking for his airfield.
The Junkers climbed steeply and continued north, skirting Leeuwarden to the west and continuing out to sea. To starboard lay Terschelling, one of the largest islands in the Frisian chain. The weather was excellent except on the far northeastern horizon where ice crystals of cunimbus clouds reached miles into the air and wore the dark skirt of falling rain. They continued over the Frisian Islands and out into the North Sea. Flecks of cloud made shadows on the water below them and sometimes there were shreds of white stratocumulus large enough to swallow the plane for a moment.
A few miles out they saw a coastal convoy. Keeping well clear of the wrecks that litter this coast, but inside the minefields that protected it, the convoy was making good progress through the calm sea. The Junkers was low enough to see the seamen moving on the decks and some of the old coal burners were making columns of smoke tall enough to reach them. They were a battered collection: half-painted funnels, rusty winches, dribbling scuppers and misplaced hatch-covers. Some of the deck cargoes were only half covered and a deck party was working feverishly on the tarpaulins. Himmel wondered why they bothered. The grimy condition of the coasters was belied by the fresh rain that had glossed their decks and given their hulls the polish of old jackboots. Two freighters had deck cargoes of honey-coloured fresh timber looking good enough to eat. There were Danes and Dutchmen; ancient coastal tankers low in the water, and at the front two French cargo liners making down the coast with machinery and chemicals. They were sailing the routes they had always sailed, some since before the first war. Strange that now they should have German naval destroyers, frigates and UJ boats fussing around their formations and German aircraft protecting them from the determined attacks of RAF planes. Stranger still when some of those RAF planes were manned by Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Danes. Two UJ boats – converted trawlers of about four hundred tons – detached themselves from the convoy and hurried to the rear. Now the convoy began changing course, but kept convoy discipline and good formation. Each wake was scratched crisp and white upon the azure ocean. It was a beautiful sight, enhanced by the red-and-yellow lights that climbed higher than the masts. The light cruiser was covered in winking lights as though every seaman aboard was sending a message to the plane, as indeed he was. Suddenly there was an explosion.
‘They’re firing at us,’ yelled Löwenherz, but his voice was drowned by the fierce bangs of the shells bursting around them. Now Himmel knew what was under the tarpaulins: guns. A near-miss rocked the aeroplane and wrenched the port wing upwards. He didn’t correct. He let the aeroplane skid down in a violent sideslip. Each exploding shell hung a new black smudge in the sky but the old smoke did not disappear, it slowly turned brown and the air around them was blotched with smelly smoke like a three-dimensional disease. The plane dropped through the bursting shells until the extra lift of the down-pointing wing, and the Junkers’ lateral stability, flattened it into straight and level flight just a hundred feet over the wave-tops.
Now they were within range of the flak ship’s 3.7 cm guns and even the multiple 2-cms. The pom-poms added a new descant to the bass rhythms of the heavies. Himmel let down even lower until they were only ten feet above the water. The sea was a different colour close to: a cold steely grey flecked with dirty spumé. Broken timber and refuse pockmarked its heaving surface, and so did the splashes of flak shells.
Himmel moved the throttles forward and, with touches of rudder, danced across the wave-tops low enough for spray to mottle the windscreen. The ship’s gunners were aiming off skilfully. Their yellow lights spanned the water to make a fairy bridge between aeroplane and convoy. Soon they were far enough away for the bridge to fall into the water behind them. Himmel reset the trim wheel and pulled the nose up into a gentle climb.
Ahead was Holland. Marking its coastline high in the air there was another ‘land’ of cumulus conjured up by the sea breeze from a cloudless sky. Himmel kept the Junkers’ nose up. By the time they reached the coast they would be above those clouds. How beautiful they were: dark grey undersides, golden rims and fluffy white tops with occasional gaps revealing intense blue sky above.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Himmel.
‘I’m fine. Is the aircraft functioning?’
‘It took a couple of knocks but the controls are working.’
‘That was damned remarkable flak, Himmel.’
‘They get a lot of practice.’
‘They get trigger-happy too,’ said Löwenherz.
They both laughed too much and the tension was relieved.
‘Do you remember that fellow they called Porky?’ asked Löwenherz.
‘Ostend in May 1941. When Karl Reinhold phoned him at the Alert Hut and told him he’d been awarded the Knight’s Cross …’
‘… for low-level attacks against friendly shipping,’ hooted Löwenherz. ‘Then he phoned me, but luckily you’d warned me that they would play pranks upon the new boys.’
‘They always did.’
‘You saved me being made a fool of, Christian.’
‘You were a good wingman.’
‘And now I’m your Staffelkapitän. It’s funny how things work out.’
‘You should be the Kommodore,’ said Christian Himmel.
‘For God’s sake, Christian, why did you take those documents?’
‘Is that why the Herr Oberleutnant came along?’ Himmel had moved into the respectful third person.
‘Of course it is, Christian.’
‘It was a matter of honour, Herr Oberleutnant.’
‘Honour?’
‘Those documents shame us all.’
‘What are you saying? What sort of documents were they?’
‘They didn’t tell you, eh? Well, perhaps they were ashamed. Even shame is progress.’ Himmel reached into his flying overalls and pulled out a bulky document with brown-paper covers. He passed it over his shoulder to Löwenherz. ‘Read it first, Herr Oberleutnant. Then you’ll see why I have to go through with this.’
It was not an impressive-looking dossier. There was a metal clip holding it together and a Luftwaffe eagle rubber-stamped on to the cover. Along the top it said ‘Luftwaffe High Command: Medical Corps: Secret’. It wasn’t a printed document. It was a duplicated typescript and in places the words were scarcely legible.
‘Go through with what?’
‘Please read it, sir.’
At first Löwenherz was inclined to return it to Himmel unopened. He feared he was being drawn into a tacit conspiracy. For some time he stared out from the cramped little pulpit and watched the green sea creep past. By the time they crossed the coastline the cumulus fractus was below them, but only by an arm’s reach. It stretched before them like a blinding white wasteland of ice and snow. The motors held a bass note like an organ pipe and the plane trembled with its power. Oberleutnant Löwenherz made his decision: he undid the metal clip and began reading the stolen medical report.
The convoy resumed the proper course after its evasive zigzagging. The destroyers and other armed ships hurried up and down, chivvying the merchantmen into line with loud-hailers and signal lamps. At the rear the light cruiser Held maintained a dignified straight course like a mother hen. The Held had been the 3,500-ton light cruiser Jan Koppelstok of the Royal Netherlands Navy until 1940 when she was seized by the Germans and refitted as an anti-aircraft ship. In the forecastle battery, hidden by the steel door, a gunner named Franz Pawlak was smoking a cheroot. His loader cleaned the breech of the 10.5-cm Model 37 with care and affection. They were both wearing the hooded fur-lined winter clothing that had been designed for the Russian Front. It gave them some protection against the piercing North Sea winds that even in the middle of summer chilled professional sailors to the bone.
The gun crews suffered even more, for many of them were ex-Luftwaffe personnel, most of whom found it hard to adapt to the rigours of a seaman’s life. Obergefreite Franz Pawlak did. He had joined the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, when cinema newsreels showed pilots relaxing in deckchairs between jousting amid puffy white clouds, yelling ‘Spitfire’ and smiling in the sunlight as high-ranking leaders shook their hands firmly and garlanded them with medals. Franz had been washed out of pilot school after a very bumpy solo landing. His marks in navigation theory had precluded his transfer to observer school and by the time he arrived as an officer candidate for the flak service he was confused and demoralized. He flunked, and was now an Obergefreite on a flak ship with precious little chance of becoming anything better. Franz loathed all aeroplanes with a terrible and sustained hatred. The previous month he and his gun crew had been credited with an RAF Blenheim bomber shot down. The gun barrel wore a white ring to celebrate it. Franz wanted to add another ring only a little less than he wanted to become a civilian again. His K3, a plump butcher’s delivery boy from Königsberg, was flushed with the exertion of loading 15-kg shells on to the awkward, steeply inclined loading-tray. He was arguing with Franz. ‘You can’t paint a white ring on the barrel until the destruction of the plane is confirmed. That’s the captain’s orders.’
‘You saw it come down,’ said Franz. ‘Now am I the best gunner in the whole damn convoy?’
‘It may have dived to sea level to avoid the gunfire, Admiral.’ Both his friends and his enemies called Franz Pawlak ‘Admiral’.
‘Get the white paint. We shot it down, I tell you.’
‘I still say it might have been one of ours.’
‘What are you talking about, Klaus, every gun in the convoy was firing,’ said Franz.
‘They didn’t start until you did,’ said Klaus.
‘Exactly. When I started, old glass-nose gave the order.’
‘I’m still frightened it might have been one of ours. It looked very like a Junkers 88 and it flew south to escape.’
‘Beaufighter. A Bristol Beaufighter. Anyway, it was an aeroplane,’ said Franz. ‘Aeroplanes drop bombs and any aeroplane that comes within range of this contraption gets shot at. Now will you get the white paint?’
‘Whatever you say, Admiral. We’ll be the only gun on the Held with two victory rings, providing the old man doesn’t make us paint it out again.’
‘I tell you something, Dikke,’ said Franz, prodding his friend in the belly. ‘We’re averaging eight and a half knots and if that damned Danish bucket doesn’t have any more steering-gear trouble we’ll be sailing past the Hook of Holland by midnight. That’s the place for aeroplanes; the RAF are over there nearly every night lately.’ He stroked the barrel of the big gun. ‘By tomorrow morning, Heini, we might have three rings on our Würstchen. Now wouldn’t that be something to write to your cousin Sylvia about?’
Klaus Munte looked at his friend and smiled, but if there was anything he hated more than to be called ‘fatty’ it was to be called Heini. ‘By tonight the war might be over,’ said Munte.
‘It won’t be over for me,’ said Pawlak.
In this, as in so much of his plausible patter, he was wrong.
What Löwenherz had before him was one of the most bizarre, macabre and horrifying documents produced by a civilized society.
‘Freezing Experiments with Human Beings’ was a thirty-two-page report drawn up by Dr Sigmund Rascher of the Luftwaffe Medical Corps, helped by a professor of medicine at the University of Kiel. The experiments took place at Dachau concentration camp and consisted of putting naked prisoners into ice-water or leaving them out in the snow until they froze to death. Their temperatures were taken from time to time and recorded by the doctors. After death there was an autopsy.
Dr Sigmund Rascher had moved the Luftwaffe’s decompression chamber from Munich to Dachau concentration camp a few kilometres down the road. Two hundred prisoners were put into this chamber and each was depressurized until his body exploded. The report on this series of experiments was sent to the Medical Inspector of the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1942.
The third and final part of the stolen file was a report of Dr Rascher’s ‘warming experiments’. These were even more perverted. Male prisoners were frozen almost to death in ice-water and then placed in a bed between two naked women. (The women were prisoners from Ravensbrück concentration camp.) Dr Rascher noted in great detail the sexual reactions of the half-dead men and to what extent these improved their chance of survival. He reported in a paper dated February 1943 and marked Secret.
It stabbed Löwenherz to the heart of his belief. Of course he had misgivings; few men didn’t. Baron Löwenherz, his father, had not disbelieved the rumours; he called them symptoms of unrest. The Nazi Party was a bridge to sanity, a stage between the 1918 breakdown on the home front and the return to a natural state of things where a strong German officer corps held Germany’s honour in trust. For the time being the nation was in the hands of these Bavarians and among them there were some villainous rascals, but better this sort of revolutionary than the Bolshevik variety, who was prepared to butcher families because their hands were clean or their names patrician. Inventive, creative men are inclined to be ruthless, the baron had told him. We must work with these Nazi condottieri, just as Leonardo had to work with Machiavelli, with Cesare Borgia and with his Count Sforza; just as three centuries later the Industrial Revolution pushed aside philosophers and humanitarians so that single-minded despots ruled Europe. They put children up chimneys and women down mines, they bullied, cheated, bribed and literally worked their employees to death. They caused misery and strife but, as we now know, the Industrial Revolution put Europe a century ahead of the rest of the world.
Now the Nazis are transforming Germany with a similar single-minded ruthlessness. Of course we can’t approve of the sort of things that occur, these camps that people speak of in whispers, the witch-hunts for Jews and Communists, the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that Hitler used to annex Austria and then Czechoslovakia. These things are bad things, but they are all things that Britain did, or would have done if necessary, to achieve its position as a world power. If Hitler cheats he cheats for Germany, if he steals he steals for Germany, if he kills then this he does for Germany too. If he needs our help then the officer corps must give it, generously and unstintingly.
All these things that his father had told him Löwenherz explained to Christian Himmel, but Christian remained unconvinced.
‘But what would you achieve if you gave these unpleasant documents to the British? Would you like their propaganda people to reveal such things to the world?’
‘I? Give them to the British?’ said Himmel. ‘Is that what they told you?’
‘Then what do you want with the papers?’
‘It’s very simple,’ said Himmel. ‘These things are being done in our name, Herr Oberleutnant. Oh, it sounds very grand when you say it’s for Germany, but these things are being done on behalf of us aviators. The research will be used to help us survive should we force-land in the ocean or the Arctic. But, Herr Oberleutnant, do you know a flyer who wouldn’t sooner die than have these disgusting experiments done to prisoners?’
‘None,’ agreed Löwenherz. ‘But that’s because we should ask them the question while they are warm and dry and on the ground, perhaps sitting back in the Mess with a cognac in their hand. Ask a flyer that question a few moments after he has crashed in the cold sea and perhaps he’ll decide differently.’
‘I won’t.’
‘No. Because you are an idealist, Christian. I remember the time when you spoke of the Nazis as though they were saviours of our land.’ Exactly, in fact, as the old baron had spoken of them. ‘Now you’re disillusioned,’ continued Löwenherz. ‘You’re bitter and resentful of your own ingenuous feelings. You’re angry because the Nazis have never delivered something they didn’t promise.’
‘Of course I am,’ said Himmel, ‘but that doesn’t mean I was right then, nor that I am wrong now.’
‘It means that you should consider matters at greater length and not rush headlong into danger.’
‘No, with respect, Herr Oberleutnant, no. We have all delayed too long. While the victories arrived on schedule we all put our conscience in pawn to success. It’s only now, when the future looks less rosy, that we are beginning to wonder if the “new order” has been built upon sand.’
‘But the documents, Himmel. What do you want with them?’
‘I made twenty-three photographic copies of the documents. Each copy was sent by normal mail to a Luftwaffe officer. I considered the list for a long time, Herr Oberleutnant. You are number twenty-three; that is your copy. The original has been posted to the Medical Inspectorate of the Luftwaffe in Berlin.’
There was silence. A tuft of cloud was decapitated by the black wing. Other larger tufts raced after it. Then Löwenherz said, ‘It doesn’t make it legal because you sent it only to Luftwaffe officers. It was a highly secret document.’
‘It’s hardly less secret now that twenty-three Luftwaffe officers have a copy. But from now on they can’t pretend they don’t know of these things. They must protest. They must raise their voices. From now on they can never say they have not heard of concentration camps …’
‘What do you know of concentration camps, Christian?’
‘I know, sir, that at least three airmen at Kroonsdijk have spent time in such places for small political offences. Even if we have three times the average, that still leaves one man on every Luftwaffe airfield who has been in such a place. How much longer can the whole nation pretend that they don’t know what we are doing in Europe, from Bordeaux to Leningrad: prisoners tortured, civilians killed, hostages executed? Now this is something that puts the honour of the Luftwaffe in jeopardy. Reichsmarschall Göring will have received one of these copies. He will understand what must be done.’ A large cloud-fragment swallowed the aeroplane and disgorged it.
