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“I feel like saying I’m sorry,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
There was the sound of a police siren behind them. They were by then back on the Avus, a perfectly straight, four-lane Autobahn. Müller looked down at his speedometer. He was well over the speed limit.
He slowed enough for the motorcycle policeman to draw abreast. The policeman looked just long enough to see the uniform cap with the death’s-head insignia and the insignia of an Obersturmbannführer on Müller’s overcoat. Then the whooping of his siren died suddenly, and he fell behind.
Their lunch at the Hotel Adlon was very nice. There was roast loin of boar as an off-the-ration bonus. Stapled to the menu was a card printed in gold saying the roast boar was provided through the courtesy of Master Hunter of the Reich Hermann Göring.
It wasn’t free, of course, but Göring wanted the upper class of Berli
n to know that he was sharing the bounty of his East Prussian hunting grounds, not keeping it all for himself.
Chapter TWO
Atcham U.S. Army Air Corps Base
Staffordshire, England
20 December 1942
It was Major Doug Douglass’s prerogative as commanding officer to conduct the final briefing before his P-38s attacked the sub pens at Saint-Lazare, but he passed on that one. So the briefing was given by a light colonel from Eighth Air Force G-3 (Plans and Training), the sonofabitch who had thought up the operation. The idiot was so happy with it that he actually had the balls to tell Douglass he wished he was checked out in P-38s so he could make the mission.
The light bird was a pilot, but he was a bomber pilot. And now he had come up with an operation in which fighter planes were supposed to do what the bombers had been unable to do, take out the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare.
There were a number of reasons the bombers had failed, including the Big One: Where the sub pens weren’t under thirty feet of granite, they were under that much reinforced concrete. Conventional 500-pound aerial bombs chipped the granite and the concrete, but they didn’t crack it, much less penetrate it.
During his initial briefing, Douglass was told that superbombs—weighing up to ten tons—were “in development,” and that they would certainly take out the pens. But the pens had to be taken out now; the subs they protected while they were being fueled and supplied were sinking an “un-acceptable” amount of shipping tonnage.
There were other reasons the B-17s and the B-24s had failed. The pens were ringed with 88mm Flakkanonen manned by the best gunners the Germans had available. These were effective at any altitude the B-17s could reach. And there were four fighter fields, capable of sending aloft as many squadrons of very capable pilots flying Messerschmidts.
All these factors had been weighed, and a new tactic devised:
No further attempt to destroy the pens through the roofs was going to be made. The bombs would be sent through the front door, so to speak. What that meant, Douglass quickly—if with a certain amount of incredulity— came to understand, was that bombs would be thrown into the pen entrances from low-flying aircraft. And the low-flying aircraft picked for this task were the P-38Es of the 311th Fighter Group, USAAC, Major Peter Douglass, Jr., commanding.
Following the law of physics that a body in motion tends to remain in motion until acted upon by outside forces, a 500-pound bomb dropped from the wing of a P-38 would continue for a time to move through the air at the same speed as the aircraft. Wind resistance would slow it down, of course, and gravity would pull it toward the earth, but for a certain brief period of time, it would proceed parallel to the ground.
The idea was that it would be released at the precise moment when its trajectory would carry it into the mouths of the sub pens.
This new tactic, the bomber pilot turned strategy expert announced, would have several other desirable characteristics. The Germans, like the English, had a new radio device that bounced radio signals off objects in the sky. These signals returned to clever devices that could then determine the range of the object in the sky. The devices were not very effective, however, against objects that were just off the surface of the water.
So, as the P-38Es approached the sub pens a hundred feet off the water, the altitude necessary to “throw” their bombs into the pens, they would arrive undetected. German ack-ack and fighters would not be waiting for them. And as soon as the P-38s dropped their bombs, they would, aerodynamically speaking, be clean fighter aircraft again and could very likely start making strafing runs on the German fighter bases before the Germans could get airborne.
During the final briefing, Douglass could agree with only one thing that the light bird said: There was truly no need for extensive training for this operation. This was so because the fighter group had already trained in the States in low-level bombing attacks.
The training, in fact, had been for the support of ground troops, but Doug knew the result was almost the same: His men knew how bombs behaved when they were dropped at low altitude.
Further practice in England would almost certainly have alerted the Luftwaffe to what they were up to.
They would leave Atcham, the briefing officer concluded, one hour before sunset. That would permit them to land at Ibsley, the closest P38 base to Saint-Lazare, by nightfall. During the night the aircraft would be fueled and the bombs loaded onto the wing racks. At first light they would take off. They could expect to be back in England before nine in the morning.
Except for his professional officer’s understanding that planners are not happy unless they can make the simple as complicated as possible, Douglass could see no reason for the overnight stop at Ibsley. But he also understood his was not to reason why. Into the valley of the sub pens would fly the 311th Fighter Group.
He took twenty-nine P-38Es to Ibsley on the evening of December 19 and lost the first of them the next morning ten minutes into the mission: The pilot lost control on his takeoff roll, went off the runway, tipped up on one wing, and rolled over and over. The bombs didn’t go off, but the avgas did, and there was an explosion.
There were Messerschmidt ME-109s waiting for them twenty-five miles from Saint-Lazare. If the German Radar hadn’t worked, then something else had tipped them off about what was coming off.
“This is Dropsy Leader,” Douglass said to his microphone. “Firewall it and follow me.”
The twenty-eight remaining P-38 pilots advanced their throttles to FULL EMERGENCY MILITARY POWER, which was both hell on the engines and caused fuel consumption to increase incredibly. But festooned with bombs the way they were, their only defense against the ME-109Es was to get to the target and dump the bombs as quickly as they could. At about six miles a minute, it would take them about four minutes to reach the drop point; the engines would probably not collapse before then.
