“Take a little good advice son. Never try to trade ribaldries with a barmaid behind her own bar. You're giving up speed and altitude before you even start.” Hilda was watching out of the corner of her eye. She'd pulled the newbie another beer and now slipped it to him with a friendly wink. She was one of the Reich auxiliary service girls, volunteers who came out to help with running the services on Luftwaffe and Army bases. Schumann had seen them come in three types. First there were the diehard Nazi ideologues, out there to pour propaganda into the soldiers, filling them with the pure uncorrupted dogma of, whatever. Hard faced and ever ready to report any disloyal or questioning sentiments for those were defeatism. Then there were the socialites, eager to come on out and show their friends what they were prepared to endure for the new Germany. Who took every chance they could to remind the troops how lucky they were that such an exalted person had taken time out from such a busy social schedule to tend to their trivial needs. And then there were the third sort, the cynical harpies who'd come out to make a fortune selling themselves to the lonely youngsters who'd never been so far from home before. Schumann preferred them to the others, at least they were honest.
But Hilda and those like her were the fourth kind. The rare ones. Girls who were there because they wanted to help the troops, who wanted to bring some humanity into the mass insanity that was devouring Europe. They'd listen to young boys blurting their horror when they'd had just learned that people wanted to kill them. They'd hold the hand of one who'd just understood what it was to lose friends. They'd help a commander find the right words for one of “those” letters to the next-of-kin. They knew when to keep quiet and just be there. Mostly, they were off farms or out of small towns where kindness wasn't regarded with condescension by the “sophisticated”. Schumann believed that Hilda probably did more to keep JG-26 sane and operational than any other person on the base. She was joking with the newbie now, letting him win some of the sallies. Schumann peeled off the money for his drink; casualties were too high to allow credit, and got up to leave. Hilda turned her head slightly so the newbie couldn't see and gave a knowing wink. She'd started helping a boy turn into a young man; a good sergeant would help some more.
Schumann needed to cross the base, to where Green Eight was hidden under the trees. Her left wing and rear fuselage was shot to hell. He'd got a bicycle to get there; nobody drove around these days, the fuel was needed for the aircraft. He'd gotten most of the way when his crew sergeant, Sergeant Bruno Alexander Dick, stopped him. Dick was another character. He'd been in the Navy during the first War and then joined the Army during the Weimar Republic. Then, he'd transferred to the Luftwaffe. It was a standing JG-26 joke that the Reich had sent him to each service in turn to make sure they got off to a good start. Another person who spent his life turning scared boys into young men.
It was nothing important, some routine matters of getting the damaged Fledermaus fixed. But in bringing them up Sergeant Dick had saved Schumann's life. For just as he had finished there was a scream of jets and sirens. If Schumann had walked across the base, he would now be in the open and mowed down when the line of Lockheeds swept across, spraying .50 machingun fire and rockets at everything that moved. If Dick hadn't stopped him, he'd have been trapped in the open the other side. But, where he was, he was just close enough to a slit trench to take cover. He dived in and had the breath driven from him as people landed on top.
Lying in a slit trench with four large German soldiers on top of him, Schumann couldn't help but think that several members of the Party hierarchy would probably quite enjoy this position. He didn't need to see what was going on to follow the events, sound and experience meant his mind's eye could see it all as if he'd been standing out there in the field. First the Lockheeds had swept over, too fast for the defenses to respond. They were what he was hearing now, the howl of their jets, the clatter of the .50s and the sky-ripping noise ending in a dull thump that told of the rockets. Even at the bottom of the trench with four human sandbags, he could feel the warm breath of the jet exhausts.
The Lockheeds were good at guessing where the flak guns were but they rarely got them all. It would be the Goodyears, they were coming in now, they would finish off the defenses. They sounded quite different. The vicious snarl of the radial engine - or the rougher growl, there were two kinds of Goodyear. The snarling one were the ones to be feared. Heavier slower thumping from guns. Snarling Goodyears had mostly the 20 millimeter cannon not the .50s on the Lockheeds and Growling Goodyears. They used the same rockets though. Same sounds. And bombs, Schumann could feel the shake of the explosions. But they carried something else too, something the Lockheeds rarely did. Jellied gasoline, jellygas. Schumann could hear its evil roar, could feel the heat of it burning. Could hear the screams of the people it killed. The Amis were the very devils themselves to create a thing like that. To put something into gasoline that made it burn hotter and slower, to make it stick to everything it touched. To suck all the oxygen out of the air so that even those who didn't fry died when their lungs ruptured.
A second wave of Goodyears? That was a new twist. The Amis didn't go in for new twists, they experimented, found something that worked then did it bigger. And more often. The Luftwaffe had countered the first American raids by dispersal, keeping the aircraft well away from the base itself. The Amis had replied with the subtlety, finesse and tactical ingenuity for which they were famous. They'd smashed and burned everything over a bigger area. Once Schumann had been at the interrogation of a US Navy pilot. Obviously a senior man for he was old, in his mid-twenties. Schumann didn't understand American navy ranks but “Ensign” sounded senior. Admirals had Ensigns didn't they? The interrogator had asked him why he was fighting. A German soldier was expected to give an answer along the lines of defending the Fatherland or protecting Europe from communism. The American pilot had replied “to kill you and break your things.”
Even their aircraft names were ugly and filled with hate. The Snarling Goodyears in particular. Executioner, Bloodletter, Demonslayer, Deathbringer, Flamethrower. Just some of those Schumann had shot down. Lying in his trench shaking with noise and fear, swamped by the sounds of the engines and explosions, surrounded by the screaming rockets and the roaring heat of the jellygas, Schumann had a sudden profound insight into the Ami mind. They were taking this war personally. It wasn't an extension of politics by other means. It wasn't a game or a competition. The Ami hated them. They had decided that Germany was too evil to be allowed to live and they had decided to kill it.
Suddenly the bits fell into place, The careful planning, the ruthless use of power, the remorseless artistry with which the Amis destroyed everything that got in their way. They weren't fighting in anger or even in the heat of a war-rage.
They had made a cold-blooded decision to destroy an enemy and were doing it as efficiently as they could. For them, it wasn't a crusade or a battle or a duel. It was a job, an unpleasant job that had to be done as well as they could, as quickly as they could and as completely as they could. Then they could go home. They didn't care what they had to do to make it happen, they would do what they had to, then they would go home. In the bottom of his trench, Schumann wept.
Even then, he could follow the air raid. The Goodyears had been replaced by Douglasses. Big slow bombers that circled the airfield and destroyed anything that moved. They took their time, the defenses had gone now. They'd pick off any building still standing, any surviving aircraft in revetments. They'd be watching for slit trenches and the entrances to air-raid shelters so they could drop their infernal jellygas on them. Then, the last stage was the earthquake moves as the Douglas bombers dropped their runway-piercing bombs on the concrete. That was the end of the base for days. Some of the thousand kilo bombs had delayed action fuzes that could work for a week or more. After a few minutes quiet, the all-clear sounded. Slowly figures emerged from the ground, surrounded by what had been an airbase and was now a fair simulation of hell.