The air was a stench of burning gasoline, roasted flesh, plastic, metal, pulverized concrete. Smoke was so thick it filled the nostrils with oil and tar, forcing people to breath through their mouths. The lucky had cloths to cover their faces, Schumann used his precious white silk scarf, watching it turn black with soot and grime even had he done so. Even the sun overhead was red with smoke and burned, burned everything. It was strangely quiet even with the burning and the explosions as ammunition cooked off. Intellectually, Schumann knew than the airbase was almost as dangerous now as it had been when under attack. In front of him were the cranked wings of a Goodyear; the aircraft had smacked belly-down into the runway then skidded into a revetment. The wreckage was mixed with that of the Gotha, the tail of the Goodyear making a cross over the joint grave. The engine cowling had detached and the artwork was still visible. A picture of a caricature German with spiked helmet and monocle being cut apart with a chainsaw. Schumann understood the thought behind it now. He walked through the wreckage of the base dazed with shock and exhaustion. Unconsciously he was heading for the mess, anywhere where he could get peace. Then a chainhound stopped him. The mess was a burned out, shattered ruin with a long line of covered bodies outside.
“Sorry sir, building isn't safe. Two Goodyears did it. First hit the place with rockets, the other dropped jellygas. SIR stop it DON'T DO THAT.”
It was too late. Schumann had seen a pair of bare legs under a cover and pulled back the groundsheet. He assumed what he could see was Hilda, it was burned, charred and blackened beyond recognition. The arms were raised almost in a position of prayer, the hands twisted and curled. The mouth was open, frozen in the screams that had come from the victim as the jellygas had seared her life away. Schumann turned and started to vomit, the effort carrying on long after his stomach was empty.
“We should bury her with the pilots Major, she would have wanted that” It was Sergeant Dick.
“God in heaven man, she was 17 years old.. Why on this earth do you think she wanted to be buried anywhere?” Schumann's scream was almost hysterical.
“Sir, you are right sir. My apologies.”
Schumann forced himself to stop and get his mind under control. “No Sergeant, it is I who am wrong and you who are right. Your suggestion was a good and kind one. Please forgive my rudeness.”
Sergeant Dick nodded and watched the pilot walk away. The young officer was going to die soon, Dick could see the shadow on his face. Perhaps killed or perhaps so wound up and exhausted he would do it himself. But the young officer was going to die.
CHAPTER FOUR STRIKING OUT
Savenay, France. Primary base o II/KG-40
Kampfgruppe, that was a joke if ever there had been one. Four Arados and less that twenty of the little Henschel 132s. The unit had been shot to pieces in Russia and sent to France to regroup. That was a joke as well. Lieutenant Wijnand had never seen so many enemy aircraft at one time. He'd heard the Ami carrier strikes were hell but this was worse than he'd ever imagined. Their unit clerk had been riding a bicycle back from the field post office when four Ami fighters had chased him. They'd hunted him like a dog until they killed him. Four fighters, one man.
Fighter pilots. Overblown egos all of them. Spent their lives flashing around leaving the real work to the bomber crews. And who got all the resources? Damned fighter pilots. Wijnand bitterly remembered the days back in 1944 when the fighter groups had had an absolute priority on the new jets. What had he been flying then? A biplane! An old stacked-wing biplane out of World War One. Strange to think it was made by the same company that built the neat little 132s. But the bomber crews were trying to survive in ancient old Heinkels and Junkers while their new Arado 234s stacked up in factories waiting for engines. It was Gal lands fault. He'd played the political game well and got the fighter groups their priority so they could rule the sky over the Eastern Front. And would fighters stop the Amis and Ivans cooling their tank tracks in the Channel? Of course not. That was down to the bomber crews. The ground forces helped of course, it was still difficult to blow tanks from the air, but it was the ground attack units that stopped the Allied assaults. And got chewed up doing it.
In truth the bomber groups were only a pale shadow of what they had once been. Back in the glory days of 1940 and 1941 they had been the cream of the Luftwaffe with direct access to Goering's ear. Then it had all gone sour. First there had been the strategic bomber problem. None of the four-engined aircraft had been satisfactory, they'd all suffered development problems. Then, there had been the disasters of the American B-29 strikes. They'd based out of Russia and tried to hit targets in East Europe. The casualties had been dreadful, several raids had been wiped out completely. At one of the bomber meetings Old Fatty had been on his best form. Jovial and confident. Asked Heinkel and Junkers if they could build anything as good as the B-29. They'd hedged and blustered but eventually they'd admitted that even if their best efforts performed as advertised, which they'd never done, they still wouldn't match the B-29. Then he'd turned to Messerschmitt and Tank and asked them how good the Americans fighters were compared with ours. Nothing to choose, they'd said. So how could our big bombers survive? Fatty had asked with a flourish. They can't. So why build them? Not a Reichsmark for the big bombers, he'd said, not a kilo of aluminum.
And then there was the power problem. Wijnand knew his little Arado had four engines because that was the only way to get the necessary power. The German engine industry couldn't get above the 1000 kg of thrust level. Heinkel had offered a 1300 kg thrust engine, the HeS-011 but it had failed disastrously. Despite experimental test runs and hard engineering work, the engine just couldn't be made to work. Eventually, it had been abandoned, given up as a bad job with its fundamental design defects too deep-seated to cure. The same fate had befallen the next-generation Jumo-012 and the BMW-018. Even if the design had worked, the engines couldn't be built. Germany's critical shortage of metals for high-temperature alloys had seen to that. The same problems meant that even his BMWs had barely five or six hours between overhauls when the Amis were up in the hundreds.
So there were no engines even for medium bombers and the old piston engined aircraft had to do. There was one bomber group in Russia still flying Heinkel IIIs. More flew Ju-88s. The lucky ones had the 388. The Arado 234 light bombers were the only jets and that was because they mostly did recon. As a result, the German bomber crews in Russia were taking a real beating from the allied fighters.
But never in the East did he see aircraft used like this. There were literally thousands of them swamping the area, shooting up anything that moved. Wijnand blessed their group commander. Colonel Kast had been a great leader in Russia, now he was saving them here. He'd ignored the big tempting French-built airfields with their solid buildings and comfortable quarters. Instead, he'd put his men into wooden shacks and dug-outs buried in the trees. The aircraft had been tucked away as well. The Henschels were easy, they'd been designed to give the smallest possible target and could be hidden almost anywhere. Hiding the larger Arado 234Cs had been a challenge but they'd managed it as well. Colonel Kast had also moved the entire group as close to the coast as he could. He'd noticed that the Amis suffered most losses crossing the coastline. So they came over it as fast as they could and got inland as quickly as they could. So when Kast had moved his unit up to the coast, the Amis had overflown them before they started to look. He was a sly one that Kast. So why did he want to see Wijnand now?