“Do you have it with you?” He asked desperately and out of breath.
Helmut grinned deviously, delightedly, not bothering to ask for a clarification. Rudi’s mad, glistening brown eyes of a terrified hare pleaded their case better than any words would. Regarding Rudi with a certain measure of amusement through grayish ringlets of cigarette smoke, Helmut discreetly maneuvered a pill into his hand and Rudi felt God-like again. Fearless and calm, just like Helmut, with nerves of steel and the marksmanship of a devil.
Take off. Gain altitude. Run in on target. Maneuver to correct. Line up with the target. Dive. Release a bomb. Recover. Repeat. All with a serene smile on his face. He was in his element, wonderfully precise and ready to receive his wreath for his twentieth confirmed kill as soon as he landed. How many tanks does it make? How many enemy aircraft? How many people were in the tanks and aircraft? Who cares… Johann says there’s no point in brooding over it now. War is war… Johann is a good comrade and Willi too. Too bad Willi had been transferred to a different squadron after the Staffelkapitän had had it with him and even worse that Johann followed him there, being the good friend that he is. Rudi would have followed too, would have asked for a transfer to an African Stuka division, but Helmut expressed a definite desire to stay in France and Rudi’s life was now somehow connected to Helmut’s with a far stronger cord than to all the Willi’s and Johann’s put together.
Rudi had nearly crashed again just days after receiving his coveted wreath and promotion and was promptly reported to the Staffelkapitän by the doctor who, for some inexplicable reason, didn’t want him to die. Just as promptly, Rudi was demoted and restricted from flying and then as the war with the Soviets began◦– transferred away from the squadron for good as a punishment, or as a means of separating him from whoever supplied him with “that crap”◦– again, most likely due to the kind Herr Doktor’s advice as Rudi had assumed. The reason for the transfer was stated loud and clear on his transfer orders and the new Staffelkapitän on the Soviet base didn’t bother reading anything else from his personal file after he had read that last shameful entry, just pursed his lips in a disgusted manner and waved Rudi off.
“Grounded for an indefinite period of time. And don’t you dare even go near aircraft in my charge!”
Rudi nodded stiffly, tears already clouding his vision, clicked his heels and swore to himself that he would reinstate his good name at the very first chance if they would see fit to offer it to him at all.
A few letters from his former comrades Johann and Willi were forwarded to him from his old base but he couldn’t bring himself to reply to a single one. What was he supposed to tell the two fighter aces whose names were already spoken with hushed reverence here? Nothing. Nothing at all. And so, Rudi sat in his tent and listened to the Stuka engines starting in the distance, alone and forgotten in his misery.
Eastern Front, July 1941
Rudi ran out of the tent to the sounds of the general commotion outside. It wasn’t the usual returning crews’ excited banter but frantic shouts more like it and therefore a good reason to abandon his desk duty which he’d been pulling for his entire life now, so it seemed to him. He shielded his eyes from the blazing sunshine in his effort to locate at least his Staffelkapitän. The latter found him first, grim as ever.
“Fucking Popovs just took down two of our aircraft with their machine-gun fire.” He irritably waved off the medic who was trying to tend to his bleeding shoulder. “Let it be! I’m fine. Wiedmeyer, can I trust you with flying with Bidermann, as his wingman? He has just lost his and we’re short of pilots for the next sortie.”
“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!” Rudi straightened out at once and clicked his heels, expressing his utmost gratitude with the sharpest of salutes.
“Leave the formalities for later. Go watch your crew chief and armorer as he reloads ammunition to your new aircraft and make sure he gets everything right.” The Staffelkapitän had finally turned to the medic, who was hovering over him and nearly begging him to allow him to at least dress the wound before Herr Hauptmann took off once again, then gave Rudi one last skeptical once-over. “You aren’t taking that stuff anymore, are you?”
“No, Herr Hauptmann. I’m in full possession of my faculties and I’m ready for the mission.”
The call came as soon as the last Ju-87 was reloaded and Rudi jumped into the cockpit of his new Stuka, comforting and familiar despite its somewhat battered state. He gently caressed the stick and swore to himself there and then that he would never compromise his position in the Luftwaffe in the same manner; never fall for an easy way out when the rest of his comrades had to face the harsh realities of war without having to numb themselves into oblivion.
Following the take-off route of his new flight leader, Rudi glued himself to Bidermann’s tail and positively refused to keep less than a few yards between the two aircraft. For the first time since he was transferred here, Rudi was taking in the local terrain, alien and therefore vaguely treacherous; endless fields in which it was easy to get lost without properly working navigation and where the smoldering ruins of villages were their only marks. The land lay prostrate underneath, vast and hostile in its endlessness, a soon-to-be common grave of them all, of which Rudi was still blissfully unaware.
Their main objectives were the few tanks and infantry fortifications miraculously left intact after the previous sortie.
“Watch for that machine gun position.” The radio crackled to life with Bidermann’s voice. “They’re using it as anti-aircraft and the son-of-a-bitch who operates it knows what he’s doing. It’s somewhere in that trench over which we’ll be diving now. Get ready.”
Rudi clasped his stick as though his life depended on it and activated his dive brakes. Without breaking the few yards’ distance between his leader and himself, he effortlessly dived after Bidermann and both bombers began their rapid descent. Rudi began laughing, in spite of himself, as the familiar terrifying scream of his Stuka’s sirens reverberated through his aircraft. The “Jericho Trumpet,” the Allies dubbed it and they couldn’t be more accurate in their description.
Bidermann turned out to be an excellent marksman and destroyed the enemy tank with his first attempt. Rudi released his bomb into the trench behind it, from where bursts of machine-gun fire were coming and toggled a knob on the control column that triggered an automatic pull-out, grateful for its existence. If it weren’t for the handy feature, the last time he blacked out due to the G-force combined with Pervitin’s influence, he would have long been dead.
“Good job, Kaiser Two!” Rudi could swear his flight leader, Kaiser One, was smiling. “I think you got him!”
As the others dived following their route, Rudi was gaining altitude still sticking to Bidermann like a shadow.