1435 19 December 1942
As he observed the casket of el Capitan Jorge Alejandro Duarte being placed before the altar inside the Duartes' enormous marble tomb, Hauptmann Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein decided that he was honor bound to inform Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade that an attempt would be made to murder him.
He reached this conclusion by a circuitous route, starting from a moment when he glanced down at the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross around his neck and at the other one on the red velvet pillow.
His first thoughts were unkind: This goddamned fool does not deserve the Knight's Cross. He got himself killed flying an airplane that he was not supposed to be flying in the first place, in a war that wasn't his.
Other thoughts immediately followed: Furthermore, he was probably unqualified to fly the Storch at all. It is a relatively simple, stable aircraft; but like all airplanes, it has its peculiarities. The Storche I've flown have gone from the first faint, barely detectable indication of a low-speed stall condition to a full stall in the time it takes to spit.
Whereupon, the sonofabitch drops through the sky like a stone. Standard stall-recovery procedures work, of course, providing you have several hundred feet of altitude to play with. If not, you encounter the ground in an out-of-control attitude, and with consequent loud crashing noises.
There are two ways to enter a stall condition in addition to on purpose, which is what the instructor pilot does to you during Transition Training, which it is safe to assume the late Capitan Duarte did not have, the Luftwaffe not being in the habit of teaching Cavalry officers from South American countries to fly its airplanes. An airplane goes into an unplanned stall either because the pilot is stupid enough to allow the airfoils to run out of lift, or because the propeller has stopped turning and pulling the airplane through the air with enough velocity for the airflow over the airfoils to provide sufficient lift. Propellers stop turning usually because the engine has stopped turning. Engines are fairly reliable. They seldom stop turning unless they are broken, as when, for example, they are hit by small-arms fire.
The rule to be drawn from this is that if you are flying a Storch near the ground someplace, you pay particular attention to airspeed and engine RPM, so that if the engine is struck by small-arms fire and shows indications of stopping, you can make a dead-stick landing someplace without stalling.
Capitan Duarte did not do this. The documents accompanying the remains gave the cause of death as severe trauma to the body caused by sudden deceleration." If he was hit, the documents would have said so.
The late Capitan Duarte crashed the sonofabitch, because he didn't know how to fly the sonofabitch. And he took some poor bastard with him.
He therefore deserves the posthumous award of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross about as much as Winston S. Churchill does. And awarding it to him is a slap in the face to every pilot who has earned it, including, of course, Hauptmann Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein.
By the time the funeral procession moved from the courtyard outside the Basilica to the cemetery, Peter was having second thoughts:
Wait. Am I being fair to the poor bastard? Is the coffee cup full of brandy I had for breakfast talking? Or the monumental ego of Hauptmann von Wachtstein, fighter pilot extraordinary? Or both?
Bullshit. Clete Frade was contemptuous when he heard they were awarding this clown his cousin, by the by the Knight's Cross. Christ, even Oberst Gr?ner was disgusted.
From that point, Peter became less unkind.
On the other hand, even if he was a Hauptmann, Duarte was an inexperienced officer. Inexperienced officers do dumb things, especially before they learn that all the talk of the glory of war is pure bullshit. I did. To save Germany from godless communism, and to bring glory to the Luftwaffe and Der F?hrer, 1 did some pretty goddamn dumb things in Spain myself. And in Poland. And in France.
Cletus told me that he went on his first combat mission determined to personally avenge the humiliation the United States suffered at Pearl Harbor.
It took about fifteen seconds with a Zero on my tail, Clete said, "to realize that all I wanted out of the war was Clete Frade's skin in one piece; somebody else was welcome to the glory of avenging Pearl Harbor.
Clete is an honest man, more honest than I am. I would find it hard to publicly admit a sentiment like that, even though I felt it. And Clete is no coward. He told me that he thought his chances of getting off Guadalcanal alive ranged from zero to none," but he continued to fly.
El Capit?n Duarte presumably was not a stupid man. He would have learned that lesson probably as quickly as Clete, and surely more quickly than I. It's a pity he killed himself before he acquired a little wisdom.
An officer is honor bound to face whatever hazards his duty requires; not throw his life, or that of his men, away. And that brings me back to Cletus Howell Frade. On one hand, if Clete is in fact an OSS agent, he knows full well the risks he is running coming down here. It may not be spelled out in neat paragraphs in the Geneva Convention, but everyone understands that spies operating in neutral countries get killed by the other side's spies.
In war, the Geneva Convention permits the out-of-hand execution of spies and saboteurs. The Geneva Convention is quite clear on the subject; A soldier found out of uniform behind enemy lines loses the protection afforded a soldier in uniform. He is presumed to be a spy or saboteur.
But Gr?ner he said so doesn't know if Clete is an OSS agent or not. And even if he is, he may just be down here to influence his father, or as some kind of high-level message deliverer.
And if Clete is not a spy, where does Gr?ner get the authority to order his execution?
And if Cleteis a spy, what then is Gr?ner? He is certainly not functioning as an officer of a belligerent army, facing his enemy on a battlefield. He is an agent of an intelligence service. In other words, they are both out of uniform; both are outside the protection and the restrictions of the Geneva Convention.
But if Gr?ner is caught for ordering the murder of Clete or of his own hired assassins, for that matter he will escape prosecution . . . not because his actions are permitted by the Rules of Land Warfare, but because he is carrying a diplomatic passport, which renders him immune to the laws of Argentina.
On the other hand, if Clete killed Gr?ner on his country's orders, and was caught, he would face an Argentine judge on a charge of murder. That's unfair.
Can I thus conclude that since Gr?ner's conduct fails to meet the small print in the Geneva Convention, as well as the German Officer's Code of Honor, I am therefore at liberty to violate the German Officer's Code of Honor and warn Clete?
By stretching the point, yes I can.
But be honest with yourself, Peter. You don't want to warn him because you have put yourself through this exercise in moral philosophy, but because you like him. We thought we -were witty when we told each other we would like to shoot each other down, meanwhile smiling at each other with warm affection. But beneath the warmth there is also the cold truth. If duty requires, we would try to shoot each other down. Yet there would be no smile on the victor's face his or mine.
I wonder which of us would be good enough to shoot down the other. I have more victories, but until recently, most of my opponents were inexperienced pilots flying inferior machines.
Clete's kills were experienced pilots, flying aircraft at least as good as his own. He's probably a damned good fighter pilot.