Not far off to the side, an enemy night fighter ambushed another Stuka. Machine-gun tracers stabbed at the German plane. It caught fire. Stukas carried good defensive armor, but you couldn’t stop everything. Flame licked across the Ju-87’s wing. The plane began to fall out of the sky. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner/radioman were able to use their ’chutes. Hope was all he could do.
No-he could do one thing more. He could mash down the throttle and scoot away from there as fast as he could go. He could, and he did. The farther from the busy French defenses over the capital he got, the less likely he was to meet a shell with his name on it or an enterprising enemy pilot peering into the darkness to spy a shape against the stars or the telltale glow of flames from the exhaust pipes.
Finding the airstrip from which he’d taken off was another adventure. Only dim lamps marked it-anything more would have invited a call from English or French planes. Landing when those lights were all he could see was nothing he’d trained for.
A couple of pilots in the squadron had already had to write off their Stukas. One was still in the hospital with burns and broken bones. Hans-Ulrich got down with no worse than a jolt. Still, this wasn’t a business for the faint of heart.
When he went to the commander’s tent to report on the mission, he was glad to find Colonel Steinbrenner sitting behind his little folding table. Only a paraffin lantern and the colonel’s cigarette coal shed any light on things. They made Steinbrenner’s face look older and wearier than it was.
“Yes, I saw it, too,” the squadron CO said when Hans-Ulrich mentioned the Stuka shot down over Paris. “That was Rolf Wutka and Sergeant Schmidt.”
“Aii!” Hans-Ulrich said, and covered his eyes with one hand. “I went to flying school with Rolf.” They hadn’t got on that well, then or later, but even so … “I feel like a goose walked over my grave. Not many of us left who’ve been going up since before the war.”
“No, not many,” Steinbrenner agreed. He was one-he’d been doing it longer than Rudel. After a moment, he went on, “Things could be worse, you know. We could be bombing our own cities instead of the enemy’s.”
“Have Luftwaffe units started doing that?” Hans-Ulrich asked. He’d always been a man stolidly loyal to those set in authority over him. Past that, he was about as political as an apricot tree. Even someone like him, though, couldn’t help knowing how restive the Reich had got these days.
“If they have, I haven’t heard about it, and I think I would have,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. He might have added more, but stubbed out the cigarette instead. The way he shook his head seemed to tell Hans-Ulrich he’d thought better of whatever it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it mattered so much, he didn’t trust Hans-Ulrich with it. Sighing, he went on, “Anything else about your return flight?”
“Only the adventure of landing.” Rudel gave back a lopsided grin. “But you already know about that, don’t you?”
“For a second there, when I was getting my nose up, I wished I were wearing a diaper under my long johns,” Steinbrenner said. “About the only worse thing I can think of would be coming in on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck at night.”
Germany had started building a carrier. When the war broke out, the Graf Zeppelin got shelved. All those tonnes of steel went into other things instead. Hans-Ulrich tried to imagine landing on a rolling, pitching deck with only lanterns to guide him in. “You’re right, sir. That would be worse. I didn’t think anything could be,” he said. “Still, I’d like to try it, you know?”
“From most people, that would be bragging. From most people, it’d be Quatsch, is what it’d be,” Steinbrenner said. “From you, though, from you I believe it. I remember how you won your Ritterkreuz.” Hans-Ulrich touched the medal he wore at his throat. He was the one who’d thought of mounting panzer-busting cannons under a Stuka’s wings. He was the one who’d taken them up and tried them out, too. He shrugged. “I didn’t do it for the Knight’s Cross, sir.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Steinbrenner answered quietly. “That makes it more likely you’d want to fly onto a carrier, though, not less.”
“All I want to do is hit the enemy as hard as I can, however I can, wherever I can,” Rudel said.
“I know that.” Colonel Steinbrenner sighed again. “Life would be simpler if everyone were more like you.” He gestured. “For now, get out of here. Grab some sleep if you’re not too wound up. We’ll go out again tomorrow night as long as the weather’s not too beastly.”
“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Hans-Ulrich said. One advantage to following the soldier’s trade was that you could always find the right answer.
Julius Lemp had taken the U-30 east through the Kiel Canal before. This time, though, he had men on the flak gun on the platform at the back of the conning tower. RAF raiders were growing bolder day by day. Yes, there were antiaircraft guns on both sides of the canal. Yes, a couple of Bf-109s buzzed overhead. Chances were he was worrying too much.
He kept men on the gun even so. If an enemy fighter-bomber did come after his boat here, he couldn’t dive to escape it. The canal wasn’t deep enough. He had to try to fight it off, or at least to make the flyer too anxious to be accurate.
No fighter-bombers roared in out of the west. Lemp relaxed when the U-boat came out into the broader waters of the Baltic. Now he could dive. He could dodge, too. Somehow he was sure that, if he hadn’t manned the gun, the English would have strafed him. There was an old joke about snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away. He knew about it. He just didn’t care. A U-boat skipper had better not care about jokes. Suspenders, belt, binder twine, a cummerbund … Whatever could possibly hold up his trousers.
Kiel wasn’t far from the eastern edge of the canal that bore its name. As the U-30 neared the port, Lemp saw smoke from two or three fires rising into the gray, hazy sky. He tugged at his beard in perplexity. “What’s going on there?” he said, pointing to the smoke plumes. “Do you suppose the RAF has started making serious daylight raids?”
Behind him, Gerhart Beilharz shrugged. Before the engineering officer could answer, what sounded like a cannon fired inside the city: once, twice, three times. Another column of smoke started going up. “I think we’re doing it to ourselves, skipper,” Beilharz answered sadly.
“That’s-madness,” Lemp said. But just because it was mad, that didn’t make it any less likely. The uprising that toppled the Kaiser at the end of the last war had started here, when sailors from the High Seas Fleet mutinied against their officers. A lot of them were Reds, but every one of them was sick of the hopeless, losing fight.
Lemp couldn’t imagine a Bolshevik uprising in Kiel today, or anywhere else in Germany. But millions of people all through the Grossdeutsches Reich were sick of this hopeless, losing fight.
When Wilhelm II saw the jig was up, he went into exile in Holland and stayed there quietly for the rest of his life. Of all the things Lemp could imagine Adolf Hitler doing, going quietly into exile stood last on the list. Hitler would hang on to power as long as he could, and then another twenty minutes besides.
Naval infantrymen in Stahlhelms on the wharf aimed an antipanzer cannon at the incoming U-boat. The U-30’s deck gun was bigger and more powerful than that door-knocker on rubber tires, but it wouldn’t be the only piece aimed at the boat. It was just the only one the sailors could spot. And for a U-boat, which had no armor, any fight with artillery was a losing fight.
“Nice to see we’re welcome,” Lemp said, his voice frigid with fury.
“Sir, I think we would have got a friendlier hello if we put in at the quays by London Bridge.” Lieutenant Beilharz sounded disgusted, too.