Some of the poilus had nerve. They stood there and fired at the Ju-87 as it roared by only a couple of hundred meters over their heads. You couldn't mistake muzzle flashes for anything else. Most of the time, they missed. The Stuka went mighty fast, and they wouldn't lead it enough. But all those bullets in the air were dangerous. Ground fire had brought down airplanes-not often, but it had.
Not today. Not this Stuka. It climbed again as Hans-Ulrich yanked back on the stick. "See any fighters?" he asked Albert Dieselhorst.
"None of ours," answered the noncom in the rear-facing seat. A moment later, he added, "None of theirs, either."
Theirs were the ones Hans-Ulrich worried about. Stukas were marvelous for shooting up and bombing enemy ground targets. When it came to air-to-air combat, they were too slow to run and too clumsy to dodge. A lot of good men had died before the Luftwaffe decided to admit that.
Although Hans-Ulrich had already been shot down once, he didn't intend to die like that. Unlike plenty of other cocky, cock-proud pilots, he didn't intend to be stabbed by a cuckolded husband, either. He aimed to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered around his bed, so he could tell them something interesting and memorable as he went. He was a minister's son, all right.
He saw French panzers moving toward Clermont. He reported them by radio-that was all he could do. A Stuka had to score a direct hit with a bomb to harm a panzer, and a direct hit on a moving target was easier imagined than done.
On the way back to his airstrip, German flak opened up on him. He was tempted to strafe the idiots who'd started shooting. A Ju-87 was about the most recognizable plane in the world, for God's sake! Speaking of good men, how many were dead because their own friends murdered them? Too damned many-he knew that.
Even through the speaking tube, Sergeant Dieselhorst's voice sounded savage: "You ought to go back there and shoot those bastards up!"
"I thought about it," Rudel answered, "but at least they missed."
"That just makes them incompetent bastards," Dieselhorst said.
"Would you rather they'd shot us down?" Hans-Ulrich asked. Dieselhorst didn't answer, which was probably a good thing.
The landing wasn't smooth, but a Stuka was built to take it. Rudel went into Colonel Steinbrenner's tent to report. "We got your news about the panzers," Steinbrenner said. "Good job. The ground forces are doing what they can to stop the froggies."
"Danke, sir," Hans-Ulrich said. "Stuka pilots ought to be able to do more about panzers from the air. We're fine against soft-skinned vehicles, but armor…?" He spread his hands, palms up, as if to say it was hopeless.
"I don't know what to tell you," the wing commander replied. "Machine guns aren't heavy enough, and you have to be lucky with bombs. You'd need to mount a cannon or something to do yourself any good."
By the way he said it, the idea was impossible. The more Rudel thought, the more he figured it wasn't. "You know, sir, we could do that," he said, excitement kindling in his voice. "You could mount a 37mm gun under each wing instead of the bomb that usually goes there. You'd need a magazine for the ammo instead of loading it round by round, and you'd want to use electrical firing, not contact fuses from the ground artillery. Once you had those, a Stuka would turn into a panzerbuster like nothing anybody's ever seen."
"You're serious," Steinbrenner said slowly, staring across the table with folding legs that did duty as his desk.
"Damn right I am, uh, sir." When Hans-Ulrich swore, he was very serious indeed. "I'd like to talk to the engineers and the armorers, see what they think of the idea."
"What if they say no?" the wing commander asked.
Hans-Ulrich only shrugged. "How am I worse off?"
Colonel Steinbrenner blinked, then started to laugh. "Well, you've got me there. Go ahead-talk to them. See what happens. Maybe they'll come up with something. Or maybe they'll tell you you're out of your tree. Who knows?"
Head full of his grand new idea, Rudel hurried away. The first person he talked to was Sergeant Dieselhorst. The rear gunner and radioman rubbed his chin. "That'd be a nice trick if they can do it," he said. "Can they?"
"I don't know," Hans-Ulrich said. "I sure want to find out, though."
He interrupted the armorers' skat game. They heard him out, then looked at one another. "That just might work," one of them said when he finished. "Mount the breech in a sheet-metal pod so it's more aerodynamic…"
That hadn't even occurred to Hans-Ulrich. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Could you fellows rig up a gun like that?"
They looked at one another again. The fellow who'd spoken before-his name was Lothar-said, "Well, sir, that's not gonna be so easy. We're Luftwaffe guys, you know? How do we get our hands on a couple of infantry cannon?"
"Oh." That hadn't occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He wondered why not. Probably because he was so hot for the idea, he ignored problems. Other people didn't, though. He supposed that was good. Well, most of him did. Every once in a while, you wanted things to be easy.
"Talk to the engineers, sir," Lothar said. "They've got more pull than we do. If anybody can get hold of that kind of shit-uh, stuff-they're the guys."
So Rudel talked to the engineers. They visited forward airstrips every so often: they wanted to find out how the Stukas were doing in combat so they could get ideas for improving the planes the factories would turn out next month or next year. (A few weeks earlier, Hans-Ulrich wouldn't have believed that the war could still be going on next year. Now, however much he regretted it, he realized anything was possible.)
They heard him out. When he started, they listened with glazed eyes and fixed smiles, the way an adult might listen to an eight-year-old talking about how he intended to fly to the moon on an eagle's back. But he watched them come to life as he talked. When he finished, one of them said, "I will be damned. We could probably do that. And it sounds like it'd work if we did."
"It does," another engineer said. He might have been announcing miracles.
"You don't need to sound so surprised," Hans-Ulrich said sharply.
"Lieutenant, we hear schemes like this wherever we go. Well, not like this, but schemes." The second engineer corrected himself. "Most of them are crap, nothing else but. Somebody has a harebrained notion, and he doesn't see it's harebrained 'cause he's harebrained himself. And so he tries to ram it down our throats."
"And he gets pissed off when we tell him all the reasons it won't work," the first engineer added. "I mean really pissed off. A rear gunner took a swing at me when I told him we couldn't give a Stuka an electronic rangefinder-they're too big and too heavy for an airplane to carry. One of these days, maybe, but not yet."
"An electronic rangefinder?" Hans-Ulrich asked, intrigued in spite of himself.
"You don't know about those?" the engineer said. Rudel shook his head. The man looked-relieved? "In that case, forget I said anything. The fewer people who do know, the better."
Hans-Ulrich started to complain, then decided not to. Plenty of projects were secret. If the Frenchmen shot up his plane the next time he went out, and they made him bail out and captured him, the less he could tell them, the better off the Reich would be. The engineer was dead right about that. Hans-Ulrich did say, "But you think my idea is practical?"
"Hell with me if I don't," the man answered. Hans-Ulrich frowned; he didn't like other people's casual profanity. The engineer didn't care what he thought. The fellow went on, "The ammunition may get a little interesting, but that's the only hitch I see."
"We could adapt the firing mechanism from the 109's 20mm cannon," his colleague said.
"Hmm. Maybe we could," the other man said. Their technical colloquy made as little sense to Hans-Ulrich as if they'd suddenly started spouting Hindustani. But he understood the key point. They thought the panzer-busting gun would work, and they thought it was worth working on. He wondered how long they would need to come up with a prototype.