Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 14

FRIDAY, 25 JUNE 1943. Morning, and another scorching day of soporific heat. Trapani on the western edge of Sicily was crowded with aircraft: two more fighter groups had arrived that morning. Major Johannes Steinhoff – ‘Macky’ to his friends – twenty-nine years old and in possession of a lean, gentle face, blue eyes and fair hair, had been up early, woken in the grey light of dawn and driven down to the airfield to join the rest of I. and II. Gruppen of Jagdgeschwader – Fighter Wing – 77. Already, mechanics were furiously working on their Messerschmitt 109 aircraft, desperately trying to get as many as possible fit to fly despite chronic shortages of parts – from simple bolts to electrical wiring to just about everything complex machines like these needed.

Trapani lay on a dusty, sun-bleached, small coastal plain, and by the time Steinhoff had planted himself in a chair in front of the wooden dispersal hut, the dawn light had been swept aside by the deep burning blue of the daytime sky. Beyond, past the edge of the airfield, lay the vast wine-dark sea. Crickets and cicadas chirruped. The heat grew palpably.

Steinhoff was exhausted. The previous day, General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland had arrived, having taken over from the sacked and disgraced Generalmajor Theo Osterkamp, the former fighter commander – Jafü – on Sicily. Galland had been commander of fighters back home in Germany, defending the Reich, but had no experience of the Mediterranean and, while a notable fighter wing commander earlier in the war, had had no staff training and had been thrown in at the deep end to say the least. The previous evening, he had summoned Steinhoff to the Trapani fighter control base beneath the summit of Monte Erice, the mountain that dominated the plain below. The route up there was a winding dusty road, one hairpin after another until, beneath a sheer wall of craggy rock, it reached a small plateau that extended outwards. Several buildings had been constructed, while pneumatic drills continued work on a shelter dug directly into the cliffs. From there, the whole western tip of Sicily could be seen stretched out before them – the white houses of Trapani town and its small port and then, further to the south, the airfield, and beyond that Marsala. It was nothing if not a stunning view. After briefing him on recent operations, Galland had then told Steinhoff he wanted to talk to the Gruppen and Staffel commanders, and so they had headed back down the mountain road to the airfield.

Sitting on stools and in deckchairs outside the dispersal hut beneath gnarled old olive trees, Steinhoff’s commanders had listened in silence as Galland talked about the air defence of the Reich and the tactics that had been developed against the American four-engine heavy bombers. The key, he had told them, was to fly straight at them, opening fire at the nose of the bomber as close as possible then sweeping on over the top. The general also told them that against American heavy bombers, there was a 50 per cent chance of being shot down during a rear attack, and similarly poor odds for a side or flank attack too. It was hardly very cheering. On the other hand, a head-on attack greatly reduced the chance of being hit – but it did mean a pilot had only about two seconds of firing time, because it was only effective when really close, and with a closing speed of nearly 600 mph that didn’t leave much margin for error. Steinhoff had watched his officers start to glaze over. When Galland had finished, not one had asked any questions.

‘Very well then,’ Galland had said. ‘Until tomorrow.’ And then he had driven back to Monte Erice. Steinhoff had barely slept, the general’s words ringing in his ears: ‘Get in close.’ ‘Don’t fire too soon.’ ‘Lead them in head-on close formation.’ Steinhoff knew one had to have nerves of steel to pull off these frontal attacks. He was not feeling confident, and in any case, he had already been a front-line fighter pilot for three long years – over France, during the Battle of Britain, over the Eastern Front and then in those difficult final days in Tunisia when suddenly it had become clear that the Luftwaffe was in deep and chronic decline and the Allies, with their shiny Spitfires and Lightnings, their Marauders and Flying Fortresses, had dramatically and decisively begun to wield the upper hand.

Steinhoff was fed up with fighting, fed up with the war, fed up with not having enough of anything. And he was utterly exhausted. The intensity, the constant fear, and now, here on Sicily, the blistering, energy-sapping heat.

Early that day, his III. Gruppe had arrived from their base in Sardinia, and then so too had III. Gruppe Jagdgeschwader 53, the Pik As, or Ace of Spades. This was all part of Galland’s plan to show any Allied bomber formations that dared to fly over a heavy response by a mass of fighter aircraft; but with some eighty Messerschmitts now parked up around the airfield complex here at Trapani, Steinhoff was only thinking of the catastrophe that might unfold if they were heavily attacked by Allied bombers here.

The hours passed and the heat grew. Steinhoff wondered how many hours he had spent in a deckchair since the war had begun. ‘A day seems very long when it is spent in waiting,’ he noted, ‘with nothing to occupy one’s imagination except the war in the air.’1 He wondered whether he would be able to lead this huge formation of fighters into the bombers successfully; it was no easy matter manoeuvring en masse because the distances on the inside of a turn were shorter than those on the outside. Leading a Staffel of, say, nine, was reasonably straightforward, but eighty … Then those other thoughts kept creeping into his mind – thoughts impossible to keep out: the raking fire of the Flying Fortresses’ .50-calibre machine guns, the bailing out, the descent, the vainly hoping someone would spot the rubber dinghy on that vast dark Mediterranean Sea.

Then Oberst Günther ‘Franzl’ Lützow arrived, the new Inspector South for the Luftwaffe. An old friend of Steinhoff’s, he had been the Luftwaffe’s second pilot to amass a staggering one hundred aerial victories. Steinhoff hadn’t seen him since the Eastern Front the previous summer.

‘I want to be here for your first big defensive battle!’2 called Lützow as he clambered out of his car. Steinhoff led him over to dispersal and to the mass of pilots sitting waiting under the shade of the olive trees. All this talk of big aerial battles was making Steinhoff feel increasingly on edge.

‘Today’s your big chance,’ Lützow told the pilots.3 ‘You must keep close together when you attack and dismiss from your mind any thought of mixing it with the Spitfires. The Fortresses are like a fleet of battleships and you can only get in among them if you break through their defensive fire in a compact phalanx.’

‘For God’s sake, Franzl,’ Steinhoff snapped, ‘spare me that awful patter!4 For days now, advice and instructions have been raining down on our heads from on high. The General keeps dangling the gallant pilots of the Reich Air Defence as a shining example before our eyes.’ It was, continued Steinhoff, enough to make all his men start to feel inferior. The reality was that, for some time now, the older veterans had been gradually, one by one, falling by the wayside, while the new boys being sent to him were short of hours and had had almost no tactical training – and, such were the fuel shortages, there was little opportunity to lick them into shape. ‘You people don’t know this horrible theatre yet,’ he continued. ‘It’s mostly water and in the long run it gets us all. They’ll wear us down by keeping us grounded and destroying our parks and workshops.’ He was now in full flow. ‘You don’t, by any chance, do you, believe in the Teutonic superhero who, after a bombing raid, rises from his slit trench, shakes the dust from his feet and ascends on steely pinions into the icy heavens, there to wreak havoc among the Flying Fortresses?’

For a long moment, Lützow stared at him, as though suddenly he had accepted there was no longer any point keeping up the charade. Then he said: ‘Yes, but how’s it all going to end here?’5

That was the question Steinhoff had been asking himself. It was what all the old-timers had been wondering. They’d lost Tunisia. It wasn’t going well in the east. In western Germany, the Ruhr was being systematically bombed by the RAF each night and by the Americans each day. The Allies were getting stronger, while they were growing weaker. How was it going to end?

The discussion was suddenly silenced by anti-aircraft fire, followed by a deep rumble from the east, behind Monte Erice, getting louder with every moment. The pilots jumped up and ran for it. Steinhoff heard the whistle of bombs falling even as he fled towards the nearest slit-trench, then leaped for it, landing on the back of someone who had got there first. A carpet of bombs exploded in rapid succession, each one closer, the ground shaking, the noise immense. Steinhoff glanced across at Lützow, dust covering his head and at the back of his throat and in his lungs. Runnels of sweat pouring down his face marked lines through the dust on his skin. Steinhoff pressed his face to the ground as a bomb crashed horribly close, almost bursting eardrums, covering them in a swathe of grit and filling their lungs once more with choking smoke and dust.

And then the bombs stopped falling and the roar of aero-engines faded away. Slowly, unsteadily, they got to their feet and paused for a moment, legs dangling over the edge of the trench in case a second wave appeared. Ammunition from a burning plane was popping somewhere not far away. As they eventually got to their feet, Steinhoff saw splinters of glass; a little way away two ground crew, hands on hips, stood watching the burning wreckage of an Me109.

At the group hut, it turned out the phone line had been cut; soon afterwards a Kübelwagen appeared with a message from Galland asking Steinhoff to call immediately from one of the Staffel dispersal huts. Steinhoff hurried over to 1. Staffel, where the medical officer was tending a row of wounded ground crew. There, at least, the line was still working.

Galland apologized for the lack of warning. ‘We didn’t know the Marauders were on their way,’ he said. ‘They were so close to sea level that our direction finders didn’t pick them up.’ He told Steinhoff to be ready to scramble; radio traffic suggested bombers in Tunisia were starting to form up. It looked as though a big raid was on its way.

A little while later, and with the line from the group hut repaired, Galland rang again to say they were tracking an enemy raid that seemed to be heading for Naples. The fighters would be scrambled to catch them on the return leg. They most likely had an hour to wait.

But Galland was back on the line sooner than that. ‘Take off straight away, Steinhoff,’ he said. ‘The bombers have turned south and attacked the port of Messina. You must hurry if you’re going to catch them.’

Steinhoff put down the receiver and shouted ‘Scramble!’ at the operations clerk. Pilots ran to their machines, grabbing parachutes left on the wings, clambering up on to the wing root and hoisting themselves into the cockpit. A quick check, a signal to the ground crew, engine turning and bursting into life, then taxi out of the blast pen. Steinhoff checked his magnetos. The smell of oil, gasoline, metal and rubber, and a cockpit already hot as an oven. He glanced around, although the collar of his lifejacket restricted movement and his oxygen mask swung to and fro. Dust was being whipped up by the prop blast, making it hard to see, but with aircraft drawing up either side of him he opened the throttle and was off, rumbling forward, controlling the huge torque with opposite rudder. A routine performed hundreds of times; and then he was free of the ground and climbing high into the blue.

‘Odysseus One to Eagle,’ he said over the R/T – the radio – making contact with the ground controller below at Monte Erice.6

‘Pantechnicons withdrawing.’7 Galland’s voice now in his headset. ‘Grid reference Able two-two King. Steer zero-two-five.’

Steinhoff led his I. Gruppe, who closed in behind him as he circled Monte Erice. He had insisted on radio silence so all that could be heard was the background drone of the engine and the hiss of static in their headsets, interrupted only by the calm and precise instructions of General Galland from the fighter control room below.

‘Odysseus,’ Steinhoff heard him say, ‘turn on to three-zero-zero, Pantechnicons at 20,000 feet heading west.’8

As they climbed into the sky, the horizon and the sea below it slipped away. A high-pressure haze had settled around them, obscuring the land mass of Sicily and so blocking any fixed reference point that might aid navigation. More updates from Galland. The bombers – the ‘pantechnicons’ – were descending, now at 16,000 feet, but still being picked up by their Freya radar.

Then a further update. ‘Odysseus, steer two-eight-zero.9 Pantechnicons presumably now at low level since the Freya has lost contact.’

Steinhoff looked around him. Down below he could see nothing. Either side, his pilots were starting to waver, rising and falling, as uneasiness grew. The haze seemed to thicken. Glancing behind, he could only see I. Gruppe behind him – the rest had disappeared from sight in the murk. He broke radio silence to tell them to close up, conscious they only had another ten minutes or so before it would be time to turn back.

‘Pantechnicons right beneath us!’10 Steinhoff recognized Zöhler’s voice. ‘Right beneath us, lots of them, heading west!’

Steinhoff now saw them too, the desert yellow of their upper bodies standing out against the silvery grey of the sea, grouped in squadrons of nine or more aircraft. It was now around 1.30 p.m., and they were about 90 miles north-west of Trapani. The bombers had just pasted Messina, Sicily’s biggest port, a mere mile from the south-west toe of mainland Italy. In all, 123 B-17 Flying Fortresses, mostly from the 97th and 99th Bomb Groups, had dropped nearly 2,000 tons of bombs on the docks, warehouses and railway marshalling yards. They’d caused considerable damage and had also had the good fortune to hit a 5,000-ton Italian steamer, the Iris, which was fatally crippled.

On paper, they were a very juicy target and blissfully free of fighter cover; but they were also low, very low, below radar, almost, it seemed, touching the waves. And they were, unhelpfully, heading in exactly the opposite direction, which meant there was now no time for a carefully worked-out manoeuvre. Steinhoff realized he needed to peel over immediately and begin his dive right away in a big arc so that he could emerge level with and hurtling directly towards them, not behind them. Even with the advantage of height and the greater speed of the Me109, there was not a moment to lose. He had to hope the rest followed. Steinhoff dipped the wing and the Messerschmitt turned and dived, building up speed so that in no time the altimeter told him he was now at just 6,000 feet. Glancing around he saw Strafer, Bachman and Berhard following tightly. Five thousand, four, three. The lower he got, the faster the bombers appeared to be flying.

He knew he had to get on to the same level as the bombers, but as he neared the closing speed suddenly seemed immense. Lining up on one, he aimed at the cockpit and opened fire. ‘I pulled up my M-E to the same height as the bombers as though I had done it a hundred times before,’ he noted.11 ‘My task was to spray the gleaming cockpit with a hail of shot.’ Tracer from his guns arced towards the bomber, while the luminous cross-wires of his gunsight shook from the recoil of the cannon and machine guns. Pulling back the stick, he climbed, g-force pressing him down in his seat. His stomach lurched, his mouth tasted bitter. Glancing back once more, he saw he was on his own – his Geschwader headquarters flight had dispersed in the attack – but his bomber had crashed into the sea. Over the R/T, pilots chattered – a mixture of excited cries and orders, but also many urgently saying they were low on fuel and pulling out. Looking down at his own fuel gauge, Steinhoff knew he had about twenty minutes’ worth left, so turned and set off back for Trapani, a terrible sinking feeling growing in his stomach.

It had been a disaster, he was certain. It was not his fault they’d come across the bombers at the last moment before turning back, nor that among all the advice about how to attack a bomber over Germany at 18,000 feet no one had once suggested how to attack in haze over sea and at almost zero feet. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘absolutely nothing, had favoured our attack.’12

Looking around him, he saw the bombers had gone, vanished entirely, and that he was on his own, flying over the water, accompanied only by the growing anxiety that he might not have the fuel to get home. It was a familiar feeling – one he’d always hated, as almost all German fighter pilots hated it: a gnawing fear that had first gripped him while making repeated returns across the Channel during the Battle of Britain after dog-fights in southern England. The only difference now was that the Mediterranean was even bigger and their Messerschmitts, because of the dust and the shortage of parts, were less reliable. Over the radio, the chatter seemed to be getting ever more hysterical. With a rage born of frustration sweeping over him, he switched on to transmit and told everyone to keep their mouths shut.

But he did make it back. The familiar marker of Monte Erice came into view and soon after, with other single fighters also homing back towards Trapani, he came back into land. Engine off, the dust settling, and a sudden stillness. And the sinking feeling of disaster.

Clambering out, he was met by Hauptmann Lutz Burckhardt and Oberleutnant Gerhard Strausen, both from his headquarters flight. Although Strausen was enthusiastic about the Fortress Steinhoff had shot down, neither had had any success themselves, nor had they seen any other bombers disappear beneath the waves. Major Siegfried Freytag, commander of II. Gruppe, and a man with both a growing cynicism and a talent for calling a spade a spade, greeted Steinhoff as he approached the hut.

‘That was a gorgeous balls-up, sir,’ he said.13

‘Didn’t your wing get any?’

‘Not a single one,’ he replied. He had lost sight of the headquarters flight in the haze, and then, when he did see the bombers, it was almost too late and they had had to attack from astern rather than head-on. ‘And we botched it, really botched it.’ It seemed the other two Gruppen hadn’t even seen the bombers.

So there it was – as he’d feared. In all, just four had been shot down – one by Steinhoff, one other, as it happened, by one of Freytag’s boys and two by the Ace of Spades. Not that Steinhoff knew it at the time. When, with a heavy heart, he phoned through to Galland on Monte Erice, he was able to report only his own single Fortress as confirmed shot down.

‘But I told you in good time that they’d gone down low,’ Galland replied.14 ‘It really isn’t possible – a hundred fighters and only one enemy shot down …’

An 88mm flak gun fired, shaking the walls of the wooden hut, and suddenly everyone was once again running to the slit-trenches, Steinhoff’s call left unfinished as the telephone fell from its perch on to the floor. As he ran out of the door, the engines of the approaching bombers could already be heard. By chance he found himself once again crouching next to Franzl Lützow, who had earlier been with Galland at fighter operations on Monte Erice. Once more bombs started to whistle down and explode as the anti-aircraft guns boomed their response. Eventually, the raiders passed, and once again they dusted themselves down and wearily clambered out. Galland, Lützow told him, was seething with rage. ‘Was there really nothing to be done?’15 he added.

Sensing a hint of reproach, Steinhoff turned on him. ‘I’ll be accountable to the general for everything,’ he snapped, ‘but what I do insist is that you finally get it into your heads that we’re trying to do the impossible here!’16

Lützow apologized – and assured his friend he was not reproaching him. ‘But, my God,’ he added, ‘how’s it all going to end?’17