Читать книгу In the Way of the Reich - Paula Astridge - Страница 11

CHAPTER FIVE

By the time he returned to the front, that despair had mutated into a hard-edged acceptance of life and its harsh realities. One of which was that Hermann Goering had taken over the command of Richthofen’s Flying Group One.

‘Goering’s not fit to even stand in such a great man’s shadow,’ Udet said with flagrant contempt to his fellow officers. He had no fear of being rebuked, as every one of those fellow officers from Jasta 11 felt the same and were bucking against High Command’s choice of a successor.

‘Certainly not,’ Lieutenant Carl von Schoenebeck agreed. ‘Especially when one considers his lack of pedigree.’

Schoenebeck was still smarting over the recent death of his friend, Wilhelm Von Reinhardt who had been first in line for the job. Reinhardt’s death when test-flying the latest model biplane had left a hole in the Air Service’s hierarchy, which Goering had just filled. So Reinhardt’s fellow pilots not only had to suffer the sadness of their friend’s loss, but the social injustice of having the arrogant, untitled Goering forced upon them as his substitute.

On the sore subject of class structure, however, Udet kept his mouth shut. With his own blue-collar background, he could hardly criticize Goering for his slightly less than patrician credentials. Besides, that inbred Blue-Blood Boys’ Club had nothing to do with his gripe against Goering. It was simpler than that. He just didn’t trust the man. At best, he believed Goering to be no more than a pale reflection of Richthofen, At worst, a liar.

There was no question that Goering was the most charming and intelligent of men, and without doubt the most captivating of conversationalists. Nevertheless, Udet had good reason to believe that Hermann had fabricated a few of his ‘kills’ en route to his Blue Max, embellishing his means of achieving them at the expense of other, far better men.

The bottom line was, though, that Richthofen had counted Goering among his closest friends and out of respect for the Baron, Udet decided to keep his suspicions to himself and to not speak out formerly against Goering or his promotion. These were sentiments shared by the rest of the men of Jasta 11. Despite their private protests, it was simply not done in the ranks of the elite to publicly bad-mouth a fellow flyer, especially when his expertise and dedication was not in question.

Stifled or not, however, those objections of theirs were still there, smouldering away beneath the surface and Goering knew it. So he decided to tackle the men of Jasta 11 head on:

‘I am aware of the fact that there are no better flyers than those I see before me now. Most of you are arguably better than I,’ he said. ‘That is why I am hoping, for Richthofen’s sake, that I shall be worthy of walking in his footsteps and of gaining your confidence and trust. Between us there must be no division as it is essential that we give our best. At this critical moment in history all of us must work as one, for there are grave times ahead and we must face them together for the glory of the Fatherland.’

It was a speech which made many of Udet’s fellow officers tolerate his command, and one which had Udet change his mind about Goering and offer his unerring support. Support from a man of Udet’s substance was exactly what Goering needed now that his closest friend and confidante, his brother Albert, was far away and connected to an entirely different branch of the Service. With Albert’s role in communications, he had ironically cut off all direct contact with his older brother.

Not quite as keen to join the Armed Services as Hermann, Albert had been sent to a communications unit attached to an infantry division on the Western Front. It wasn’t that he lacked the courage or patriotism, just the inclination. His general disinterest in all things military was at odds with the lust for war and violence that spurred Hermann into action. For Albert, The Great War was all guts and absolutely no glory. He was posted to what sounded like a safe assignment. However, despite its false sense of security, his position had thrown him into the thick of it from the start.

When it came to trench warfare technicians in uniform like him were in high demand because they got killed on such a regular basis. Their daily missions to reconnect severed communication lines in the heat of battle and without cover made them easy targets for the Allied sharpshooters. Their suicidal excursions out onto ‘No Man’s Land’ demanded the greatest of courage under fire and returned, for their efforts, the very least in military glamour and commendation.

For three and a half years, however, Albert had got lucky. He had managed to keep himself relatively intact. By early 1917 he had only been able to boast a few warrior’s wounds. Two of them were small scars where enemy bullets had whisked past and removed a few layers of skin from his shoulder and left ear. The other one was slightly larger and came courtesy of a piece of plate-sized shrapnel which had sliced through his leg like a circular-saw and come close to severing it in half. The massive blood loss that ensued required that he grit his teeth and overcome his heart-thudding fear as he dragged himself from the field. It was an act of bravery which more than matched his brother’s but went without the medals or acclaim.

That seemed to be the way it went in Albert’s life. He was his own worst enemy when it came to the extent of his courage. Albert always felt, quite incorrectly, that his courage fell short of his own Homeric ideals of valour; whereas Hermann had dedicated his life to convincing himself and others that those mythical ideals and deeds came to him as second nature.

‘The last of the Renaissance Men,’ he often described himself to Albert, as a most successful exercise in personal propaganda. It left his younger brother forever in awe and ashamed of himself for not living up to the mindless courage of others. Examples of which he witnessed daily in the trenches.

‘Who was that man?’ he asked of Major Hans Bauer, who had just sent their Unit’s replacement ‘runner’ on his way with a vital dispatch – an urgent request to Command Centre that their unit be relieved before it was completely annihilated.

They had been in dire straits for days. With the battle raging around them and a death toll that defied counting, each soldier still alive had ceased firing in favour of simply taking cover in their trenches. Out of ammunition and hope as the bombs rained down on them, they had been able to do nothing but keep their heads down low and huddle in the mud. Yet at the peak of the carnage and terror, the ‘runner’ in question had not hesitated to brave the bombs and barbed wire in his 11th-hour dash for help.

‘Brave man,’ Albert continued, as he tried to coax a last few drops of water from his canteen, before discarding it. It was empty. As bone dry as his own mouth and expectation of getting out of their hellhole alive.

‘Oh, don’t worry about him. Nothing can kill our Corporal Hitler,’ the Major answered as he casually pushed off the leaden weight of a dead, partially dismembered body that had just fallen on top of him. ‘Three times that man’s been near fatally wounded, but he just keeps coming back for more. Son of a bitch seems to enjoy it.’

Despite the Major’s flippant dismissal of young Corporal Adolf Hitler’s heroism, Albert always remembered being daunted by it. There was no question in his mind that God must have been standing close at that young man’s side, protecting him for greater things to come. He wondered whether he, Albert Goering, would ever measure up if they did.

He got his chance to find out at the end of 1918 when Germany launched its final all-out offensive. As a last resort, with all their other lines of defence down, Albert and his Technicians’ Unit were moved to the Front Lines. Shortly thereafter he was shot in the stomach. It was a wound that would have killed him had the bullet managed to travel a little further through his innards. Fortunately, it missed his spine by a centimetre and lodged itself in a position that caused immense pain, and enough internal damage to plague him for the rest of his life.

‘But at least I’m still alive,’ he thought with a jaded optimism as he lay bleeding on the hospital stretcher. He wasn’t quite sure that ‘survival’ was his best option given his excruciating pain, the absence of morphine to relieve it, and the fear factor of coughing up copious quantities of blood.

‘You’ll never recover completely,’ the Army doctor told him without a trace of sympathy. Hard pressed for time and compassion, the medic in his blood-stained apron paused only briefly at Albert’s bedside to deliver his diagnosis and drugs as he had done with stream-lined efficiency to the ward full of sick and dying soldiers under his care.

A short while later, one of these soldiers collapsed at the foot of Albert’s bed.

‘Are you all right?’ Albert asked, as with great difficulty he knelt down and lifted Sergeant Wilm Hosenfeld’s bandaged head onto his lap. There was nothing much more he could do but offer the young NCO a sip of water and a few words of comfort. With a serious shortage of medical staff to tend to the casualties who were pouring through the hospital doors in their hundreds, there was no alternative but for the patients to be self-sufficient.

In this case, Albert had the choice to either risk the tearing and infection of his own wound by getting out of bed to help a fellow soldier or to leave the man dying alone on the floor. He chose to help.

When Hosenfeld came to, he was grateful for that helping hand that got him to his feet and helped him back to his bed. He fell back onto it in a heavy, dizzy exhaustion.

‘Thank you, Corporal?’ he said. Through the swirling haze of a second faint, he strained to extend the courtesy of addressing his saviour by name.

‘Corporal Goering, Sir,’ Albert obliged.

‘Thank you, Corporal Goering.’

‘Is there anything else I can do for you Sir?’

‘The biggest favour you can do me now, Goering, is to get yourself back to bed where you belong.’

It was a welcome request as Albert himself suddenly came close to passing out. Feeling himself waver, he quickly grabbed hold of a nearby chair to stop from falling flat on his face.

‘What a sorry pair of soldiers we are,’ Hosenfeld said wryly, as Albert struggled to regain his senses.

They laughed. Their mutual moment of trial and camaraderie had struck up a friendship that was to last a lifetime; a meeting of minds between two unlikely soldiers who had been dragged into the war and been rather surprised to have survived it. Both pacifists by nature, they were men who, by rights, should have been killed by the first angry shot, but had lived to hopefully never fight another day.