Читать книгу In the Way of the Reich - Paula Astridge - Страница 12

CHAPTER SIX

When the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918, Hosenfeld was happy to return to his country village and pursue his teaching career at the local Catholic college and Albert chose to return to Munich, determined to finish his degree in engineering at the Technical University. It had become his one desire to create and build for the future, rather than to take any further part in its destruction.

Although the Armistice provided them with the peace and opportunity to move on from the war, it made Hermann and Udet wild with fury. Both of them were still fit to kill and cursing the day that Germany capitulated. Their country’s failure had left them at a loose end, without a war on which to hang their hopes.

‘We’ve been ordered to surrender our squadron’s planes to the Allies,’ Hermann informed Udet on the day Germany lay down its arms. Fresh back from his latest mission with two new kills to his credit Udet pulled off his leather cap and goggles and looked at Goering in complete disbelief.

So, it was over. Just like that. World War I was over. And here they were, Germany’s finest, the acclaimed Knights of the Air, grounded for good. Fallen angels still desperate to kill and conquer but now without the license to do it. Lost and without purpose they didn’t know which way to turn after all the drama they had been through; all the courage and sacrifice, and the need for vengeance that had sustained them for years.

It felt like it had all been for nothing, and had ended at the stroke of some politician’s pen. Insult now added to injury because the planes they had fought in were simply to be handed over to the enemy with a smile. It was ludicrous and degrading: the ultimate humiliation.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Goering snapped at him. ‘I have no choice. They are my orders.’

With the frustration of his only battle ever lost, one in which he had not even been allowed to play a part, Udet slapped his gloves down hard on the desk.

‘Well, I’ll be damned if we’ll hand them over intact,’ he said.

The rest of the pilots from the renowned Jasta 11 felt the same. Their famed flying skills suddenly failing them as they deliberately crash-landed and destroyed their planes on delivery to the Allied air base. It was a final act of defiance that their enemy counterparts did not question. Neither arresting nor even reprimanding the men for this last show of pride, which was one that every Allied pilot felt sure would have been his, had the situation been reversed.

Now out of uniform, without a cause but still with an insatiable need to fly, Udet joined forces with fellow Blue Maxer Ritter von Greim to put on Air Shows to assist in the Prisoner of War (POW) Relief Fund. But although a resounding success, it was a short-lived moment of splendour. When one of their two planes crashed, it was hardly a priority to have it repaired. Certainly not in a struggling post-war economy which was unable to sustain its own people, let alone subsidise the rebuilding of flying machines that had failed in their duty to protect the Fatherland.

Nevertheless, Udet continued to fly high through the rest of the ‘Roaring 20s’, capitalising on his glory days, but contributing little to life in general. After three years of marriage, he divorced lovely Lola to indulge in a life of philandering, hard drinking and other frivolities. It was a course of action which led him directly to Hollywood, and a series of low budget films, in which he and his stunt flying starred. All of them were B grade productions that were thin on theme but broke every box office record. For a while he was the toast of Tinseltown, liaising with the rich and famous.

‘Who are mostly nice, simple people just exhibiting their eccentricities for public relations purposes,’ Udet wrote to a friend back home. ‘Seems to me the only thing they have in common is their swimming pools. I swear, in some of them, you can stroll on the bottom in a diver’s helmet!’

At this point in his life, Udet’s feelings and convictions didn’t go half so deep. Hollywood, for him, was the ultimate hiatus from care and responsibility; a hedonistic world of glitz and glamour that was the perfect escape from reality and his memories of his past which tore at his heart and kept calling for him to return.

He had deluded himself into thinking that he had stopped pining for what had once been. He had had to work very hard to do this when depression had threatened to almost cripple him during his Air Show performances in Europe. They had been dreadful days when his daredevil stunts hadn’t helped to soften the acute longing for what he had lost.

‘This is the way we live,’ he had noted in his diary. ‘How dull and irrelevant life has become. For now we stand in the present fighting only for a living. A lost engagement means that my monthly budget is out of whack. But ho-hum, how my thoughts wander back to the time when it was worthwhile to fight for your life.’

Still, to have achieved worldwide celebrity status was at least something of which he could be proud. And at the 1929 Cleveland Air Show he made a point of it, despite the fact that the odds were against him from the start.

He had to fly and perform his aerial stunts in his eight-year-old Flamingo, when the other international pilots were equipped with the newest, the finest and the fastest in technology. Their edge was thanks to the Versailles Treaty which had forbidden Germany to produce any aircraft that capped 100hp. It was a ruling which left Udet at a considerable disadvantage, not to mention petulant over the unfairness of the truce.

‘To lose as an individual is easy. One competes, gives one’s best. Victory or defeat are in one’s own hands. But to lose for one’s country is bitter,’ he thought, with a tight lump in his throat as he strode out on to the airfield. Above all, and for Germany’s sake, he was hell-bent on making a good show of it.

It was a task that was made a little easier for him when he overheard a young American boy in the crowd say:

‘Mommy, Mommy, look. That’s Ernst Udet! He shot down 68 planes in The War!’

‘Hush darling,’ his mother replied in a mild reprimand. ‘They were our boys he shot down.’

But being 12 years old, that son of hers was set on having the last word. ‘Yeah. But it was still pretty darn good.’

‘Yes it was,’ Udet reminded himself with a sudden surge of pride. The boy’s words had sent his spirits soaring sky high. Somewhere they hadn’t been since his last dog-fight over France. No one had outflown him then and they were not about to do so now. Antiquated plane or not, he was the best and he was going to make sure that they all knew it. And how better to prove his point than to fly upside down only inches from the ground, picking up from it a white, silk handkerchief that a woman in the audience had dropped.

The cheer that went up was resounding, as was the praise from his fellow flyers. The most flattering of which came from the renowned American Ace, Colonel Eddie Rickenbacker who accepted Udet’s handshake as if it were a privilege, rather than an offer of friendship.

‘You’d have thought they’d have clapped louder for their own local hero,’ Rickenbacker laughed, as they stood together on the podium at the closing ceremony. Smiling for the photographers, he put his hand on Udet’s shoulder, leaned a little closer, and said in his amiable, American twang ‘I’ve got a bottle of booze in my hip pocket. Have a drink with me later?’

It was a generous offer in the days of prohibition. As generous as was Rickenbacker’s grace in allowing himself to be upstaged by his former flying foe. Udet admired him for that and decided to follow suit soon after when another man’s pride was put in his hands.

‘And we have a happy surprise for our flying hero,’ said the Master of Ceremonies into his megaphone. ‘Among us here is a man, a simple man, who saved Lieutenant Udet during a hail of enemy fire in 1918. Please come up to the podium, Herr Mueller, and say hello to your old friend.’

As the crowds clapped, a man climbed up onto the stage. Hesitant, and with eyes lowered, he approached Udet with his gaunt face blanched white with embarrassment. The man was a complete stranger, someone Udet had never seen before in his life.

‘Now, Herr Udet,’ the MC encouraged. ‘Shake hands with the man who saved your life.’

The unknown Mueller haltingly extended his hand and said ‘I’m so happy to see you again Lieutenant Udet.’

Bewildered, Udet looked him up and down. The man’s cuffs were frayed and his shoes were in desperate need of repair. But worse, was the look of fear on his face, his protruding, dark-circled eyes gazing at him in a silent plea for help. He was a man downtrodden by life, fighting for his last chance.

‘So give him that chance,’ Udet thought as he reached out to shake the stranger’s sweaty hand. ‘I’m glad to have been given this opportunity to thank you for saving my life Herr Mueller,’ he said. To which there came a second, thunderous round of applause. Rowdy enough to make Mueller blush before he proceeded to tell his tale of courage:

‘I found Lieutenant Udet unconscious in the barbed wire,’ he recounted to the crowd with renewed confidence. ‘I lifted him over my shoulder and carried him, like a mother carries a child, to safety.’

The story was as fresh and fascinating to Udet as it was to the audience. Standing stock-still and straight-mouthed on the podium, he stopped short of calling the man out as a liar. There was little to be achieved in doing so, he reasoned.

When Mueller finished his account, he stepped down from the stage, straight into a ring of reporters. There he continued to answer their questions about his close friendship with Udet and to revel in his 15 minutes of fame; every now and then, his conscience tweaked enough to have him throw a shame-faced smile back up at Udet.

‘I heard your friend, Mueller, got a job with a construction company the other day,’ Rickenbacker said over a clandestine drink a few days later. ‘That’ll be directly thanks to you. Poor blighter had been out of work for months.’

Udet was tempted to tell Rickenbacker the truth, but instead replied:

‘I’m glad.’

And he meant it.