I am sorry for not writing for the past couple of weeks, but I made a policy that if all I could do was write to complain about the insanity of Hauptmann Hein, I had rather not write at all. Enough to say that for the past several days, despite his every attempt to crush, burn, stifle, freeze, maim and drown me, I am still here. As, God help us, is he.
The events of today however, must be told.
Our mission today was to be a quick sortie across the Channel to attack shipping anchored in the port of Dover. Reconnaisance had shown an injured frigate with destoyer escort had arrived there in the night and we expected it to be busy undergoing repair. We took off before first light in order to catch them at their work.
I cannot say the raid went as planned, but it went as expected. We delivered our bomb in the Hauptmann’s usual unorthodox manner, and while our escort held the RAF at bay the staffel turned tail for home.
Hein turned inland.
“Vo ist, Hauptmann?!” Even though by now I knew his lunacy had no bounds, I could not help cry out.
“Fritz, has it not occurred to you,” he replied, banking to fly parallel to the cliffs, “To wonder why the British feel it necessary to erect these large steel towers along the coast?”
“Hauptmann, I will gladly discuss it at length when we are safely back at base!”
By now we were quite low, only metres from the grass verge lining the cliff, and slowing by the second. In front of us, loomed three identical steel towers, like mini Eiffels, and beside them an anonymous and harmless looking shack.
A finger of MG fire reached up to us from a sandbagged position along the cliffs, but it was not sited to shoot inland and at such a low angle, and only managed to trim the row of trees behind which we were…landing!
I was speechless. Our aircraft slammed down in a field between two stone walls and the Hptmn stomped on the rudder to swing our nose back to face the towers, only a hundred metres distant. I threw open my cockpit and leaned over and banged on the glass over his head. He appeared to be regarding the towers through his sights, as though wondering what reaction a well aimed MG burst might provoke. At last he registered my banging and releasing his harness, threw open his own cockpit and climbed onto the wing.
About a mile away I saw green uniformed figures, bearing rifles, scaling a gate and obviously intent on reaching us before we could destroy our apparently, to them, crippled aircraft. I could imagine their enthusiasm, such a prize! A barely damaged Stuka and two ‘Jerrie’ prisoners in the bargain.
“Hauptmann please!” I begged, “Back in the cockpit – we can still escape!”
“We can Fritzy,” he said, to my dismay jumping down from the wing, “But first I must relieve myself.” And with that, he jogged toward the small hut I had seen from the air, which was now about 100 metres away. He approached it in a crouch, only straightening as he drew up against the timber wall and peered through the small window.
Then, incredibly, with a glance toward the advancing Tommy troops to be sure he had time, he urinated on the timber wall. As he did so, the door to the shack swung open and a tin hatted Tommy with a cup of steaming tea in his hand, stepped outside into the weak sunshine to check the progress of the raid over the port.
At this I began to clamber onto the wing, my intention being to fling myself into the pilot’s seat, and though I had never flown the lumbering beast before, through sheer will and not a little inspired terror, haul myself up into the air. Whether I succeeded or not, it seemed the better alternative to standing and watching my Captain complete his ablutions while waiting to be captured.
Hein by now had seen the Tommy emerge and flatted himself against the wall. Picking up a fist sized rock he stepped calmly up behind the Englander and struck him under the ear, collapsing him silently to the ground. This did not go unseen by the troops a half mile away, and two of them dropped to their knees and began taking pot shots at me as though it was I who had single handedly decided to take on the British Army! Although they were too far away to shoot with any accuracy, I nonetheless vaulted back into the safety of my own cockpit, and tried to bring my MG to bear on them. The traverse was too much though, and the best I could do was loose an impotent stutter of shells that didn’t get within forty degrees of their approach.
It was enough to send them momentarily to the ground though and the Hauptmann seized this chance to grab the Englander roughly by the strap of his tin hat, bouncing him over rocks and bushes to the waiting Stuka, where he lifted him bodily over his head as though he were a sack of straw and threw him onto the wing. As he clambered up after him he roared at me, “Don’t just sit there Fritz, get this dog into your chair and sit on him!”
I cannot now believe what was being asked of me, but then, with the English Army bearing down on me, our aircraft sitting idling atop the Cliffs of Dover, I was losing all ability to judge what was a reasonable order, and what was insanity. For the Hauptmann, it seemed a perfectly reasonable request, and so, perhaps it was. I leapt up from my seat and together we bundled the Tommy headfirst into the cockpit in front of me. If he was not already sore before this, he certainly was afterwards, as his helmeted head landed with a resounding crack on the armour plate of the cockpit floor. We could not, in the short time available, conceive a way to get his legs inside the cockpit in a manner that would both allow me to regain my seat, and close my cockpit, so the Hauptmann quickly abandoned this nicety and jumping into his own cockpit cranked the throttle to full and the pulled the flaps down.
Between the limp legs of the Englander I saw the tumbledown stone wall behind us recede, too slowly. Imagined the next wall and the little wooden hutch beyond us approaching, too quickly. I decided that this time, I would go to my death with my eyes open, drinking in for the last time the Earth’s beautiful green veldt and vivid blue sky. This moment of peace was only spoiled by the odour coming from the groin of the Tommy, inches from my face, apparently proving true the stereotype Goebbels had laughingly described in a recent speech; of a race to whom capture by the Germans was a fate worse than death because in German prison camps the prisoners were required to wash weekly…
By the time I had finished this train of thought, I realised the earth was receding below me. In seconds we swooped down over the cliffs, losing height toward the sea, but gaining precious speed. Though the wind was howling through my open cockpit, I heard a grunt as the Hptmn pulled the stick back and we left a feathertail wake in the water for a demented half minute as our gull winged monster seemed undecided about whether it preferred to be bird or fish.
Bird was the eventual decision and we traded sea for sky in an overdue dash for home.
About five kilometres out from our base, the Tommy woke, and began to thrash his legs, and try to raise himself from the floor in a handstand that, had he succeeded, would have seen him propel himself out of our cockpit and into the void two hundred metres above France. I was tempted to allow him to do this, if only for the pleasure of imagining his surprise on the way down, but as the Hptmn had gone to some little trouble to capture him, I decided instead to jam my boot onto his neck until he started gurgling and stopped thrashing.
Hein took more than his usual care as he glided in to land and we actually made an orthodox approach as he called the tower and asked for an armed escort to meet the aircraft. Perhaps my comrades thought that at last, I had tried to kill the Hauptmann during a mission – heaven knows I had discussed with them often enough how this might be accomplished in a way that would still allow me time to safely bail out. In any case they appeared more than a little surprised to see him taxi up to the apron and bounce unscathed from his cockpit.
Or perhaps it was the two green clad legs sticking up from mine.
In any case they quickly jumped into action and organised the transfer of our prisoner from my cockpit floor to our vegetable store room (the only room on the base with a decent lock) and I was lying on the ground between our landing struts when Hein jauntily returned.
“Quite a war, eh Fritz?”
“Not quite the war I had grown used to, Hauptmann,” I observed.
He sat too, regarding the building into which our prisoner had disappeared. “Now perhaps, we will find out what those mysterious towers are all about!”
I sighed, “It is something called radar, Hauptmann. A system of radio waves that lets the English detect our raids."
He looked at me strangely, as though I was the man in the moon and had just landed in front of him.
“It was in the briefing you slept through this morning.”
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