looked again at those boys who had been his close comrades through the agonies of cadet school. They’d teased him mercilessly when they heard of his application to become a flyer, but they’d come to the railway station at four-thirty in the morning to bid him goodbye. He looked at their childish faces; the amateur photo was creased and faded. One was buried in Narvik, another had been crippled in an amphitheatre near Sparta, the third was an Oberst on Manstein’s staff at Army Group Don. The fourth was commanding a Bewährungs-kompagnie (a suicide unit for enemies of the régime) near Kharkov.
The group in the small ivory frame was his class at the Neu Bieburg A/B Flying School, with an old Bücker biplane in the background. Only half of those recruits finally got their wings.
Twenty-five men sepia-toned and defaced by youthful signatures: pupils and instructors at Schleissheim Fighter Pilot School. He was blinking in the strong sunlight. He’d just completed two hundred flying hours when that photo was taken. It had seemed a lot at the time. Scowling in the front row was his present commanding officer who, like most of the instructors there, had just returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. To Löwenherz he had seemed a remote and glamorous figure with his four victories over Loyalist Spanish planes. Now, he supposed, the new replacements on his Staffel saw himself as a similarly forbidding figure: distant and cold and expert. Löwenherz hoped so.
He stopped looking at the photos and pulled on his silk dressing-gown before going to the end of the officers’ billets for a shower. He scrubbed himself energetically under the cold water and dried himself thoroughly. He had a catlike grace of movement that fitted his fastidiousness with food and his concern for clean personal linen. When he returned to his room he spent forty minutes ironing the shirts and underclothes that he had washed and left to dry the previous night.
When Löwenherz finished he put away the electric iron and dressed carefully. He inspected his gleaming high boots and fixed the Iron Cross and the German Cross Order to the pocket of his newly laundered tunic. He briefly checked his appearance in the mirror: the white tunic was immaculate and he slanted the white-topped cap rakishly. The bulldog came out from under the table and prepared for the walk through the woodland to the Officers’ Mess.
‘It’s wet outside, Bubi,’ he warned, but, like his master, the dog enjoyed walking through the fragrant grass. The rain had ceased and sunlight shone upon the wet grass. The dog sniffed each patch of it and ran across the road and cocked its leg at the slit-trench bomb shelters. Löwenherz used to scold Bubi for doing that, but since the shelters had never been used from the day they were dug he had ceased to care if the dog fouled them.
As Löwenherz stepped out from his quarters four Dutch civilians arrived carrying mops and brooms. Behind them cycled Feldwebel Blessing, the civilian staff overseer. The Feldwebel dismounted from his bicycle when he saw Löwenherz and saluted him with precision. Blessing was a young, over-weight Bavarian with heavy features and small piercing eyes.
‘Good morning, Feldwebel Blessing,’ said Löwenherz. ‘There’s rust in the water supply again. The same trouble as last March, I suspect.’
‘It will be investigated, Herr Oberleutnant.’
‘Excellent, Blessing, I am confident that it will.’ Although he was unpopular, Blessing’s efficiency was a byword and his civilians kept the billets clean and shining. A few generals like Blessing in the OKW and perhaps we shouldn’t be on the defensive in the East, nor preparing Italy for an Allied invasion, thought Löwenherz. Blessing cycled energetically away towards the main barracks with Bubi barking at his rear wheel. Löwenherz walked towards the Officers’ Mess and soon the dog returned, racing after him, splashing through the puddles.
Along the perimeter fence sat hundreds of sea-birds driven inland by the summer storm. Bubi chased them along the fence, barking and jumping high into the air. Lazily the wet white blobs stretched their wings and circuited briefly before settling back into place.
As he neared the Officers’ Mess, Löwenherz recognized one of his pilots walking towards him through the sunspotted woodland. The boy would probably have avoided a meeting with his Staffelkapitän if he had been looking where he was going.
Christian Himmel was a twenty-two-year-old Unteroffizier. His basic pay was one hundred marks per month plus another forty marks in Wehrsold (war pay) and seventy-five marks Fliegerzulage (flying pay). This, even allowing for income tax and contributions to Nazi funds and winter relief, still left him with more comforts than he had known in civil life and just double what his father earned as a gardener. He was a muscular boy with short untidy hair that he inexpertly trimmed himself. His face was round and his serious mouth full-lipped. ‘Angel-face’ he had been called at the camp where he had done his labour service, and the lack of wrinkles in his clear skin did make him look like one of those carved cherubs that crowd together around the altars and pulpits of the baroque churches near his Bavarian hometown.
Himmel was shy, although no one at Kroonsdijk had less reason to be daunted by Oberleutnant von Löwenherz than he had. In July 1940 during the Kanalkampf (as the Luftwaffe named the early period of the Battle of Britain) the circumstances had been very different. Löwenherz was a young ensign newly posted to a Messerschmitt 109 squadron where Himmel was a very experienced pilot, with a Polish Lós bomber and two Spitfires to his credit and a novel reputation. It was said that Himmel had shot down more enemy aircraft than he claimed, and on at least three occasions he had been more than generous in allowing kills to be credited to others.
Löwenherz’s first two kills – a Hurricane and a Defiant – had a considerable number of Himmel’s bullets in them, as Löwenherz was the first to admit. But Löwenherz had been Himmel’s wingman, and, as Himmel said, a good wingman should share credit for every victory. A wingman flew two hundred yards on the beam of his leader and covered him from stern or quarter attack. The leader navigated, led the attack and made the decisions. Himmel had done that well. Himmel was also a skilled mechanic. His concern for the aircraft on the Staffel amounted almost to hypochondria, an obsession that was his excuse for being shy, silent and alone. When he spoke with his ground-crew men he tried to confine the conversation solely to technical matters. Sometimes Löwenherz could almost believe that Himmel ticked and whined and roared, and made better contact with his machines than with his fellow men.
‘Good morning, Himmel.’
‘Good morning, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said the boy. There was a gust of wind and Himmel, clad in black mechanic’s overalls, shivered.
‘Plugs still oiling up, Christian?’
‘They fitted new rings but that was just a waste of labour, Herr Oberleutnant. There’s only a very slight improvement.’
The dog made playful rushes at the Unteroffizier’s boots. Himmel pretended to punch Bubi’s head and the dog growled and made fearsome open-fanged passes at his fast-moving hands.
‘Kugel won’t be able to do it today. The Major has had trouble with his supercharger capsule. He’s given strict instructions that his plane must be ready this evening.’
‘Then Kugel will be busy,’ said Himmel.
‘Very, very busy,’ smiled Löwenherz, picturing the potbellied old mechanic facing the Gruppenkommandeur’s wrath.
Löwenherz said, ‘I’ll tell him to do a run up when you land tonight. If you’re still getting a drop in revolutions I’ll tell him he must fit a new engine. How’s that, Christian?’
‘Thank you, Herr Oberleutnant.’
‘Are you going to breakfast?’
‘I’m
