Stuka Pilot

It takes a long time to gain 2400 feet with a Ju. 87; far too long, for now I begin to weigh the pros and cons. My one ego says: if the thirteenth tank has not yet caught fire you needn’t imagine you can do the trick with one more shot. Fly home and remunition, you will find it again all right. To this my other ego heatedly replies:

“Perhaps it requires just this one shot to stop the tank from rolling on through Germany.”

“Rolling on through Germany sounds much too melodramatic! A lot more Russian tanks are going to roll on through Germany if you bungle it now, and you will bungle it, you may depend upon that. It is madness to go down again to that level for the sake of a single shot. Sheer lunacy!”

“You will say neat that I shall bungle it because it is the thirteenth. Superstitious nonsense You have one round left, so stop shilly-shallying and get cracking!”

And already I zoom down from 2400 feet. Keep your mind on your flying, twist and turn; again a score of guns spit fire at me. Now I straighten up… fire… the tank bursts into a blaze! With jubilation in my heart, I streak away low above the burning tank. I go into a climbing spiral… a crack in the engine and something sears through my leg like a strip of red hot steel. Everything goes black before my eyes, I gasp for breath. But I must keep flying… flying… I must not pass out. Grit your teeth, you have to master your weakness. A spasm of pain shoots through my whole body.

“Ernst, my right leg is gone.”

“No, your leg won’t be gone. If it were you wouldn’t be able to speak. But the left wing is on fire. You’ll have to come down, we’ve been hit twice by 4 cm. flak.”

An appalling darkness veils my eyes, I can no longer make out anything.

“Tell me where I can crash-land. Then get me out quickly so that I am not burnt alive.”

I cannot see a thing any more, I pilot by instinct. I remember vaguely that I came in to each attack from south to north and banked left as I flew out. I must therefore be headed west and in the right direction for home. So I fly on for several minutes. Why the wing is not already gone I do not know. Actually I am moving north north west almost parallel to the Russian front. “Pull!” shouts Gadermann through the intercom, and now I feel that I am slowly dozing off into a kind of fog… a pleasant coma.

“Pull!” yells Gadermann again—were those trees or telephone wires? I have lost all sensation in my mind and pull the stick only when Gadermann yells at me. If this searing pain in my leg would only stop… and this flying… if I could let myself sink at last into this queer, grey peace and remoteness which invites me…

“Pull!” Once again, I wrench automatically at the joy-stick, but now for an instant Gadermann has “shouted me awake.”

In a flash I realize that I must do something here.

“What’s the terrain like?” I ask into the microphone. “Bad—hummocky.”

But I have to come down, otherwise the dangerous apathy brought on from my wounded body will again steal over me. I kick the rudder-bar with my left foot and howl with agony. But surely it was my right leg that was hit? Pull to the right, I bring the nose of the aircraft up and slide her gently onto her belly, in this way perhaps the release gear of the undercarriage will not function and I can make it after all. If not we shall pancake. The aircraft is on fire… she bumps and skids for a second.

Now I can rest, now I can slip away into the grey distance… wonderful) Maddening pains jerk me back into consciousness. Is someone pulling me about?… Are we jolting over rough ground? Now it is over… At last I sink utterly into the arms of silence…

When I wake up, everything around me is white… intent faces… a pungent smell… I am lying on an operating table. A sudden, violent panic convulses me: where is my leg?

“Is it gone?”

The surgeon nods. Spinning downhill on brand new skis… diving… athletics… pole jumping… what do these things matter? How many comrades have been far more seriously wounded? Do you remember… that one in the hospital at Dnjepropetrovsk whose whole face and both hands had been torn off by a mine? The loss of a leg, an arm, a head are all of no importance if only the sacrifice could save the fatherland from its mortal peril… this is no catastrophe, the only catastrophe is that I cannot fly for weeks… and in the present crisis! These thoughts flash through my brain in a second, and now the surgeon says to me gently:

“I couldn’t do anything else. Except for a few scraps of flesh and some fibrous tissue there was nothing there, so I had to amputate.”

If there was nothing there, I think to myself with a wry humor, how could he amputate? Well, of course, it is all in the day’s work for him.

“But why is your other leg in plaster of Paris?” he asks in astonishment.

“Since last November—where am I here?”

“At the Waffen S.S. main. dressing station at Selow.”

“Oh, at Selow!” That is less than five miles behind the front. So I evidently flew north-north-west, not west.