Stuka Pilot

In an ensuing operation a cruiser sinks in a matter of minutes under my bomb.

After the first sortie our luck with the weather is out. Always a brilliant blue sky and murderous flak. I never again experience anything to compare with it in any place or theatre of war. Our reconnaissance estimates that a hundred A.A. guns are concentrated in an area of six-square miles in the target zone. The flak bursts form a whole cumulus of cloud. If the explosions are more than ten or twelve feet away one cannot hear the flak from the flying aircraft. But we hear no single bursts; rather an incessant tempest of noise like the clap of doomsday. The concentrated zones of flak in the air space begin as soon as we cross the coastal strip which is still in Soviet hands. Then come Oranienbaum and Peterhof; being harbors, very strongly defended.

The open water is alive with pontoons, barges, boats and tiny craft, all stiff with flak. The Russians use every possible site for their A.A. guns. For instance, the mouth of Leningrad harbour is supposed to have been closed to our U-boats by means of huge steel nets suspended from a chain of concrete blocks floating on the surface of the water. Even from these blocks A.A. guns bark at us.

After about another six miles we sight the island of Kronstadt with its great naval harbour and the town of the same name. Both harbour and town are heavily defended, and besides the whole Russian Baltic fleet is anchored in the immediate vicinity, in and outside the harbour. And it can put up a murderous barrage of flak. We in the leading staff aircraft always fly at an altitude between 9,000 and 10,000 feet; that is very low, but after all we want to hit something. When diving onto the ships we use our diving brakes in order to check our diving speed. This gives us more time to sight our target and to correct our aim. The more carefully we aim, the better the results of our attack, and everything depends on them. By reducing our diving speed we make it easier for the flak to bring us down, especially as if we do not overshoot we cannot climb so fast after the dive. But, unlike the flights behind us, we do not generally try to climb back out of the dive. We use different tactics and pull out at low level close above the water. We have then to take the widest evasive action over the enemy-occupied coastal strip. Once we have left it behind we can breathe freely again.

We return to our airfield at Tyrkowo from these sorties in a state of trance and fill our lungs with the air we have won the right to continue to breathe. These days are strenuous, very strenuous. On our evening walks Steen and I are now mostly very silent, each of us guessing the other’s thoughts. It is our task to destroy the Russian fleet; so we are reluctant to discuss its difficulties. Argument would be merely a waste of breath. Those are our orders and we obey them. So in an hour we come back to the tent, inwardly relaxed and ready to go out again into this hell in the morning—

On one of these walks with Flt./Lt. Steen I break the customary silence and ask him rather hesitantly: “How do you manage to be so cool and so collected?”

He stops for a moment, looks at me out of the corner of his eye, and says: “My dear chap, don’t imagine for a moment that I have always been so cool. I owe my indifference to hard years of bitter experience. You know something of what one is up against in the service if one doesn’t see eye to eye with one’s superiors… and if they are not big enough to leave such differences behind in the mess and refuse to forget them on duty, it can be plain hell.

But the most finely tempered steel comes out of the hottest fire. And if you go your own gait alone, without necessarily losing touch with your fellows, you grow strong.”

There is a long pause, and I realize why it is that he understands me so well. Although I am aware that my next remark is not very military, I say to him: “I, too, when I was a subaltern sometimes promised myself that if I were ever given a command I wouldn’t at any rate behave like some of my superiors.”

Steen is silent for quite a while before he adds: “There are other things besides which form a man. Only a few of our colleagues know that and so are able to understand my serious views on life. I was once engaged to a girl I loved very deeply. She died on the day we were to have been married. When a thing like that happens to you, you don’t easily forget it.”