Stuka Pilot

We fly in low over the water from the south; it is dark and murky; I cannot distinguish anything more than 2000 to 2500 feet ahead. Now I see straight in the line of my flight a black moving mass: the road, tanks, vehicles, Russians. I at once yell: “Attack!” Already at almost point blank range the defense looses off a concentrated fire from in front of me, twin and quadruple flak, machine guns, revealing everything with a livid brightness in this foggy light. I am flying at 90 feet and have bumped right into the middle of this hornet’s nest. Shall I get out of it? The others have fanned out on either side of me and are not so much the focus of the defense. I twist and turn in the craziest defensive maneuvers to avoid being hit; I shoot without taking aim, for to balance my aircraft for a second in order to hit a definite target means being shot down for certain. Now I climb a little as I reach the vehicles and tanks and soar over them, I feel I am sitting on eggs and waiting for the smash. This is bound to end badly; my head is as hot as the metal screaming past me. A few seconds later a tell-tale hammering. Gadermann yells: “Engine on fire!” A hit in the engine. I see that the engine is laboring with only a fraction of its capacity. Flames lick the cockpit.

“Ernst, we are bailing out. I’ll gain height a little and fly on for as far as we can to get out of the way of the Russians. I saw some of our own chaps not too far from here.” I try to climb—I have no idea of my altitude. A dark patch of oil has spread over the inside and the outside of the windows, I can no longer see a thing and throw up the hood of the cockpit so as to be able to see, but that is no good either, the flames outside screen my vision.

“Ernst, we must bail out now.”

The engine stutters and rattles, stops, stutters again, stops, stutters…. Our kite will be our crematorium on this meadow. We must bail out!

“We can’t,” yells Gadermann, “we are only flying at 90 feet!” He can see from the back. He, too, has thrown up the hood, it snaps the intercommunication cord in two. Now we can no longer speak to each other. His last words are: “We are over a forest!”—I pull the stick for all I am worth, but the aircraft refuses to climb. I know from Gadermann that we are flying too low to bail out. Can we crash-land the Ju. 87? Perhaps it is still possible, even if I can see nothing. For that the engine must keep running, if only feebly. It may come off provided the terrain is in any way suitable.

I close the throttle slowly. As I feel the aircraft sink I glance out sideways. I see the ground rushing by. We can only be at 20 feet. I brace myself against the shock. Suddenly we touch and I cut the ignition. We crash. The motor stops. It must be the end of us. Then comes a grinding crash and I know no more.

I am aware of the stillness round me-therefore I am still alive. I try to reconstruct: I am lying on the ground, I want to get up, but I cannot, I am pinned down, my leg and my head hurt me. Then it occurs to me that Gadermann must be somewhere. I call out: “Where are you? I can’t get out.”

“Wait a second—perhaps we can manage it—are you badly hurt?” It takes some time before he hobbles up and tries to get to me through the wreckage. Now I understand what is causing me so much pain: a long piece of metal from the tail of the aircraft is skewering the lower part of my thigh and the whole of the tail is on top of me so that I cannot move. I can thank my stars that nothing is burning near me. Where can the burning parts have got to? First, Gadermann pulls the piece of metal out of my leg, then he extricates me from the other parts of the aircraft which are crushing me. It requires all his strength to heave them off. I ask: “Do you think the Russians are already here?”

“It’s hard to say.”