LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

flying right through the bad winter weather. There was no chance for a breathing-space. We must stop these people within the next few weeks or we can be sure they’ll keep bombing us right through next winter. What’s the good of winning a war if our families, our homes, our cities, museums, and culture are bombed to destruction. We can move our Tiger tank factories deep underground, but we can’t put Speyer Cathedral or Cologne underground.’

      ‘The experts at OKL say that if we can crack the morale of the bombers this year, they’ll give up bombing the cities.’

      ‘The only way I know of cracking their morale is shooting them down.’

      ‘Well, of course. They say if we could bring their casualty averages up by just two and a half per cent, the RAF would have to change their tactics.’

      ‘Now you understand why I mustn’t be late back,’ said August. ‘A short summer night like tonight, the moon almost full. If they come tonight and we don’t knock down a record number of them we don’t deserve to win.’

      The Luftwaffe Citroen stopped at the first of the HQ’s road blocks. The Luftwaffe sentries with their sub-machineguns looked strangely out of place in the candy-striped sentry boxes. An elderly sentry checked their papers and waved the car on. It had rained heavily here and the striped box made dazzling reflections on the shiny road. The bunker itself was in beautiful forestland south of the airfield. The tall beech trees were dripping on to the sunlit paths and beyond the woodland patches of heather were near to flowering.

      They got out of the car. There was a smell of resin from the sun-baked pine trees and also the damp dark smell of mould. Deelen airfield was only a stone’s throw beyond the trees and from there August caught the sound of a light aircraft. He waited until it came into view above the trees. It was a white two-seater biplane climbing steadily and earnestly without showmanship.

      ‘That’s what I call an aeroplane,’ said August. ‘If only flying had stayed like that, instead of giving way to scientists, horse-power, calculating machines and control systems.’

      ‘You mustn’t complain about that, my good August,’ said Max. ‘You are a controller, remember.’

      The white biplane banked and turned neatly. Its fabric was still wet with rain and its wings flashed in the sunlight. The little plane kept climbing in spirals, like the diagrams in training manuals. Then, just as deliberately, it set course on a reciprocal of its take-off path and passed over them again. Before they could turn away the puttering of the white trainer was drowned by the roar of a twin-engine Junkers. The great black machine appeared over the leafy oak trees like some new sort of flying beetle. Its sting-like aerial array seemed to quiver as it searched for the other plane. In a moment it had gone.

      ‘What a beauty,’ said Max. ‘For the time being, I’ll take the calculating machines and horsepower every time.’

      The bunker was truly gigantic. Its entrance road sloped down to a levelled site several metres below ground level. In spite of this the bunker towered above the surrounding woodland. It was as high as an apartment building and as long as a city block. Its roof was three metres of concrete laced with steel rods and heavy steel girders. Every lesson learned in the first years of war had been embodied in its design.

      ‘It’s indestructible,’ said Max. ‘It will stand there for hundreds of years after the war is over. Even if you wanted to remove it, it would be impossible.’

      Max was enjoying August’s surprise. ‘Take no notice of all those windows in the wall,’ said Max. ‘That’s just to give some light to the office workers. Behind that layer of offices, the concrete internal structure is many metres thick.’

      The doors were one-centimetre steel, hung on hinges as big as fists. The concrete corridors were noisy with Luftwaffe personnel, many of them young girls. Max Sepp knocked briefly upon an office door and marched into an office crowded with Luftwaffenhelferinnen, uniformed girl communication auxiliaries. Max was on first-name terms with them. He collected a metal document-case and gave it to his driver to carry. Max settled down to gossip with one of the girl auxiliaries. From among the young officers who received Max’s cigars one elected to show August the ‘Opera House’ itself. He was a dark-eyed young man. He put the cigar away in his desk and reached for his cap. He had grown a blunt black moustache to imitate the one Dolfo Galland, the popular young general of fighters, wore. August guessed he’d smoke his cigar in similar mimicry. With a seeming disregard for convention or discipline he kept his left hand thrust deep into his jacket pocket in a rakish manner that well suited the night-fighter clasp on his chest and German Cross on his top pocket.

      The young Leutnant took August upstairs. The outer shell of corridors gave on to the inner chamber at three levels. At the top of the staircase they passed through another identity check by an armed sentry. The Leutnant said to August, ‘There is a drill on at present – Pheasant Alert – so we must keep very quiet.’

      As they entered the cool dark Battle Room August shook his head in disbelief. The Leutnant smiled; every visitor was amazed. It had become a show place for top Nazi VIPs and this was the place to stand for a first glimpse. As August’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that it was indeed like an opera house. Seated rank upon rank in front of them were Helferinnen, each one crisp and neat in her white uniform blouse. He saw only the backs of their heads, as would a person standing at the rear of a steep theatre balcony. Far below him, in the orchestra stalls, were rows of high-ranking control officers. Everyone’s attention was upon the stage. For hanging where a theatre’s curtain would hang there was a glass map of Northern Europe. The green glass map was fifteen metres wide and its glow provided enough light for August to see the rows of white faces peering at it and the papers on their desks. On the walls beside the map there were weather charts and a complex board that showed the availability of reserve night fighters. The cool air, silent movement and green light conspired to make the atmosphere curiously like that of an aquarium.

      Each of the girls in the balcony with them had a spotlight. From the fresnelled lens of each one was beamed a small white T to represent a constantly moving RAF bomber or a green T to represent the fighter hunting it. As the map-references came over the girls’ headsets they moved the white bombers across Holland and Northern Germany in a neat line. Down in the stalls the phones were in constant use and there was a shuffle of papers and movement. The air-conditioning made a loud humming sound and it was cool enough inside this vast concrete bunker to make August shiver even on this warm summer’s day. From here phone and teleprinter cables stretched across the land to airfields, watchtowers, radar stations, radio monitors and civil-defence headquarters. Even U-boats, and flak ships off the Dutch coast, reported aircraft movements to this bunker which the Luftwaffe had christened the Battle Opera House.

      Overlapping circles of light had appeared on the map. Each one was a radar station like August’s own. Each one had two night fighters circling above it waiting to pounce upon a bomber coming into range of its magic eye. Now and again one of the T lights was switched off as a bomber was destroyed.

      The young Leutnant had noticed August’s Pour le Mérite and decided that he was worth a fuller explanation than most of the rubberneck visitors that he showed around. He pointed to the six rows of stalls far below them.

      ‘It’s in the two front rows that the battle decisions are made. The Major-General third from the left is the Divisional Controller. On each side of him he keeps an Ia – Operations Officer. On the far left is the NAFU or Chief Signals Officer. Second to the right of the Div Controller, the officer with the yellow tabs is the Ic or Intelligence Officer. The old man on his right is the senior Meteorology man. The second row of officers, the ones speaking into phones all the time, are Fighter Controllers carrying out the orders. On that same desk there’s a Flak Officer, Radar Controller and Civil Defence Liaison.’

      ‘Who is the man in the tinted-glass office on the left?’ asked August.

      ‘Radio Intelligence Liaison Officer. He only comes out to talk with the Divisional Controller. Even then it’s in a whisper.’ He smiled, he had the cynical attitude to boffins that operational pilots always have.

      The T-shaped lights moved slowly

Скачать книгу