Rage of Battle

definitions of “battle fatigue” were no longer useful. The stress levels were so intense, yet so fluid, that save for the Battle of Britain and the lot of German pilots attacking the aerial armadas of American Superfortresses in the final days of World War II, this kind of stress was hitherto unknown in the history of battle. It meant that whereas in the 1940s men could, in a pinch, be left on the battlefield for weeks, even months, now endurance was measured only in days — often, as with the tank crews, in hours.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

For over two months Leonhard Meir and the two elderly couples he had tried to take out with him had lived in a roller coaster of uncertainty as the normally well-ordered Stasi police did not seem to know what to do with them. At first they were told they must stay inside, a twenty-four-hour curfew in effect, but then they had been issued brown passbooks allowing them to go outside but no farther man two kilometers.

* * *

At Allied headquarters in Brussels, the punishing cost in pilots trying to keep the Soviet-supply lines through eastern Germany closed could no longer be justified. It was clear that if NATO kept losing pilots at this rate, the equation would turn, especially with the enormous stockpiling of arms and materiel SATINT showed was going on in Berlin, the Russians in effect holding the Berliners as hostages in as coldblooded a calculation as the NKA’s General Kim had made in his advance down the beleaguered Korean peninsula.

From southern Germany Second German Corps, consisting of a badly mauled armored division and mountain brigade, fighting next to Seventh and Fifth American Corps, were requesting WFS — weapons-free status — for the mobile, nuclear-tipped Lance missile batteries, which, other than chemical weapons, were considered NATO’s land weapon of last resort. Permission was denied, though the Lances were authorized to fire as many conventional warheads as “deemed necessary,” NATO’s way of signaling its commanders that stockpiles were rapidly diminishing.

* * *

Ironically, 130 miles behind the western front, Berlin had been one of the safest places in the opening stages of the war. The Soviet divisions and fighter squadrons situated between the city and western Germany protected the inhabitants from NATO bombing — the area so heavily armed that as well as the central front being festooned with SAM sites, some farmers, members of Stasi reserves, had been issued with the deadly hand-held Soviet SAM-7Ds, so that low-level attacks had become increasingly dangerous. And yet NATO HQ knew the buildup of supplies in Berlin must somehow be checked.

* * *

Battling his boredom, Leonhard Meir had started to take much more notice of his surroundings and discovered that the northern suburb of Lubars, where he was being kept along with his elderly acquaintances, could actually take on the air of a rural village, its crossed wooden gateposts and ornamental fences reminding Meir of his country childhood.

Perhaps it was the air, the pervasive smell of stored hay in the farms all about the city, with the soft tones of autumn, that reminded him of another age. If you ignored the jets— the two elderly couples seemed to have no trouble doing this — you could even delude yourself at times that you were on a farm.

At first Leonhard felt ashamed because the older people seemed more able to stand the strain of not knowing what was going to happen. Even the old man who had panicked in the car and had not wanted to return to the city now seemed calmer than he. But what Leonhard Meir didn’t realize was that the old peoples’ hearing had deteriorated to the point that they simply didn’t hear many of the jets. Even so, Meir saw things were changing; morale began slipping rapidly in proportion to the depletion of their canned food stocks and the introduction of severe rationing, all farms’ produce being claimed by the Russian authorities. For a while, supplies of canned goods had held out, and the fall having been reasonably mild to this point meant that some of the late vegetables were also available, though these, too, very quickly ran out. Still, for a time, the Berliners’ renowned sense of humor, never entirely understood by most other Germans, who had never lived surrounded in a Communist sea, had held. Then, when all reserves were gone, shops looted, the sense of humor began to wane — even around the outer suburbs such as Lubars, closer to farms than the inner suburbs. It became evident that “old” Berliners, especially those who had lived in what had once been the old, Western sector, were expendable.

It was on a Friday morning, one of the old men complaining again about how they had become prisoners in their own apartment, that Leonhard first sensed a resentment of his presence. Once grateful to him for trying to get them out of Berlin, the two couples now saw him as merely another mouth to feed.

Going for a walk to let things cool off a little, Meir pondered how long it would be, if ever, before he’d have any knowledge of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, let alone his son, who had been stationed at Fulda. But he was determined not to let the depression overwhelm him, always telling himself that tomorrow would see some small improvement. Surely the war couldn’t last much longer. All the experts had said that another war couldn’t last very long. Just as they had told the world Adolf Schicklgruber wouldn’t last long.

Meir heard the village clock strike noon and set his watch ten minutes ahead, an old habit he’d developed on his shoe salesman’s route to make sure he was never late for appointments.

At that moment a squadron of twenty-four British Canberra Mk-8 bombers were taking off from Greenham Common in southern England, their yellow lightning flash insignias either side of the RAF’s blue-circled red bull’s- eye streaked with water from a passing shower. Their target was Berlin.

MiG fighters scrambled in northern Holland, flying out over the hook high above the North Sea.

Seeing the blips of ten MiGs fifty miles east of him, the squadron leader of the twenty-six Canberra bombers crossing the North Sea called for interceptor assist. This wasn’t necessary, however, as RAF ground radar on England’s south coast had already dispatched six aquamarine, bullet-nosed “Tigers” out over East Anglia into a fish-scaled sky to do battle with the MiGs. The Canberras’ commander looked out across his bomber’s wide, stubby-looking wings and, seeing heavy cloud cover over Holland, instructed his pilots that the squadron would detour farther south, below the hook of Holland, which arced like a left-handed scythe toward Germany, then go in for the attack south of Hannover. The Canberras’ navigators recalculated, under instructions from the wing commander to use Magdeburg, twenty-three miles east of the old West/East German line, as the IAP, initial aiming point, for the bombing run on Berlin.

* * *

Of the nine remaining Canberra bombers that had survived the German Roland missiles, three were hit by SAM-16s, the advance hand-held Soviet surface-to-air missiles in plentiful supply along the Berlin Corridor. One Canberra crew managed to bail out over the Havel River in Grunewald Forest in what used to be the American sector of West Berlin. He pulled the cord for his inflatable vest well before he hit the water, but the carbon dioxide cartridge was a dud. One of the coolest of the cool in aerial combat, the pilot, Kevin Murphy, an Australian born and raised in the outback, had a dread of water, and was now desperately telling himself to calm down, which he did after a few anxious moments, unhitching the chute harness and breaking free before beginning to blow into the mouthpiece of the Mae West. Now his uniform, particularly the elastic G suit, was beginning to soak up water at an alarming rate. His finger slipped from where he was holding the mouthpiece. He grabbed for it and resumed blowing as he heard a power boat start out from the shore. He was going under.

* * *

The Stasi people’s patrol boat dragged the river for two hours: slow, monotonous work, a crowd gathering on the eastern shore by the picnic tables to see whether they would find the “terror bomber.”

“Why bother?” said one of the three men aboard the patrol boat.

“Because, you Dummkopf” said the oldest comrade in charge of the boat, “it is important.”

“Why?”

“Because, you Dummkopf, headquarters wishes to know what squadron he is from. This is vital intelligence.”

The crew member, a youth in his midtwenties, made a rude noise at the acne-faced teenage boy who was the third member of the crew. “Intelligence, nonsense,” said the crewman. “We know what squadron they came