Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,33

his first shot of the war. He aimed right at the central hub of the propeller and squeezed the trigger.

Eddie Hertz was reaching for the lever to drop his bombs. These aerial attacks were always a complicated business. Keep your eye on the horizon, watch out for enemy ground fire, make sure you weren’t jumped from above by a Hun fighter, choose your targets. Were you high enough to escape your own bomb blast? All of this, every second, you had to concentrate. His right hand found the lever. That tower. There were bound to be soldiers in it – probably a machine-gun nest. He’d take it out. He knew it was a medieval building – had stood there for six hundred years – but this country was full of churches like that, and sparing this one from the war was not worth the American lives he might save by destroying it. He pulled back the stick, certain he had enough distance to climb over the tower, and lifted the bomb release lever.

Free of its two twenty-five-pound bombs, the Camel immediately felt lighter in the air, but no sooner had Eddie began his evasive manoeuvre than the aircraft jolted in his hand. Something had hit the engine. He was absolutely sure of it this time. He could feel the craft struggle in the air, and already he was losing what little altitude he had. The bombs exploded almost simultaneously beneath him. Hot shrapnel peppered the plane.

Axel Meyer watched in amazement as a thin streak of black smoke began to pour from the climbing aircraft. He was so distracted he did not even see the two silver shapes fall from beneath its wings. Two great clouds of earth exploded behind the church and again he and Erich were showered with earth. The pilot had misjudged his drop, but Axel wasn’t thinking about that.

He laughed out loud. His first shot of the war and he had hit an American fighter plane. No one would believe him. He clapped Erich on the back. ‘Crack shot!’ he yelled. Erich slumped forward. Axel shook him. His helmet fell off. A gaping wound was oozing bone and brain from the back of his head. Erich’s eyes were open but he saw nothing. A piece of metal from the bombs must have caught him. Axel leaped to the other side of the tower and looked over. Five of his platoon were lying dead or contorted in agony. He searched the sky for the enemy plane and saw it desperately trying to maintain an even flight, with thick black smoke now pouring from its engine. Flickers of flame played around the exhaust vents too. ‘Burn in hell, Drecksau,’ shouted Axel. If that pilot ever got out of his machine, Axel was going to hunt him down and skewer him with his bayonet. Then he heard the Feldwebel’s order: ‘Select your targets. Wait for my order to fire.’ For a moment he had forgotten the American soldiers were coming too.

A few seconds after the explosion Eddie Hertz felt his legs begin to burn with a terrible sharp pain. He looked down to see his leather flying boots peppered with perforations, and blood oozing out of the holes. That wouldn’t kill him, at least not yet, but he dreaded to think what would happen when he hit the ground. The black smoke, which made seeing where he was going almost impossible, began to choke him. The words of that British song spun through his head:

Take the cylinder out of my kidneys

The connecting rod out of my brain . . .

He fought back a sudden urge to vomit. Maybe it was shock from his wounds. He felt slippery with sweat but chilled to the marrow. Eddie tried to turn his machine around, so he would crash close to, or even behind, the Allied lines. But halfway through his turn the Camel’s rotary engine coughed and spluttered to a juddering halt. In the sudden silence, he could hear shouting and firing from close by. His plane dropped towards the ground.

Eddie was lucky. When his engine cut out, he was already flying beneath tree level. He tried to keep the plane level, but the ground was uneven and there were even some fresh shell holes ahead. The aircraft hit the field with a splintering crash and Eddie was jolted brutally in his cockpit as the Camel’s flimsy undercarriage collapsed beneath him. He covered his head with his hands and waited for the grinding,