Amerika Bomber by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798858505464
Amazon: B0BYQV24XQ
Goodreads: 178211385
Published: 2023-08-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Tuesday 10th April 1945

Barajas Ejército del Aire Base

Madrid

The rebuilt DB 801 had needed repeated jolts from the battery cart before it fired up in a cloud of grey-blue smoke. I watched the rev counter and the temperature gauges like a hawk, ready to shut down at the first hint of a fire as ever so gradually the throttle was advanced.

Behind me, Werner Reitsch’s boys had finished unscrewing and cutting out superfluous equipment and redundant internal fabric from the V4. Sommer, the veteran mechanic and I had pored over the numbers; the guns were gone, as was every last kilogram of armour plating, machinery mounts, ammunition boxes, access flooring to the tail observation window, the chemical toilet, baffles to conceal the flaring of the DB 801s’ exhausts at night, all now lay in heaps some distance away from the aircraft. Unfortunately, according to my calculations because the tanks were still full of 87-octane the Amerika Bomber was at least a thousand kilos over her theoretical maximum all-up take-off weight.

A DB 801 in prime condition was capable of generating up to seventeen hundred horsepower at maximum boost at sea level. Barajas was at an altitude of a little over two thousand feet, about six-hundred-and fifty metres which reduced the power across all four power plants disproportionately to the thinning of the air, which rendered the wing somewhat less efficient as a lifting aerofoil than at sea level. Therefore, the aircraft was underpowered, still too heavy and all of a sudden, marginal air density and power loss factors threatened to be straws that broke camel’s backs!

Stabsfeldwebel Werner Reitsch had taken the news that he was about to be killed in the V4’s pretty much doomed forthcoming attempt to take off in his stride. I had informed him – contrary to Klaus Hartmann’s direct order not to – that our mission was to destroy New York and basically, he was okay with that.

Like me, he badly wanted payback.

‘I lost my wife, my daughters, my mother and my stepfather in the Hamburg firestorm back in forty-three,’ he had told me, ‘somebody ought to pay for that.’

Hartmann and two of his SS men had driven across the field to ‘consult’ with the Base Commander an hour ago; now a car was trundling back across the infield towards us followed by a truck that even at a distance, looked so decrepit it ought to be pulled by horses.

Werner Reitsch leaned over my shoulder to peer at the approaching vehicles.

“I said we’d have trouble with the Spanish,” he reminded me.

I was not about to disagree and as a precaution, the Crew Chief had had a couple of his boys recover everybody’s flying gear from the Officers’ Mess and barracks where we had been billeted yesterday.

It seemed that Generalissimo Franco’s regime had been gradually withdrawing the hand of friendship to his old Civil War ‘friends’ in recent months as he watched the Allied armies march inexorably across France into Western Germany. Increasingly, Spanish co-operation had become a transactional

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