1
The parachute hanging loosely from his shoulders slapped the back of his knees and looked a couple of sizes too big for him. His ground technician suggested he ought to shorten the straps. Fritz Wendel waved him aside; it was too much bother. When he had dressed for the first flight before dawn that morning it had been bitterly cold, and he had worn his thick fur-lined combinations. The ridge of high pressure brought a cloudless April day. The sun had risen and beneath the azure sky it had grown pleasantly warm. Some cumulus began to form during the afternoon by when it was decidedly too hot for furry combinations and he had discarded them in favour of his lightweight flying overall. Hence the loose parachute. Four o’clock was late in the day for a test pilot who still had a couple more flights scheduled. So he had to get a move on.
The aircraft climbed. He had time to rehearse the drill mentally during the ascent to 18,000 feet. From there at full throttle he would put the fighter into a ‘steep incline’ as the manual called it. A works pilot ferrying in the first series of this particular machine had reported that at high speeds unpleasantly strong wing vibrations developed. The aircraft was a Bf 109T. The T stood for Träger (carrier), for this was one of the fighters designed to fly from the flight deck of Germany’s aircraft carrier Seydlitz, an Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruiser hull being converted into a flat-top at a Baltic shipyard.
Compared with her sister aircraft, the Bf 109T had broader wings and that was suspected to be somehow the cause of the unusual vibrations. Exactly how that caused the problem remained to be established. Possibly it would need no more than a couple of flights to identify the fault, as was often the case, or even only one. In five or six minutes he would know.
Yet it was with the new aircraft, the Me 262, that he had allowed himself to become preoccupied. The airplane which would become the world’s first jet fighter once the turbines were delivered stood in the experimental hangar below, due to make her maiden flight in a few days – and he, Fritz Wendel, would be at the controls. She might have only a piston engine and spinner for the time being, but nothing would keep him away from her. In anticipation he savoured this step into a new epoch of aviation history.
At twenty-four years of age, Wendel was already the holder of the absolute world speed record, and had brought the propeller-driven aircraft as far as it could go. He didn’t claim all the credit of course, naturally some rubbed off on Professor Willy Messerschmitt and his magnificent design and construction team. It was a joy to fly for an aircraft manufacturer who recognised no boundaries when a question of progress was involved.
At 18,000 feet Wendel levelled out and looked below. He could see the extensive Messerschmitt works, nearby the angular mosaic of Augsburg with the narrow alleys of the Fuggerei inside the town. Beyond all the houses and factories lay fields, woodland and mountains – the broad hump of the Zugspitze and the bizarre rocky mass of its neighbours.
Instruments OK? Everything ready! Throttle forward, nose down and he went into the dive at full revs. As the bird hurtled earthwards he heard the roaring engine, the howl of the slipstream and watched the speedometer needle rise – 600 – 650 – 700 kph. Through the cumulus. Now the needle indicated 750. Almost his own world record! He detected nothing out of the ordinary, a few vibrations certainly but harmless, caused by disturbed air below the cumulus. That was normal.
At 3,000 feet he pulled out and climbed to 22,500 feet for a second dive. He had to be certain that the works pilot had merely encountered turbulence below cloud and misinterpreted the effect. On the second dive the machine had just passed the 750 kph mark at 9,000 feet when the left wing, contorting, began to vibrate violently. The frequency of the vibration was so powerful that the whole aircraft shook. The contours of the wing blurred and only the rapid wave-like motion of the wing-tip could be distinguished. Nothing more could be done. He pulled back the throttle, unbuckled his seat straps and in the same split second it happened. The wing bent, its metal skin peeled off, ribbons of debris whipped away followed by the wing itself, snapped off at the joint with the fuselage. Scarcely a second had elapsed.
The remains of the Bf 109 fighter began to spin wildly as it careered groundwards. Somewhere there was another crack. Not that they were any use now, but he noticed how the controls were slack. As if in a centrifuge he was forced back into the leather seat, imprisoned by the irresistible G-force. His nerve held and his mind was clear. He had gone through the same thing a year before. A good 6,000 feet still separated him from the ground. He tried to prise himself up against the cabin sides. It cracked again somewhere. His hand could not reach the lever to throw off the plexiglass hood. The right wing broke off, the aircraft nose jerked down, he levered the cabin hood open and the force catapulted him out, spinning his body through the air like rag doll, sucking out his breath. He saw the ground swirling below him. It was nothing new, he belonged up here.
Wendel spread his arms and legs to brake the speed of his fall. The tremendous velocity began to ebb away as air resistance took effect. Seconds later quiet fell, and he experienced a sense of weightlessness in the vertical descent. Twenty-one feet per second, 1,250 feet per minute. And a minute is a long time between life and death. But now he would survive, would carry on living to fly again.
His hand felt for the rip cord to open the parachute. It was supposed to be on the left side between hip and shoulder, but his fingers located neither the steel ring nor the strap to which it was attached. His fingers began to feel, to search, more hastily. They found only the smooth fabric of his overall.
He took fright. Suddenly he remembered the loose straps which he had not bothered to adjust before taking off. He felt for the parachute pack, found it together with the dangling webbing which had slipped from his shoulder and now hung below his left hip. He replaced it correctly, looked down, gauging that he still had sufficient altitude, waited two or three seconds and then pulled the D-ring. The wire cable jerked free a steel pin from its retaining bracket and so released the silk. It was as easy as that to stay alive.
The canopy came free with a rustle, flapped, deployed normally, tipped him upwards and swung him. And then he saw coming directly towards him – twisting and turning like the wings of a lime-tree seed – the starboard wing of his broken Bf 109, which had separated in one piece from the fuselage. If this piece of spinning junk hit him or tangled into the parachute shroud lines it would not be the first time that a pilot had lost his life to such a freak occurrence just when all seemed safe. There was nothing he could do now but wait... The wing hissed by a few yards below his feet. He landed in a ploughed field and when checking himself over noticed the blood for the first time. He had lacerations to his face and a foot. Not bad, but a nuisance.
At the hospital the foot injury had to be stitched. The ankle needed to be immobilised: bedrest was prescribed. The doctor spoke of two to three weeks: the piston-engined Me 262 maiden flight was listed for three days hence. If he wasn’t available it would be given to somebody else. There he lay, Fritz Wendel, undisputed holder of the world speed record, brimming with health and confined to bed.
In his hospital cot there was plenty of time for reflection. His mind wandered to the year 1938 when he first heard of the new machine which eventually would fly without a propeller and faster than his record-breaking machine, the Me 209 V1. For three years he had waited and watched almost paternally over the development of the new warbird, had pored over the blueprints, chatted with the engineers and later had often spent hours in the experimental hangar noticing how this piece or that was fitted to her. And now, from his hospital bed, he would be forced to put a brave face on it and listen to a colleague’s joyous account of what it had been like to fly his personal baby...
He spoke to the medic, who shrugged his shoulders. When the superintendent of the experimental hangar visited his bedside, Wendel begged him to delay the flight. The superintendent promised to do what he could. Privately he thought the man must be crazy, wanting to hobble from his hospital bed to fly a jet fighter airframe fitted with a piston engine and propeller. Wendel settled back, hands behind his head on the pillow. His mind was restless, but his thoughts always came back to when it began . . .