Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age) Read online

  PRAISE FOR WALTER J. BOYNE

  “The saga isn’t a new genre, but the aviation saga is—and Walter Boyne invented it. Here’s a first-rate story of the jet age from our foremost aviation writer.”

  —Stephen Coonts on Supersonic Thunder

  “Boyne packs the novel with historically accurate detail. Aviation fans will gulp this one down in one long, satisfied swallow.”

  —Booklist on Roaring Thunder

  “Boyne’s narrative follows the story until 1954, incorporating the evolution of the B-52 bomber and the Boeing 707 commercial jet airliner. . . . Boyne doesn’t disappoint.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Roaring Thunder

  “Dawn Over Kitty Hawk is an amazing book. Not only is it riveting history, it is also a suspense story that takes readers inside the ferocious competition to be the first in flight.”

  —Thomas Fleming, president of the Society of

  American Historians and New York Times bestselling

  author of The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee

  FORGE BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE

  Dawn Over Kitty Hawk

  Operation Iraqi Freedom

  Roaring Thunder

  Today’s Best Military Writing (editor)

  Hypersonic Thunder

  Supersonic Thunder

  ROARING THUNDER

  A Novel of the Jet Age

  WALTER J. BOYNE

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ROARING THUNDER: A NOVEL OF THE JET AGE

  Copyright © 2006 by Walter J. Boyne

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-4746-6

  First Edition: January 2006

  First Mass Market Edition: February 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO SIR FRANK WHITTLE,

  HANS VON OHAIN, ANSELM FRANZ,

  AND NATHAN PRICE—ALL GIANTS OF THE JET AGE.

  ROARING THUNDER

  • THE PASSING SCENE •

  Germany protests over maltreatment of ethnic Germans in Poland; Great Britain and France pledge to come to Poland’s aid in the event of war; Germany and Soviet Union announce non-aggression pact; The Grapes of Wrath published in the United States; Pan Am begins regularly scheduled flights between the United States and Europe; Igor Sikorsky constructs helicopter.

  CHAPTER ONE

  August 27, 1939, Marienehe, Germany

  The turgid waters of the Warnow River lapped at the stone-covered beach, the gentle gurgling muffled by the dense fog spreading its tendrils deep over the grassy flying field. A thousand yards away five men worked feverishly in the yellow light billowing from the “Special Project” hangar doors, checking the small, almost dainty aircraft they had just rolled out. Cautiously, as if they were handling a live bomb, they wrestled the plane into a 180-degree turn so that the odd circular hole at the end of the fuselage pointed out toward the river.

  Fritz Obermyer sat on the edge of the Fiat Toppolino’s tiny running board, his 120 kilograms of muscle and fat tipping the car, suppressing its springs, and sending the glow of its headlights at a cockeyed angle. Obermyer drew deeply on the stub of a cigarette, felt its warmth flare beneath his nose, then carefully dropped it beside him, grinding it into the tarmac with his foot.

  He nudged his companion and pointed. “Look at him. When he came here three years ago, a little snot-nosed graduate student from Göttingen, I thought he was crazy.”

  Gerd Müller, short, lean, and wiry, stretched and laughed. “You tried to give him a hard time, Fritz, but he drove you crazy being polite. No matter what you said—or what you wrote on the wall in the latrine—he never lost his temper.”

  As Frontsoldaten, they were accustomed to discomfort and waiting, and the long hours spent at the field meant nothing to them. Obermyer had left the Berlin Institute of Technology to volunteer for the army in August 1914. Now he was nominally a machinist foreman in the new plant building the Heinkel He 111 bomber. A forceful personality, he had used an artful combination of his engineering training and his Nazi Party connections to become accepted as an aide to Ernst Heinkel himself. Heinkel was at first quite resistant to the idea but over time, as Obermyer’s talents became obvious, welcomed his assistance.

  Heinkel found that he could depend upon Obermyer to know what was happening on the factory floor, in the long rows of drafting tables, and in the local Nazi Party headquarters, usually long before anyone else was aware of it. The information was often invaluable, and within a few months of his employment, Heinkel looked upon Obermyer as an indispensable political divining rod. Müller was an excellent machinist but had been attached to Obermyer—at his insistence—as an assistant.

  The arrangement suited the plant management, who saw Obermyer and Müller as agitators. They were glad to have them off the factory floor and worried each time Obermyer came through, acting as if he were the local feudal lord, gathering information and dispensing favors. They, like Heinkel, knew better than to protest. The firm was already at odds with the government, and everyone wanted to avoid any further difficulties with the Nazi Party. When Obermyer suggested that he be attached to the Special Project organization, Heinkel acquiesced—the more sensitive a project was, the more hazardous it was to raise a political issue.

  Obermyer could intimidate most people with a glance; stone-cold gray eyes gleamed from his cruelly scarred face, and he walked as he had for four years in the trenches, bent over, moving with a menacing hunched step that made it seem as if he was about to leap on his prey. Yet he was also an able humorist, able to prick egos with the little two-line poems he wrote on the mirrors of the noisome latrines of the Heinkel Aircraft Works factory. He wasn’t always malicious but was usually apt, and the workers waited as eagerly for his latest poem as some of them might wait for the latest joke on the Nazi Party. He wrote those occasionally, too, just to see who laughed and to make a note of it. He wielded his party membership just as he had used his role as a quartermaster sergeant in the Roehlk Freikorps after the war—to his own advantage. And while most Nazis bragged about their low party membership numbers, confirming their early support for Hitler, Obermyer’s reputation was built on the decisive action he had taken in 1934 during the “Night of the Long Knives” when Adolf Hitler
had squelched a Brownshirt revolution and executed Ernst Roehm. When one of Roehm’s none-too-alert bodyguards had attempted to sound the alarm, Obermyer had cut him down with a single slash of his favorite brawling tool, a razor-sharp trench shovel. From that night on he was an icon in the party, a symbol of action and loyalty to the Führer. But far from being a convinced Nazi, Obermyer was an opportunist, pure and simple, intent on looking out for his own interests at all times.

  Müller was an old comrade, a companion in adversity in the trenches, where they had not only saved each other’s lives but, more important, saved each other’s sanity as well. No matter how desperate things became, no matter how short on food or how bad the morale, they each had the other to rely upon. They were inseparable, with Müller content to follow where Obermyer led, ready always to do what he said. Müller had once made a joking threat to some of the Heinkel workers, saying, “Obermyer is the brains and I’m the muscle.” Obermyer heard him and interjected, “I’m the brains and he’s the stomach.” Both men were correct.

  In July 1918, Müller had watched Obermyer save another life, that of a twenty-year-old new recruit in a sappers’ battalion. They were in a just conquered French village behind the line of German advance. The young soldier was engaged in loading mortar shells from an abandoned truck into a horse-drawn sled when Obermyer had grabbed him by the neck and tossed him into a shell hole and fallen on him. In the next instant four 105mm artillery shells landed, one detonating the mortar shells and blowing the truck, horse, and sled to atoms.

  The old soldier in Obermyer had heard the inbound whistle, judged the accuracy of the artillery, and acted accordingly. The young recruit, Willy Messerschmitt, was profoundly grateful.

  By 1937, Obermyer had worked for Heinkel for three years when he contrived a meeting with Messerschmitt, a rising star in German aviation. Obermyer reminded him of their first meeting, suggesting that Messerschmitt might like to have a man inside the Heinkel plant to “keep an eye on things.” As grateful as Messerschmitt was to Obermyer for saving his life, he was repelled by the suggestion.

  Yet things were difficult for him. The State Secretary for Air, Erhard Milch, hated him, for he had lost a close friend when one of Messerschmitt’s Me 20 early passenger transports had crashed because of a manufacturing defect. The feud continued over the years and Milch had repeatedly denied him contracts. At the time of their meeting, Heinkel and Messerschmitt were engaged in a bitter competition to build the Luftwaffe’s next fighter, and, given Milch’s attitude toward him, Messerschmitt knew that he needed all the help he could get. They made a verbal agreement, never yet breached, that Obermyer would supply important inside information on Heinkel projects directly to Messerschmitt himself, in return for a sizable monthly cash stipend. So far it had worked well, particularly in the fighter competition. Messerschmitt valued Obermyer’s carefully collected estimates on the man-hours required to build the Heinkel 112, for these were far higher than Messerschmitt’s Bf 109 required. Messerschmitt used the figures with devastating results in his proposal and believed that they had done much to win the competition for him, even though his aircraft was both faster and more maneuverable.

  Obermyer had long since found that being disliked in a position of relative power had its advantages. No one ever objected when he proposed that he attend a conference, even those held in other European countries—they were glad to have him away from the factory. Because of his background, he preferred engineering conferences, although an international air show was almost as satisfactory. Two or three times a year, depending upon the business climate, he would travel to conferences where he met representatives of companies in other countries. Almost invariably, he would find among them someone who was willing to pay for information. His latest contact was the firm of Marcel Bloch, which built handsome fighters for France and needed information on the gear retraction system Heinkel had used in the high-speed He 70 “Blitz.” He preferred to be paid in English sterling but would accept good information in exchange, as long as he believed he could sell it elsewhere.

  Now Müller and Obermyer watched as the twenty-seven-year-old physics specialist von Ohain bounded around the little He 178, peering like a mother hen over the shoulders of the men preparing it for flight. Coatless, Dr. Pabst Hans von Ohain was oblivious to the cold, totally absorbed in the last-minute adjustments to the engine he had created from his imagination and three years of hard work. He had seen his dream move from his ideal of a noiseless, part-less engine to a ferocious whirling combination of heat, sound, and thrust, more than four hundred kilograms of it.

  Von Ohain moved like a shadow to Max Hahn, the brilliant mechanic who transformed von Ohain’s ideas into the complex assembly of sheet metal and steel castings that formed the primitive jet engine, more than seven meters long, nestling inside the aircraft’s fuselage.

  “He took my joking well.” Obermyer looked at von Ohain’s tall, slender figure with approval. “If Warsitz can keep from crashing this crate, young Hans will be a rich man someday.”

  Müller picked up a stick and began knocking mud from his boots. He and most of the Special Project team had spent the two previous days tramping up and down the field, tamping down high spots and filling in shallow depressions, to make sure there were no problems on takeoff.

  “Better save that stick for the birds, Gerd.” Obermyer snorted. Yesterday, on an early-morning taxi test, the jet engine had sucked a seagull into the intake, forcing an immediate shutdown. They had to push the airplane all the way back to the hangar, disassemble the engine, pluck out the bits of raw and cooked seagull, then put the engine back together. There was no apparent damage, but it added to the morning’s uncertainty and to the intensity of the inspection.

  Everything had to be ready for the big moment when Professor Ernst Heinkel himself arrived in his custom-bodied Mercedes. Short, dark, his face dominated by an oversize nose that seemed to overflow his spectacles, Heinkel had been a prime mover in German aviation since the 1914–18 war, designing and building many of the most important aircraft used by the German and Austro-Hungarian air forces. In 1933, he’d been persuaded to build a new factory for three thousand employees in Rostock. Now it employed five times that number and was overflowing into the Marienehe suburb, turning out dozens of twin-engine He 111 bombers every month. The main factory buildings, beautifully aligned, gleaming with acres of windows, were a stark contrast to the ramshackle secret hangar housing von Ohain’s creation.

  Heinkel was a canny businessman. Recognizing that he was of the wood, wire, and fabric era, he hired the best people he could find as he pushed forward with sleek, all-metal aircraft. He was ambitious and longed to expand his interests to include an engine factory, as Hugo Junkers had done. There was no chance that the Air Ministry would give Heinkel the license and the materials to enter the piston engine market, but this new jet engine of von Ohain’s was a different matter. The deferential young physicist, so polite that he seemed more like a choirboy than a genius, had convinced him that turbine-jet engines could be built that would outperform piston engines. More important, von Ohain had convinced him that they could be built more cheaply, using relatively inexpensive conventional equipment, and could be developed far more quickly. This morning would prove whether von Ohain was right or not.

  At the edge of the tiny field, Müller shivered. It was cold for late August, and all of them had been there since three o’clock. “Is the movie-star test pilot here yet?”

  “No, he’s probably kissing some pretty little secretary good-bye. He lives a pretty hectic life.” As they spoke, a black Horch drove up and the test pilot, Erich Warsitz, popped out. Even though he was six feet tall, blond, handsome, and talented, Warsitz was still popular with the rough-hewn factory crew because he was so matter-of-fact about risking his life testing the most advanced—and implicitly dangerous—Heinkel planes.

  Müller fumbled in his pocket, producing a knife and a sausage wrapped in paper. He sliced two thick pieces of saus
age, handed one to Obermyer at the point of his knife, and held the other in his hand; it was a familiar gesture, first practiced twenty years ago, when they were starving teenage soldiers together. Müller had sworn never to go hungry again and ate as much as he could whenever he could, never gaining an ounce of weight.

  “I don’t blame him—a short life but a merry one. He damn near killed himself just last June, flying the rocket plane. He takes too many chances.”

  They watched as Warsitz, swinging a good-sized hammer by its handle, joined the group at the hangar.

  “Good morning, Dr. von Ohain; are we going to fly this morning?”

  “Yes, Herr Warsitz, as soon as Professor Heinkel arrives—and the fog lifts. First, we are going to test run the engine.” Smiling, he pointed at the hammer, saying, “I see you have your patented escape equipment in hand.”

  Warsitz nodded uneasily. He still was not entirely accustomed to aircraft with canopies, preferring open cockpit planes, where if you had trouble you could go over the side in an instant. The hammer was for breaking his way through the canopy if it jammed. Despite his cool test pilot demeanor, he was well aware of the danger. Earlier in the month he had made a short series of taxi tests and actually “hopped” the experimental jet plane off the short runway for brief, straight-ahead flights. He was convinced that the He 178 was the door to the future—but he knew it could easily be his coffin as well, for it embodied so many untested ideas.

  Normally companies tested new airframes and new engines separately. They would fly a new engine in an old design to test it or fly an established engine in a new airframe for the same reasons. But the He 178 was a new airplane and a new engine—and that was doubly dangerous. That morning, for the first time in his test-flying career, Warsitz had left behind a letter to be forwarded to his parents if anything had happened. More telling, he had made a special good-bye to his beloved dachshund, Max.