A little while later, and with the line from the group hut repaired, Galland rang again to say they were tracking an enemy raid that seemed to be heading for Naples. The fighters would be scrambled to catch them on the return leg. They most likely had an hour to wait.
But Galland was back on the line sooner than that. ‘Take off straight away, Steinhoff,’ he said. ‘The bombers have turned south and attacked the port of Messina. You must hurry if you’re going to catch them.’
Steinhoff put down the receiver and shouted ‘Scramble!’ at the operations clerk. Pilots ran to their machines, grabbing parachutes left on the wings, clambering up on to the wing root and hoisting themselves into the cockpit. A quick check, a signal to the ground crew, engine turning and bursting into life, then taxi out of the blast pen. Steinhoff checked his magnetos. The smell of oil, gasoline, metal and rubber, and a cockpit already hot as an oven. He glanced around, although the collar of his lifejacket restricted movement and his oxygen mask swung to and fro. Dust was being whipped up by the prop blast, making it hard to see, but with aircraft drawing up either side of him he opened the throttle and was off, rumbling forward, controlling the huge torque with opposite rudder. A routine performed hundreds of times; and then he was free of the ground and climbing high into the blue.
‘Odysseus One to Eagle,’ he said over the R/T – the radio – making contact with the ground controller below at Monte Erice.6
‘Pantechnicons withdrawing.’7 Galland’s voice now in his headset. ‘Grid reference Able two-two King. Steer zero-two-five.’
Steinhoff led his I. Gruppe, who closed in behind him as he circled Monte Erice. He had insisted on radio silence so all that could be heard was the background drone of the engine and the hiss of static in their headsets, interrupted only by the calm and precise instructions of General Galland from the fighter control room below.
‘Odysseus,’ Steinhoff heard him say, ‘turn on to three-zero-zero, Pantechnicons at 20,000 feet heading west.’8
As they climbed into the sky, the horizon and the sea below it slipped away. A high-pressure haze had settled around them, obscuring the land mass of Sicily and so blocking any fixed reference point that might aid navigation. More updates from Galland. The bombers – the ‘pantechnicons’ – were descending, now at 16,000 feet, but still being picked up by their Freya radar.
Then a further update. ‘Odysseus, steer two-eight-zero.9 Pantechnicons presumably now at low level since the Freya has lost contact.’
Steinhoff looked around him. Down below he could see nothing. Either side, his pilots were starting to waver, rising and falling, as uneasiness grew. The haze seemed to thicken. Glancing behind, he could only see I. Gruppe behind him – the rest had disappeared from sight in the murk. He broke radio silence to tell them to close up, conscious they only had another ten minutes or so before it would be time to turn back.
‘Pantechnicons right beneath us!’10 Steinhoff recognized Zöhler’s voice. ‘Right beneath us, lots of them, heading west!’
Steinhoff now saw them too, the desert yellow of their upper bodies standing out against the silvery grey of the sea, grouped in squadrons of nine or more aircraft. It was now around 1.30 p.m., and they were about 90 miles north-west of Trapani. The bombers had just pasted Messina, Sicily’s biggest port, a mere mile from the south-west toe of mainland Italy. In all, 123 B-17 Flying Fortresses, mostly from the 97th and 99th Bomb Groups, had dropped nearly 2,000 tons of bombs on the docks, warehouses and railway marshalling yards. They’d caused considerable damage and had also had the good fortune to hit a 5,000-ton Italian steamer, the Iris, which was fatally crippled.
On paper, they were a very juicy target and blissfully free of fighter cover; but they were also low, very low, below radar, almost, it seemed, touching the waves. And they were, unhelpfully, heading in exactly the opposite direction, which meant there was now no time for a carefully worked-out manoeuvre. Steinhoff realized he needed to peel over immediately and begin his dive right away in a big arc so that he could emerge level with and hurtling directly towards them, not behind them. Even with the advantage of height and the greater speed of the Me109, there was not a moment to lose. He had to hope the rest followed. Steinhoff dipped the wing and the Messerschmitt turned and dived, building up speed so that in no time the altimeter told him he was now at just 6,000 feet. Glancing around he saw Strafer, Bachman and Berhard following tightly. Five thousand, four, three. The lower he got, the faster the bombers appeared to be flying.
He knew he had to get on to the same level as the bombers, but as he neared the closing speed suddenly seemed immense. Lining up on one, he aimed at the cockpit and opened fire. ‘I pulled up my M-E to the same height as the bombers as though I had done it a hundred times before,’ he noted.11 ‘My task was to spray the gleaming cockpit with a hail of shot.’ Tracer from his guns arced towards the bomber, while the luminous cross-wires of his gunsight shook from the recoil of the cannon and machine guns. Pulling back the stick, he climbed, g-force pressing him down in his seat. His stomach lurched, his mouth tasted bitter. Glancing back once more, he saw he was on his own – his Geschwader headquarters flight had dispersed in the attack – but his bomber had crashed into the sea. Over the R/T, pilots chattered – a mixture of excited cries and orders, but also many urgently saying they were low on fuel and pulling out. Looking down at his own fuel gauge, Steinhoff knew he had about twenty minutes’ worth left, so turned and set off back for Trapani, a terrible sinking feeling growing in his stomach.
It had been a disaster, he was certain. It was not his fault they’d come across the bombers at the last moment before turning back, nor that among all the advice about how to attack a bomber over Germany at 18,000 feet no one had once suggested how to attack in haze over sea and at almost zero feet. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘absolutely nothing, had favoured our attack.’12
Looking around him, he saw the bombers had gone, vanished entirely, and that he was on his own, flying over the water, accompanied only by the growing anxiety that he might not have the fuel to get home. It was a familiar feeling – one he’d always hated, as almost all German fighter pilots hated it: a gnawing fear that had first gripped him while making repeated returns across the Channel during the Battle of Britain after dog-fights in southern England. The only difference now was that the Mediterranean was even bigger and their Messerschmitts, because of the dust and the shortage of parts, were less reliable. Over the radio, the chatter seemed to be getting ever more hysterical. With a rage born of frustration sweeping over him, he switched on to transmit and told everyone to keep their mouths shut.
But he did make it back. The familiar marker of Monte Erice came into view and soon after, with other single fighters also homing back towards Trapani, he came back into land. Engine off, the dust settling, and a sudden stillness. And the sinking feeling of disaster.
Clambering out, he was met by Hauptmann Lutz Burckhardt and Oberleutnant Gerhard Strausen, both from his headquarters flight. Although Strausen was enthusiastic about the Fortress Steinhoff had shot down, neither had had any success themselves, nor had they seen any other bombers disappear beneath the waves. Major Siegfried Freytag, commander of II. Gruppe, and a man with both a growing cynicism and a talent for calling a spade a spade, greeted Steinhoff as he approached the hut.
‘That was a gorgeous balls-up, sir,’ he said.13
‘Didn’t your wing get any?’
‘Not a single one,’ he replied. He had lost sight of the headquarters flight in the haze, and then, when he did see the bombers, it was almost too late and they had had to attack from astern rather than head-on. ‘And we botched it, really botched it.’ It seemed the other two Gruppen hadn’t even seen the bombers.
So there it was – as he’d feared. In all, just four had been shot down – one by Steinhoff, one other, as it happened, by one of Freytag’s boys and two by the Ace of Spades. Not that Steinhoff knew it at the time. When, with a heavy heart, he phoned through to Galland on Monte Erice,