The Uvalde Raider by Ben English (great books for teens TXT) 📕

a thousand years. He gave the German people a new self-respect for themselves and their nation, and banished much of the disgrace associated with the ruinous loss of the recent war. Men went back to work and vast new projects were undertaken to showcase Teutonic skill, knowledge and engineering expertise. Among those was a concentrated effort to expand the military, and the building of a powerful new German air force called the Luftwaffe.

Vadi still entertained a different dream for Max, and a different future for him in being a physician. But of all of Max’s youthful desires, the most persistent and lasting was the one to fly. This led to several discussions that became heated on occasion, an unfortunate circumstance usually brought on by Max. He would become so exasperated with his father, as he could not make the elder Grephardt understand what the idea of flying meant to him. Yes, being a doctor was a noble and respected profession, and Max understood the vital need for good ones. It was just that being a doctor and saving lives did not hold any personal calling to him.

In the end and ironically enough, Max Grephardt would instead spend much of his younger years in the taking of lives during the war to come. Tragically for the five brothers, he was not the only son who heard the beguiling call of the sirens that sang the songs of military glory.

Heinrich, the oldest, was the first to don a uniform. He joined the Kriegsmarine, the resurgent German Navy and served aboard one of her dreaded Unterseeboots, or U-Boats. One dark night his submarine slipped out from its base in Lorient, never to return. Somewhere in the vastness of the North Atlantic, it found an unmarked watery grave for all hands aboard.

The second one out the door was Rudolph. He had enlisted in the Panzers and became a tank commander on the Eastern Front. He and his crew were lost during the Battle of Kursk, when his Panzer Mark IV Ausf.G was turned into a fiery, exploding volcano due to a direct hit from a Soviet T-34. Rudolph and his fellows never even caught a glimpse of the enemy iron monster that killed them all.

After Max had joined the Luftwaffe, younger brother Willy signed up for the Wehrmacht Heer as a common infantryman. By that time the Grephardt family already had three sons committed to the Vaterland and knew all too well they were in a war in which the tides were turning. But Willy was still eager to go and do his part and dutifully marched on until January of 1944, when he was killed in action outside of Monte Cassino on the Italian front.

Paul was the youngest and the only one to not put on the uniform. A very bright, introspective young man of faith, he had decided to follow Vadi into the clergy, a decision that brought a collected sense of relief to what was left of the Grephardt family.

He had gone to study in Frankfurt, not too far away from Meiningen. In the black days of early 1944, he would become yet another civilian casualty to the Allied bombing campaigns. Paul was killed in the same raid that destroyed the historic Paulskirche, along with most of the renowned center area of the city that dated back to the Middle Ages.

When he received the word, Max had pondered upon the coincidence of his youngest brother losing his life within sight of the church named after the same apostle as he. The timing of this news had been devastating for both of his parents, as they would receive the official notice concerning Willy just days afterwards.

Yet for Max, he was living his dream and was quite good at what he had always been so keen to try. The tragedies of his own family, along with his personal exploits, found him recognized nationally as one of the true heroes of the Fatherland, and he wore the Knight’s Cross medal proudly around his neck. Luftwaffe Hauptmann Grephardt seemed to lead a charmed life in the midst of a tidal wave of carnage and death that engulfed all around him. The fact that he was now the only surviving brother of five only heightened that assumptive perception.

The Nazi Party propaganda machine, desperate for such inspiring stories in the midst of so much bad news from so many fronts, ran full length feature articles on him. German magazines and newspapers carried his carefully crafted image, a jaunty young fighter ace with handsome features complete with the required perfectly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. They had even brought him back from his badly needed presence on the Eastern Front, to portray himself on film while spending time in Berlin rubbing elbows with the powerful and privileged.

That trip to Berlin and being placed so close to the upper echelons of the Nazi Party was when he first discovered that all was not as it had first seemed. His boyish enthusiasms and patriotic dreams in this Third Reich were shocked to their very core, confronted with the reality of what he and so many others had been fighting for. So much blood spilt, so many lives lost and for what? For these pompous, self-serving zecken to strut about at the beck and call of their delusional leader?

Of course, he had already realized the war was an issue in serious doubt. Max had experienced firsthand the merciless hordes of the Red Army in the east, as well as the industrial might and resolve of the Allied forces to the west. But up to this point the reasons and goals for the struggle had been clear enough for him to follow without question.

But now, much like the war itself, the doubts and the needlessness of it all began to haunt him. In Berlin, his perspective began to change and the wisdom of his Vadi from years ago