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

He found himself wanting so badly to return to that little Lutheran Church along the banks of the Werra, and to speak with the minister who was so faithful to it and to all that it stood for. This time not as a young boy or a rebellious teenager, but as one man in search of truth from another. A man finding himself confronted with many more questions of essentiality than possible answers for them, and seeking wisdom from what he now saw as the wisest man he had ever known.

Instead he was hustled back to the front and to the cockpit of his waiting Messerschmitt, to do battle once more against the massed waves of Yaks, Migs, and Lavochkins, as well as the British made Hurricanes and American built Airacobras, Warhawks and Kingcobras. The Red Army was on the move, which meant the Red Air Force was fully deployed in providing the requisite close aerial cover. It was the largest and most brutally effective war machine the world had known up to that time, and it was methodically grinding its German adversaries into the icy, snow covered ground of Northern Europe.

The Luftwaffe mail routes were often sporadic and unreliable, but still occasionally he would receive a letter from his father. In them he noted an increasingly open disgust for the Nazi Party and its leadership, and the disastrous path they were leading Germany down. Max wrote back as much as he could yet wondered how many of his letters actually made it home.

He was very careful about what he said and how he said it. There was a joke going around that one would never find a Gestapo man anywhere near the front, as they were too busy sitting around post offices and reading other people’s mail. Such was the dark humor that permeated among the men who were actually fighting, and dying, in this increasingly hopeless war. Max hoped that his father would hear that joke and take heed of the intent.

It was on his ninth mission after his return from Berlin, and what he had seen and experienced there was still fresh on his mind. Max never even saw the Yak-9U that slipped in from behind, directly astern and slightly lower in the classic fighter-on-fighter line of attack. His first hint of any real trouble was when the powerful 20 mm rapid fire cannon of the white camouflaged Yak ripped the guts out of his tried-and-true Me109, and turned it into a smoking piece of airborne junk that was rapidly falling out of the winter Lithuanian sky.

That smoke had quickly turned into an oil fire that filled the cockpit of the little fighter, and Hauptmann Grephardt still carried the burn scars to prove it. Max managed to hastily get the canopy back and the mortally-wounded Messerschmitt inverted, upon which he bailed out into the shockingly frigid slipstream.

With his heavy flying clothes still on fire he was able to deploy his chute, which led to another immediate problem: the victorious Soviet pilot had not only wanted the gray camouflaged 109, but he also wanted one Hauptmann Maximilian Friedrich Grephardt, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. Max had spent the rest of his slow ride down to the frozen ground side-slipping his parachute to spoil the Russian's aim, while still trying to put out the fires on his winterized uniform.

While ultimately successful on both counts, his rather precarious situation was compounded by the fact that he just happened to bail out over recently acquired Soviet territory. He also found himself unarmed, as he and his issued Walther PPK had evidently gone their separate ways sometime during the hasty exit from the Messerschmitt.

For two whole days Max led elements of Stalin's military machine on a not-so-merry chase, until he found himself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. On the third morning Hauptmann Grephardt awoke with the ominous muzzle of a Mosin-Nagant 91/30 mere inches from his face and his back against cold, unyielding stone.

Weak from exhaustion and pockmarked with burns as well as shivering from exposure, he must have not looked important enough to waste a rifle bullet on. Instead, the Red Army soldiers in attendance decided to pick up where the smoke inhalation, the flames, the brutal cold, and the lack of food and sleep had left off. Rather than just up and killing him, they had beaten the hapless hauptmann to the point where he was rapidly becoming more dead than alive. His only saving favor was the timely arrival of a Soviet propaganda officer, who recognized the Luftwaffe pilot for what he was and decided he just might know something of tactical or even strategic importance.

So Max was packed into a lend-lease American six-by truck, along with some other German prisoners who looked as if they had been given the same Communist warm welcome as he. But the young Luftwaffe officer had other ideas and a second dose of Russian hospitality was not among them.

Picking his moment, he literally rocketed out of the bed of the truck as it sped along, right under the noses of the guards who had let their own lack of sleep and attending complacency get the better of them. He had hit, skidded and then bounced down the side of a steep incline and into the thick forest below, closely pursued by shouts, cursing and a substantial amount of small arms fire attempting to seek him out.

Max had jounced hard through the brush line and came up sprinting, encouraged by the cracks and pops of bullets striking all about. He ran as far and as fast as he could until he could run no further. Then the beleaguered young man simply dropped in his tracks and