Spandau Phoenix

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

The North Sea lay serene, unusual for spring, but night would soon fall on a smoking, broken continent reeling from the shock of war. From the bloody dunes of Dunkirk to the bomb-shattered streets of Warsaw, from the frozen tip of Norway to the deserted beaches of the Mediterranean—Europe was enslaved. Only England, beleaguered and alone, stood against the massed armies of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and tonight London was scheduled to die.

By fire. At 1800 hours Greenwich time the greatest single concentration of Luftwaffe bombers ever assembled would unleash their fury upon the unprotected city, and over seven hundred acres of the British capital would cease to exist. Thousands of incendiary bombs would rain down upon civilian and soldier alike, narrowly missing St. Paul’s Cathedral, gutting the Houses of Parliament. History would record that strike against London as the worst of the entire war, a holocaust. And yet …

… all this—the planning, the casualties, the goliathan destruction—was but the puff of smoke from a magician’s gloved hand. A spectacular diversion calculated to draw the eyes of the world away from a mission so daring and intricate that it would defy understanding for generations to come. The man behind this ingenious plot was Adolf Hitler, and tonight, unknown to a single member of his General Staff, he would reach out from the Berghof and undertake the most ambitious military feat of his life.

He had worked miracles before—the blitzkrieg of Poland, the penetration of the “impassable” Ardennes—but this would be the crowning achievement of his career. It would raise him at last above Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. In one stunning blow, he would twist the balance of world power inside out, transforming his mortal foe into an ally and consigning his present ally to destruction. To succeed he would have to reach into the very heart of Britain, but not with bombs or missiles. Tonight he needed precision, and he had chosen his weapons accordingly: treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism—the most destructive forces available to man. All were familiar tools in Hitler’s hand, and all were in place.

But such forces were unpredictable. Traitors lived in terror of discovery; agents feared capture. Fanatics exploded without warning, and weak men invited betrayal. To effectively utilize such resources, Hitler knew, someone had to be on the scene—reassuring the agent, directing the fanatic, holding the hand of the traitor and a gun to the head of the coward. But who could handle such a mission? Who could inspire both trust and fear in equal measure? Hitler knew such a man. He was a soldier, a man of forty-eight, a pilot. And he was already in the air.

Two thousand feet above Amsterdam, the Messerschmitt Bf-110 Zerstörer plowed through a low ceiling of cumulus clouds and burst into clear sky over the glittering North Sea. The afternoon sun flashed across the fighter’s silver wings, setting off the black-painted crosses that struck terror into the stoutest hearts across Europe.

Inside the cockpit, the pilot breathed a sigh of relief. For the last four hundred miles he had flown a tiring, highly restricted route, changing altitude several times to remain within the Luftwaffe’s prescribed corridors of safety. Hitler’s personal pilot had given him the coded map he carried, and, with it, a warning. Not for amusement were the safety zones changed daily, Hans Bahr had whispered; with British Spitfires regularly penetrating Hermann Göring’s “impenetrable” wall of air defense, the danger was real, precautions necessary.

The pilot smiled grimly. Enemy fighters were the least of his worries this afternoon. If he failed to execute the next step of his mission perfectly, it would be a squadron of Messerschmitts, not Spitfires, that shot him into the sea. At any moment the Luftwaffe flight controllers expected him to turn back for Germany, as he had a dozen times before, test flying the fighter lent to him personally by Willi Messerschmitt, then returning home to his wife and child, his privileged life. But this time he would not turn back.