Wolfgang's Castle: Germans against Hitler

By Rex W. Last

Amidst the secluded valleys of Bavaria, 1940, lies a covert Nazi stronghold, the womb to the sinister Project Sea Eagle. Here, in hidden chambers beneath the earth, Nazi scientists toil over an innovative menace: a fleet of aqua-planes intended to unleash a torrent of terror upon Britain’s shores once more.

Against the dark tide rises a band of unlikely allies: four anti-Nazi Germans, two audacious SOE operatives, and twenty captive RAF officers. With scarce resources yet unyielding resolve, they plot to dismantle this aquatic harbinger of invasion. At the heart of their mission lies the experimental ‘aquaplane,’ a swift maritime vessel conceived to ferry troops and weaponry across the Channel, a dire threat to England’s already beleaguered coast.

The citadel of Sea Eagle, veiled beneath the earth, eludes the reach of aerial bombs, and a direct military assault is a gambit Britain can ill afford. Amidst the storm of war, Major Archie Wellings of the SOE forms a daring coalition with two German couples and others, orchestrating a clandestine assault on Wolfgang’s Castle, the nexus of Sea Eagle. They turn Nazi ideology against itself, employing ingenious subterfuges to thwart the looming peril.

Wolfgang’s Castle is more than a tale of espionage and warfare. It delves into the essence of patriotism, the indomitable spirit of resistance, and the unexpected corridors of camaraderie amidst the horrors of war. With a sprinkle of satire, a glimpse into wartime’s gender dynamics, and a tender vein of romance, this thrilling narrative is not just a journey through the shadows of war, but a venture into the myriad shades of human valour and ingenuity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781398492028

Book preview

Part One

Chapter One

Angels two nine. Just a whisker below his normal cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet. Outside, a piercing clear blue sky. In front of him, the blur of the propeller and the constant deafening drone of the Merlin engine. But no ice on the cockpit window, thank God. His mask chafed like hell, but at this height you have to breathe oxygen or die. A glance down at the instrument panel. Airspeed 240 mph, but what about the juice?

He stabbed a gloved forefinger at the tank indicator button to update the fuel meter. The needle jerked across the dial. At one gallon per minute, the calculator in his head told him there was still plenty of gravy in reserve to take pretty pictures for half an hour and then bugger off home with several spoonfuls to spare. He twisted his head to look back along the length of the fuselage. No contrail to give away his location, and not a bogey in sight. All tickety-boo.

The only fly in the ointment was that whopping great purple-grey cloud bank sitting bang on top of his target area about five miles ahead. No doubt about it, that little lot went right down to below a thousand feet and it would be pointless even to think about taking aerial pics from that height. Normally he would have been tasked with a secondary objective for a recce but on this occasion he had been ordered to photograph unusual factory construction work to the south-east of Nuremberg, and the powers that be had not offered him an alternative. Which meant he would have to use his initiative. Bad idea. Last time he did that he had flown into a solid wall of flak and nearly got himself and his kite chewed into little bits for his pains.

He dipped the starboard wing to skirt the billowing white mass and began his search for a likely spot. He could always have a bash at the south of the city, the railway yards and industrial districts, but they had been well and truly covered not long ago by his oppo, and that area of Nuremberg was heavily defended. Besides, his pal’s crate had only just made it home, peppered with ack-ack, engine coughing like an old geezer with asthma. Ah well, let’s try and find somewhere relatively useful to play before we set our sights on Blighty and buxom Josie Cartwright serving behind the bar of the Wheatsheaf.

He pushed the beer lever gingerly forward and the growl of the Supermarine Spitfire Mk 1 deepened as he slid into a shallow power dive towards a smaller clump of cumulus to the south, seeking out a break large enough to find an interesting subject for his camera. For several seconds, his view was entirely blanked out by the damp clinging cotton wool curtain. His eyes constantly shifted across the instrument panel, always returning to the altimeter as the two hands unwound towards ten thousand feet, angels one zero. As the ground below gradually began to flicker into sight through the last wisps of cloud, he dipped his wings slowly to right and left to improve his view. Then he levelled out and angled his neck up and back again to check for bogies, but this piece of sky was completely empty.

Without warning, a chunk of cloud peeled back completely to reveal a sunlit swathe of snow-clad Bavarian countryside beneath him, densely wooded with the odd patch of meadowland and the occasional farmstead, the narrow grey-blue snake of a river, and the intermittent glimmer of a single-track railway winding amongst the trees. That railway line might just be of interest, he thought to himself.

Across the hills, shafts of sunlight painted bright patches amidst the prevailing gloom, revealing miles of unspoilt countryside, none of it of any apparent military value. He banked to port and began to circle the area. Not much here to excite the PI girls at home hunched over the still-wet large-scale photos of the Fatherland.

Hang on a mo. A substantial square-shaped country house bounded by a thin rectangular ribbon of water swept by his port wing. A flash of sunlight. Was that a moat? Surely not. Then his eye caught a small smudge of movement across a broad snow-covered meadow some distance from the house. Triple tyre tracks trailed behind it in a gentle curve. Hey, wasn’t that some kind of aircraft? What the blazes was it doing out here in the sticks miles from anywhere? The meadow itself appeared large enough for a plane to touch down and take off, but it certainly wasn’t marked as a recognised landing field on the current map of the region.

He racked his brains to try and determine what kind of kite it might be. The blur in front of the cockpit indicated that it was a trimotor, probably a Junkers Ju 52, known as the Tante Ju, Aunt Ju in English, the German equivalent of the Douglas DC-3 Dakota. A familiar workhorse of the skies, but what the deuce was it doing taxiing around in the middle of the Bavarian countryside in the depths of winter? That plus the railway line certainly makes this little lot worth a couple of snaps from the old Box Brownie.

He continued in the turn and fiddled with the camera controls in front of him. When he came around to the house again he was not sure if the aircraft was still visible on the ground, as his camera was directly beneath the fuselage, but he levelled the Spitfire, pressed the button and started filming. He eased back on the throttle and was beginning to shoot a decent sequence of shots from west to east when a menacing black shadow swooped over him and down across his ten o’clock. Damn. A bloody bogey, Me-109 by the look of it. What rotten luck. He wondered why the Luftwaffe was sniffing about in this neck of the woods. Maybe he really had chanced on a patch of Bavaria that was more interesting than seemed at first sight. Certainly gave yours truly a scare, though.

That’ll teach you to keep your sodding Mark One eyeballs peeled at all times, laddie. But for a few seconds more he maintained straight and level flight, because he had spotted another bank of cloud a mile or so in front of him. Just the place to play hide and seek, step on the gas and outrun the Me-109 which reappeared out of the cloud and was screaming around in a tight turn.

He thumbed the tit to stop the camera and prepared to make a hasty departure. For weight reasons, the Spitfires doing this vital recon­naissance work had no on-board armaments, only superior agility and speed. He turned up the wick and headed for the cloud. As he did so, he glimpsed the brief metallic glint of a long thin lake in a steep-sided gorge but a second later it had vanished in the clammy embrace of the fluffy cumulus. Moments later, he had climbed above the huge white mass and was whizzing along at angels three two, leaving the bandit trailing miles behind.

Much later, the Spitfire bumped over uneven grass towards the hangar and the waiting black Humber saloon. That encounter with the 109 was far too much excitement for one day, the pilot muttered to himself, I’m just glad to be back on good old terra firma after the familiar interminable periods of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer panic.

As always after a long flight, he felt utterly drained, coupled with a deep sense of anti-climax after having come face to face with the enemy. The raw risk and the deadly challenge were dangerously close to becoming a drug. You wanted to go straight back up there and shout defiance at fate all over again until the issue was finally settled one way or the other. But, before anything else, there’s a debriefing report to present and all the bureaucratic bumph to wade through. Then, and not before, can my thoughts shift away from winning the war to warm pints of beer and the barmaid’s ample bosom.

Back at a secret location, the film was developed. The duty sergeant passed the small set of photographs to the Senior PI Officer and summarised the debrief for him.

‘The pilot reported that you might find tyre tracks across a meadow on the first print, but that the rest were of open countryside. There was a possible sighting of a single-track railway among the trees, but that was all he managed to observe. He was busy avoiding an Me-109 at the time, so he is not very optimistic of having captured anything else of real interest. And there are just four prints in this particular sequence.’

As per regulations, the Senior PI took the first look at the results of the pilot’s efforts. The building on the westernmost print, with its unusual square-shaped moat, stirred a recollection at the back of her mind and she delved around in her copious card index files. After a quarter of an hour’s search, she struck gold.

The house was called Waldheim and was apparently owned by a key member of an underground group who assisted Jews and others regarded as enemies of the Reich to flee the country. The specialist marked the top left-hand corner of the envelope holding the prints with a cross inside a circle to indicate that they were of potential military or intelligence importance.

Next, the envelope was handed over to a courier and half an hour later it was being opened by staff at the Photographic Interpretation service. Aware that the four prints were flagged as significant, the team were settling down to examine them with particular attention when a priority batch of images from Hamburg docks was rushed in for examination in advance of a bombing raid planned for the same night.

When that kind of flap was on, everything else took a back seat. As a result, the four prints ended up being stuffed back in their envelope, and a junior staff member casually stamped them ‘For Training Purposes Only.’

Chapter Two

The latest intake of young WAAFs to be put through the course for PIs settled down in the draughty room set aside for training classes and waited anxiously to meet their tutor. Some unkind folk will tell you that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t even do that become RAF instructors. Harsh, but often true, no more so than in the case of Sergeant Prosser, in his late twenties, self-opinionated, overweight, his florid features topped by a thatch of untidy brown hair.

He strode importantly into the room, clapped his hands and waited for silence. After much scraping of chairs and a bout of nervous coughing, the room was transformed into a sea of upturned faces eager to learn how to become Photographic Interpreters. Prosser perched himself on the edge of the desk, crossed his legs and stared sternly at the serried ranks of young women on the benches before him. He cleared his throat and began.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ he snapped.

‘Morning, sir,’ came back in a ragged chorus.

‘My name is Sergeant Prosser. You have been selected to train for a crucial task in the overall war effort. It will be your responsibility to examine in the greatest detail aerial photographs which can reveal priceless information about the enemy, the disposition of his troops, damage from bombing raids, and much more besides. Those of you who pass this course will be making a substantial contribution to the vital challenge of defeating Mr Hitler.’

As he droned pompously on, he gradually became aware of a growing murmur of whisperings and suppressed giggles. A few of the girls sat red-faced with their heads bowed, the rest stared defiantly at their instructor. Unfortunately for Sergeant Prosser, two of his fly buttons had eased undone and a morsel of wrinkled white flesh was clearly visible to the whole class, like a skinned conger eel. Leaning back with his legs crossed only exacerbated his sartorial predicament.

Prosser was now stumbling through his signature statement of the obvious: ‘Sharp eyes, patience, an excellent memory and the ability to use your initiative and pose questions when you believe you are right—these are central to your task as PIs. Do remember that things look very different when viewed from an unusual angle.’

At his words, several of his audience, close to hysteria, buried their sniggering faces in their hands. Prosser was used to his charges becoming rapidly bored with his below average skills as a tutor, but this was going way too far. Unable to decide whether or not to make some caustic comment about the unforgivable inattentiveness of this bunch of students, he resolved to struggle bravely on. However, two colleagues walking along the corridor past the windowed room noticed his plight and its embarrassing cause and gestured urgently for him step outside.

One of his fellow tutors whispered to him in a voice shaking with suppressed laughter, ‘You’ve got trouser trouble, old boy. Talk about an over-exposed print. Not so much half-mast as open porthole, if you get my drift.’ Puce with embarrassment, Prosser readjusted his fly, stomped back to the classroom and struggled through the rest of his faltering introduction to the essential work of a PI. Gradually and reluctantly, a semblance of order was re-established and the introductory session ground slowly to its tedious end.

Mercifully, on the second day there were no more sartorial disasters. The trainee PIs were anxious to get their hands on real aerial photographs and Prosser duly obliged, still somewhat unnerved by his unfortunate experience of the previous day.

Amongst the prints set out for the class to examine were copies of the four taken by the Spitfire pilot of the snow-covered Bavarian countryside marked as significant by the reception officer but placed back in the envelope by a junior dogsbody who stamped the photos as suitable for training purposes only.

Prosser encouraged his charges to investigate the prints for the least little object that might be out of the ordinary, and for some time the room remained relatively silent as the trainees bent over their magnifying glasses and shifted them slowly across the aerial shots, keenly scanning them for anything worthy of comment.

Then one bright young lady, Jenny Wilkins, who was working on the last of the four photos, noticed a curious cross-shaped object on the stretch of water which appeared to have an unusually long wake. After studying the blurred image for several seconds, she tentatively took the plunge.

‘Sir?’

Jenny waved an enthusiastic arm at Prosser, breasts straining at the buttons on her uniform blouse. Prosser did his best not to ogle them but was obliged to glance down at her name label.

‘Yes, er, Wilkins, is it?’

‘Sir, could you repeat what you said earlier today about the relationship between the length of a vessel’s wake and its speed, please?’

Prosser drew himself up to his full height of five feet seven and blustered his way through an explanation. Jenny listened carefully, then spoke out.

‘If that is the case, sir, I think there is something very strange indeed happening on the lake just here.’

She stabbed a finger about two thirds of the way down the narrow expanse of water, which ran due north to south.

‘If those calculations you gave me just now are correct, sir, the vessel travelling across the lake must be moving at around eighty to ninety miles per hour, which seems hardly possible.’

Prosser peered at the print, taking a second or two to consider her assertion, then he smirked condescendingly. Not before time, he told himself, an opportunity arises for me to assert myself over this insolent gaggle of self-assured young women who dared to gawp and giggle at my masculinity.

‘It’s all too easy,’ he asserted smugly, ‘for a beginner like yourself to misinterpret an aspect of a print which will almost certainly turn out to have a quite mundane and self-evident explanation.’

He strode across to her side of the table, and reached for the magnifying glass on its stand.

‘Now, ladies, gather round, and I will give you a little demonstration of how easy it is for you to let your enthusiasm and your—dare I say it—female imaginations run away with you.’

He waited until every eye was eagerly scanning the print.

‘Let me start by employing the parallel of the situation in which a trainee pilot can find himself, looking down over the side of his aircraft and seeing a small black object moving across the landscape below. You may not believe this, but one very difficult lesson he has to learn is that it takes a great deal of practice to distinguish between a bird in flight and an aircraft.’

His audience muttered and giggled.

‘I know, it appears improbable, but it genuinely is the case. I recall when I was earning my wings as a fighter pilot that I laughed at my instructor, but by Jove, he was right, and I damn soon became able to distinguish one from the other. Never throughout my flying career did I make that mistake again.’

What Prosser chose not to point out was that his flying career had lasted precisely five weeks, until one afternoon he landed in poor visibility three feet under the runway and ended up in the Station Commander’s lovingly tended garden, wrecking the vegetable patch and collapsing the undercarriage of his Spitfire in the process.

It was at that point that a serious visual defect in his right eye, which he had succeeded in disguising thus far, was detected by the medics. As a result, he was ignominiously booted out of the squadron and placed on desk duties for the duration.

‘Now,’ he continued self-importantly, ‘show me this alleged high-speed boat with the long wake and we’ll soon determine what it really is.’

Jenny pointed at the middle of the print and drew sharply back as Prosser leaned uncomfortably close to her to inspect the phenomenon.

‘Yes, well, Wilkins, that high-speed vessel, as you are pleased to call it, is a fishing boat with its nets extended.’

He peered again at the lake.

‘And your supposed wake, my dear,’ he added patronisingly, ‘is nothing more or less than the reflection of clouds on the water. Ten out of ten for enthusiasm. But only two out of ten for observational powers.’

He stood up smugly from the table. ‘Anyone else with questions?’

The silence in the room was almost tangible.

‘In that case, I think we should call it a day, ladies.’

He stomped out of the room, leaving the WAAFs to giggle and gossip, and Jenny to begin to wonder if she really was seeing things.

Maybe I was just imagining it, she told herself despondently, shuffling her notes together. I desperately want to become a PI and it looks as if I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. She turned down invitations to join the others for cream buns and biscuits in the village’s Olde Tea Shoppe, and made her miserable way back to her quarters.

Chapter Three

A small group of men were sitting at the long tables in the mess when Prosser made his noisy entrance. He grabbed a cup of tea and a tired-looking rock bun and weaved his way over to the table where two of his fellow sergeant tutors were sitting.

One of them was leafing through the local paper in a desultory fashion, the other was spooning sugar into his tea. Prosser plonked himself down with a huge sigh, grateful that another wearisome day at the chalk face was over and done with.

‘How’s it going?’ the sugar spooner asked unenthusiastically. ‘Any corkers or good-looking blond jobs among your batch? Our spies inform us that you were lecherously preparing to use your close quarters combat weapon on them. Hope it didn’t catch a cold, old boy.’

The other added with a smothered smirk, ‘I understand it was a bit draughty out there in the front line yesterday afternoon, old chap. Positively chilly on the willy.’

‘Very funny,’ snapped Prosser, ‘I’d just forgotten to do up my sodding fly properly. I must admit, though, that I was on the receiving end of some very admiring glances. But I can assure you duo of sex fiends that I will keep my secret weapon well and truly buttoned until the right girl comes along.’

‘If that’s ever likely to happen, Prossy old boy. A lonesome bachelorhood beckons for you, I fear.’

He took an inelegant sip at his tea and watched as Prosser struggled to chew a corner off the bun.

‘Meantime, in answer to your enquiry,’ responded Prosser, ‘I rate the present batch as fair to middling. No really knockout maidens among them, but now I come to think of it, there is one I wouldn’t mind half an hour in the back row of the flicks with. Bleeding Miss Know It All she is, though. Shame, she’s a cute enough dark-haired bluebird with real quality knockers, but she’s far too superior for blooming words.’

‘There’s a smasher among my lot, too, but she’s already someone’s homework if the ring on her finger is anything to go by. Trust my sodding luck.’ The newspaper reader sniffed and returned to his scrutiny of the small ads.

Two tables away, a civilian in a nondescript grey suit sat unob­trusively reading a well-thumbed technical manual, apparently obli­vious to the exchanges on the ever-interesting subject of WAAFs, their physical attributes and their availability or otherwise for sexual antics. Prosser took a noisy slurp of tea, then spoke up again.

’Well, in the middle of an exercise with that set of dud photos of Bavaria’s fields and forests we’ve been trying them out on, this Jenny Williams—that’s her name, I think—ups and asks me about the speed of waterborne vessels and the length of wake they generate. She thought she had seen one tearing across the surface of the water at an impossible speed.

‘That’s a woman’s fertile imagination for you. If you ask me, I don’t honestly believe the fair sex is really cut out for this kind of highly skilled work.’

‘Anyway, I thought those pics were just dreary vistas of snow-clad woods and meadows, Prossy old son.’

‘No, there was actually this long thin lake on her photo. Bang in between two steep valley sides.’

He took another thoughtful chew on the rock bun.

‘I had to rack my brains and remember all that gen about ship’s wakes and the like, and she showed me a sort of blob with stubby wing-shaped attachments. I pointed out that this was definitely a fishing boat with extended nets. As for the dirty great long white streak on the water behind the vessel, it was clear as a bell that the alleged wake was nothing more startling than the reflection of an oddly-shaped cloud patch on the surface of the water, and I told Miss Brainbox so to her face.’

‘Some of them take one peek at a blurred spot on a print and swear it’s the Führer himself out for a bike ride. What did she think it was doing?’

‘Doing? You mean the fishing boat? What speed? Around eighty miles an hour, she reckoned. I felt like telling her she ought to take her eyeballs out one at a time, wash them out thoroughly in Pears soap, rinse them in cold water and stop having silly feminine visions. You don’t become a proper PI in ten minutes flat, that’s for sure. I reckon that young lady’s going to be a complete washout.’

The three of them were snorting with laughter at the visual frailties of the females of the species, when the civilian in the grey suit leapt abruptly to his feet, pushed back his chair with a sharp scraping sound and rushed out of the room.

Prosser turned sharply and stared in astonishment.

‘What’s got into him, I wonder? Oi,’ he called after the man, ‘you’ve forgotten your sodding book.’

‘Never mind him, Prossy, what are you getting up to when you go off duty today?’

‘Nothing much. Looks like another exciting evening by the fire listening to Lord bloody Haw-Haw on the wireless.’

Chapter Four

When the knock came at the door of the bedroom she shared with three other girls, Jenny hardly noticed it. She was too absorbed in fearful concerns about her dwindling future prospects in the PI training course. She half regretted turning down the invitation to stroll across with the rest of the gang to the nearby village and sample the delights of the local tearoom. Depressed by Prosser’s dismissive response to her observations, she really did not want to be alone with her thoughts. Her initial keen enthusiasm was drifting into serious doubts and misgivings about her abilities. Perhaps she really was just seeing things and wasn’t cut out for this kind of work at all.

Her past had been cluttered with similar episodes, leaving a trail of unmet aspirations and doomed ambitions. It was shortly after her fifteenth birthday when she fully realised that her father regarded her as a complete failure. The birthday tea had been a sullen affair with just a couple of friends from school sitting down to unappetising meat paste sandwiches and stale cake, and she was grateful when they had left, their insincere thanks echoing sourly in her ears.

Later that night she had crept downstairs towards the kitchen. She had been suffering from a persistent sore stomach and was going in search of the tin of Andrews Liver Salts in the kitchen cupboard. As she passed the sitting room door, she heard subdued, angry voices. Her father and mother were having one of their bitter heated arguments.

She stopped to listen, just as her father snapped, ‘And Jennifer, what has she achieved? No school prize this year, no head of class, no captaincy of hockey. Nothing. Another birthday come and gone, and precious little to show for it. She’s just a nearly girl, like you are a nearly wife and I am sick and tired of your lack of ambition and plain unwillingness to achieve anything in this house.’

Liver Salts forgotten, Jenny turned to flee back upstairs and, as she did so, she could just make out the wretched sound of her mother sobbing quietly in the face of his venomous outburst.

Back in her room, she pulled the thin sheets over her head, and in that instant she understood, with all the clarity of an adolescent’s sudden insight into the harsh realities of adult life, that her father, the bank clerk, one man she was supposed to love and admire unconditionally, was the true root cause of all their miseries, obsessed as he was with other folk coming second because he himself was one