A few hours later they had crossed Denmark and were again over water. They sighted a gray smudge on the horizon. Kent assured Phips it was England, Mother England, and they all breathed a sigh of relief. They were very low on fuel. A pair of British Hurricanes flew by and took up position on either side. They were used to nursing cripples and would guide Mother’s Milk back to an airfield. They’d be on fumes when they landed, but they had made it. It was the middle of June 1944. Allies had landed in Normandy and the men of the Mother’s Milk were still part of the war.

Finally, Phips could relax. He did wonder just what they had managed to bomb on their first and so far only run over Germany. He hoped to God it wasn’t a girls’ school or an orphanage. But then, how many girls schools were protected by antiaircraft guns?

Colonel Ernst Varner walked away from the undistinguished one-story wood building that was jammed with the military hierarchy of the Third Reich. For the moment it was the site of the OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the headquarters of the German military. The Wehrmacht controlled the regular army, the Heer; the navy, the Kriegsmarine; and the air force, the Luftwaffe. A walk in the surrounding woods was what Varner needed to clear his head. The air within the building was stale in more ways than one.

Varner had been inside a few moments earlier and had actually heard Adolf Hitler speak emotionally and illogically about solutions to the military dilemma confronting Germany. And, the more he heard his Fuhrer pontificate, the more he realized the little man with the mustache was delusional at best.

Varner hadn’t always felt that way about his Fuhrer.