Post by redsycorax on Dec 13, 2022 2:49:40 GMT
Before she fell in love with Georg von Tregor (the Horned Owl) after the German crimefighter defected to the allies, Rosalie Ashley had her own career as one of the few British female fighter pilots, the legendary "Midnight Angel", a formidable air ace. But even heroines and paragons of virtue sometimes commit questionable acts.
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COVENTRY, 14 NOVEMBER 1940 :
Rosalie Ashley was once a war worker, one of the innumerable "Rosie the Riveters" who laboured in home front industries while most men were away at the battlefield, and so she might have remained except for a singular tragedy. She was working near Coventry, where her father was a Church of England vicar and long since retired Royal Air Force veteran from the First World War. Rosalie was his only child, and definitely a 'tomboy' in her childhood. She listened, enraptured, to her father's stories about the glories and hardship of aerial combat, and showed an early flare for engineering, mathematics and aeronautics. Except that on that fateful night in mid-November 1940, her home town descended into the pit of hell. And then she'd seen it, her father's church aflame, when he was supposed to be holding Sunday services. She tried to get through to the burning city, but no-one would let her through. And then something cold and hard gripped her inside, and her anger roared into determination and resolve. Finding a fallen air force officer, she abandoned her war worker's smock, pulled on his leather flight jacket and goggles and did her hair up so that no-one would detect her real gender as she grabbed his flight keys from his prone corpse.
And her ruse went undetected as the cold equations and her own indomitable will propelled her into the plane's cockpit. As the rotors ignited, she felt a sense of exhilaration as the power and majesty of the plane pervaded her. She pulled back the throttle as she soared aloft, eager and vengeful, intent on insuring that no-one else would die if she could help it. And help it, she did. Pretending that the ground radio apparatus in her plane had sustained damage during combat, she repeatedly struck out at the enemy that night, her valour, courage and perseverance impressing many of her unsuspecting colleagues as she avenged her father's death. Even so, history records that despite its inhabitants valour and courage, Coventry took a fearful toll. St Michaels Anglican Cathedral was set aflame, gas, water and electricity utilities were down, and the incendiary and petroleum ordinance used had destroyed roofs and turned the inner city into a firestorm. Despite the valour of the RAF and ground anti-aircraft artillery, the loss of life was less than one might have fought, but 568 people had perished in the destruction. Eight hundred and sixty three had been badly injured, with three hundred and sixty eight sustaining moderate injuries. Mercifully, many Coventry citizens had made a habit of deserting the town during its night hours, and few of its air raid shelters were hit, but nine police constables died in the night's depredations. The main Daimler, Hunter Hillman and Alfred Herbert Ltd machine tool works and several naval and air ordinance factories had sustained damage.
On many other Earths, only a single Nazi bomber was shot down that night- but those worlds didn't have a huntress of the skies aloft like "Der Mitternachtsengel" as the shocked Luftwaffe pilots soon labelled her after they encountered her in air to air combat and discovered that their most deadly, highly professional and effective opponent was a woman. Rosalie expected to encounter some harsh discipline finally, when the plane that she'd comandeered finally taxied to a halt on the pitted but still operative RAF airfield. At which point, destiny took a decided turn. When she climbed from the cockpit, it was to cheers and applause, from both the surviving civilians and her fellow pilots. And then she undid her flight helmet and pulled it off, revealing her true identity. There was a moment of stunned silence and bewilderment, then the cheering and applause began again. Although she should have been reprimanded and perhaps imprisoned for what she had done, what she had also done was to avenge the civilian deaths that night and show courage and determination under fierce aerial bombardment.
And the denouement was inevitable. Two days later, she was escorted to London, to a meeting with Sir Winston Churchill and the Chiefs of Air Staff, to provide a debriefing on the circumstances of the raid and what she had witnessed in combat. It was invaluable, given her observation of detail and the configuration of the attacking Luftwaffe fighters. She had noticed that there had been a pathfinder aircraft in the vanguard, which seemed to have been inordinately interested in the night's targets. She had a reasonable grasp of the science involved and the Chiefs of Air Staff took her seriously. She also provided them with calculations of the heavy ordinance bombs that the Luftwaffe had dropped. All of which led to a special dispensation. For the duration of the Second World War, Rosalie Ashley, later nicknamed "Midnight Angel" by her admirers as well as those who feared her prowess, discipline and fortitude on the Nazi side of the aerial war, was the RAF's only female fighter pilot.
AUGUST 1943: JERSEY, CHANNEL ISLANDS:
"You mean, this Mavis Rupprecht character escaped from the Amazon Reformation Island? But I thought that was supposed to be impregnable."
Her colleague Britannia (the Amazon Penthesilea) sighed as she shook her head:
"I believe that she played her captors and after she'd done that, she killed a prison guard. From what our new ally Paula has told us, Rupprecht had an unhealthy relationship with her while Paula was being coerced to serve the Reich, given that they held her daughter Gerta captive. But beneath the velvet dresses, Rupprecht was a hardened covert operative herself, placed within Paula's retinue to keep her supervisor under surveillance. I take it you've heard of the Leipzig Academy.'
Rosalie nodded: "So, Penny, are you saying Mavis Rupprecht is one of that lot? Blazes."
"I fear that if she is allowed to return to the Reich, she will share crucial information with her overlords."
"No wonder Winston sent us to deal with this. From all accounts, she used a trick to subdue even Wonder Woman. The Princess was trying to locate a covert Axis operative base in Northern Maine, run by a former member of turncoat Nazi sympathiser William Pelley's Silver Shirts, one Leon Dexter. Using information that she'd gained about our common weakness, she precipitated an incident where Wonder Woman went beserk, throwing her tormentor Mavis through a window."
"If she is from the Academy, then she's got to be recaptured. But why here, on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands?"
"I fear the worst, Rosalie. She may be trying to show her superiors that her Academy place was justified and that she's every bit as barbaric as her male counterparts."
Midnight Angel nodded: "I've never been under any illusions about what our sex might be capable of. Sadly, Penny, not every woman is as principled and independent as you Amazons."
"Trouble, amiga. My invisible plane has detected a large missile emplacement on the island. It looks like our intelligence sources were right."
"Leave it to me, Penny."
"I wish that infernal Spear of Destiny were not disrupting my Amazon heritage and prowess, sister, or I would join you in an instant."
"Ah, but I don't have your abilities, my friend."
"No, Rosalie, only courage, fortitude, keen intellect and a strong right hook, as our mutual friend Mr Grant would put it."
"I'm going to make Rupprecht sorry she ever lifted her arm to salute that murderous madman with the toothbrush moustache."
In black camouflague and under an ebony parachute, Midnight Angel's presence lived up to her namesake. Alighting, she hid her parachute, donned a gas mask and ran stealthily toward the installation. With a cosh, she hit the sole guard on duty and drew her pistol. She heard the sound of another weapon being drawn and dived for cover as a fusillade of bullets gouged fragments from the rock wall behind her: "Come out of there, Englander!"
"Mavis Rupprecht, I assume? Too cowardly to face me without a gun, are we?"
"Do not try my patience, woman! I have faced the mighty Wonder Woman herself and almost prevailed."
"That's not how I heard it. You were defeated twice! Once through your own stupidity, at that."
"I will not allow you to sacrifice this project!"
"Did you really think it would go undetected? You really are a disgusting piece of work, Rupprecht. Nazi elite warrior? So you think it's justifiable launching a chemical V weapon at London and killing millions with Sarin poison gas? All because your boyfriend died in a shoot out at that spy base across the Atlantic?"
"Do not mention Leon Dexter's name!"
"You're a wilful exhibitionist, Rupprecht. I'll stop you if it's the last thing I do!"
"That may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, witch!" Angered at Midnight Angel's taunting, Mavis Rupprecht fired another row of shots at the direction of her voice. Except that given that the Channel Islands had once and would again be a British frontier outpost, she wasn't there. Having calculated where Rupprecht was, Midnight Angel crept above the balcony where the crazed, wild-haired Nazi agent had based herself. Hmm, interesting. Either this was supreme Nazi arrogance, only stationing a single guard there to protect Rupprecht, or foolish overconfidence in the Leipzig graduate's own boastful prowess as a 'strategic asset.' And then, Rosalie leapt, tackling Rupprecht, who struggled against her surprise assailant:
"Ach! Der Mitternachtsengel! Tonight will be a coup for the Reich!"
"I'm glad to see my fame precedes me. Oh, and one other thing. The Amazons may believe women like you can be rehabilitated but I'm under no illusions about your real character and depravity."
"Do not lecture me!"
"Why? Because you think you were posted here as some sort of privilege?"
"What else would you call it? I, Mavis Rupprecht, will be the one to wipe London and its defiant inhabitants off the map of Europe!"
"Ah. Thank you for confirming that."
As the two women grappled and landed blows on each other, Rupprecht managed:
"You are a tough fighter. As I have been told."
"As you will, Mavis. You're not safe home on German soil now. One of us will die tonight and it won't be me." Throwing Midnight Angel to one side, Mavis Rupprecht made a mad dash for the control panel where the missile launch sequence could be triggered. But Midnight Angel had been taught by the best and sprang again, before Rupprecht could avoid her. And then, coldly and efficiently, Rosalie Ashley broke Mavis Rupprecht's neck. With her pistol, she took aim at the console and destroyed it. A glistening ladder appeared behind her, as Britannia's invisible plane silently lifted the weapon from its launch area and the grateful pilot rejoined her Victory Legion colleague in the cockpit. When the Nazi detachment noticed what was happening, it was too late to intervene. The invisible plane accelerated away and a few seagulls and crustaceans were the only victims of the abortive poison gas V weapon as it detonated harmlessly several hundred miles to the southwest on an uninhabited island.
In Washington, Wonder Woman received the news that Mavis Rupprecht had been 'neutralised.' She knew what that meant, even if she regretted the necessity of the action behind those words.
JANUARY 1945: ILSE HAGEN:
What she saw in the camp turned her stomach. Midnight Angel was under no illusions about the character of this sadist either. While Mavis Rupprecht had at least been trained under the iron discipline of the Reich's Leipzig Academy, Kommandant Ilse Hagen was infamous for her brutality and ruthlessness toward male and female inmates, especially prisoners of war. She gloried in torture and castrated some of her male POWs after they had failed to satisfy her voracious sexual appetite. Decapitation, burial alive, the restoration of barbarisms thought to have been left behind in the darkness of the medieval era. Well, then. Messalina and Erzebet Bathory had fallen before her, and tonight, their latter day daughter would join them. A whip crackled near her:
"Turn and face me!"
"Not so loud, Hagen. You're not facing one of your servile SS boys now."
"Why should I not take what I want? I am an Aryan woman and a warrior! I will prevail."
"Your much-vaunted Third Reich is dying around you, Hagen. And you'll join it, soon."
"What is your name? I want to know it before I sunder your head from your shoulders!"
"Does the name Mitternachtsengel ring any bells?" As she flattened herself on the ground, Midnight Angel noticed that a loop of Hagen's whip had snagged on one of the barbed wire fence posts. She leapt forward, unsnagged the loop and pulled forward, leaving Hagen to stumble toward her:
"Then hell will have a new inmate tonight!"
"I wouldn't be that eager to get there, Ilse."
"I know what you did to Mavis Rupprecht, Englischer, but you will not end my life tonight."
"What are you trying to prove, Hagen, that women can be as soulless, corrupt and evil as men? You're coming in alive, this time. You will face a war crimes tribunal and you will pay for what you've done here over all these years of Nazi insanity."
"Do not sneer at me, churl."
"It's over, Hagen. You haven't had reinforcements here for months and your would-be protectors are callow, inexperienced boys while the remnants of your glorious army are fighting and dying on the Eastern Front."
"I will not surrender! I will never surrender!" From her greatcoat, Ilse Hagen produced a pistol and levelled it at Midnight Angel.
"Don't force me to do this, Hagen. Don't cheat the families of your victims of your humiliation and fall and exposure of your depravity and cruelty."
Ilse Hagen's face broke into a grim smile: "Or will it be you? Will I be the one to end the icarus-flight of the Midnight Angel herself?"
The two women fired simultaneously, but when the smoke and ash of the battlefield cleared, it was Rosalie Ashley who stood over Ilse Hagen's twisted body, her face twisted in one last, defiant animal snarl of defiance, hatred and rage.
FEBRUARY 1945: DRESDEN.
And so it came about that one dark and stormy Spring night in early February 1945, several hundred USAF and RAF aircraft, including one woman, took off for a top-secret mission well inside Germany itself, past the relative safety of liberated France and the battlefields of the Netherlands and Belgium, where the D-Day offensive had slowed to a gradual Allied western front advance as the Nazi behemoth started to fall apart, exhausted by six long years of futile struggle, its wartime empire gone and its defences reduced to Hitler Youth and elderly veterans of an earlier global conflict. As the squadrons passed from Allied territory, remaining anti-aircraft artillery opened up as the fragmented Luftwaffe struggled to get its Messerschmitt jets into the air to defend their dying, embatted homeland. But it was all to little avail. While a number of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealander pilots perished en route, soon their objective became obvious.
Dresden. Despite the arduous conditions of total war, it was still a major German industrial and financial hub. Its electric trams still ran, its market stalls still thronged with activity even if some of them had to substitute more stygian goods for the usual fruit, meat and vegetables. In one concession to the ominous future awaiting the city, movie theatres had been closed; in another, throngs of soldiers and ordinance flowed through the city to the eastern front, now within Germany's borders as the Red Army avenged the ordeals that had beset them for the last four years since Hitler launched his ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the fact that an earlier empire-builder, Napoleon, had foundered on an earlier attempt to subdue an earlier incarnation of absolutist Russia. Dresden had been hit before, in 1944 and earlier in 1945, the target the military marshalling yards in Friedrichstrasse and several hundred lives had been lost. Children were making their way to school, and the elegant shopping precincts of Neustadt and Pragerstrasse still held their treasures to those who could afford them. The legendary Pfunds Molkerei confectionary shop still dazzled the very young and not so young alike, while the vineyards of Schloss Ekberg could be relied upon to provide a heady vintage for those so inclined.
But if one looked closer, there were signs of pathological abnormality. There were shops boarded up, the debris and burnt timber and masonry of synagogues subjected to arson, demolition and vandalism as the Nazis turned on the Jewish inhabitants of the city and deported those that they could apprehend to the death camps within Poland and elsewhere within the Third Reich. Gauleiter Martin Muschmann had controlled the city for almost a decade, presiding over the onset of the Holocaust, purging communists, social democrats and other subversives from the civic environs and even attracting the susceptible within its future foes, such as Edward Duke of Windsor, the Nazi sympathiser who had once been Edward VIII of the United Kingdom before abandoning his erstwhile kingdom to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson and entering exile away from his former realm. However, beneath the shining exterior of architectural magnificence such as the former Court House of the imperial era and the once sumptuous Continental Hotel lay torture, depravity and barbarism, for the Gestapo interrogated its prisoners and suspects there.
And while some of the RAF and USAF believed earnestly that they were only targeting the ordinance factories and military ancillary industries within the city, RAF Air Chief Marshal and head of Bomber Command Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris was an advocate of total war. Given the terror that London and other major British cities had endured from Luftwaffe air raids and more recently, the V weapons launched from the faltering Nazi toehold in the still occupied provinces of the Netherlands, Harris was in no mood to be lenient now that he could unleash the full fury of Allied aerial warfare on the city below. Some might argue that retaliation and saturation bombing would not bring the dead of London, Birmingham and Manchester, amongst other besieged metropolitan centres, back, but then compassion and restraint are elusive qualities during a time of total war.
And thus it was that Rosalie Ashley, the RAF's Midnight Angel, air ace and feared figure amongst her Axis adversaries, watched on in horror and disbelief as her companions in arms dropped massive ordinance down on avowedly civilian targets, demolishing the historic Semper Opera House and the Catholic and Lutheran cathedrals (the gothic Frauenkirche). Groundbusters tore apart the Neumarkt and Altmarkt commercial districts, the Central Theatre, Pragerstrasse and the Central Railway Station. She heard the order to head to a higher altitude as she watched the discharged burning debris, masonry, ignited fuel, flammable chemicals and wood develop into a firestorm that spread out, asphyxiating and burning alive even those who had sought sanctuary in Dresden's air raid shelters. Altogether, that grim night, 25,000 people are estimated to have perished.
EPILOGUE:
Reportedly, even British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and an array of cross-partisan MPs were aghast at the night's devastation and immediate consequences, but Bomber Harris was unrepentant. RAF medical officers saw and treated some of the more guilt-ridden and self-recriminating members of the RAF and USAF that had participated in the Dresden raid. For several weeks afterward, Rosalie Ashley avoided contact with Georg von Tregor, the Horned Owl, who had defected from Nazi Germany and who had lost his son Wilhelm, the young and innocent Fledermaus, to Nazi barbarism and brutality. And yet, Rosalie asked herself tearfully, was she any better? Although she had dropped her share of bombs on military and industrial targets only, the fact remained that her actions had contributed to what she considered a morally monstrous act.
Ironically enough, though, that very same Horned Owl had experienced his own metaphorical road to Damascus, providing assistance to Blitz victims in London and elsewhere in the embattled United Kingdom. He had seen his share of wounded elderly civilians and dead and dying children, screams as suburban houses burnt down with occupants that they couldn't rescue- and, above all, there was the spectre of the knowledge of the Holocaust and its far greater depredations. As he witnessed Rosalie's tears, anguish and heartache, he yearned to go to her, hold her and tell her that the very fact that she mourned what she had contributed to was a sign of her high moral calibre and quality. But he wondered whether she would accept his comfort, or repudiate him. Like him, she had endured the loss of a close family member. Yes, children had died in Dresden, but they had also died as a result of Nazi bombardment from aerial warfare and there were the untold number of Jewish children who had perished in the furnaces of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He had deliberately blinded himself to the charnel house behind the theatrics and appeals to facile patriotism and therefore, he asked himself, was he worthy of such a strong, magnificent, compassionate warrior who wept for her adversaries?
Fortunately, only a matter of months later, the cankered and wounded obscenity that was Nazi Germany finally collapsed, amidst the apotheosis of pretentious 'ubermensches' both literal and metaphorical, and amidst the gotterdamerung, a wounded and lonely woman and man found one another at last and confessed their respect, admiration and love for one another. But that is another story.
THE END [2.46 PM, JANUARY 4, 2023]
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COVENTRY, 14 NOVEMBER 1940 :
Rosalie Ashley was once a war worker, one of the innumerable "Rosie the Riveters" who laboured in home front industries while most men were away at the battlefield, and so she might have remained except for a singular tragedy. She was working near Coventry, where her father was a Church of England vicar and long since retired Royal Air Force veteran from the First World War. Rosalie was his only child, and definitely a 'tomboy' in her childhood. She listened, enraptured, to her father's stories about the glories and hardship of aerial combat, and showed an early flare for engineering, mathematics and aeronautics. Except that on that fateful night in mid-November 1940, her home town descended into the pit of hell. And then she'd seen it, her father's church aflame, when he was supposed to be holding Sunday services. She tried to get through to the burning city, but no-one would let her through. And then something cold and hard gripped her inside, and her anger roared into determination and resolve. Finding a fallen air force officer, she abandoned her war worker's smock, pulled on his leather flight jacket and goggles and did her hair up so that no-one would detect her real gender as she grabbed his flight keys from his prone corpse.
And her ruse went undetected as the cold equations and her own indomitable will propelled her into the plane's cockpit. As the rotors ignited, she felt a sense of exhilaration as the power and majesty of the plane pervaded her. She pulled back the throttle as she soared aloft, eager and vengeful, intent on insuring that no-one else would die if she could help it. And help it, she did. Pretending that the ground radio apparatus in her plane had sustained damage during combat, she repeatedly struck out at the enemy that night, her valour, courage and perseverance impressing many of her unsuspecting colleagues as she avenged her father's death. Even so, history records that despite its inhabitants valour and courage, Coventry took a fearful toll. St Michaels Anglican Cathedral was set aflame, gas, water and electricity utilities were down, and the incendiary and petroleum ordinance used had destroyed roofs and turned the inner city into a firestorm. Despite the valour of the RAF and ground anti-aircraft artillery, the loss of life was less than one might have fought, but 568 people had perished in the destruction. Eight hundred and sixty three had been badly injured, with three hundred and sixty eight sustaining moderate injuries. Mercifully, many Coventry citizens had made a habit of deserting the town during its night hours, and few of its air raid shelters were hit, but nine police constables died in the night's depredations. The main Daimler, Hunter Hillman and Alfred Herbert Ltd machine tool works and several naval and air ordinance factories had sustained damage.
On many other Earths, only a single Nazi bomber was shot down that night- but those worlds didn't have a huntress of the skies aloft like "Der Mitternachtsengel" as the shocked Luftwaffe pilots soon labelled her after they encountered her in air to air combat and discovered that their most deadly, highly professional and effective opponent was a woman. Rosalie expected to encounter some harsh discipline finally, when the plane that she'd comandeered finally taxied to a halt on the pitted but still operative RAF airfield. At which point, destiny took a decided turn. When she climbed from the cockpit, it was to cheers and applause, from both the surviving civilians and her fellow pilots. And then she undid her flight helmet and pulled it off, revealing her true identity. There was a moment of stunned silence and bewilderment, then the cheering and applause began again. Although she should have been reprimanded and perhaps imprisoned for what she had done, what she had also done was to avenge the civilian deaths that night and show courage and determination under fierce aerial bombardment.
And the denouement was inevitable. Two days later, she was escorted to London, to a meeting with Sir Winston Churchill and the Chiefs of Air Staff, to provide a debriefing on the circumstances of the raid and what she had witnessed in combat. It was invaluable, given her observation of detail and the configuration of the attacking Luftwaffe fighters. She had noticed that there had been a pathfinder aircraft in the vanguard, which seemed to have been inordinately interested in the night's targets. She had a reasonable grasp of the science involved and the Chiefs of Air Staff took her seriously. She also provided them with calculations of the heavy ordinance bombs that the Luftwaffe had dropped. All of which led to a special dispensation. For the duration of the Second World War, Rosalie Ashley, later nicknamed "Midnight Angel" by her admirers as well as those who feared her prowess, discipline and fortitude on the Nazi side of the aerial war, was the RAF's only female fighter pilot.
AUGUST 1943: JERSEY, CHANNEL ISLANDS:
"You mean, this Mavis Rupprecht character escaped from the Amazon Reformation Island? But I thought that was supposed to be impregnable."
Her colleague Britannia (the Amazon Penthesilea) sighed as she shook her head:
"I believe that she played her captors and after she'd done that, she killed a prison guard. From what our new ally Paula has told us, Rupprecht had an unhealthy relationship with her while Paula was being coerced to serve the Reich, given that they held her daughter Gerta captive. But beneath the velvet dresses, Rupprecht was a hardened covert operative herself, placed within Paula's retinue to keep her supervisor under surveillance. I take it you've heard of the Leipzig Academy.'
Rosalie nodded: "So, Penny, are you saying Mavis Rupprecht is one of that lot? Blazes."
"I fear that if she is allowed to return to the Reich, she will share crucial information with her overlords."
"No wonder Winston sent us to deal with this. From all accounts, she used a trick to subdue even Wonder Woman. The Princess was trying to locate a covert Axis operative base in Northern Maine, run by a former member of turncoat Nazi sympathiser William Pelley's Silver Shirts, one Leon Dexter. Using information that she'd gained about our common weakness, she precipitated an incident where Wonder Woman went beserk, throwing her tormentor Mavis through a window."
"If she is from the Academy, then she's got to be recaptured. But why here, on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands?"
"I fear the worst, Rosalie. She may be trying to show her superiors that her Academy place was justified and that she's every bit as barbaric as her male counterparts."
Midnight Angel nodded: "I've never been under any illusions about what our sex might be capable of. Sadly, Penny, not every woman is as principled and independent as you Amazons."
"Trouble, amiga. My invisible plane has detected a large missile emplacement on the island. It looks like our intelligence sources were right."
"Leave it to me, Penny."
"I wish that infernal Spear of Destiny were not disrupting my Amazon heritage and prowess, sister, or I would join you in an instant."
"Ah, but I don't have your abilities, my friend."
"No, Rosalie, only courage, fortitude, keen intellect and a strong right hook, as our mutual friend Mr Grant would put it."
"I'm going to make Rupprecht sorry she ever lifted her arm to salute that murderous madman with the toothbrush moustache."
In black camouflague and under an ebony parachute, Midnight Angel's presence lived up to her namesake. Alighting, she hid her parachute, donned a gas mask and ran stealthily toward the installation. With a cosh, she hit the sole guard on duty and drew her pistol. She heard the sound of another weapon being drawn and dived for cover as a fusillade of bullets gouged fragments from the rock wall behind her: "Come out of there, Englander!"
"Mavis Rupprecht, I assume? Too cowardly to face me without a gun, are we?"
"Do not try my patience, woman! I have faced the mighty Wonder Woman herself and almost prevailed."
"That's not how I heard it. You were defeated twice! Once through your own stupidity, at that."
"I will not allow you to sacrifice this project!"
"Did you really think it would go undetected? You really are a disgusting piece of work, Rupprecht. Nazi elite warrior? So you think it's justifiable launching a chemical V weapon at London and killing millions with Sarin poison gas? All because your boyfriend died in a shoot out at that spy base across the Atlantic?"
"Do not mention Leon Dexter's name!"
"You're a wilful exhibitionist, Rupprecht. I'll stop you if it's the last thing I do!"
"That may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, witch!" Angered at Midnight Angel's taunting, Mavis Rupprecht fired another row of shots at the direction of her voice. Except that given that the Channel Islands had once and would again be a British frontier outpost, she wasn't there. Having calculated where Rupprecht was, Midnight Angel crept above the balcony where the crazed, wild-haired Nazi agent had based herself. Hmm, interesting. Either this was supreme Nazi arrogance, only stationing a single guard there to protect Rupprecht, or foolish overconfidence in the Leipzig graduate's own boastful prowess as a 'strategic asset.' And then, Rosalie leapt, tackling Rupprecht, who struggled against her surprise assailant:
"Ach! Der Mitternachtsengel! Tonight will be a coup for the Reich!"
"I'm glad to see my fame precedes me. Oh, and one other thing. The Amazons may believe women like you can be rehabilitated but I'm under no illusions about your real character and depravity."
"Do not lecture me!"
"Why? Because you think you were posted here as some sort of privilege?"
"What else would you call it? I, Mavis Rupprecht, will be the one to wipe London and its defiant inhabitants off the map of Europe!"
"Ah. Thank you for confirming that."
As the two women grappled and landed blows on each other, Rupprecht managed:
"You are a tough fighter. As I have been told."
"As you will, Mavis. You're not safe home on German soil now. One of us will die tonight and it won't be me." Throwing Midnight Angel to one side, Mavis Rupprecht made a mad dash for the control panel where the missile launch sequence could be triggered. But Midnight Angel had been taught by the best and sprang again, before Rupprecht could avoid her. And then, coldly and efficiently, Rosalie Ashley broke Mavis Rupprecht's neck. With her pistol, she took aim at the console and destroyed it. A glistening ladder appeared behind her, as Britannia's invisible plane silently lifted the weapon from its launch area and the grateful pilot rejoined her Victory Legion colleague in the cockpit. When the Nazi detachment noticed what was happening, it was too late to intervene. The invisible plane accelerated away and a few seagulls and crustaceans were the only victims of the abortive poison gas V weapon as it detonated harmlessly several hundred miles to the southwest on an uninhabited island.
In Washington, Wonder Woman received the news that Mavis Rupprecht had been 'neutralised.' She knew what that meant, even if she regretted the necessity of the action behind those words.
JANUARY 1945: ILSE HAGEN:
What she saw in the camp turned her stomach. Midnight Angel was under no illusions about the character of this sadist either. While Mavis Rupprecht had at least been trained under the iron discipline of the Reich's Leipzig Academy, Kommandant Ilse Hagen was infamous for her brutality and ruthlessness toward male and female inmates, especially prisoners of war. She gloried in torture and castrated some of her male POWs after they had failed to satisfy her voracious sexual appetite. Decapitation, burial alive, the restoration of barbarisms thought to have been left behind in the darkness of the medieval era. Well, then. Messalina and Erzebet Bathory had fallen before her, and tonight, their latter day daughter would join them. A whip crackled near her:
"Turn and face me!"
"Not so loud, Hagen. You're not facing one of your servile SS boys now."
"Why should I not take what I want? I am an Aryan woman and a warrior! I will prevail."
"Your much-vaunted Third Reich is dying around you, Hagen. And you'll join it, soon."
"What is your name? I want to know it before I sunder your head from your shoulders!"
"Does the name Mitternachtsengel ring any bells?" As she flattened herself on the ground, Midnight Angel noticed that a loop of Hagen's whip had snagged on one of the barbed wire fence posts. She leapt forward, unsnagged the loop and pulled forward, leaving Hagen to stumble toward her:
"Then hell will have a new inmate tonight!"
"I wouldn't be that eager to get there, Ilse."
"I know what you did to Mavis Rupprecht, Englischer, but you will not end my life tonight."
"What are you trying to prove, Hagen, that women can be as soulless, corrupt and evil as men? You're coming in alive, this time. You will face a war crimes tribunal and you will pay for what you've done here over all these years of Nazi insanity."
"Do not sneer at me, churl."
"It's over, Hagen. You haven't had reinforcements here for months and your would-be protectors are callow, inexperienced boys while the remnants of your glorious army are fighting and dying on the Eastern Front."
"I will not surrender! I will never surrender!" From her greatcoat, Ilse Hagen produced a pistol and levelled it at Midnight Angel.
"Don't force me to do this, Hagen. Don't cheat the families of your victims of your humiliation and fall and exposure of your depravity and cruelty."
Ilse Hagen's face broke into a grim smile: "Or will it be you? Will I be the one to end the icarus-flight of the Midnight Angel herself?"
The two women fired simultaneously, but when the smoke and ash of the battlefield cleared, it was Rosalie Ashley who stood over Ilse Hagen's twisted body, her face twisted in one last, defiant animal snarl of defiance, hatred and rage.
FEBRUARY 1945: DRESDEN.
And so it came about that one dark and stormy Spring night in early February 1945, several hundred USAF and RAF aircraft, including one woman, took off for a top-secret mission well inside Germany itself, past the relative safety of liberated France and the battlefields of the Netherlands and Belgium, where the D-Day offensive had slowed to a gradual Allied western front advance as the Nazi behemoth started to fall apart, exhausted by six long years of futile struggle, its wartime empire gone and its defences reduced to Hitler Youth and elderly veterans of an earlier global conflict. As the squadrons passed from Allied territory, remaining anti-aircraft artillery opened up as the fragmented Luftwaffe struggled to get its Messerschmitt jets into the air to defend their dying, embatted homeland. But it was all to little avail. While a number of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealander pilots perished en route, soon their objective became obvious.
Dresden. Despite the arduous conditions of total war, it was still a major German industrial and financial hub. Its electric trams still ran, its market stalls still thronged with activity even if some of them had to substitute more stygian goods for the usual fruit, meat and vegetables. In one concession to the ominous future awaiting the city, movie theatres had been closed; in another, throngs of soldiers and ordinance flowed through the city to the eastern front, now within Germany's borders as the Red Army avenged the ordeals that had beset them for the last four years since Hitler launched his ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the fact that an earlier empire-builder, Napoleon, had foundered on an earlier attempt to subdue an earlier incarnation of absolutist Russia. Dresden had been hit before, in 1944 and earlier in 1945, the target the military marshalling yards in Friedrichstrasse and several hundred lives had been lost. Children were making their way to school, and the elegant shopping precincts of Neustadt and Pragerstrasse still held their treasures to those who could afford them. The legendary Pfunds Molkerei confectionary shop still dazzled the very young and not so young alike, while the vineyards of Schloss Ekberg could be relied upon to provide a heady vintage for those so inclined.
But if one looked closer, there were signs of pathological abnormality. There were shops boarded up, the debris and burnt timber and masonry of synagogues subjected to arson, demolition and vandalism as the Nazis turned on the Jewish inhabitants of the city and deported those that they could apprehend to the death camps within Poland and elsewhere within the Third Reich. Gauleiter Martin Muschmann had controlled the city for almost a decade, presiding over the onset of the Holocaust, purging communists, social democrats and other subversives from the civic environs and even attracting the susceptible within its future foes, such as Edward Duke of Windsor, the Nazi sympathiser who had once been Edward VIII of the United Kingdom before abandoning his erstwhile kingdom to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson and entering exile away from his former realm. However, beneath the shining exterior of architectural magnificence such as the former Court House of the imperial era and the once sumptuous Continental Hotel lay torture, depravity and barbarism, for the Gestapo interrogated its prisoners and suspects there.
And while some of the RAF and USAF believed earnestly that they were only targeting the ordinance factories and military ancillary industries within the city, RAF Air Chief Marshal and head of Bomber Command Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris was an advocate of total war. Given the terror that London and other major British cities had endured from Luftwaffe air raids and more recently, the V weapons launched from the faltering Nazi toehold in the still occupied provinces of the Netherlands, Harris was in no mood to be lenient now that he could unleash the full fury of Allied aerial warfare on the city below. Some might argue that retaliation and saturation bombing would not bring the dead of London, Birmingham and Manchester, amongst other besieged metropolitan centres, back, but then compassion and restraint are elusive qualities during a time of total war.
And thus it was that Rosalie Ashley, the RAF's Midnight Angel, air ace and feared figure amongst her Axis adversaries, watched on in horror and disbelief as her companions in arms dropped massive ordinance down on avowedly civilian targets, demolishing the historic Semper Opera House and the Catholic and Lutheran cathedrals (the gothic Frauenkirche). Groundbusters tore apart the Neumarkt and Altmarkt commercial districts, the Central Theatre, Pragerstrasse and the Central Railway Station. She heard the order to head to a higher altitude as she watched the discharged burning debris, masonry, ignited fuel, flammable chemicals and wood develop into a firestorm that spread out, asphyxiating and burning alive even those who had sought sanctuary in Dresden's air raid shelters. Altogether, that grim night, 25,000 people are estimated to have perished.
EPILOGUE:
Reportedly, even British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and an array of cross-partisan MPs were aghast at the night's devastation and immediate consequences, but Bomber Harris was unrepentant. RAF medical officers saw and treated some of the more guilt-ridden and self-recriminating members of the RAF and USAF that had participated in the Dresden raid. For several weeks afterward, Rosalie Ashley avoided contact with Georg von Tregor, the Horned Owl, who had defected from Nazi Germany and who had lost his son Wilhelm, the young and innocent Fledermaus, to Nazi barbarism and brutality. And yet, Rosalie asked herself tearfully, was she any better? Although she had dropped her share of bombs on military and industrial targets only, the fact remained that her actions had contributed to what she considered a morally monstrous act.
Ironically enough, though, that very same Horned Owl had experienced his own metaphorical road to Damascus, providing assistance to Blitz victims in London and elsewhere in the embattled United Kingdom. He had seen his share of wounded elderly civilians and dead and dying children, screams as suburban houses burnt down with occupants that they couldn't rescue- and, above all, there was the spectre of the knowledge of the Holocaust and its far greater depredations. As he witnessed Rosalie's tears, anguish and heartache, he yearned to go to her, hold her and tell her that the very fact that she mourned what she had contributed to was a sign of her high moral calibre and quality. But he wondered whether she would accept his comfort, or repudiate him. Like him, she had endured the loss of a close family member. Yes, children had died in Dresden, but they had also died as a result of Nazi bombardment from aerial warfare and there were the untold number of Jewish children who had perished in the furnaces of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He had deliberately blinded himself to the charnel house behind the theatrics and appeals to facile patriotism and therefore, he asked himself, was he worthy of such a strong, magnificent, compassionate warrior who wept for her adversaries?
Fortunately, only a matter of months later, the cankered and wounded obscenity that was Nazi Germany finally collapsed, amidst the apotheosis of pretentious 'ubermensches' both literal and metaphorical, and amidst the gotterdamerung, a wounded and lonely woman and man found one another at last and confessed their respect, admiration and love for one another. But that is another story.
THE END [2.46 PM, JANUARY 4, 2023]