Next, Barbara flew the Mayfair over Munich, the industrial and cultural capital of Bavaria where Hitler had founded the Nazi party and set up his headquarters. Also heavily bombed, even the city's 500-year-old twin-towered cathedral was badly damaged.
Along the way, she became accustomed to the pings and creaks and other unexplainable noises of the Mayfair. She found the plane to be more serviceable than she had expected from an old lady of the war. No enemy planes or gunfire interrupted her flight, although she saw many Allied fighters and bombers going to and from the now quieting war zones.
Peace was finally being restored to the countries she was flying over. Only a few weeks before, in mid-April, Allied troops had gained control over the Nazis in most of Germany.
By May 2nd, all the one million German troops in Austria and Italy had surrendered.
Flying over the always beautiful Austrian Alps, the pastoral mountain and valley landscape looked little damaged, until Barbara saw the vast destruction below in Linz. The medieval port city on the Danube river had been an important target for Allied bombers because of its railroad junction and the iron and steel works and machinery factories there.
Nothing, however, prepared Barbara for the devastation she saw the war had brought to the magnificent Austrian capital of Vienna. She had only to see the damage done to its 800-year-old Cathedral of St. Stephen, even without it reminding her of her beloved, to almost cry at what had become of the once beautiful city where Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Johann Strauss had written their glorious music. Only a few weeks before, the Russians had liberated the city which had been occupied by Napoleon over a hundred years earlier.
Barbara had long since lost the belief, first held when she was a recruit ferrying bombers in America, that war was an exciting adventure. Being in England during the Blitz of London, she had seen war up close. There was only fear and misery in it. Now from above she had seen its destruction on a grand scale from Normandy to the heart of Austria. She could only imagine how much more terrible the bombings and fires had been on the cities below.
Every mile Barbara had flown over the war-ravaged countries made her heart pound, wondering if Stephen was lying wounded below somewhere, or worse. The fear of that was intensified when she reached Vienna and looked down to see the damage done to the Cathedral of St. Stephen.
She silently prayed that her Stephen's life had been spared.
Her Stephen? Was he that now? Would he be hers, at last? The widespread destruction Barbara saw from above also made her more angry at those who fed the flames of war, such as Chet Armstrong, to whom war was just a business, as he had admitted.