What you're about to read is about my father, and what he did on a certain day of a certain month of a certain year during that war.
On that day, a Sunday, my father did things that to us now are simply too shocking to be believed. But I'm here to tell you: they MUST be believed.
And I am here to tell you why.
To understand my story, it is not necessary to know any special historical facts, or technical items, or names and places or languages or nationalities or indeed, anything at all beyond that which most of us encounter in the course of our daily lives. Except that for my father, on the day in question, Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1944—there were a few chores to attend to before he could get back to the comfortable domestic tranquilities of his daily life.
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First, a few notes.
The “Mission" of the title of this work is a bombing mission that was actually flown by American forces based in England against Germany on December 25, 1944—its official title was "Mission 760."
My father was a Radio Operator in a 10-man crew of a B-24 heavy 4-engined bomber (distinct from the better known B-17 by having twin tails) based in the county of Norfolk, England.
This story is underpinned by intensive research of the actual events of that day,
historical background, my father's recorded recollections, and most importantly, the dozens and dozens of memoirs and accounts by the very men who were part of that monstrous forces that are portrayed in these pages.
However, this is not a history of the events written in the traditional manner.
I did not want to simply recite fact after fact after quote after unquote—let others do it that way. I am not a historian and neither am I an author; I am here as someone who has an interest in the tale being told; he is, after all, my father.
My father's thoughts, as they occur, are in italics. His spoken words also appear in italics.
But be warned: in my vision of his world, some creative liberties with the English language have been taken. This is not the English you remember from Miss Peyton's class.
All the names, where known, are the actual names of the people and places.
I took exceptional care never to forget that, in the place of things I
am imagining happened, for the people in this story the things that happened to
them that day were all too real.
This story is based on the actual events of a World War II bombing mission flown by the writer's father, a Radio Operator with the 8th Army Air Corps' 467th Bomb Group on December 24, 1944. While the historical details of the mission are accurate to the best of the writer's knowledge, the thoughts, dialogue, and sensory experiences of the characters are fictionalized to bring the story to life.
M iami Beach and the sun is just blinding. You're on Collins Avenue outside the Cadillac Hotel thinking maybe you should head on to the beach because there's no marching today, thank God—or maybe not, 'cause what has He done for you lately?
Someone's coming towards you on the sidewalk . . . hmm, he looks familiar! Christ, it's Raymond from Dunster House! What's he doing here?
He's looking worried as he gets closer. “Hey, Russ, didja forget the test?” He's wearing his blue parka with that stupid varsity patch. Why's he wearing his parka? It's hot as hell. “The test!” he says again. “Ol' Bartlett's gonna be sore if we're late!” But you haven't studied at all, you tell him. You've been marching. Suddenly you realise that you're going to fail the test because they made you march and now you're late, as well, and Class is—where's Class? The corridor is impossibly long, and you've forgotten which room it's in. Oh, Jesus, but that doesn't matter, because Rita and her best friend are asking you if you'll be at the dance tonight.
That's right! It's Saturday and there's a dance tonight, and all the English girls from Norwich are coming, so you'd better make sure your uniform—
“Sir?”
You feel the pressure of fingers giving your shoulder a small but firm shake.
“Sir? You're flying today, sir.”
It takes you a second or two to process the information, but when you do, the dream-tendrils instantly vanish.
You blink a few times and then, in the faint light, you see the round face of Mason, the CQ—Charge of Quarters—who is a guy that manages your huts and makes sure everything is shipshape behind the scenes for you and your crewmates. Unfortunately, he's also the one responsible for waking you up before a mission.
You sleepily grunt to show him you're awake, and he moves to the bunk next to yours to wake up Hubbard.
You're still a little fuzzy. What the fuck time is it? But you know what time it is: 3 a.m. Oh man, Miami Beach . . . you want to be back at Miami Beach. You lie there for a moment trying to remember your dream. But you can't.
The hut begins to stir with the sounds of the men waking up, and you know you still have a few minutes before you have to shift. You think about last night, when it was confirmed today's mission was on. You were having a beer with O'Connell, the Engineer, and a guy from another crew—Peterkin, Peterson, you can't remember. The door being barged open and Dornan, the Group Ops Officer, standing there with his clipboard, barking “Listen UP!” and the groans as everyone in the room realised what that meant.
Of course, you'd been expecting it. Missions didn't just sprout like dandelions, fully formed and ready to be picked. The higher-ups had to roundtable it, then the viziers and satraps had to concretise it, then the shamans and wisemen had to pass their wands and scepters over all the various Groups, Wings, Squadrons and—
“Robbie! Your shaving cream! Hello! Can I borrow it?” It's Hubbard, razor in hand, looking at you owlishly. You tell him Sure. Just leave you some. You might need it tomorrow.
Or I might not.
Suddenly something washes over you and pulls your heart down to your stomach in a clutch of cold—not exactly fear, more like . . . sorrow—when you process the full reality of what you're going to do—where you're going to be.
Fuck . . . twenty thousand feet . . .
It comes with what feels like a steel band around your head as you think you might never wake up again, you might never be having any more dreams, that this world will all be gone for you by this time tomorrow.
No, it won't happen, your rapidly-awakening brain counters furiously, fighting the thoughts.
But you know it might.
No way to know if it's gonna happen. What's gonna happen. There's no law. There's just chance. The luck of the draw.
Gotta do what you gotta do, comes the voice, the voice that makes it possible for you to actually do what it is that you know you have to do. You know that if you don't, someone else will have to do it.
This always happens before a mission. You know it's coming, so every time you're just that teensy bit more armored, more able to shrug it off. Because you have to shrug it off.
But it doesn't want to be shrugged off. It's impossible, you think tightly. This can't be happening! I'm only 22. My life has just begun.
Then you think: I've gotta keep it together. If I lose it, then it's all over. I can't be the only one who's scared. We're all scared. Even Mose is scared. John Moseley is the pilot of your crew. He's in charge of what happens up there. If he tells you to stay in the plane, you stay in the plane.
But he's also your friend. They all are. Mose and you have often talked about the possibilities. But you've agreed that the better everyone does their job, the better the chances that you'll all come home. Just one mistake can make everything unravel. That's all it takes—one guy not paying attention, one procedure not followed, one switch not thrown—everyone goes down.
Everyone has to trust everyone else, because you're playing with your lives. Mose always reminds everyone of this when you happen to all be in one place that is not the interior of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber.
Not that anyone needs reminding. Uh-uh, comes the thought. They do. They constantly need reminding.
You're happy to do the reminding when Mose is not around. Although you're not the oldest—Mose is, by a hair—you're the intellectual. No one else has gone to college except you. Sometimes they jokingly call you Perfesser but every time there's an argument they come to you, because you usually have the answer. And when they tell you Hey, Robbie, talk some Latin, you're happy to oblige with some Ad hoc! Ex post facto ergo propter sum! Sui generis in situ, et tu, Brute! and for the grand finale, Et furthermoris, ad infininauseam!
And you're happy to take their money on Poker Nights.
Right. Off we go.
You sit up and use your feet to find your slippers. It's fucking cold! England in December; and this winter, 1944, is one of the coldest on record.
You get dressed pretty quickly so you'll be ahead of the pack in the mess hall. You wash your face and then shave, very carefully. You want that oxygen mask to fit—very tightly.
You put on your fur-collared leather jacket and head out into the frigid blackout darkness, smoking your first of many, many cigarettes. After you stamp it out you jump on one of the bicycles that are always outside the hut door.
At the mess you get in the chow line. Since it's a mission day, you get real eggs, not those ghastly powdered square things that would gag a buzzard. Luckily, you rarely have to eat them, because you can buy real ones for a shilling from some of those itinerant farmer-pedlars who hang around the base fence. You fry 'em up with the hut coal stove and they're pretty good, if you don't mind saying so yourself!
Some of the guys have such crippling pre-mission heebie-jeebies that they can't eat even a corner of a slice of toast, but no one hassles them for it. Things can get mighty exciting up there and the last thing you want is an overactive tummy.
This doesn't seem to be a problem for you, but you still don't eat a lot. The rest of your crew are all luckily pretty level-headed, but you've all talked about your fears, and everyone knows that if anyone's somehow having a hard time, someone else will cover for him.
Coffee. Strong. Black. That, and another cigarette, of course.
There's desultory conversation among the crews. You look around and see that the room is more crowded than you've ever seen it.
You're sitting next to a gunner in the 791st Squadron, and you strike up a chat. You're in the 790th. Almost chums. He tells you what he's heard: that today every plane in the group is going up. Jesus! No wonder it's so crowded. He doesn't know the exact destination but he thinks it's in support of the guys on the ground.
Then he starts shaking his head. He looks down at his food. You ask what's wrong.
“Assembly,” he says. “It's gonna be hell up there with 61 planes. I ain't never done assembly with 61 planes.”
Oh man. A sort of prickling sensation sweeps you from head to toe as what he just said sinks in.
Assembly is terrifying. You still don't know how they do it. It's after everyone has taken off, and they have to go in circles while the various formations in the group get into their pre-assigned positions. It's insanely complicated—the pilots have to position their planes in these patterns that will supposedly present the most firepower against incoming fighters, while also minimising prop-wash—those chaotic disturbances in the currents of air aloft that a plane's propellers leave in their wake, seriously threatening the stability of any planes that somehow find themselves suddenly behind them.
You've seen the diagrams that the pilots have to follow and the whole thing looks like some kind of three-dimensional chess game. The top layer of planes form a sort of V-shape, slightly forward and to the left of the next layer which is, like, 200 feet below them . . . then the next layer down is a three-plane “V,” where the second plane is aligned with the tail of the point plane, but 20 yards below and to the right, while the third plane—
But the most awful moments occur when, depending on the cloud base, whole groups of planes can suddenly disappear during assembly, leading to those heart-stopping instances when the whiteness of the cloud is suddenly replaced by the appearance of the tip of another plane's wing just feet from your window . . . so close you swear you can count the rivets.
When it's done and all the planes are in their correct positions, you see how it makes sense . . . on paper.
Jesus, you think. Chess . . . with 61 planes. The vision of the scything propellers of a B-24 appearing as if by magic just inches away from your wingtip seems to finally drop the bottom out of your ability to reason. (No more breakfasts. No more hut, no more cigarettes, no more mornings, no mor—) NO!
You clamp down viciously on the fear. NO! No. I'm stronger than you, you think deliberately, reasonably. I'm stronger, you fucker. Get the fuck outta here. The disturbing miasma slowly recedes.
You turn to the gunner. You play chess? you ask him.
“Naw,” he replies, thickly. “I play checkers.”
Well, think of it like a giant checkers game in the sky, you suggest. You know how the pieces move, how you jump them?
He nods slowly. Well, it's not so hard to add more pieces, as long as you know the rules, you explain matter-of-factly, not having a clue what you're talking about, only how reasonable it sounds.
You hold up your pack of cigarettes. He takes one. You take one too, and with your butane lighter, you light his, then yours.
Don't worry, man, you tell him cheerfully. I'm gonna be right up there with you.
This seems to break the hold of apprehension that's been gripping him. He turns and grins weakly. “Truax. Johnny Truax. But they call me Tru.”
Russ Robinson, you tell him as you shake his hand. But they all call me Robbie.
Introductions made, the gunner seems to relax somewhat. Someone he knows squeezes in on the other side of him, and his attention is turned away. Good.
You lean back in your chair, blowing the occasional smoke ring, eyes half-closed. You'll go when your cigarette's finished, but for now you let your thoughts drift and let yourself be soothed by the somehow-comforting susurration of mens' voices filling the room. The voices are calm, subdued. No one's laughing.
You listen absently to the snatches of conversation, noting the sheer numbers of drawls, burrs and twangs that pepper the words, all so distinctive, yet, all so American:“—so she told me that from now on I'm not gonna put up with your constant—” “—and when the engine block is real warm, the bolt comes loose much easier than—""—aw, come on, Shelby, I ain't tellin you he was gonna really pull outta formation, I'm—” “—damn, my buddy Reno gets better chow in the Navy, ah mean lookit this shit never seen no chicken—”
You tune out. Sixty-one crews . . . the entire goddamn Group!—610 men, maybe all of whom are in this room. Probably not more than a few above the age of 25, but lots just 18—just out of high school. Probably quite a few even younger who lied about their age. The mind rebels. There's a 17-year-old kid on one of these ships, maybe with a 50-calibre? Crazy.
In just a few hours you'll be up there. It's so hard to grasp. But you must grasp it. You let yourself be consoled that you'll be too busy to be scared. But you know that's a lie. You're never too busy to be scared. Then you tell yourself that, who cares, you never see the one that gets you.
Except that's a lie, too. You'll sure as fuck see the one that gets you, because it'll probably be in the belly and you'll be shrieking as you try to put your intes—SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP shut— . . . . UP— . . . !
It takes a couple of minutes to straighten yourself out but by then it's time to go. You drain your coffee and push your chair back.
The gunner's friend has gone and he's just sitting there, staring into space. He doesn't seem to notice your movements.
You tap his shoulder. See you up there, Cap'n.
He starts, then turns to squint up at you. You should really salute him, as per Col. Shower's regulations, but since this isn't a movie, you don't.
“Bobbie, right?” he says as you put on your cap and squash out your cigarette and turn to go. That's right, you tell him, not caring that it isn't.
He suddenly catches your jacket sleeve. “Say—thanks, Bobbie. Thanks a lot.”
This time you furl your brow into a frown and snap your right hand to your forehead in a crisp, textbook salute. Give 'em Hell, Gunny-sergeant! you say, like John Wayne in Flying Tigers.
He realises you're putting him on. No one ever really salutes anyone around here. He bursts out laughing, and so do you.
There, you think, glancing around the room. Now someone's laughing!
You say goodbye to the gunner and tell him you'll see him at 20,000 feet.
Then you make your way to the door and step into the night.
Surly Indeed
Y our boots crunch in the frost-capped grass and inevitably you feel that tap on your shoulder. Joe Pilarski, the tail gunner. He usually skips breakfast altogether on mission days and he sometimes waits for you outside the tent so he can go with you to the general briefing.
He's impossibly young: just 18 compared to your 22, and you know he looks up to you, although you can't think why. Hell, he's always alone in his glass bubble at the rearmost part of the plane, and unlike you, he has a ringside seat to the impossible horror all of you face, every single time you go up. Plus, he never knows where he's going—only where he's just been. You always joke that he never knows if he's comin' or goin', and that always gets a laugh.
He just needs some kind of surface to bounce off to keep his jitterbugging under wraps, and maybe your crack wits and genial manner give him the mistaken impression that you aren't as afraid as he is. But you don't mind. He's a nice kid, little Joe. You ponder this as you walk together down the dirt path to the briefing hut chattering inconsequentially.
You think: how can it be that they can't all see just by your expression that you're actually coming apart at the zippers? Why can't they see it—it's gotta be all over my face. But they don't look any different than when they're shootin' pool at the Enlisteds club. Is that what I look like too, or are they all pretending not to notice so I won't get more—here you search for the right word (there are so many)— . . . unbent?
You relax. Nah . . . I could raise 'em all with nothing in the hole and an Ace on the deck and make them think the Genie of Timbuktoo himself was squattin' on my head.
“Huh?” says Joe, and you realise he heard you.
You give him a hearty slap on the back. Joey-Boy, I'll put good money on your shooting off the ailerons today.
“And yer sister loves donkey farts,” he says earnestly, bashing your shoulder. That makes you wrestle him to the ground, and then it's all over . . . over on the sweet sweet soil of good ol' Earth.
It's just after four and the sky in the east is lightening behind the bare branches of the stands of poplar trees that line the other side of the field. It's a scene of stark and brooding beauty that returns your thoughts to neutral/grim.
Pilarski is rattling away.“Ya think the flak will be like Coblenz, Robbie, or maybe wherever we're goin' today the Krauts'll all stick little white flags on the end of their wings, now wouldn't that be . . . “
This field-not-field that you're now traversing is RAF Rackheath, a large, artificial interruption in the impossibly green landscape of rural Britain, whose largest feature is a triangle of three runways, each alarmingly barely wider than the wingspan of your B-24, with the main runway being about as far as you can walk in 20 minutes and the two auxiliaries around a 15-minutes trek each, all of which slash through what were once fields and hedgerows and the edges of farmyards.
When seen from the air, you're struck by how much it looks like some drunken idiot decided to plunk down some duct tape right in the middle of a pool table.
The whole thing actually sits on the fields and farmlands of the estate of one Sir Edward Stracey, Baronet, and is located almost at the easternmost point in England, in Norwich—just 14 miles from the North Sea, but more importantly, where England and Germany are closest together.
But this airbase is not unique. In a twist of fate, this large bulge of land that thrusts into the North Sea towards Europe just happens to be the only billiard-table-flat region in a country of undulating downs and windswept moors, which makes it an ideal location if by some chance there were to appear a large group of loud-talking, gum-chewing men in fur-lined jackets who proceed to trample through the hedgerows, fill the pubs, hand out chocolates and cast around for places to temporarily store their diverse collection of large four-engined bombers.
Temporarily, that is, because optimally speaking, these fur-bearing men want the bombers to enjoy that rarest of English creatures, a Nice Day, not by sitting in the sun and having oil rubbed over them, but by buzzing over to Germany and bringing it to its knees with the application of the pinpoint-dropping of large amounts of high explosives onto the beating heart of the Nazi War Machine—factories, transportation hubs, Wolfsschanzes—that sort of thing.
At least, that's the idea.
Indeed, these men, who humbly refer to themselves as “The Mighty Eighth” are so delighted with the suitability of the land for their purposes that they gratefully accept the tenancy of over 60 of these airbases, some slightly used but most brand-spanking new, all dispersed athwart the English countryside in numbers so great that there are several located just a bicycle-hop from you.
This multiplicity of very long, very straight and very concrete interruptions in the greensward of rural Britain comes in mighty handy if you're in a large aluminum flying contraption that's boasting more holes than a termite rodeo from nose gun to rudder flap, is leaking gasoline from one wing, holding itself upright with the other, and desperately looking around for someplace, any place that isn't grass or lettuce, to land.
Kind of like that ship, Green Dragon, whom you watched with interest one afternoon from the control tower on a day off, sweating someone else's mission out with your companions. Count-count-count. Twelve . . . thirteen, fourteen . . . down the ladder as the squadrons returned from—where was it? Oh yeah. Halle.
You watched with interest because you were hoping they'd really given the place a pasting. Oh, you yourself would make it there soon enough, but this was the first time the 467th had sent any boys over there.
Halle. It was where a guy named Reinhard Heydrich was from, you knew, because it had been in all the papers at the time.
This guy was a real piece of work. He put the “Sicker” in Sicherheitsdienst, or SD—the dreaded security apparatus that he and that other piece of work, Heinrich Himmler, had grown from infancy to a multi-tentacled monolith that bashed on doors at 5 a.m. and dragged screaming victims, sometimes by the hair (for some variety, you see, because it was actually quite tiresome work) off to populate the thousands of labour camps dotting Eastern Europe.
Sadly, you were too late to personally blow Heydrich into six different Hells. The Czechs, out of England, had done that in early '43.Real sons-of-bitches, those fuckers . . . but we're gonna get you.
(All this fascinating stuff came, of course, from Krause.)
But now, as you watched with the others, all silent as mausoleums except for a few ground crew yelling out the count, Green Dragon staggered downwards, missing the beginning of the runway by a mile but somehow
nice job you're still in the county of Norfolk
being as agonising to watch as it had ever been, but you and your no gods now prayed fervently that the pilot would bring it in in one piece. There were ten guys in there; ten guys whose mothers would soon either be beaming with pride or fainting to the porch deck in front of the guy with the telegram.
And now was the moment. You again were gripped by that sickening yet familiar clutch to the throat by that thing in your brain that began repeating Random random random he's gonna buy it or he's not gonna buy it, it's fifty-fifty anyone take sixty-forty random random oooh look, that wing's gonna drop first anyone want seventy thirty OOOHHHH and it's almost touching it looks like eighty is it
It was around then that it became no longer a betting parlour but a horror flick and you spun away, thrusting through the small knots of men whose faces were locked like death masks, their stunned, stone-still stares like
bottomless boreholes to Hell
and, now almost desperate to be anywhere but here, as you gritted your teeth and shoved a path through to the stairs—
—the violent, rending, impossible sounds of large pieces of metal screeching across the field reached your ears and it was
(no no no no no no no please PLEASE)
suddenly joined by huge, echoing BOOMs that reverberated around the base and clapped against the barracks and then barrelled across the field once more, signalling the termination of the hopes and dreams of ten young men whose only crime had been not to go to flaps-fifteen for final approach.
You learned after the show was over that Green Dragon's leaking left wing had joined forces with a spark from the landing gear, with what remained in the fuel tanks igniting in a fireball that blew off the wing and its landing gear, causing the ship to start cartwheeling in a flat arc, flames touching off some bombs still in the bomb bay because the rookie bombardier probably had forgotten to salvo them over the Channel, the giant ghastly shrieking mess traversing the entire base and smashing into some workers' huts that thankfully had been empty at the time.
There were no survivors.
But your mind swept all that away with an impatient rush the next time it was you in a plane, because your capacity to put individual horrors in separate compartments to be reviewed at leisure in some unguaranteed future was radically diminished when it was you not watching, but actually taking part in the festivities.
No. It had not taken you long at all to discover that mayhem was a topic that made up its boundaries as it went along, rending and wasting, screeching and bellowing hither, thither, and shall we go with her? but never coming to any kind of retaining wall. There was always more mayhem just up the lane and over the fence.
For the Mighty 8th, the first non-training horrorshows had taken place about two years previously, with the first American bombing mission from England to Occupied France taking place in mid-1942.
At the time you were still at Harvard, although you'd enlisted in the Army Air Corps reserve and were finally called up and evaluated and because of your color-blindness been forever disqualified from being an officer (which meant no pilot, navigator or other spots reserved for officers) but your genius-level performance in their IQ tests and your previous experience in the entertainment field had landed you in “Special Services”
one step up from bomb disposal
where you were expected to entertain the troops by being the organ-grinder to someone's monkey or vice versa, (depending on if a cloud was shaped like an elephant, but never on Tuesday) which you dutifully did for a year in Miami while going through boot camp until one day you got fed up and requested a combat assignment
and the guy LAUGHED
after which they sent you through training where you majored in Radio Operator and minored in Gunner on B-24s, all of which took well over a year, following which at graduation you met the nine men who would be the crew you'd be flying with “for the duration” (oh, and 25 missions—let's not forget the 25 missions) and then, only then, finally being injected into the fighting with your first-ever flight to Hamburg on October 30, 1944.
This delay means that you weren't present as the 8th Air Force cut its teeth against Germany, thus avoiding the numerous catastrophes that had been the result of poor planning and reckless adventurism that had resulted in that— that—
You fight it. The projector for that particular movie shuts down. But you know it'll be back.
Meanwhile, this is your home—the 467th Bombardment Group (Heavy); pop. approximately 4,000, consisting of four squadrons of B-24 Liberators, numbering approximately 62 planes, 61 of which your new friend Johnny Truax says are going up today.
Plan Of Execution
A s you enter the Briefing Hut and sign in, you're hit by a blast of warm air that consists of varying concentrations of sweat, body odour and the nasal symphonic equivalent of one-hundred-and-one varieties of Old Spice, the entire olfactory potpourri filtered through a pall of grey smoke.
But there's also a peculiar twinge that hovers at the edge of the senses that you can't identify—that you've never encountered anywhere else except here. Although you dismiss the idea as absurd, you can't shake the feeling that what you smell is fear.
(But fear has no smell. So it must be Old Spice.)
Behind you, Pilarski's met some pal just past sign-in so you push through the crush of guys still yammering in the aisles, towards the front, where you're rewarded with the sight of Mose and Jonesy, who's lately been your co-pilot since Rosenthal vanished without explanation—transferred out, compassionate leave, who knows—and it looks like they're keeping a seat next to them open for someone—probably Beyer, the bombardier. Well, tough luck, Beyer. It's your seat now.
Mose and Jonesy are clearly happy to see you, though, and vice versa. Buh-bye, Beyer!
You ask the two pilots if they've heard anything about what's happening today. Mose, who's sitting on the other side of Jonesy from you, looks theatrically from side to side as if scanning the room for Nazi infiltrators, then leans in conspiratorially with a mischievous grin. “Them Pinetree boys been workin' overtime on this one!”
Pinetree!
Until a couple of weeks ago you'd never have understood what he was talking about.
That day, you were lying on your bunk, which was pretty near the hut door, reading an Elmore Leonard book.
Suddenly the door opened, but just a crack, and a voice from a face that had deliberately squashed itself into the crack barked in a kazoo-like parade-ground voice: “Staff Fergeant Robbie Robinfon on the double! Hup-hup-hup HUP.”
Who the fuck? But then you realised it could only be Mose, who in a previous life must have been the class clown. You put down the book with a chuckle and pulled the door, Mose's face still attached, into the room. And there he stood, your illustrious pilot, crush cap askew and a shit-eating grin on his face, pretending to be hiding something in his armpit.
On further prodding, a hip flask made its appearance and was announced to be “Voove Click-O Un-doo-twa!” Laughing, you told him to quit fucking around. “C'mon, Robbie, we need to talk,” he said with fake gravitas. “At the office.”
You went back inside to get your coat, hat and gloves and told Hubbard you'd be back before evening chow.
A lowering cloud base hung sullenly in the leaden English sky as you both walked from the huts down the dirt track toward a distant cluster of buildings housing the motor pool and various maintenance sheds. Mose put a comradely arm around your shoulders while you cracked your pack of Craven A's and lit one for yourself and offered him one.
He clapped your shoulder and said, “Mah boah, them ain't cigarettes. Them's er-satz cigarettes.”
He pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his back pocket. You immediately ditched your stub and took a Lucky Strike. Tanks, you told him. Battleships, too.
And then you were there: a squat edifice of grey concrete seemingly connected to nothing. It had a door, but nothing else on the outside.
Everyone called it The Office.
It was actually a pump house, but no one seemed to know what it pumped. All you knew was that it was warm in there and there were convenient pipes you could sit on. No one ever seemed to be in there working, so some of the crews used it as an unofficial place to knock back a few while not giving a shit about rank. It was strongly discouraged for enlisted men to show their faces at the Officer's clubs, and definitely a no-no for officers to enter the EMs, or “Service Clubs” which were for the rabble.
For some reason, despite your vastly dissimilar backgrounds and upbringings, you in the big city, he in the rural South, Mose and you got along very well. Mind you, most everyone in the crew had become good friends, but . . . maybe it was that part of you that had always wanted to be a pilot. What did it matter? A good guy was a good guy.
But what the hell was Mose up to today?
After you both grabbed a pipe to sit on, he reached behind him and pulled something from behind a fuse box that was on the wall.
“From my cocktail cabinet!” he chortled, holding out a pint bottle of what looked like gin. Huh? Mose was not a big drinker. Of light spirits. No, he was a bourbon man from the hobnails in his boots to the tips of his propellers, but bourbon was a rare commodity in wartime England.
So you both sat on your pipes and took sips from the hip flask, which was blessedly rum, and the pint bottle, which was gin, home-distilled from where you didn't want to know.
It seemed Mose just wanted to shoot the shit.
So he talked and you listened, and you smoked and you drank.
Now, you've always been aware that Capt. John Raymond Moseley, who by virtue of his position as Food Chain Committee President, the remit of whom is everything that goes on inside that Consolidated B-24-J Liberator Aerial Conveyor of Combustibles that the US government has so generously provided for his personal usage—the sole proviso being that while he's tooling around the skies, they'd like him to drop by a couple of places first for the purpose of dropping off a few packages for the nice folks below—well, his position entitles him to have access to certain information channels that you, as lowly Staff Sergeant (Sharpshooter) are not.
So when he started talking about what he knew about how all these missions came about, and who where why and what it took to make one happen—well, you kinda always suspected how it was done, but Mose said he “knew the facts.”
“Russ,” he said, his voice solemn, “a mission is just like a mountain.”
Skip, you replied with equal gravitas, using one of the many nicknames bestowed upon him by the crew and thinking that at that moment he would have looked great with a pipe, You don't say. Just how can a mission be like a mountain?
Before he told you how a mission was like a mountain, he first wanted you to know why sitting around in the hut playing poker was not the little-known but devastating secret weapon that was being held back for further research and development before being unleashed on the Axis forces in a surprise blow that would have everyone home for Christmas.
You feigned fury and uttered a curse that turned Mose's ears red, and he made you repeat your promise that if your lucky Deuce of Clubs delivered you back to the homeland undamaged, not even a darn would escape your lips forever after.
And then he told you how a mission was like a mountain.
One of the guys on the summit—maybe Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold (the Hap being short for Happy, because he has eyebrows permanently arched, cartoon-style, in a round face that masks a ruthless disregard for collateral damage in his drive for “results”) and Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz (lately the doorman at the Ritz) would get together at “Pinetree,” which was the genius code name for the 8th's HQ in High Wycombe, around London somewhere, and they'd pick targets, according to whatever situation was concerning them at the time.
So once they've got the target, or targets, they pull the files that have been accumulating on just about every German city above the level of Beergarden since the war began—photo reconnaissance, transportation, whatever—from the corresponding departments.
Once the basic target selection and associated target information is gathered, they determine what assets they're going to need—how many bomb groups and what proportion of those groups' planes they need, then what fighter assets will be going with the bombers.
As you and Mose agreed, it's around about there that you lose the plot, but there's more—vastly more—that has to be decided, from types of bombs, bullets and billy clubs you'll need to knock some sense into the Krauts; and it's a fact that many, many people are pulling all-nighters on missions like these, and in the end, you're actually kinda glad all you have to do is sit around freezing for six hours or so after which you get to come home and have a nice, stiff drink.
Or not.
The conversations in the room gradually fade away until an uneasy silence prevails, disturbed only by the occasional cough and the flicking of lighters.
It's time.
The briefing officer pulls the cloth aside from west to east
(as he proceeds, the moans of derision from the throng begin to accumulate, and he, familiar with his role in the pantomime, theatrically drags the edge of the cloth just up to the coast of E. Anglia and then stops—whereupon a chorus of boos erupts, and so on, evoking some sort of burlesque routine, except this isn't a dance hall and that's not a stripper)
so you see your base first, then the English Channel—he pulls it reeeeal slow, and then the continent appears along with your route across it until you see your target area. He seems to do his job with malicious relish, though you know that's just your imagination. He's flying today too.
You strain along with everybody else to see what it is, but then some bright bulb announces it and it sweeps across the room like an evil wildfire.
Gerolstein? Never heard of it. Then another name: Daun. And another: Ober. All blanks. At least it's not Berlin! No one you've met yet has bombed Berlin, but you know that the anti-aircraft network there is massive—probably the worst place to be anywhere near if you're in a B-24.
Then a name you've heard of: the Rhineland. It's the industrial heartland of Germany. Factories, railway hubs, that sort of thing. And wait—what? He's saying that this will be a “maximum effort” mission and there will be over 2,000 bombers and—the part that matters to you most—900 fighters. Good god! Yes, for once, god is good. 900 “Li'l friends,” as everyone calls them, will be there running interference for most of the duration. Almost the entire Group, 61 planes, will be going. No wonder the place is crowded.
The briefing officer is saying that the cloud cover that's been keeping the Allies from bombing the fuck out of the Nazi counteroffensive is finally breaking up. This is going to be the mission that's gonna deal with the bastards once and for all.
That may be so, but these abstract outcomes aren't your biggest concern. You can't help but do the calculation, although you've promised yourself you won't: this will be only your sixth mission, and your “tour” will not be finished until you've completed 25. Jesus F. Christ . . . everything must go exactly right—or put it another way, not one thing must go wrong—nineteen more times in a row.
You just have two words for your chances on finishing the Tour: Tick and Tock.
But that's not all, you think grimly, despite yourself. A mission only counts if you make it to the target and back. If somehow you have to turn back before the target—for any reason at all—it doesn't count. You'll have to do that one over. And you've heard the doomsayers' favourite maxim that once you pass your 10th mission you're living on borrowed time. Of course, you know that's bullshit—exactly which genius has made that calculation?—because you know that the odds are firmly reset to zero every time you get in that plane.
Right? Right.
It doesn't matter. None of it matters. Because you're going to get in that plane and go wherever they tell you to go, and bomb the Nazi fucks back to the Stone Age.
The rest of the briefing is the same stuff you always hear on missions over Germany. Nonetheless, you can't repress a cold chill when he begins to go over procedures for worst-case scenarios over enemy territory: Emergency landing spots. Current known positions of friendly or enemy troops. What to expect if you bail out and get captured.
This last always gets your total attention. The horror stories, always legion and always unverifiable, suppurate through any gathering of Allied flying men, because at this stage of the war the “rain of ruin from the sky” over Germany is truly a wonder of epic proportions.
It certainly has not escaped the notice of that little crippled goblin, Reichsminister für Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who has decreed that captured enemy bomber crews are to be known as Terrorflieger—Terror fliers. The stories go that any crew that have bailed out and had the bad luck to come down on German territory need to fear most not the SS or Gestapo or Hitler Youth, but Farmer Gunther Prien, his wife Eva, and the townspeople of the small village of Buttfuchen, near Enniedamnstadt.
Quite literally, the pitchforks and farm implements are more dangerous to you than a 9mm Luger or Walther PPK. Indeed, the best possible outcome is if you have the outstanding luck to be turned over to the Luftwaffe—enemies in the sky, but friends on the ground.
Earlier in the war, you know, Allied fliers who'd been picked up and processed by the Luftwaffe were sent to their own camps, called “Stalag Lufts” or something like that. Word had it that they were cushier than the camps for infantry and the like—you'd heard that some had even allowed baseball! But you'd also heard that in one of those camps a bunch of idiots had escaped—the stupid jerks; they're surrounded by thousands of square miles of Germany—where the fuck they gonna escape to? And on being rounded up they'd all been shot like ducks in a pond.
But that was then. This is now. Just the other day someone told you that Hitler recently threatened to have all captured Allied airmen summarily executed, and had to be talked out of it by that smirking blimp, the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, so bringing your lucky deuce of clubs on every mission is a matter of urgent priority, not a goofy superstition. And your lucky deuce guarantees you'll never be bailing out over Germany.
Right? Right.
Anyway, you don't have time to be speculating, because this briefing is breaking up. Everyone has to go to their separate briefings—pilots here, navigators, bombardiers, gunners there, and you for a quick dash back to the hut because you forgot your backup pack of cigarettes.
You tell Joe where you're going and he wants to come with you. But for some reason, you want to ride over there alone right now. You're just not in the mood for Joe's perky chatter.
Shoot 'Em Up
T he wind is brutal and the path is pockmarked with hills and valleys (at least it seems that way to your hastily-snatched bike whose tyres probably knew inflation sometime back in the Great Depression). You tighten your scarf, lower your head and pedal as fast as anyone can with one hand on the handlebars and the other lighting a cigarette.
Your thoughts drift, and you look back on how far you've come. Because you get along with just about everybody, you've made some surprisingly well-placed friendships—the higher-ups like you because you catch on quickly and figure a lot of shit out without constantly needing prodding. And besides, some of these people have college-level educations, even if it is West Point or Annapolis or the Naval War College, so topics of conversation don't have to be restricted to grousing about the chow or the prissiness of the local English girls.
No, instead you can wax poetic about the headaches of juggling graven-in-stone schedules with the predictably unpredictable English weather—or trying to come up with a “nice” way to tell 400 anxious aviators that the mission today is Berlin. Or Stuttgart. Or Bremen. Or Sch—no, please please go the fuck away another thought hey is that Mickey no it's
not him but it looked what was I thinking about
oh right . . . the higher-ups complaining about the pains in the ass of being in a foreign country and trying to run a base while attempting to herd a band of almost-kids whose only goals are “gettin' some action before the war's over” which, they'll get their wish, because the war seems to have a life of its own, as if it's always been here and is always gonna be here.
But through conversations with the Lieutenant-Colonels, Majors, Division Butlers and others in the know, you've been able to piece together a fairly accurate picture of how, after much trial and error—or trial and terror, to put it more accurately—the wiseguys running the English and American forces chose not to cooperate in any meaningful way until that lovely creation, the Combined-Bomber Offensive was announced in early 1943 that would have America bash the Krauts by day and England thrash 'em by night in a round-the-clock bomber-go-round 'n' round zippity-doo-dah day, KEE-rist.
It sure had seemed a grand fucking mess from the vantage point of last year, when you'd really become part of the Machine, but it was a mess that was gobbling up Stateside boys just like you—at least, the ones bound for the Air Corps—like a rat with raisins.
One of which had been dumb enough to volunteer for combat.
Which, as you knew, began with guns.
Which meant . . . Yuma.
Yuma?
Yuma. Like some old Western. Unpaved streets. The cantinas and the Mexican-style roofs sloping over the edge of the streets. . . fucking NIGHT AND DAY from Sioux Falls. All the fuck from October to Christmas. My first-ever Christmas away from home. No, really? Didn't I—
How they sent you up in those DC-4s—”Skymasters,” they called them (that had been completely emptied of all first-class furniture and cocktail services. The nerve!)
They were the first 4-engine planes you'd ever seen up close, let alone gotten into. You were just on top of the world then—you fucking loved it. It didn't hurt that you were a natural with the guns.
They wanted to know if anyone got airsick. You chuckled about this, but very quietly, so as not to upset the guys who were in paralyzed terror about being more than six feet off the ground. You remember one guy who was panting so hard from terror that the training Sergeant pulled him out and sent him off for medical treatment.
Airsick? No air you'd ever met'd ever made you sick. You knew you were gonna ace this part. Do your worst, you remember thinking as they hustled everyone up the ladder. They were just separating the men from the 16-year olds posing as men.
Then, they had you skeet-shooting. You were a natural skeet-shooter. Clay pigeons met their demise in explosions of dust as you hit your mark, time and again. Considering your poor eyesight, this was quite the miracle. And it was even funnier when you thought about here you were among all the farmboys who'd been shooting things all their lives and couldn't hit the side of an opera house, and you who'd never even seen a real gun till . . . oh yeah, it was that guy Mike Dorosin at Latin, he showed me his shotgun, all engraved and shit.
Then they put you on a range, with .45 automatics. Those damn things were heavy! Especially after holding them up for hours on end.
And then the rifles. You kicked so much ass on the pistols and rifles that they gave you a Sharpshooter medal. Capwell, the guy who'd tested you, had told you you were so close to Expert—the top rank—that he was gonna put you in for it. But, while you were watching he went to that asshole Sgt. Simpson who was in charge of the detail and couldn't stand you, and when he came back he said, “Gee, Russ, he told me that if you didn't get it, you didn't get it.”
You couldn't give a shit. A medal wasn't gonna protect you at 23,000 feet.
You met O'Connell there, and it was only by vast coincidence that you ended up in the same crew, but stranger things happened all the time.
Then the fun began! Real guns at altitude in real bombers, although at the time you had no idea whether it was a B-17 or a B-24. But that shooting at streamers towed behind those poor single-engine guys . . . Yeeeeeaaah, little more to the left and POW! You could imagine that being a Focke-Wolfe 190.
Scratch that. You couldn't imagine that being a 190, no, not tearing through the formation like an angry, buzzing, chattering silver hornet missing propellers by inches wreaking twisting shrieking havoc on the guys in the rear how the fuck were you gonna shoot such a thing down you barely saw it and then it was gone
gone, gone gone OH SHIT you almost fall off your bicycle because you've stupidly been trying to get your lighter to light in a 20-knot crosswind.
It was all fun and games until one day—it seemed like one day, but it was probably more like two—guys started dropping out right and left. They'd be up there clattering away next to you and then they'd be gone. “Gutless wonders,” was the label immediately applied by some of the instructors, but you knew it had to be more than that.
By this time, stories—hideous, unbelievable stories—were filtering back from Europe. Not through the news or general public, but through the guys who'd done their tours and come back as instructors. Word got out.
As usual, you dealt with it as the “War, and rumours of war,”-esque Chinese-Whispers nonsense which normally emerged when large groups of young men (or old men, for that matter) gather together in large groups. For as you knew, large groups of men never gathered together in small groups. And while the Truth was putting on its shoes, the Lies were winging their way across the countryside.
Besides, it simply was not possible for 100 bombers to go out and only 40 come back. But that parachute story . . . that one where the guy's parachute was caught by the propellers of the bomber behind the one he'd just bailed out of . . . who makes that shit up?
Fuckers, that's who. And just shut the fuck up. Nothing like that's gonna happen to you because god gave you a brain. And you're gonna use that brain. And you're gonna come home in two pieces—the top part of your suit and the bottom part of your suit. With a silk-striped tie, a grey fedora and a spring in your step and a young lady on your arm.
You begin humming a Frank tune. You're almost there.
E ven in the gloom you can spot your hut from a fair distance by the “Moseley's Marauders,” that someone has scrawled on the door (you know it's one of the waist gunners, Sol Womack, and you pray he's a better gunner than he is a sign painter).
Above that is an equally squirrelly “HUNTERS LODGE,” with no apostrophe, and above that, at the very top, it says “BAKER'S BRAVES.” Hunter and Baker are the captains of the other two crews who share your humble but bare-bones Nissen hut, 18 guys all told.
Nobody's there. That figures, since everyone in the Group is flying today. You grab your cigarettes and get on the bike again and it's off to your briefing hut, this time both guns blazing. Behind the trees across the field there's the barest glimmer of dawn reflecting off the gray underside of the cloud layer. Good—seems like a fairly high ceiling, so assembly won't be complicated by unwanted cloud cover. You hope. That's still a few hours away. And you know that England has a habit of dropping the fog curtains just 15 minutes before takeoff.
You make it to the Radio briefing hut just as the last few guys are going in.
The guy giving this briefing, CGO (Communications Group Officer) Holdrege, is as dry as a cracker in Cairo, but you know that he cracks wise. He certainly knows his frequencies, and that's what you're there for. This is all stuff the Krauts would kill for, which is an additional reminder that “Name, rank and serial number” is never gonna work for you in some dingy interrogation centre if you end up on the ground in Deutschland über alles.
It's for this reason that when he runs down the numbers, you don't write them down. On paper. You make the back of your hand the place for the curious letters and numbers you're going to need. You won't need them too often, though, because taking off a glove in -50° temperatures is not a thing done lightly.
You have to memorise the ones you don't already know, but not a whole lot is news today. Primary and backup frequencies; call signs; jamming procedures; recognition signals (friend or foe) and silence protocols for avoiding detection.
As you process the scads of information he's giving you, you relax. This is all familiar territory. No need to be apprehensive about your chances or the multiple ways you might not come back. Anyway, once you're up there you'll be way too busy to be frightened.
It's always the same: once those four Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp fourteen-cylinder air-cooled radial engines fire up you enter that Zone; you can't explain it, but it's like you just strapped the entire airplane onto your back. Mose says he feels the same way. But he's the pilot—and you damn your colour-blind eyes all to Hell that it's not you up there, for the quadrillionth damn time.
At least, that's what you tell him—and he always comes back with that Mississipi drawl, "Hell, Russ, you don't want that fishbowl up front and all them Luft-waffa (he always splits it in half) Mister Schitz (Messerschmitts, you always tell him, Mose, they're called Messerschmitts) shootin' atcha, but if ya wanna, you can come up any tahm ye want and take mah place, and I'll take your place and steal yer pots at the poker table. Deal?" and you know he's speaking the bible according to Moseley, psalm, chapter and verse.
What you don't let on is that you like your dials and knobs and the fact that you look outside through that damned window as little as possible just fine, thank you.
No need for any added stimulation like counting flak bursts and their proximity to the plane, or the sudden apparition of a B-24 wing hovering into view ten feet from your window, nosirree.
The sun, small and wan, is nonetheless firmly in view by the time you emerge from the radio briefing.
You stroll over to the equipment room with the R/O from Baker's crew, since he's in your hut, even though you've embarrassingly forgotten his name. That's understandable, because you pretty much only know your own crews' names, since time spent learning the names of men whose bunks might be empty tomorrow morning (or filled with replacements—same thing) is time better spent learning which members of your crew might be the most dependable in an emergency. Or who bets with only a pair of twos.
The equipment room is where you've stored all the stuff you'll need in a mission—and it's a shitload. You don't have the luxury of a locker, but everyone's got a series of hooks on a sturdy pine board running the width of the room. The guy whose hooks are next to yours is the other waist gunner, Clifford “Hubba-hubba” Hubbard.
He's still in the gunners' briefing for some reason, and as you're taking your electrically heated pants down something falls from one of his clothes. You lean down and pick it up. It's a small metal figurine wearing some kind of uniform—probably from Hubba-hubba's toy soldier collection. You take a quick look around and pocket it.
You take your stuff down and spread it out on the table behind you in the order you're going to be putting it on.
First, long underwear. These are thick and slightly scratchy woolens that will be the innermost integument of the multi-layered “Sky-Man” creature that you will shortly become. Next, heavy socks. You'll add them to the ones you have on . . . for trudging through the German snow to your POW cam—it comes unbidden and you cast it aside.
Next, regular uniform pants and shirt. And now the stuff that matters: your gen-wine F-2 Electric suit-jacket, pants and gloves, all electric—even the inner shoes that will go inside your sheepskin boots.
And thank heavens for this suit. You remember your Combat Crew Transition, about a year ago—when they gave you B-24s and put your crew together—when this suit didn't exist. Everyone had to wear those ghastly full-shearling suits, so thick that you could barely bend your elbow enough to put a cigarette to your lips. And they made you feel like Bigfoot. Come to think of it, they made you look like Bigfoot. And at altitude the wind would somehow always find a way to get into them and up a sleeve or a pants' leg to torment you, always when you were the busiest.
All that was left after that was your wool scarf. They'd give you your safety gear at the end.
Gettin' It On
Time to start putting all this stuff on, but first—a cigarette. You've got time because you didn't dawdle. You learned on the first day of boot camp that All Good Things Come To Those Who Hurry The Fuck Up, but also, A Cigarette Waits For No Man.
Uh-oh, here comes Hubbard. You start pulling on your long underwear. Now the socks. Hubbard is looking in the pockets of his pants, then in his jacket. “Hey Robbie, you seen my Napoleon?” he says, a tinge of anxiety in his voice.
You ask him if it has a tricorn blue hat and one hand tucked into the front of his jacket. “Yes! That's it! That's exactly it!”
You tell him that you haven't seen it. You pull on your socks, hopping first on one foot then the other, until they're firmly on. By this point Hubbard looks gripped with terror. He's shaking his socks out over and over, then getting on his hands and knees to see if it's somehow fallen behind his boots. He looks up, wide-eyed. “I can't fly without my Napoleon! Robbie! I can't fly—he— “ . . .
You somehow maintain your solemn expression while you remove Napoleon from your jacket pocket and dangle the little metal soldier by its base. You ask him if he's looking for this?
You've never seen so many different expressions on someone's face as on Hubbard's at this moment: confusion, joy, anger, relief, comprehension and laughing rage. “You fucker, Robbie!” he laughs through clenched teeth as you help him up, and you assure him that without your finding it it could have been kicked across the room, to be picked up to become a lucky charm for someone else. He pummels you on the back and swears he'll get you somehow.
Pretty soon some of the crew's other enlisted men filter in: Sol “Solly” Womack, 20, one of the waist gunners, whom you obligingly relieve of his paycheck on poker nights, Joe “Jojo” Pilarski, Tail Gunner, and Gene “Zoom” Zumalt, 19, today in the role of armourer and spare "assistant to the engineer," a mythical position that has existed ever since Shower and Mahoney decided between them to ditch the ever-problematic ball-turret gun.
They grumble about how the Krauts will be expecting us, for fuck's sakes! Uh-huh, as if they hadn't been for Coblenz! and suddenly there's that ME-109 being a speck and then how the fuck did it DO that? growing HUGE, its yellow spinner-nose-cone like those spinners on the tents at the Faire on Boston Common almost hitting the top of the plane with its tail wheel as it caromed through the formation almost like he had a death wish otherwise why the fuck would anyone—
“Ten-HUT!” You automatically jerk to attention. You hear the voice of one of the chaplains attached to the 467th, and you perform a perfect pirouette to face him. He salutes, as do all of you, and tells you that if you need him, he'll be in his office.
You relax and go back to your flying attire. And taking the stage tonight, ladies and gentlemen is a man who needs no introduction, Russell J. Robinson, drawing admiring looks for your perfectly-cut smoking jacket and leather pants. No, twill razor-creased trousers and a Turnbull & Asser flak jacket that will take even the most determined Nazi shrapnel with a silk tie from Moroni as you stop at the hat check and pat the girl on her cheek with a “Hiya sweetheart!” and Zumalt's nudging you with his elbow: “Hey Robbie! Goin' to see the chaplain?”
You're struggling with the zipper on your heated jacket. You reply with a negative. You won't be needing a chaplain today. Or any other day. The only person in your crew who might is the navigator, Nelson “Horatio” King. He's career army, which means he's in it for the long haul, and you know that he goes to Mass and all that stuff, but he's the only one, as far as you know. You briefly look up at Zumalt.
It looks like he wants someone to go with him if he does go see the chaplain. You ask him what's up. Zumalt's the nervous type, and he can get quite anxious before missions. At present, he looks as jittery as a cockroach in a dance hall.
You meet his eyes with a level gaze and tell him you've heard through the grapevine that there's a diversionary attack going to Cologne which will probably keep the Krauts plenty busy today, so no need to worry. It's not true but it's the thought that counts. Whether there're ten or a hundred fighters there's not much you can do about it. Like a thunderstorm when you want to play golf. Just do something else.
Wait—that's not a good analogy. Aaah, fuck it. You look at Zumalt, raise one eyebrow and do your ear-wiggling trick, and he can't help cracking up. You know your man.
Now you really have to concentrate. Getting all this stuff on takes time, because everything needs to be checked. You go over every item, looking for tears or unstable seams or wonky zippers—but you pay special attention to your electric gloves. If you somehow lose one at altitude, you will have five icicles hanging from your wrist in a matter of minutes.
With a sudden click, the zipper surrenders to your gentle ministrations: this is gonna be a perfect mission.
Or is it?
Getting all your gear assembled, but more importantly, on, is an exacting and time-consuming task, but at the same time, it's really the last time before you're actually in the plane that you'll be alone and uninterrupted for any length of time. Well, alone being somewhat of an exaggeration, as you're surrounded by a hundred other guys all intent on getting all their gear on, but since it's a time for concentrating and not for conversing, your movements are largely muscle-memory because you've done them before so many times. Like pressing your left foot on the clutch—it just does it, you don't have to think about doing it beforehand.
Or like field-stripping a .50-calibre machine gun. While blindfolded. At 20,000 feet. Wearing an oxygen mask.
It makes a lot of sense, though, them making you learn how to do that at gunnery school. Even though you may never have to do it again in your life, if it ever comes time, your fingers, hands and arms will just do their thing while you are busy shitting bricks. It kinda helps, though, to actually be good at it.
Quite unbidden, your thoughts return to Gunnery School and Lieutenant “Cap” Capwell (Gee, Cap, how'd you ever get a nickname like that? An excess of Einsteins at school? Don't worry, it's all relative!) who had told you that you were a “Regl'r Dan'l Boone” with a rifle, and it was only that asshole Sgt. Simpson that had deliberately not OK'd your qualification for Expert rather than the Sharpshooter, in the Marksmanship Qualification test. You knew this, because Lt. Capwell told you. You have no idea why the guy didn't like you, but it happens. Speaking of Einstein, there seems to be some law that every institution has to have at least one asshole that you have to cross paths—
60 Forts lost
Huh? Where'd that come from? Jesus.
We're going to . . . where are we going? Zumalt is fiddling with his gloves. He says he thinks it's the Rhineland somewhere. Oh, right. The ball-bear—no, the rail yards. That confluence of railways, roads and ratholes the bastards are using to transfer fresh troops or fresh fuel (heh . . . not much of that left!) You've heard that new fighter pilots are getting as few as twenty hours' practice time due to lack of fuel. Good. Very good. All the better to sputter into view as you take your turn on the waist gun. Three o'clock low and a nice left-to-right deflection pass as we lead him . . . wait . . . wait . . . now!)
“Robbie?” The fighter scene vanishes. Zumalt again. “You almost done? We'd better go get our chutes.” A quick check to confirm that your sunglasses are indeed in their case, and you're done. You clap him on the back and remind him that payday's next Friday. He laughs. It's only thirty-five cents, but every poker night? It's gotta hurt.
You tell him you have to get your bag first and remind him—again—that you don't need to pick up a chute. It's waiting for you in the plane. The riggers packed it into the back of your seat, because there's not enough space for a chest pack. Whatever—you don't plan on using it. The logic there is subject to no interrogations! Ich weisse nix! Bin bescheidener Feldwebel Flieger im Dienst meines heiliges Land!
When you confess to being a flyboy feldwebel on a mission for your holy land, they're gonna hoist you on their shoulders before they take you to the Kamp Kommandant, where you'll be given lots of schnapps and quite possibly Mozart.
You remember being somewhat mystified when you found out that all the rest of the crew from the officers were all sergeants, like you, until you found out that that was because when you landed in Stalag Luft Hellfuck, being a feldwebel-sergeant-and above, protected you from any rough treatment from the Krauts. Fun! Fun! Fun facts everywhere. This war was full of them.
But you knew your German wouldn't give you a witch's tit in Hell better treatment than anyone else. What the fuck. You'd never end up there. Would you?
Fuck . . . the crews. They disappear. One moment they're there, then they're gone.
That 390th gunner that somehow returned through the French ratline that you met at the King's Head . . . now a ground tech because he couldn't get captured again and reveal how he got back. “You don't wanna go there, man. If I hadda do it again I'da stayed in the plane.”
Again, that sudden clutch. This can't be happening. Christ. I'm fucked. This is gonna be the time—
Then the mental backslap, almost automatic by now: Ferchrissakes, Robinson, shut the fuck up. It's not gonna happen. You're gonna do your job just like you've done it a hundred times before and you're gonna be belly up to the bar tonight laughing over how the flak took one look at you and ran away screaming.
To calm down, you start one of your logic puzzles and light a cigarette. If two guys start at Point A and one guy walks two miles an hour . . .
You stub the cigarette out halfway. It doesn't matter—it's one of those local mixes of straw and weeds. Time to get your gear—the stuff you really can't do without.
Now Pay Attention . . .
Y our flight bag is where you left it, against the wall at the end of the room. It contains your A-14 flight mask—a moulded rubber thing that goes over your nose, continues just under your eyes and reaches under your chin. Its tight fit is crucial for survival, and is the reason that there are no beards in bombers.
It harnesses behind your head with straps and has a flexible hose that is connected to a metal tube that branches from the ship's oxygen system.
If it fails somehow at 20,000 feet—just 8,000 below the summit of Everest—in about 15 seconds you'll start to become confused. Fifteen seconds after that, you'll be dizzy, lightheaded, and probably not know where you are.
By this time you're probably grabbing at your mask, desperate for some air, but in just two more minutes you'll be losing coordination and gasping in great, gulping pants.
It will mercifully only be another minute or so before you lose consciousness and collapse at your position, so you won't feel oh god everyone unconscious and the plane going down in a great big sweep towards that endless green all those seconds of life and I won't even know they were ever there
—! NO
You check all the rest of the stuff in your bag. At the plane, one of the guys will recheck your bag while you check his. You simply can't leave a single thing behind.
Goggles: check
Mae West: Fucking thing gets in the way besides, I'm never going down in the North Sea—just isn't gonna happen
. . . check
Medical kit: Oh, you're bleeding badly from shrapnel that's nearly severed your arm at the shoulder, Gunner Sergeant? Well, let me help you with this handy little patch kit. We'll have you all shipshape in a
. . . check
Escape kit: Oh yeah, uh-huh, a silk map of Europe! 'Uhh, Entshuldigen Sie bitte, meine kleine freunde, wo ist Frankreich?' What fucking clown dreams this
. . . check
It goes down the line. A lot of stuff you're never gonna need. (Correction: you pray you're never gonna need.)
Done, you sling the heavy bag onto your back, and, feeling like a bear with its baby on your back you join Zumalt in the walk to the parachute loft.
You realise you've completely missed your flak gear—it wasn't where it was supposed to be. You ask Zumalt and he informs you that he personally took a ride out with everyone's flak gear to the airplane last night so you wouldn't have to worry about it along with the hundred other stuff ya hadda do on mission days.
Your gratefulness for this unexpected act of kindness causes you to mentally agree that next game, you will not bluff Zumalt, no matter what.
Thanks, Zoom. I'll hitcha back.
Zumalt starts chattering about malt beers. As you both walk over to the loft, which is just over from the equipment room, the sky looks like it's not clearing, but getting thicker. Gonna be a thousand-foot ceiling in an hour if this keeps up. Maybe they'll scrub.
Fat chance. They never scrub.
In the far distance you can dimly make out the hulking shapes dotting the perimeter track. They look like giant tombstones, black against the ground mist, like tombstones in the woods, like a race of giants died and—
“Robbie, didja get a chance to ask the major about those passes?” Zumalt asks, for the 56th time. He's talking about a three-day pass to London—an item almost unattainable these days, with no one having any idea how to get one. However, the major owes you big moolah—around thirty bucks—from a recent game, and maybe you can trade some amenities.
Nah, you tell him truthfully. He's been keeping outta sight lately. “Aww, man, Robbie. I ain't ever been to London. Everyone else, but not me. Piccadilly Lilly! All them high-class babes! You just gotta get those passes, Robbie. Willya?”
You assure him that the passes are as good as already clutched in his grubby paw.
Wham! you feel a slap on your back and the next thing you see is a grinning O'Connell, pipe in mouth and hair looking like it's trying to escape. “What the hell is up, Robbie, my good man? Ready to mount the valiant beast for another stab in the rump of the couthless Hun?”
You remind him that the Huns were a race of savages from centuries past. No, these were Krauts, a race of savages who had taken note of his badge number as he flew over last time and were planning a rump roast for him personally.
As he laughs, you marvel again as you look at him that such a man can be so affable and looneytunes on the ground, but once in the plane he turns into Airman O'Connell of The Mighty Eighth!
Indeed—to a man: every one of 'em tough 'n' rugged, hell-for-leather skyjockeys!
You wonder if you too seem that way to them.
But then you concede that such thoughts are like sprinkles on a wedding cake . . . irrelevant to the matters at hand; in this case the reality that up there, all of you all just become one many-armed beast that rages and freezes but takes very good care of itself and its arms, which it will never let go without a fucking twin-barreled full-on battle to the death.
They pick up their chutes while you smoke your cigarette and watch the lowering sky. Gerolstein. How many hours did they say? Two and a half. Not too bad. Zuider Zee to Ostend, then Kalden . . . what was it? oh yeah, “church.” Kaldenkirchen and into Germany proper. Right next to Dusseldorf. Crawling with fucking Luftwaffe bases. Flak towers and .88s by the hundreds.
Oh god. Oh god. Oh god, and you can't stop saying it even though you have no god, but every time it's like an ice pick stabbing away between your eyes—oh, god, oh god. You're seeing the flak towers, grotesque horrors of quick-pour concrete towering over the landscape and pumping little puffs of death, any one of which can blow a hole as big as a truck in the side of the plane and take your head clean off like some giant angry bear
You blink your eyes rapidly. This is getting way out of hand. You've just got to calm down. What the fuck is wrong with me? You've never been this way before. Why now?
This is going to be your sixth mission. Nineteen to go for your tour. Nineteen . . . how the fuck am I gonna make nineteen?
Already that first mission to Harburg is just a blur. The sheer horror of it—so many moments of such shocking heights of fear that you were never aware you had inside you. Entire orders of magnitude more paralysing waves of terror at what was happening around you than ever, ever in your cruellest nightmares.
Moments when you begged whatever gods were present would just make it all stop, please please just let me live, please, please, yet when it continued to even more ghastly heights you knew that gods did not exist and the only higher power was sitting five-feet-nine-inches above the heels of your flying boots.
Was this going to be the one?
You made your five. Make your five and stay alive. Just do your job. Use the considerable wits you were lucky to be born with. Your chances are good. Mose is the best in the business.
The Wisdom round the veteran crews was that your eleventh would be your last, but you just Would. Not. Believe it.
—unlucky 'leven straight to heaven—
NO.
The dice didn't roll that way, the cards were different every time.
In twelve hours you'll be at the bar having a double scotch-rocks. It's just the way it's all gonna happen. Now straighten the fuck up and get on it. In any case, you suddenly realise that thinkie-time is over. A horde of guys are milling around and trying to find their crews so they can get their trucks for the hardstands.
“H ey, hey, hey HEY! The man of the hour, the thinking man's thinking man!”
It's Mose. He slaps you on the shoulder and grins his mischievous grin.
Again, you're struck by the almost preternatural difference between this grandly cheery figure, to whom life seems like a giant dandelion patch with bumblebees and songbirds, and that man in the plane—that terse man who speaks in monosyllables but barks in irritation when he needs to get through to an unruly crew.
That man who is welded to his plane as if it were his childhood home, a friendly, attentive monster that does his every bidding instantly and without protest, and, with his caresses and exhortations, strains its every sinew to bring you all back alive.
He's the same height as you, a tad leaner, always wears his pants hitched up high, with creases so sharp he could probably walk through hedges with no mechanical assitance. His eyes are kind of squinty, but with laugh-wrinkles at the edges. He can be a Class-A goofball when he wants to be.
Mose is the epitome of a bomber pilot, and is respected by all the crews you have to fly with—his formation flying is always going to be the best and the other pilots know it and some of the load falls off their shoulders because they know that where Mose goes, he goes straight, true and unwavering, even in the face of the worst the Krauts can throw at him.
The higher-ups know all this too, and you know that big things are in the works for you and Mose. Big things.
Whaddya think? you ask him, looking up at the 9/10th cloud cover.
“Aah, it's s'pposed to clear pretty soon, 'ccording to the weather man. They ain't gonna scrub, that's for sure. This one's been in the works for a long, long time.”
Jonesy suddenly is standing beside him.
Leo Jones, co-pilot (currently—they seem to move co-pilots around for some reason) is a short but rugged kid—maybe 20—whose flying skills are unmatched (says Mose) and says he's from a military family going back to the militias, from the early 1800s. He thinks he's gonna fly all his life, leastways, that's the plan.
He's not book-smart like you but has a host of skills and aptitudes—he sometimes helps the ground crews fix stuff on the plane in his off-time—skills that you definitely lack. No oil except in your hair, is your motto.
Mose thinks he's the bee's knees, and if Mose thinks that, you know the odds just jumped in your favour.
Pilarski and Womack show up together, arguing about the Christmas decorations they've scrounged for the hut for the party tomorrow, and everyone slaps everyone else with an eye to maximum leather-clapping volume.
You again marvel that no one gives a fuck about rank. Everyone, even Mose and Jonesy, are on a nickname-only basis . . . at least until everyone is at their station and the bomb bay doors are closed.
Then it's strictly “Captain,” “Co-pilot,” “Navigator,” “Radio,” and so on.
At the moment it's “Hey Mose, Jonesy, Robbie,” and “Howdy, boahs, flyin' somewhere tonight? You c'n give us a ride.”
“Hey, Hubba-Hubba!” Womack calls out as Hubbard appears, a broad grin on his face, waving what looks like a Stateside letter. “Can you get some of that tinsel for tomorrow night?”
He's referring to strips of aluminium foil, called “chaff,” or what the English call “Window,” that the gunners routinely throw out of the plane to confuse the Kraut radar. Hubbard, evidently in a different time zone, is rereading his letter under the light of his butane lighter. But he still replies “How much ya need, Solly?” The deal is sealed, and a future—the future
It suddenly strikes you that they're talking about tomorrow, an entity that does not yet exist, indeed, may never exist. Your mind can't grapple with the possibility that yes, yes, of course, tomorrow will exist, but you might not be in it. Everybody will just go on like they've always gone on but I won't see them do it, they'll all be there, for months, years, decades, but I won't . . . I won't be able to talk to them any more, Mom, Dad, they'll be at the house doing everything they do but I won't see them do it and see them grow old and no more Buswell Street and no more Boston or Claire or anything and maybe they'll cry for a few months maybe years but I'll still be—
Your face must have altered its expression, because Mose puts a hand on your shoulder and says, ”Okay, Robbie?” A pause, and then your emergency grin splits your cheeks and you lean in conspiratorially. Boys been sayin' your future wife's gone all potty over some B-17 flyboy over at the 443rd. You gonna confirm or deny?
He doesn't hesitate. “Your fiancée so tired this mornin' I hadda put on her socks for her, and she 'bout jiggled herself ta bits!”
You both roar with laughter.
The others are all chattering animatedly. They seem relaxed. If not, they're better actors than they appear.
Mose whacks his sides and shivers. “Shit, it's fuckin' COLD this mornin, ain't it? So Rob, ya gonna give them Krauts some lecturin' t'day?”
You tell him that you will implement Plan H once above Germany, sending fake Hitler speeches down to the unsuspecting German public announcing that Hitler has decided to switch sides and work at the Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan instead.
You're all standing at the side of Green Lane West, a road that used to bisect the airfield when the airfield was being built but now has itself been bisected. Up that way—north, to the technical buildings, is where you'll catch your trucks.
That is, if everyone were here.
“Anyone seen King?” Mose asks, as knots of men begin to disperse and walk up the road. Womack says he saw King a couple of minutes ago, getting some extra maps from Ops. Mose says you'll wait until King and Pilarski are—”I'm here, Cap!” pipes up Pilarski—until King gets here before you all head out to the trucks.
Out of nowhere, the scene suddenly takes on a certain manufactured aspect, like some Japanese Noh play. The sky, immobile, sullen. Indifferent. Deep furls of dark chaos stretching from horizon to horizon casting no reflected light on the void of the field that you can't see but know is there.
You, the men. The group. The actors.
The strange, humming current of what—dread? sadness? resignation? that began when it really became clear what was going to happen today and now will no longer allow you to relax is running a hard buzz now, colouring your perceptions with a patina of unreality as you stand there, looking at the men and hearing their voices.
You know them all, yet you feel that they're a movie you're watching—no, that you're a movie they're watching, and O'Connell is talking to you and you're responding, but somehow you feel on a higher plane heh yeah higher plane gonna be on a major higher plane in an hour and then the images start to appear, the desk, the little light, your pad and then the sound, that massive, monstrous sound RRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWNNNNnnnnnnn as the giant bomber pulls to the left and dives and the shuck-shuck-shuck as everything shakes in a perverse rhythmic conga rattle and Mose's tinny voice says “Hold on everyone, hold on hold on” and you close your eyes to make it all disappear but it won't and you feel really bad for Mother, because she'll never know how scared you were as you plunged inexorably towards the waiting Earth and instant obliv—
Everyone bursts out laughing at something Mose is saying: “. . . you guys don't stop fuckin' cussin' I'm gonna put you on the goddamn catwalk for the duration!”
You realise that the frozen smile that you've had on your face the last couple of moments is the perfect transition to your own agreeable chuckle and that no one has noticed a single thing amiss.
The “catwalk” that Mose is referring to is what you call the 10-inch wide metal strip that runs between the bomb bay doors and is the only conduit between the front and the back of the plane. It's possibly the most dangerous single location for a man moving around a B-24 at 20,000 feet because it's just a strip of thin aluminum. No spars, no crosspieces, no nothing. Most of you just never have the nerve to walk it. Unfortunately for you, if you have to man the waist gun for any reason, the catwalk beckons.
King is running up, huffing and puffing. “Sorry, guys, hi guys, didja miss me?”
“Long time no see, ya ugly fucker,” says Womack, jovially. “Been fakin' up the route again?”
Lieutenant Nelson King, Navigator, is a tall, weathered-looking guy from somewhere out West—Tulsa or something. He's only a year older than you, but he looks thirty. Fuck, we all look thirty.
He's not as boisterous as the rest of the crew but he likes his scotch and can usually be found at the Officer's Club—where you're not supposed to go but do anyway, any day of the week—reading a book. Just like me.
As a navigator, King comes alive, and he's so damn good at getting you out of tight spots that you've lost track of the number of times you'd had to thank him for bringing you home. Mose and him—without those two, Stay Alive Till 25 would be a laughable dream.
Everyone's joshing and chattering. Pilarski's singing “Scrub! Scrub! Milk run!” and being shushed by the others. “Don't fuckin' jinx this mission, ya little squirt!” says Hubbard, giving Pilarski a playful push. You wonder what everyone is in such high spirits about.
Last night in the hut, after you'd gotten back from your beers with O'Connell, you'd made sure to pull out your stationery and scribble out a quick letter to your mother, as you did almost every night.
Dearest Mom, it went—you didn't bother addressing it to your father because you knew he wouldn't read it—you won't get this for a while but Merry Christmas anyway. Thanks for the advice on the woolens! Next time I get to a laundry I'll ask them not to iron 'em. Here it's cold cold cold, as always, but still no snow. No White X'mas, though I know you'll surely be having one!
Everything here is coming up roses, as you no doubt suspected all along! Hammock-living and fine wines are agreeing with your underworking boy—no work parties or ditchdigging for me!
Tomorrow we're working again—I was kind of hoping we'd have X'mas off but I guess that would deprive our German friends of all the goodies we're bringing along to give a little boost to their X'mas cheer this holiday season.
But don't worry—it's going to be a piece of cake—maybe even Christmas cake! And I'll tell you all about it tomorrow. Love to Dad and Claire and much, much love to you!
Your Russ
You folded it and put it in its military-issue envelope and stuck it in the hut postbox. They'd probably black out the word “German”—idiots—who the fuck else would we be fighting? but no sense in incensing the censor! Good one. You loved your little word games.
As you lay in the dark hut, knowing sleep would be impossible, you contemplated the fact that that could be the last letter you would ever write. You tried to think of what death would be like. Would it be just—an absence of everything? Or would there be something incomprehensible waiting on the other side? Some cosmic surprise, maybe . . . endless martinis with adoring throngs of babelike angels serving 'em to you in crystal chalices.
But you knew there would be no cosmic surprise. It would be . . . it would be like where you were before you were born. Yeah, just like that.
And you weren't scared of where you were before you were born, right?
Oh, Christ, no, I can't die. To leave everyone . . . everything. It was all so impossible. You wondered why the fuck you were so eager to volunteer for all this.
You're such an asshole, Russ, why couldn't you have just stayed where they put you? You could've passed the war tuning your chops for your acting career. But noooooo . . . ya hadda be a hero. No one would have given you two looks after the war was said and done—whenever the fuck THAT'll be—and you coulda gone on with your life. Become maybe like Frank. Or Bing.
Very slowly, as your thoughts crowded together and merged into absurdity, you'd settled into an uneasy sleep.
Truckin'
H urry up and wait. It's the bane of your existence. At around 7 you'd all ambled over to the transportation area to get your trucks, but the ground-hugging cloud base isn't going to gently usher 61 B-24Js into the heavens without some serious haggling with your 6,000-pound-overweight planes, any one of whose wingtip can nip a dandelion at runway's edge, cartwheel into a fireball visible from Santa Claus's sleigh, and make a hole at the end of the runway through which you could parachute to China.
Some of the rookie pilots have shown you how this can be done dandelion-free by stepping on the brakes just before takeoff.
Whaaaat . . . ? you'd asked Mose one day in disbelief after the Piederecki crew had suddenly become atoms during takeoff four days previously.
“See, Russ, when you're just 'bout leavin' the ground, the co-pilot gotta hit the brakes on the wheels 'cause ya can't take 'em in ta the wings while they's still spinnin'. They's mighty hot and liable to cause a fire in the wheel well if they keeps spinnin', so ya gotta shut 'em down with the brakes the second they leave the runway. Piederecki's co-pilot jes' shut 'em down too damn early.”
Your mind seesaws at the image of a fully-bomb-and-fuel-laden B-24 being suddenly halted by an application of the brakes at 120 miles per hour.
But how come the pilot didn't tell the co-pilot when to hit the brakes?
“Pilot too busy tryin' ta get over the fence at the end of the runway, Russ! No time for speechifyin'.”
He stops to let Jonesy catch up. You light a cigarette and walk next to O'Connell and Womack as you head for the truck depots. The conversation, as usual, is where the flak is going to be.
Womack is animatedly blasting your loving mission planners: “Why the fuck do they make us fly over cities pos-i-tively throwin' up Fourth o' Ju-lahs of flak? I mean, like Aachen. How come we hafta go through Aachen to get to the rest of Krautland? Why not fly over them fields of Eidleweiss and beerkellers instead? Ain't no flak there.”
O'Connell, engineer that he is, patiently explains through his pipe that your thoughtful mission planners don't wish to deprive you of the gas you're going to need to get back to base, three engines out, half a wing gone and Pilarski pushing from behind if they route you to Hell and gone on a joyride through Hitlerfuckenland. “Which ya rather have, Sol, a blast in the ass, or an ass with no gas? If ya see what I mean.”
That ludicrous explanation makes you chuckle out loud and immediately the sky seems to lighten a tad—just a small, unwilling increment—and, at least for the moment, where the flak is gonna be is a question for the academics.
Your last mission—your fifth—had been just days before, on the 18th. It had been a complete fuckup. Coblenz, the target, was completely socked in, so the whole group turned round just 100 miles from the IP. 200 bombers doing a 180 was easier said than done, and you had a fighter cap on top who had no idea what was going on.
Once they'd sorted it all out there'd been some flak on the way back but the losses had been some less-experienced pilots interrupting the flight paths of their innocent neighbours, with predictable results.
One of them was a ship from the 458th out of Horsham-St. Faith with some stupid name—Bomb-Ah-Dear or something.
The rookie captain, a guy named Curland, who Mose knew, had gotten too close in the turn to his neighbour and their wings had clipped, enough to cause Curland to overreact on the rudder pedals so his ship actually went in closer to the other guy, the tip of his wing hitting the guy's outboard engine.
They were behind you at the time that day so you saw nothing, but you'd felt them—a slam against the side of the plane so hard that you were sure you'd been hit by flak.
But it had only been the blast wave of two B-24s exploding simulaneously with a clap of unearthly thunder in a fireball that heralded the end of the road, no more tomorrows, no more drinks at the bar, for twenty guys.
Twenty guys in one microsecond. Jesus. One moment you're doing something, thinking something, the next—Eternity. How can that be? Fuck, don't let it be me. Please, don't
“Robbie Robinstein! And who do we spy here? Hub! Con!”
Coblenz disappears. You look behind you to see who it is.
Christ, you'd almost forgotten Beyer, the bombardier. He's an officer—Lieutenant, in fact, but he is so un-officer like that you sometimes call him “Loytnant” with the German pronunciation.
What's up, Hair Loytnant, you give his neck fringe under his crush cap a frazzle. He's tall—six foot—and angular, with a mouth too big for his narrow face but which is almost always grinning, and long nose and squinty eyes that almost make him look Oriental.
“Late again . . . “ says Womack laconically. “Whatcha always doin' after briefing, 'tenant? —goin' through our lockers lookin' for hot books?”
“That's it,” Beyer replies. “'Invasion Of The Nissen Hut Hot Girls II'. . . got that from King's locker.”
“I heard that!” calls out King, who's walking just ahead with Mose, Jonesy and Pilarski, adding “Your mother!”
You look at your watch. Almost 8. Takeoff at ten.
“What we flyin' today, Skip?” asks Hubbard.
“Leading Lady,” Mose replies.
Hubbard stops in his tracks. “Yer shittin' us, Skip,” he calls, his voice an incredulous squeak.
He hurries to catch up. “Did all youse guys know about this?”
O'Connell gives him a taut slap upside his cap. “Everyone except you, you soft-shelled meso-pelagic echinoderm.”
You have to chuckle. Where the fuck does he get this stuff?
Flying Leading Lady means you'll be the lead ship in your squadron. Good. Up in front.
“Happy times!” says O'Connell. “I love that bird.” There are murmurs of agreement.
While B-24s are beasts, some of them can engender affection; even love. They move you around with the aircraft, so from one mission to the next you usually have no idea what plane you'll be in. But Leading Lady got you through Coblenz untouched and you're mighty grateful to her.
Word is that the higher-ups are so impressed with your crew's performance so far that they're thinking of making you the lead plane in some upcoming missions. Well that's fucked, you think, who wants to be sticking out at the front of the pack? We'll be sitting ducks.
But you know that it's an honour and a privilege, which doesn't change the intensity of the flak, but which will be what you'll be clutching to your chest with pride as you take the long plunge to the ground. Mom, I love you, but I'm just all busting out over them making us the lead plane. Can you believe they chose us over—ooh, how pretty that mountain is; wonder if we'll hit the top or maybe that quaint little vill—
You've arrived at the motor pool. Hunter's crew is already there, standing in a tight bunch and chatting nervously, every one of them with a cigarette either being lit, smoked, stubbed out and lit again, every gesture accompanied by that little white tube. The cigarettes look like extra fingers, or breathing tubes, not artificial but organic; permanent fixtures attached to the anatomy of every man on the base.
Every man in your crew except King smokes. He had tuberculosis as a kid and has to watch his lungs.
But you—your cigarettes are your best friends. Everything you do involves cigarettes. A task accomplished requires an immediate cigarette. A task about to be undertaken requires a preparatory, thoughtful cigarette. A flop down on your bunk deserves a congratulatory cigarette, a drink two; a conversation maybe five and for the day maybe thirty, sometimes forty. The last thing you do before turning in is to stub out that cigarette and the first thing you do on waking is to reach for that pack, which is never, ever far away.
Doc says they're perfectly healthy, and when the flak blows off the starboard wing, you know you're gonna light a cigarette before you bail out.
Your crew greets Hunter's. You both live in the same hut, so most of you are good friends. They truck you out to the hardstands together to preserve “cameraderie.” Uh-huh. “Fighting spirit,” the Japs call it.
Jesus, glad I'm here and not there. Fuckin' Japs are scary little fuckers. Christ, when we're done with these bastards they're probably going to ship us out there. Man, it never ends.
The recent news from that theatre that had most impressed the men was something some lunatic had dubbed “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” in which American fighters had dispatched 480 Jap carrier planes in one day, killing more than 1,000 experienced pilots, and 2,000 other guys, primarily sailors in the two aircraft carriers that were sunk.
Good god. It must have just been a slaughterhouse. Fucking planes everywhere, parachutes, flaming spinning wrecks, people falling from cockpits no parachutes—fuck, better make sure my parachute is all checked out first thing in the plane that's what
“Robbie Russell Robinson! Jeez, am I glad to see you!” It's Hunter's R/O, Barclay. You greet him by pulling the visor on his cap so it's askew.
Bark bark bark! Whaddya say? He's a few beds over from you in the hut.
“Didja get the frequency for the li'l friends?” He looks genuinely alarmed.
You tell him Of course not! Who needs a 900-plane fighter escort over Eastern Germany? We can land somewhere, get to know the good burghers and drink some of their Prussian beers.
You show him the back of your hand and he pulls out a marker and eagerly takes the numbers down.
“I was kinda sleepy in the briefing and I forgot ta write it down.”
What the fuck? you say, genuinely concerned. What are you gonna do when those ME-109s come alongside—wave?
Barclay is sheepish. “Yeah, I know. It won't happen again.”
Don't blow it, Bark, Hunter's counting on you.
He looks down at his feet. “Don't tell anyone, willya, Robbie?”
You say you'll shout it to the four winds as you pick up your flight bag. You step up your pace to get to the truck before anyone else.
Tickets, Please
T he trucks, British Bedford QLs, are forming up in a row facing the T2 aircraft hangars. They're all covered with olive-drab canvas lashings to keep out the constant drizzle, which is thankfully not present this morning, and painted with white stars and unit numbers.
Yours is 094 and you quickly spot Gerry, one of the ground crew, standing behind the opened tailgate and smoking a cigarette.
“Holy fuck, it's goddamn cold! Hey Robbie!”
Hey Ger, you greet him. What's the wild word?
“Aaaah, same ol' same ol'. Where you guys goin' today?”
Mars, Ger, we're going to ride gondolas in those wonderful canals the Martians built centuries ago. You can't tell him your target because he's not one of the Initiates; not one of the Chosen Ones, as you are. He's a lowly mechanic and could be a German spy with a radio in his top pocket, ready to broadcast "Verdammt, das ist Gerolstein! Alle Flakbatterien von der Ostfront sofort nach Gerolstein verlegen!" as soon as he gets back to his parking area.
If he succeeds, they'll move all the flak batteries from the Russian Front to Gerolstein.
Damn, my German is getting pretty good, you allow yourself. The lessons are paying off.
The lessons.
Two or three times a week you stroll over to where the administration buildings are and greet an MP at Site 8 and go through a door and into a fairly large room that's set up like a classroom.
It is a classroom, and usually around twelve guys—sometimes more, sometimes fewer—and you, sit in your metal chairs at your metal desks with notebooks and pens, and mostly listen to a man named Krause. Well, rather, Lt. Col. Karl Krause, a 1st-generation German-American who grew up in California but went regularly back to Germany to visit relatives, so his German is without accent.
When you were going through your various processings, the question had come up if anyone knew any German, and you had piped up. Since then you'd been listed in a special section that was officially non-existent: a training section intended to create German speakers who could perform various tasks during missions that would confuse the Germans and potentially save lives.
What these tasks exactly were, they hadn't got to yet. But you loved your German lessons and Krause said you were a natural.
“You learn fast, Robinson! Du musst üben, wie ein Jagdfliegerkommandant zu sprechen!"
You assured him that you were practicing every day, and that soon you would be indistinguishable from a fighter commander. But what about a name? You ask Krause for a name.
“Call yourself 'Adler Eins.' That'll get 'em every time.”
Eagle One. Yeeahh, I like it!
Only Mose knew what you were doing every time you wandered off. The others probably thought you were brown-nosing the brass at HQ.
The crews are just behind you. You hoist your bag over the tailgate and Gerry grabs your straps and shoves you bodily up and over the tailgate because you can barely move in your Skyman suit, let alone climb four feet over an obstacle.
You somehow get to your feet and drag your bag all the way to the back and plant yourself on the starboard bench corner. No one crowding you on one side.
One by one, the men, cursing and puffing, make their way into the truck.
A guy from the Baker crew dumps his bag and sits next to you, humming some out-of-tune popular song. His face has a completely blank expression on it, like he's watching some movie in his head.
Hey, Rabbit. Mind if I ask you something? Curiosity has outfoxed restraint. How the hell old are you, anyway? Your tone is cordial.
“Fer real? Or fer fake?”
For real.
“Ah be 18 on January 6. Don't tell no one, Robbie.”
The reason he got away with it is obvious: he's a hulk. Over six feet and probably 200 pounds. Only his face gives him away—unlined, unused and uncomprehending. He has a slight overbite, which is why he got his nickname. He's a waist gunner and word has it he hates the Hun passionately and uses his gun with such aggression that at mission's end he's almost knee-deep in spent cartidges, which is a complete mystery on missions where there aren't any German fighters.
“Yer a good shot, Robbie, ain'tcha?” Rabbit has to raise his voice as more men pile in to the truck.
I try to follow the bouncing ball, I guess, you say in his ear. Why?
“How many Krauts you got, Robbie? I got a 190 on that Metz run. It was confirmed!”
You admit to not having ended the hopes and dreams of another human being perhaps in many ways similar to yourself, differing maybe only for not having any such nonsense as a “Tour” of 25 missions, rather more like an “Odyssey” of 600 missions, to be ended only when, well, cartwheeling earthwards onto some lonely Russian hill to be turned into ashes, atoms, metal and rock.
No Krauts. Zero Krauts, you tell him cheerfully. They must hate me or something.
The men settle in, slinging their packs every which way, with Sorrys, Hey man, watch it! and a bunch of Oww, fuck!s. It's too noisy to talk, but not too noisy to smoke, so pretty soon, after everyone is basically situated, out come the lighters, briefly illuminating the white faces of the crews that appear to hang in space like lanterns in a seafood joint.
The truck lurches back and forth as the driver handles the gearshift ineptly, but then suddenly you've backed out and soon you're picking up speed along the road to the perimeter track.
Someone starts singing a variation on that ubiquitous Bing Crosby song called White Christmas and soon there's a ragged chorus singing along.
I'm dreamin' of a White Christmas
As I fly off ta bomb the Reich
And I'll just keep hopin'
The bomb bays open
And my thousand-pounder will deliver
Another pinpoint straaaaaaaiiikkke
You have to laugh. What base genius came up with that one?
You recall your own shot at immortality when at Boston Latin School you had penned the lyrics to the 300th-anniversary song while elder pal Lenny Bernstein had done the music. You wonder what the fuck he's doing now. Probably hanging with the swells in Times Square while we hang up here in Helligoland where the natives are restless and twelve-year olds are sighting those 88s and 105s in boxes just for your visiting pleasure before they trundle off to school. Na, Kleiner, schon wieder mit Papas Knarren am spielen? and the kid will answer you, Yeah, I'm having lotsa fun playin' with Daddy's guns and you'll see the results right in the kisser, smack at formation height, maybe right in the wingroot just next to
There's nothing to look at so you close your eyes and take deep drags off your cigarette, chasing the thoughts away by seeing how many rhymes you can make with unhappy.
When you open your eyes again and look out the back you see a truck close behind yours, and another behind that, in a long line that you don't count.
It takes about 12 minutes to negotiate the narrow path to your plane and the hardstand. You look at your watch: 9:04. One hour to takeoff, give or take a balky propeller or recalcitrant bomb bay door.
The truck whirls and screeches to a stop as everyone almost falls off the benches in the usual finale to a hardstand ride—Mike, the driver, explains it as “the last chance to wake all youse guys up,” and it usually does the job.
Soon it's a melée of arms and legs and straps and bags and curses and laughs as the men express their obvious joy to have arrived at one of the most familiar locations they've known and flown over the last 18 months or so: their hotel in the air, their transport to the clouds, a trusty metal steed whose every crevice is more familiar to every one of them than the dustbunnies under the bedroom stairs.
You pick up your bag and grab Rabbit's strap from behind so his bulk gives you a boost as you both make your way to the back of the truck.
As the rest of the Baker crew exit the truck they say their goodbyes as they head for their plane, a couple of hardstands over from you.
But before you heave yourself over the side, you manage to grab Rabbit by his Mae West as he's almost all the way out of the back and is just preparing to let go of the deckframe and drop to the ground.
Hey, Jerome . . . !
He immediately halts his flailing and looks up in astonishment. No one calls him Jerome—it's the name he left behind in the playground. But you know it because he confessed it to you the last time you were teaching him principles of ballistics so he'd stop trying to shoot down the other ships in the formation.
You lean in, your hand gripping the Mae West tightly just below his chin, and observe with satisfaction that every one of his knuckles is straining to keep his 200-lb. bulk from falling backwards out of the truck.
Affecting a blank expression so he has no idea what you're about to say, you use the Orson-Welles eye-to-eye quick stare to terrify him.
His childish moonface gazes up at you, mouth agape.
Jerome, as far as I'm concerned, you're still in high school. So you better pay attention, 'cause we're gonna have a test. And it ain't gonna be multiple choice. Got it?
He nods with a gratifying expression approaching panic.
If one round of yours so much as sends a postcard to a plane in this outfit, I'll . . . —you cast around for the most ghastly punishment you can think of— . . . I'll . . . I'll ground you for life.
With that you let go and he plummets to the ground, sprawling headlong among the flight bags.
You give him the Wayne salute and he grins with relief and hustles away to catch his men.
The comedic interlude doesn't even leave a note as it flees from memory, to be replaced with that shiftless buzz.
Work work work.
As you throw your bag to Gerry, who's there to help everyone make it safely to the ground, you quickly cast a jaundiced eye on what the weather is doing now.
Scheiss. Clearing, just like Mose said.
T he sky seems to be reconsidering its earlier choleric intemperance—no more dark furls, downcast thrusts or overall irritable mien, but, possibly regretting its bad temper, it has decided to manufacture a shy rose glow that banishes the greys and browns and softens the spiky black edges of the woodland round the edges of the base.
Maybe tomorrow the sun will rise and there will be no clouds, you observe matter-of-factly.
The sun. No clouds! Fuck, I so want to see it . . . I don't care about clouds. Give me rain. And those birds . . . I want to hear birds.
But if I'm not here tomorrow they'll be singing and the sun will be rising anyway. None of them—the sun, the rain, the clouds, the birds—gives a flying fuck if I'm here tomorrow or I'm . . . wherever it is I won't be
Your boots seem glued to the tarmac as you allow yourself these last morose reflections. But the tide is turning.
Gotta make sure we make our own luck on this one. No fuckups. Can't do anything about what's coming from the dealer but we can sure shuffle the pack with a few minor alterations in our favour.
You pick up your pack and switch gears with some effort. It's flytime and damned if you aren't the best Radioman-Gunner in the Second Division.
Well, maybe not the best—now. But after a couple of missions you'll be getting it down.
When you'd arrived here back in September, after much fiddling with your usual set of calculations based on what you'd scrounged from some statistician guy at Ops, you'd realised that you needed to be almost grovellingly grateful for being assigned the 467th.
Compared to other groups the attrition rate had been markedly lower, for what reasons no one knew except that in the meat grinder, the 467th managed to avoid the slashing blades with more alacrity and verve than others.
And triple that for being in a crew piloted by Mose. The brass quickly observed that the Moseley Crew stood out from the pack right from the beginning; in formation flying, target bombing accuracy, and of course the factor that mattered over all else: coming back in one piece while carrying ten undamaged items of precious cargo. You feel shiny all over.
Suddenly, you realise that Gerry and Mike and the truck have roared away and you're standing about 30 feet from the twin tails of Leading Lady, looking down her left side. You ignore all the hubbub and just marvel—again—at just how huge she is. Just goddamn massive.
Slinging your pack over your shoulders, you begin to walk over.
Fucking two feet. For the nth time, you consider that when fully loaded with fuel, bombs and men, the clearance of most of the fuselage above the concrete will be a couple of inches above two feet.
Goddamn propellers spinning . . . plane doing 130 . . . two feet! above the runway. Mole sticks up out of his hole to see what's all the racket and—kablooie!
Mose is talking with one of the ground crew near Number 2 engine—the inboard one on the left side. He and the officers were transported by jeep to the plane separately from you and had been here a little bit before you, to do their walkarounds, extra checks and talks with the ground guys about any potential problems aloft.
You duck under the wing and back-pat his shoulder in greeting as you crab by him, to emerge just in front of Number 2 engine. You don't want to be too close, so you back up a little and survey the beast from the front.
The crisp, almost lilac-tinged scent of the 100-octane aviation gasoline that the plane uses pervades the air you're breathing—you've always loved the smell of gasoline, so it doesn't bother you in the least.
Other signature smells that make up that vast cloud surrounding a parked B-24 include the acrid whiffs of cordite that accompany the bombs they're even now installing in the bomb bays; the thick, almost-sweet odour of the high-performance oil they use for the engines, and of course the usual miasma of rubbery and metallic bouquets from the numberless things that are being rotated, pivoted, slotted into place and readied for the business of war.
You want a cigarette but you know you're not allowed to smoke on the hardstand—officially. They're still loading the bombs so you have to wait anyway—you get in the plane via the bomb bays.
A sudden CRACK and then a deep sonorous roar from across the field fills the air. A plane has started an engine. Then another. The thrumming merges and the pilot pushes the throttles and the thrum becomes a howl as the engines go to medium, then abruptly back off. They're not going anywhere just yet—just probably spinning their magnetos just for the hell of it.
Now the crew is lining up with their bags for the bag-check in back of the left wing. You move in and Hubbard makes a space for you.
Thanks, Hub. Everything jolly? you ask him, with manufactured cheer.
He looks like he's swallowed chalk, but he nods and mumbles something you don't catch.
Now this guy is really in Mission Mode. Tech Sgt. Hubba-Hubbard is already cavorting at 20,000 feet.
Then: Why aren't I?
As you go through the motions of the bag check, you feel somehow separate from yourself, as if one of you is watching you from a slight distance, while you yourself are doing the moving and the thinking.
The other you is ignoring the tableau of plane, hardstand and men, instead absorbing the way the sky looks against the trees . . . that long spiky black living divider between the dark, colourless earth and the vast sky, which is now casting dark blues and steel greys, always moving, always changing. Maybe living, too, like the trees—
The hilarious impossibility that you may never see this scene again reunites you with any dispassionate tableau-watching alter-egos and as you together ponder this unimaginable scenario and turn it over in your brain(s) it begins to collapse, becoming too abstract, unhandleable, then finally no longer available for review.
And that buzz that's been with you since Mason shook your shoulder is settling just below your collarbones like some insect testing its wings for flight. Very soon now
Then:
“Sergeant Robinson! How you holding up, son?”
Why, Colonel Shower! What a surprise! Why, I'm just . . . I'm just . . .
“Speak up, son! How're the nerves? Ready to go tackle the enemy?”
Well, sir, I'm just . . . I'm stunned, sir, at the moment.
zzzzzzzzz
“Stunned? Stunned? What's that, Sergeant? I don't know that word.”
Sir, I'm just so terrified about this mission that I don't think I can do it, sir. The flak, sir . . . I just know it's going to get me this time. And I left my two of clubs behind, sir. Please can you give me a pass just this one time just this one fucking time can I get a fucking pass just go back to my hut and read a book instead of being on that fucking plane can I—
"I don't know that word.”
don't know that word, Sergea—go back to my hut and
. . . *blink* why, good morning to you too, Airman Russ of Lancelot's Shining Knights of Renown Revue wake up you son of a bitch wake up know that word wake upwakeupwake
up
UP wakeupWAKE THE **FUCK UP** RUSS WAKE *NOW* UP*NOW* WA—
—obbie's bag is good,” King, who's on your right, has just been announcing, you realise,
. . . and all this time you've actually been going through various bags and doing the mental checklists of what should be in them. All the ones you've looked at are missing nothing. That's right, isn't it? Isn't it, Sergeant?
Huh? Oh ye—
And it seems that a faraway voice is speaking . . . saying sensible, logical things, things that make sense . . . things that are piercing through the nine-tenths December cloud cover in your head
very reasonable, yesh, very cool very—
Now, you don't wanna lose Reality, right, Russ? don' wanna lose, nosirreee
—'cause if you lose it, you'll miss these last minutes of Earth, precious minutes going by now, to drink in, to devour all these fractions of life, you don't want to miss those, those tiny things going by, Russ, do you?
—wanna miss the thingsh unnh cant miss 'em, no, can't ohmygod I'm not seeing them, I'm in a fuckin' FOG, I can't see I can't no no no no NO NO NO! This
and the voice is saying calmly If you don't come out of it, Russ, why, you're gonna get . . . like—one . . . of
— . . . THEM.
*whirrrrrrrrrSCHLACK*
and the movie projector in your head clatters to an abrupt halt.
Whaaaa . . . ?? Them? NAAAaaaaawwww . . .
Naw, naw, no, nu-nu-nu-nu-nuh naaawww. Like them?
A pause for what seems an eternity . . . then something snaps.
2 guys leave Point A and GuyX walks three miles an
Your number puzzles grab the controls.
and GuyZ walks at
For you, it's all over. For now. And no one has seen a thing
Very quickly, the announcement comes: bag checks all good, crew proceed to stations.
But first: last words from your hallowed leader, your guiding light, the man who's the key to your continued existence; the man who will take you there and bring you back, whole in body, if not in mind . . . your guru, ranking officer, captain, pilot—and friend.
Perfect. Just *Perfect*
C aptain John Raymond Moseley, looking somewhat pale but still razor-creased and boot-tips gleaming, crouches on his haunches just back from the edge of the towering left wing, and picks a stalk of some dried weed from one of the cracks in the concrete. He studiously chews on the end of it and waits for the crew to gather around.
A few of the crew, including you, crouch in a semicircle in front of him, while the rest stand behind you.
When all the murmurs and shuffling cease, Mose begins quietly:
“Men, today we're on what they call a 'Maximum Effort.'”
A few of you groan with practiced derision. It's always a Maximum Effort, isn't it?
“No,” Mose's voice rises. “There are gonna be 2,000 ships up there . . . ”—gasps—“all four divisions.”
? . . . Jesus W. Arnold Ramses Gulliver BENEDICT FARQUHAR CHRIST.
“Are we all goin' to Gerolstein, Skip?” Sol Womack pipes up brightly. There are a few laughs.
“Sixty-one of us are, Sgt. Womack,” Mose continues, ignoring the levity, and you suddenly realise there's no more Alabama drawl. “And I want formations tighter than a nun's . . . here he gropes for the word—”cassock. Tighter than a nun's cassock. Y'all hear?”
There are murmurs of “Sure, Cap'n,” and “Yeah, Skip.”
“The 445th will be travelling with us today, as well as the 492nd, at least until Ostend. Then for us it's on to Krefeld and Cologne to Ahrweiler and the IP—flying time including Assembly should be about three and a half hours. Flak . . . “
By now the crew is motionless; hands in pockets or holding bag straps; no fidgeting, no whispers.
“ . . . flak barges off the Dutch coast as usual, and then the worst should be over Cologne. Unknown over the target, but we can be pretty sure they're preparing some kind of Christmas Eve do, so we gotta hit 'em right in the chimney so Santa don't give 'em all our presents.”
Scattered laughs.
“Weather over the target is clear. There should be no problems putting our bombs in the pickle barrel and getting out quickly.”
You know Mose is being sarcastic, although it's not overt enough to be spotted by anyone who doesn't know him. The “pickle barrel” reference is one whose origins are lost to history but must have been spoken with typical brass balls to the press by some Air Force swell who wanted to tamp down concerns about hitting civilians. It's now only used to lampoon the idea of putting bombs anywhere near civilians, because everyone knows that bombing civilians is, well, wrong.
“Target is marshalling yards and lines of supply and communications in or around the target so the Krauts can't move troops around. So let's bomb the hell out of 'em and get back in time for the Christmas party.”
You know Mose knows more than he's telling—he just doesn't want to worry the men any more than they already are. It's all gonna happen anyway—no sense in previewing the coming Running of the Gauntlet.
“No chatter on the coms, men, it's radio silence unless you see bogeys, is that clear? Robbie'll keep you updated, right, Robbie?”
Sir.
“Make it a perfect mission. I want all your attention at all times. I gotta fly this thing, so I can't be distracted by trivials. Keep it sharp and we'll all be havin' a beer at the bar tonight. Got it?”
Ragged assent.
“Okay, beat it, you guys—let's go Kraut-hunting. King, see me upstairs.”
The gathering breaks up.
You sling your pack, then hesitate.
Now just wait a minute here . . . I'm supposed to climb in to that contraption and pretend like I know what I'm doing while concealing the fact that I don't from my loyal and trusting crewmates, all of whom are depending on me to deploy every one of my skills, some of which I don't have, for the purposes of—awww, forget it.
You've made this speech before.
You stand back from the wing and survey Leading Lady, its mirror-finish aluminum majesty not for a moment letting on that from an architectural standpoint, it is defying several Laws of Gravity by merely being upright, its skin is so thin—how it's going to get you to 27 Angels is something you wished were someone else's problem.
Y ou wonder for the 27th time why the massive propellers—all four of them, the triple blades of each longer than you are tall—have to have the one in the middle always pointing to the ground.
Once, when you'd actually asked, Ground Crew Chief Kelly "Corners" Seidel had laughed and looked at his sidekick, Rocco "Fans" Saroli, like it was some big secret. They'd given you some gobbledegook about oil pooling in the cylinders, leading to something called "hydrostatic lock."
Aaaaaaaaaa . . . you'd said with a sudden flash of recognition—chalepa ta kala!
It was the only Greek you remembered.
You shook your head wonderingly, and, as if now it all made sense, you gave them your Bela Lugosi eyebrow-trick.
"What the fuck is that?!" said Fans, and you were opening your mouth to reply when Corners suddenly swung around to face the plane, opened his arms wide and said "Beautiful things are difficult, my boy! Beautiful things are difficult!"—and then it was your jaw that became hydrostatic.
How the fuck do you know THAT? you sputtered, incredulous. You—
"I read Homer too, y'know, Rob! You ain't the only perfessor in this outfit!"
? . . . . . . . . . . . . !
And that was the day you knew your odds of making 25 had just ticked one martooni closer to a hundred.
. . . —but "hydrostatic lock?" Uh-huh . . . like a straight beats a flush.
Pilarski comes over. “Hey, Robbie, let's go help 'em turn the fans!”
This makes you laugh. Yeah, let's! you say, like some happy schoolkid roped into some plot. The rest of the crew are dispersing. Mose and Jonesy head to the cockpit, to go through the preflight checklists. They've already done the walkaround and conferred with the ground crew chief. Most of you will get to your stations through the bomb bay, so the doors'll be open a while longer.
But right now: goofing-off time.
—Maybe, your brain-possessing self counters, but not until I tell Mose what we're doing.
You wait until Mose is in his seat and looking around. Then you catch his attention with your waving arm and wait until you see him grin and give you a quick thumbs-up.
The hardstand is not yet a bedlam of noise, and you could conceivably shout your intentions to Mose, but you opt for the more unambiguous messaging method of crew-to-crew signalling.
This is a multilayered variation (dialect, if you will) of the general Interperson (Silent) messaging systems of the 8th Army Air Corps (itself a subset of the Air Force at large and, of course, all the other armed services, which each have their own "dialects," "vocabularies" and even slang, all of which are as different to yours as hay is different to cornflakes).
For you, this means a library of movements that sometimes resemble the Sign Language that you know blind folks use, but is much more military-specific, as there will be few blind people who need to know how to signal "Bombs away!" at 22,000 feet.
You remember when you saw Dawn Patrol, with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone—how they used that cryptic hand-language on the battlefield, and you wondered what it was and how the hell anyone could ever learn it.
Some gestures are obvious, like pointing to things, but when you need to signal things like "I want you and Turner to take Marcowicz and Connors and check out that ridge, but stay quiet as fuckin' churchmice. Tell Monster and Rags to hold position and just WAIT for my signal," well, anyone watching would swear you was a fuckin' hand puppet done too much benzedrine.
And you?
—Chop-throat-slash-point-point-hands-widen<no long time>slash-point-Pilarski-<circle around ear>-palmsflat-out-slowly-to-sides-pointMose<bunched-fingertips-lips>MmmmWAH!—and, why, you believe you could translate it to German!
The propellers—each altogether almost as tall as you, at 5.5 feet feet each—tower over both of you as you approach them. You pick the outboard engine on the left wing and, although you know the propeller has already been turned by the ground crew, you like to turn one for good luck.
Hep . . . hep . . . GO!
Both of you grab the tip of the right lower propeller and heave with all your might.
Jesus Christ, this whole thing must weigh more than a goddamn ton! you complain as you both strain with effort.
The propeller seems to protest your feeble ministrations for a few seconds but then, slowly, majestically, it begins to allow you to pull its massive bulk to the left as the other two, tall as houses, rotate in sync with yours like outstretched arms appealing to the sky to crush you like bugs.
Then Pilarski says, grunting as he pulls. “Damn, I'd hate to be anywhere near these fuckers when they're spinnin', eh, Robbie? Remember that guy?”
It’s a ritual. Uh, yeah, you do remember “that guy.”
About a month after you'd arrived at Rackheath, the Group, or some of the Group, was doing a mission you weren't flying. The way it was told to you, one of the planes was still on its hardstand, but just about to taxi out to get in line on the perimeter track, so all its propellers were at high thrust.
Anyway, one of the ground crew—the guy who guided the ships out from the hardstands and onto the runway—name of marshallers—for some reason had gone under the left wing to get something or check something. Now, considering as how and he was supposed to be intimately familiar with the SOP for handling departures from the hardstands, this guy of all people should have known better than to be fucking around near a non-chocked heavy bomber with all four Twin-Wasp R-1830-33 supercharged engines at near-maximum thrust.
The pilot, unaware that he was there, had begun to turn the plane in anticipation of moving off the hardstand.
The marshaller, who had been standing fairly close to the side of the bomber, for some reason had turned around just as the inboard propeller, whose tips were demolishing the air only 20 inches from the side of the plane and were now moving—impassive, monstrous, howling, HUGE—towards him faster than he could process what was happening, and he “like, just got sucked in.”
“Jesus Christ, it was just goddamn awful,” one guy said. “It's like he just vanished in a cloud of blood.”
There had been sheets of blood and pieces of the marshaller all over the side of the plane and the hardstand. Many of the witnesses—mechanics, mainly—had gotten violently sick.
No blame had been apportioned. The pilot had no reason to believe that someone was under the wing. But the guy had to be taken off flight duties and sent off to recuperate at Coombe House in Dorset, a kind of high-class resort for burned-out flyers. After that, you heard no more.
The propeller finally does that snap and there's a new one where yours used to be. You playfully cuff Pilarski in the back of the neck. Good job, kid. Now all you have to do is not shoot someone else’s propellers off for ‘em.
Meanwhile, Mose, who's been observing all this from the cockpit, waits until you've completed your heroic task. Then he slides his plexiglas side window open and yells “Hey guys, better get movin'! Takeoff in ten!”
You look at your watch and laugh. It's just past nine. Takeoff is officially at 10:20. He means 80.
Wilco, Skip! you yell back, and give him the thumbs-up.
Let's roll, you tell Pilarski.
He hesitates. It seems you're not the only one who's reluctant to possibly irretrievably remove your flying boots from the green and pleasant land that is England.
You start walking to the bomb bay.
No no nosirree, can't disappoint the Krauts by being late. The kids running the flak guns would be mighty disappointed if we failed to turn up on time to take our places in the boxes in the sky they've got all set up for us to fly through fuck will it be today maybe just get some shrapnel instead of my head blown off fuck what if they find our altitude we'll be goners, shite, one of those poor bastards spinning impossibly Jesus, how does a B-24 spin horizontally like that like a fucking top with wings, no chutes because they're all crushed against the hull by centrifugal
“Hup-hup, Sergeant Robbie!” O'Connell is poking his head out from the side of the doors absurdly trying his best to look upside down.
Pilarski is throwing his bag up into the bomb bay and pulling himself after it.
You throw your bag in . . . and hesitate.
As it begins to blot out all sight of the world you're leaving, the vast hulk that is the B-24 Liberator bomber, dark and indifferent to the small life crawling around inside it, unalive yet somehow alive, is brooding and hostile—until those four giant podlike creatures that hang from its horizonless wings roar into life, giving it life—at which point its bulk becomes sleek and weightless and it metamorphoses into a beaming sky god, living only to soar once released from its earthbound existence of interminable incapacity.
The belly of the plane is so low that you don't need a stepladder to access the bomb bay.
And there are no actual doors to get in your way—unlike the B-17, whose bomb doors are just hinged metal plates that physically open and close, hanging open on the bomb run and catching wind resistance. The B-24 is slung so low to the ground that if you had the same type of doors the bomb guys wouldn't be able to load the bombs.
So the B-24 features doors that roll into the fuselage and roll back out, just like Dad's old oak rolltop desk in the den. (The image somehow resists your efforts to summon it. Nothing from the world you once knew that doesn't involve the preposterous reality you inhabit makes any sense any more . . . the longer you're here, the longer it seems you will be here, and all thoughts of any other universes recede into mere pinpoints in your mind's eye . . . places that were, not are, and might not ever be again.)
You shake your head as if trying to dislodge a fly.
After your flight bag you hoist yourself up, bulky Skyman suit and all, in through the space to the right side of the catwalk—the narrow strip of metal that runs down the center of the bomb bay between the doors and which will be the only way to travel from the front of the plane to the back and which terrifyingly spans the length of two Cadillacs 62s parked end to end.
It's the only way, because if at altitude you happen to step on a closed bomb bay door, which are shockingly thin to save weight, you will be on your way to Valhalla with little further effort on your part.
To your right and left, this room's walls are decorated with bombs, stacked up against the sides of the plane, all painted that dreary Olive Drab
why paint the goddamn bombs? Do they really need to be camouflaged as they rain from the sky and obliterate
and looking somehow fat and friendly, though you know they're not, well, maybe fat but definitely not friendly, but this compartment is Beyer's business, so you quickly get yourself upright and squeeze through the narrow, arched doorway that separates the bomb bay from your compartment, ducking so you won't crush your skull before it gets crushed anyway by the fireball after takeoff, and well, here you are. As close to home as you get these days.
Cheap Swill
You and O'Connell, who's basically your roommate during missions, call this place “The Living Room,” because, well, “The Dying Room” isn't quite as catchy.
It's almost impossibly tiny for two grown men to occupy simultaneously—reaching from the cockpit to the bomb bay about ten feet in length, and a hilariously cramped 6.5 feet wide. If you stand in the centre and reach out your hands you can actually touch some of the equipment on either side. And the walls and ceilings are crammed with wires, tubes, struts, doodads and whatsits, most of which you know little except for the crucial hydraulic lines without which the pilots cannot steer the plane, the electrics—which power your heated suits, among other things—the oxygen, without which you will be dead on arrival, and that most precious of all, the fuel lines.
the fuel lines jesus 1/8th inch of aluminum between a piece of flak and those lines a shrieking hot metal castoff the size of a frypan but shaped like a corn flake ripping through them and spraying gas all over the place and I'm going down but first barbecued like a well-done filet mignon and
“Yo-ho!” O'Connell suddenly appears in the cockpit doorway. “Didja bring me whiskey?”
You admit as to how you brought no whiskey. Would champagne do?
“Only if it's Perignon '26—I ain't drinkin' no cheap swill.”
You give him your standard lecture on the use of double-negatives and tell him it's a 1913, which seems to palliate his fevered brow. He goes off to check his gauges.
The Radio Station—the place where you sit—a miserable hole by any standards, is nonetheless your coccoon for the duration and you're so familiar with it that you're thinking of having it refurbished, with better lighting and maybe even Chintz curtains.
It's on the right side as you look to the cockpit, kind of shoved into a corner, with the left side being the bulkhead, or wall, between the back of Jonesy's seat and the Living Room.
This “arched partition,” as O'Connell calls it, is the home for the ungainly black box that is your purpose in this life: the radio. On this device you will work your magic as a Radioman.
Beneath that and extending a couple of feet in length and a bit less in width is a small metal desk, bolted to the fuselage, which is the place where you will put your champagne glass and use your pencil and pad to do your calculations and number puzzles.
A too-small distance from the desk is your chair, an ill-designed swivel-thing made of metal, with a lightly padded leather seat whose backrest is your parachute. It is not a thing for sitting on for hours at a time, but at least you have a chair. You know that the waist gunners have only the cold deck
good for playing poker but bad when it's 50° below and you have nowhere to hide when cannon shells are spraying through the walls and all hell is exploding all around you
You blink rapidly to shake the thoughts and they quickly disappear.
Might as well settle in.
You shove your bag against the plane wall and squeeze your bulk into your position.
At head height right in front of you is the thing that plagues your dreams and is the source of your nightmares: the two-by-three ft. plexiglas window from which you can watch any unfolding dramas. No choice of two-for-one matinees or double-bills—just what's available that particular second.
You wish it weren't there but you know you'd have vast regrets if there were just a blank wall. This window might be the porthole to the last few seconds of your life; a last view of the clouds, perhaps, or maybe the countryside near some obscure German village as your plane hurtles to meet it.
But it would be better with blinds. Chintz curtains just won't do.
From your station you can literally turn and be looking right through the cockpit door at Mose. If you got up and pulled your lines a bit, you could tap him on the shoulder. However, since he's usually strung as taut as interstate pylon wires while flying, you, yeah, never do that.
Behind you on the opposite side of the plane is O'Connell's picture gallery: the dials and switches that he has to constantly monitor that involve fuel transfers, electrical and oxygen matters and a host of other things that you're glad you don't have to think about. O'Connell is an exceptional Flight Engineer as Flight Engineers go—you've watched him tackle some hairy situations without once changing that chess-player expression of his. This is good for the midst of aerial battle, but unfortunate in a poker game, because with that face he can bluff a pair of fours to a straight flush with ten dollars in the pot. He has to be closely watched.
He has a similar chair to yours, except without the parachute. It's behind you, closer to the bomb bay. You can reach out and tap his shoulder, but it's too far to yell when the engines are running.
Right behind you in the center of the ceiling is the top turret. It's arguably the most important position in the plane after the pilots' cocktail lounge, because it's there that a 360° view of the beach and waterfront (with occasional Focke-Wolf 190) is available to the lucky tenant. Only what's below the plane can't be seen, but the waist and rear gunners take care of that.
It's kind of like a skylight, except that when workmen install skylights they typically don't include the murderous Browning twin .50 calibre machine guns that fire projectiles that are bigger than the bottles of Tabasco that they put on the tables at the luncheonette, which travel at three times the speed of sound at a rate of 450 per minute, and which can penetrate an inch of hardened steel armour plate at a distance of, well, a Babe Ruth homer at Fenway Park.
It doubles as an observation platform for O'Connell to man at takeoff, so he can tell Mose of any hazards on the taxiway or runways. To get into it you have to remove a small metal step-platform from brackets on the side of the fuselage and slide it into position into slots on the deck. You stand on that and you can start firing away immediately.
If things get hot, you might have to man the guns up there . . . something you don't want to think about right now.
Can't think about right now.
It's a form of mercy that you have no time to think about anything at all beyond your impending sequence of tasks and you find yourself dreading any downtime . . . it'll be the Zuider Zee—that's when the Hell starts.
You take a moment to survey your situation.
Oh, fuck. Here again. This godawful miserable stinking place where no man was ever meant to be.
What a fucking tub.
You're reminded of the evening not long ago when you, O'Connell and Womack had graciously invited two random RAF guys to your table for drinks at the King's Head in Norwich.
Everything started off well enough until after a few pints the conversation had suddenly switched to B-24s.
“Fuckin' cows, that's what they are, innit?” one of the RAF toffs commented loudly to the table, his pal looking away in embarrassment.
The guy, a squirrelly-faced lookalike of RAF Wing Commander “Dambuster” Guy Gibson, his pencil-thin moustache looking desperately around to escape his upper lip, ploughed on.
“I mean, they look like cows, so they must fly like cows, if ya see what I'm gittin' at.”
Definitely of bovine extraction, you agreed, winking at Con and Womack.
“Wot's that? Wot's that you said?” the RAF guy said, his eyes narrowing. “Bo-vine wot?”
You asked what he flew. “Me? Wot do I fly? Stirlings, mate. The best damn ships on the planet.”
Con's eyebrows went up theatrically. “Stirlings? Wot's that, mate? Oh yeah, the new experimental 9-engine bomber . . . ”
Sol abruptly got up from the table with a raised forefinger “Be right back, gentlemen. I gotta get some smokes.”
Only you seemed to wonder why he went out the pub's door to the driveway outside.
Guy Gibson called over the barmaid and ordered another round. You and O'Connell stopped him and said this round was on you. “Except make it double scotches all round,” Con said briskly.
Heh . . . you brightened internally, he has a Plan.
Womack returned to the table, looking a tad hot under the collar.
Gibson was now singing the praises of the Great Jerry-Bashing of September 1940, otherwise known as the Battle of Britain.
“They got focked, mate, right up the arse. And where was you lot? You was no-where, that's where you was.”
His pal put a hand on his arm and whispered something in his ear.
“Fock that! I'm not leavin' now. The evening's just gettin' started.”
The drinks arrived and you paid the barmaid.
Gentlemen, to cows, wherever they may be grazing, you announced gravely, raising your glass. Everyone raised their glass, Gibson immediately draining the entire contents of his.
Then, as one, you, O'Connell and Womack got up from the table and wordlessly filed past the two startled airmen, upturning your glasses over the head of the insufferable prick who had dared to call your hotel in the sky a cow.
As you grabbed your bikes in the lot outside Womack pulled some shiny objects out of his pocket. “I stole their bicycle lights,” he said grandly. “They'll never make it home.”
N ow, as you begin upacking the small things that you'll need today—pens, pencils, pads, flashlight and the like—your nose is assailed by by the familiar “Bouquet of B-24”: gasoline and engine oil fumes with snatches of sheepskin, whiffs of cologne and sharp metallic overtones of the brass from all the ammunition just loaded, everything overlaid by the dull aroma of Olive Drab.
This rather squalid atmosphere, which you have nicknamed “Pre-” will be swept away by the powerful winds blasting through the multiple openings everywhere on the ship on takeoff, after which the new atmosphere will be called “Post-”. As in Post a note: I'm going to smoke.
The large black radio mounted to your left on the bulkhead seems in good condition. You put on your headset and beginning running down the frequency checklist.
You can hear O'Connell moving around you as he makes his checks and you also hear the muted conversation in the cockpit—Mose and Jonesy having finished their preflight checklists and now desultorily discussing the ever-changing weather situation.
Beyer, the bombardier, is already in his position in the bottom of the glass bubble below and aft of the cockpit. King, the navigator, as usual, is nowhere to be found.
Yeah, okay, we're all good, nicht wahr?
You look down, trying to remember if you've forgotten anything.
The desk. The little light. Your pad. They're all here.
This is all real.
You flash forward to the moment you know so well—when Mose makes that slow stop on the 45: the L-turn at the bottom of the runway where he'll start running up the engines, Jonesy stomping on the brakes, that awful roar that seems to come from everywhere at once, rattling the bomber's hollow airframe as if it were sitting on a newly-minted earthquake and you know it's all irreversible now, these are possibly the last moments you'll ever be connected with earth again oh god oh god oh god it's real it's real, not a drea—
“Shit, sorry guys, I hadda talk with Callaway's navigator about the Gee-H approach.” Nelson King blunders his way breathlessly into the small space between you and O'Connell and forward to the cockpit, where he apologises for his tardiness and updates Mose on various minor route changes.
Snapped back to reality, you mark down the numbers for 8th HQ, signals from whom you have to monitor and record every hour or so. Today's ID symbol is an edifying “I TL.”
Fuckin' brilliant, General Brayne, musta taken many sleepless nights to come up with that one. Ya dopes, the Krauts aren't all beer-swilling camp-followers of the Chivalric Order of Teutonic dumbfuckery—I don't think 1 TL will hold 'em off for long.
You briefly look up and something catches your eye, just under your small port window. It's a flaw in the metal of the airplane—no, not a flaw—a deliberate . . . ? You run your finger over it.
It's like something from outside banged against it or something.
You are well aware that even though from the outside a B-24 looks implacably solid, more like granite than metal, in point of fact the hull is just a single layer of sheet aluminum, with an afterthought of a layer of varnish to add charm.
You can push a screwdriver through the hull with little effort—you haven't done it, but you've seen it done—which raises an important question: why doesn't a B-24 just crumple in a heap to the runway under the force of gravity?
Now this question is directed to Dr. Koblenz, Chief Physicist at the University of Goddammitenburg: just how does the B-24 hold itself together when in reality it is a flying soufflé wrapped in tin foil? —I'm glad you asked, Herr Robbie, because ziss is a kvestion of the atomic weak force colliding viss the eggs in the
Fuck. It's SHRAPNEL.
The realisation hits you like a bucket of ice water to the face. You shrink back in your seat, as far away from it as you can, your mind in turmoil.
We came back from Coblenz. I could have sworn that wasn't there. Fuck fuck fuck I was probably too busy to notice it it must have been a weak burst maybe under the plane and that piece was just outta gas but it's level with my eyes fuck just two feet closer and it could have gone through and taken my eye clean out or maybe a little stronger and it would have been curtains—just like THAT oh man, jesus and I didn't even see it
There are no reassuring thoughts to replace that tiny triangular perversion now staring you in the face.
Bury it. Just bury it. What's done is done and it didn't get you, did it? It's a good omen. Lightning never hits the same place, right?
It's all you can summon, but now you have powerful reasons to be terrifed.
You sweep all thoughts away except those that are to do with your prescribed tasks.
Radio equipment at your station secure for now, you shout over your shoulder to O'Connell if he needs anything from the back, because you have to check some transmitter boxes in back.
“Nah, all good here, Robbie. Thanks.”
The bomb bay doors are still open and you're going to have to traverse the catwalk to get to the rear.
Luckily, this strip of metal, about wide enough to fit your booted feet side by side, holds no terrors for you. Even aloft, you blithely shuffle (crouching, of course) back and forth with your portable oxygen bottle on one chore or another, holding on to the cables on either side for balance.
With a full bomb load it's mighty intimate if two of you are trying to cross in the opposite direction. In that case, one usually goes first, but any emergency can require a two-person cross-traverse. Pilarski is crazy-terrified of the catwalk during flight, which you all find somewhat amusing, but hey, you must admit to being afraid of shrimp.
You start the shuffle up the catwalk, noting the spiderweb of cracks in the concrete last glimpse of Earth just two feet from the bottom of the overloaded plane. Then you're past and into the main cabin behind the wings.
The light blasting in from the waist gun window ports removes some of the dingy feeling of up front and it almost looks livable. Why, move over, Stadtler Hotel Boston. Dad works for Stadtler. Great suites and a bargain, too if you're visiting downtown maybe just $26 a night or was it
Womack and Hubbard are installing their guns and setting up their ammo belts, which emanate from large orange metal boxes just behind the openings of their gun ports.
Along the sides of this part of the penthouse and master bedroom run spars that help hold the aluminum sheeting from abandoning its post and demanding another room from the front desk. Things like crash axes, fuse panels, oxygen and electrical hookup boxes are mounted in a seemingly arbitrary arrangement on both sides of the cabin, while cables, wires and tubes run aft to rear, floor to ceiling, all painted that cheery Olive Drab. If you hold both arms out wide you can almost touch the side walls with your fingers.
Carefully maneuvering the various step-up-step-down terrain down to the waist guns, you greet the two gunners and tell them Santa sends his regards. Then, even though you know Pilarski is locked away in his turret, probably napping, you go back there and rap on the top of the plexi with your flashlight.
Joltin' Joe Pilarski, you call through the opening in the top of his turret, and he immediately tries to look upwards and behind simultaneously. Looks cozy. Trade?
“Oh, hi Robbie!” he shouts. His voice is tinny and round. “All good up front?”
All good, you reassure him. Takeoff as soon as they shoot the red. Now I must remind you, the bar only stocks one kind of beer, and you'll need exact change. Just yank the call bell after takeoff and a lovely serving girl will come down and serve ya.
His laugh is untinged with nerves. It's a good sign.
“Thanks, Robbie! See you on the other side!”
Kill 'em dead, soldier, you call, and rap his turret goodbye.
You head back, pinching first Womack's, then Hubbard's neck as you pass.
You gentlemen are heroes! Remember that! you yell behind you, not entirely tongue-in-cheek. But they both laugh anyway.
The transmitter junction is lit up like it's supposed to be so it's back over the catwalk and to your position.
You shove yourself into your chair and are soon staring out through the viewing port in front of you.
I hate this goddamn window.
You don't want to look outside. In fact, when you're up there you studiously avoid looking out because that reminds you with brutal emphasis of just what it is that you're presently doing.
You're in no mood to gaze at fluffy white clouds or tiny patchwork landscapes. They just provide the backdrop for ghastly whirring, shrieking things that erupt from far below, or some red-black horror delivering death from inside the next fluffy billow.
Then, with no warning, sorrow . . .
You freeze, eyes vacant and staring, as you feel an unstoppable and dangerous upwelling that is already threatening to fill the corners of your eyes.
The way your plane is parked, you have a view of the hardstand and other hardstands with their parked planes, but you also have a view of a fringe of trees off to the side.
And you just saw a small bird flying between a couple of bare branches. Now it is just sitting there, as if it has flown there just to be admired by you.
Christ, that bird might be the last animal I ever see . . . —oh god, how can this all be real? how can I be only 22 and looking at the last bird of my life . . . the Void, it'll be so dark and there will be nothing in it—until the end of time.
NO.
It won't, you stupid moron. It won't be the last animal you'll ever see. You'll see plenty of animals because you'll get through this goddamn war WITHOUT A SCRATCH . . . without a scratch, I said. D'you hear? Repeat after me:
You obey and repeat. Again and again, until the present banishes the future—gives it a thorough thrashing, in fact—till all thoughts of it vanish.
There is only Now, only a job, which you know you're gonna do with flair, creativity and talent, because you're the best in the business—right?
Right.
It's time for you to start getting the communications stuff figured out, but first things first; you grab the tube that's dangling from the end of the oxygen mask that's presently hanging around your neck and find the oxygen outlet—a metal receiving dock on the wall to the right of your desk, and plug it in. Firmly.
You're already wearing your leather helmet with the built-in headphones and throat microphone. You find the lead and plug it into the outlet for the Intercom system.
Suddenly the plane shudders.
Not Your Imagination
T hen, a giant, air-rending sound, like a car passing you at 120mph on a two-lane highway, swiftly followed by a WHACK. Then another. And another, faster and faster until the sound starts to blend and merge, too many whacks to distinguish. Then the whacks transition to a buzz, then to a growling, eardrum-shattering drone, and you suddenly realise that it's drowned out the sound of the engines on your side starting up.
You look outside and see the giant, 12-foot propellers ripping the air to a sheen, just vertical blurs—the one nearest to the plane just four or five feet from where you're sitting.
You watch from your port the ground crew chief with his fire extinguisher, walking slowly in front of the engines. You notice that he stays well back from the spinning props . . . no red paint jobs today.
I need a fucking cigarette.
Almost as if they heard you, the props suddenly begin slowing. Mose is shutting them down. He shouts back from the cockpit “Take fifteen, men, there's been a delay.”
O'Connell beats you to the bomb bay, which is now closed, by a hair. Move it, Con, ya lazy sacka shit, you giggle-shout, as you push him playfully across the catwalk and into the waist.
He beats you again to the emergency hatch on the floor just aft of the waist gunners and he drops out carefully, as the ground is only two feet below the hatch.
You're close behind and faster than you can say Jack Sprat your Zippo is flicked and you're taking your first deep drag. O'Connell is also crushing a plug of tobacco into his pipe and beaming with pleasure.
“Wahoo! Last pipe!”
Corners, the ground Crew Chief, is strolling over. “Staff Sergeant Robinson, put that thing out immediately.”
Then he grins. “Gotta light?”
You hold out your lighter and then see his pack. Ooooohh, Camels! Trade ya.
“Forget it!” he says, as you light his cigarette. “Here, take it.”
He pushes the pack against your Mae West and you accept it gratefully.
Thanks a bunch, Kel! You coming to the Christmas party? A little gamee-gamee?
“With you? I'd rather pet a wolverine.” He claps your shoulder and hustles back to his men, staying carefully in sight of the cockpit at all times.
You smoke hurriedly. Deeply. You take in as much as you can of the scene—a few of the ground crew off to the side near the edge of the concrete, jobs done, sweating out the takeoff almost as much as you.
Con stands a little ways off, writing in a small notebook as he puffs on his pipe
At random intervals from across the field you hear planes starting their engines, then shutting them off. It reminds you of a chorus of lawnmowers on the first sunny day in weeks back in Brookline.
Well, kind of.
You look over to the stand of trees where the bird was. Gone.
And now, so are you.
A jeep roars up and the stripe inside it yells up to Mose that it's a go.
You and O'Connell are the last ones in the plane. You take a last look at the ground, committing the image to memory, and then head up to your station.
It's 9:47 a.m.
You call in to the tower and tell the Group Ops Officer you're online and then deliver your first communication to Mose.
Captain, on with the tower. At your discretion.
“Roger, Radio. My discretion.” This generally means he can start up the engines for real this time, which he begins doing.
O' Connell grabs the top of your head, pretending to use you as a handhold as he enters the top turret, and you slap at his hand like you're killing a mosquito. It's a ritual.
He'll slide a small hatch open on the top of the plane aft of the turret so he can stick his head and shoulders completely outside so he can get the best possible view of the stand, the taxiway and any other locations the plane is likely to pass through, for hazards: vehicles, men, items in the road, such as dropped bombs from other ships, and so on.
You'll occasionally grab the top of his flying boots and shake them as if to knock him off his perch and he'll kick the air ineffectually, trying to get you to stop.
All four engines are now idling, the occasional black puffs of exhaust from the manifolds coughing out from under the wing. The drone is familar, intimate; like the air conditioner in your Royal Penthouse suite at the Dorchester on Park Lane, WK1.
Where, of course, you've never been, but your mind's eye has got it thoroughly covered.
You know you're going to be there for more than ten minutes, so you check your frequency modules. These are actual little boxes that you insert into the main radio when you want to change frequencies, and remove when you need another frequency.
You make sure you have your Kraut frequency modules—these will allow you to monitor Kraut ground channels for communications or directions to fighters dispatched from airfields in the path of the bomber stream. The Kraut system—once known as the Kammhuber Line, that had been so devastating for the RAF earlier in the war—and its variations directed against the 8th Air Force so effectively in 1943 and early 1944, has long since been decimated; but its remnants are still alive and powerful and able to create Hell in a bomber stream.
But not if you become a volunteer Jafu for the day.
A Jafu—the nickname for a Jagdfliegerführer, or any one of many German ground commanders that oversee the deployment of fighters against a bomber stream as it passes through his sector—will be barking orders on those frequencies that you will hopefully be monitoring.
It is devoutly to be wished that you yourself can interrupt the Führerbefehl, or orders from the top, with your own urgent "Adler Eins: Alle Jäger zurück zur Basis!" (Eagle One: All fighters return to base!) which you've practiced enough with Krause to actually be delivered with a slight Bavarian accent.
Now this part is pure fun. You wonder how you could ever have been apprehensive. You and the guys are gonna roll some strüdel today.
The intercom crackles. “Crew, take positions.” It's Mose, announcing the departure from the hardstand and onto the taxiway.
You will stay where you are, your back against the bulkhead, but the waist gunners will have to sit with their backs against the strut that marks the step-up deck just between the waist and the bomb bays; since they have nowhere to sit, it's the safest place to be while the plane is taking off.
“Safe,” however, is relative.
The transition from flesh to atoms will be efficient and unhampered by any obstacles if your B-24 clips the fence at the end of the runway due to an insufficiently rapid uptake of landing gear, and the resulting menage-à-ten trillion of the newly-liberated molecules of high explosive and 100-octane AvGas will create a fireball that will send a mushroom column racing for the cloud base—with a shoutout to the planes assembling above.
So the gunners sometimes come up and sit with you, like kids during a thunderstorm.
That night . . . your restless mind, unsatisfied with imaginary scenarios, needs no encouragement. Westover Field. Just a bus ride from home. The night training mission.
You were fourth for takeoff—just some navigation exercise, like all the others. But everyone was a rookie back then, even you.
The flare went up and the first ship began its takeoff run. You couldn't see it, of course, but Con was inside the turret as usual. No one said anything on the intercom.
You were timing everything and by then the lead ship should have been past the perimeter and climbing, with Number Two already on his takeoff run.
Then the whole ship shuddered and a moment later BOOM! the sound arrived. Con started shouting Holy shit! Holy shit!
You jumped up and got into the turret with Con, which was a hell of a squeeze, just in time to see a giant flash that lit up the whole field from end to end and reflected off the cloud layer.
Then another massive shudder and three seconds later another dull BOOM!
What the fuck—Con and you thought the first one had crashed and you'd just seen its tanks blowing, but later you found out that that was the second ship going down.
The second ship . . . which contained the crew who shared your hut.
All gone. No more drinks or rainbows, no more dinners at home with mom, no postwar, no growing up, no marriage, no kids, except the one McKibben will never see. Fuck, who's gonna write McKibben's wife? Graziano's mom? No way I'm gonna do it. I'd just be crying my eyes out all over the ink and making spiders all over the paper. Has to be Mose . . . poor Mose. Poor THEM. Jesus, this is so fucked.
The next day as you sat on your beds, in complete shock, men came in unanounced and began collecting the personal effects from your absent hutmates' lockers. When they got to Mowat's, you couldn't take it any more and leapt up to make sure they weren't taking anything he would have wanted you to make sure went to his girlfriend in Toronto.
Who the fuck are you guys? You'd asked, in a foul mood. There was no answer.
But back on the runway that horrific day, the scene had continued, impossibly, to deteriorate.
Number Three had no orders and was already on his takeoff run when your hutmates' plane crashed, so there was little he could do. By that time there were two wrecks sending flames hundreds of feet into the sky directly past the end of the runway and the Number Three skipper must've lost his mind . . . and his nerve.
That time he'd raised his nose so high to avoid the funeral pyre that he just stalled out and fell in a flat drop from 200 feet. Amazingly the waist gunners managed to bail out, but from 100 feet their chutes barely had time to open and they were both killed.
And there you were . . . up next. The tower had barely had time enough to gather their wits, with Mose already running up the engines, when the message came to scrub.
Wham. Thirty guys, just . . . poof. Not Krauts, just a crazy throw of the dice.
Back then, you thought it was a freak of nature, a one-in-a-million stroke of bad luck. Now you know that things like that happened with appalling regularity. Training grounds were deathtraps. This mission would probably be safer than any one of those iffy flights you had been on in the early days.
Those had been heady times, filled with camaraderie and laughter, as the crew began to know each other and form a unit, but the penalties were harsh for those who weren't quite up to their jobs. Usually it meant death, for they were all hopelessly young; without the extra year or two of life that would have given them the mental tools to do things like fight in this war.
At the pitches of intensity of training flights, where everything was “Practice, practice, practice” in real-world conditions, small errors were big errors, because you usually only got one chance to make 'em and no chance at all to learn from them. But you learned to live with that dual dark-side-light-side twilight existence, with the brutal reality of guns and bombs and hate and deception and shut the fuck up, you goddamn loudmouth bastard, because, well, that's what young men do.
Wendover, with Shower commanding, had been a near-dictatorial regime in which rest of any kind was highly discouraged. Even a cigarette break could bring over some “stripe with a gripe,” as you called it, which didn't bother you at all—you with your diplomatic trompe d'oeils, misdirection, and soothing banter. They were putty.
Still, no one really knew how to do much of anything back them, which was incredibly dangerous—mind-alteringly dangerous—to themselves and everyone around them.
This meant that being at 20,000 feet might be the least dangerous place to be, even with Huns a-comin' for lunch and a smoke, because the ground could be infinitely more perilous—what with all the random activities being conducted around machine guns, high-calibre ammo, bombs, gasoline and countless other combustibles all stacked, packed and racked in close proximity to each other like at the Cereals & Sundries aisle at Uncle Farley's One-Stop Shop. . . the better to blow you, the plane and 44 random witnesses to Kingdom Come, always in the usual numberless and indifferent ways.
“Intercom check.” It's King, who's now sitting on his box just behind the pilots.
“Bombardier? Beyer?”
“Hear you loud and clear, Nav,”
“Radio? Robinson?”
Gotcha, Captain. Radio here.
“Engineer? O'Connell?”
“Uh, he sends his regrets but asks you to accept his pet monkey instead, sir,”
“O'Connell, consider yourself a private. Hand in your stripes back at HQ,” replies King, betraying not an ounce of humour.
“Aww, Nav, that's awful rough. I can hang upside down in the bomb—”
Mose's voice cuts him off: “Cut the chatter, men, and finish the com check.”
Duly chastised, the men finish the com check. You punch one of O'Connell's boots and yell up the turret But can you still do trigonometry?
“You'd be surprised what monkeys can do when given a sextant,” he yells back.
A sudden movement outside—Corners and a mechanic dashing out to remove the wheel chocks. This is it—the last earthly barrier to your journey to the sky.
While It Lasts
Y ou mentally capture the scene from your port—the blur of the propellers, the edge of the hardstand, the fringe of trees—and consign it to an imaginary trunk in an imaginary attic labelled Last Views Of Earth On Earth. It's the sixth occupant so far—the first five are what you saw on your last five missions. Since you're rarely at the same hardstand twice, it's quite a variety of images . . . but sadly, no birds.
There's a lurch and the pitch of the engines begins to rise as Mose increases power to the ones he needs to move the plane.
The nosewheels on B-24s can't turn, so on the ground the only way to move and turn the plane is by engine thrust. It's slow and clumsy, but Mose is an expert and the plane moves with massive grace.
You have no idea what number you're in for takeoff, but Mose does, and apparently it's your turn to enter the stream. Since you can only see what's on the right side, your view is of the edges of the base. On the port side of the plane would be a view of the inner taxiways and the main runway, with all the ships on their takeoff runs, but you're just fine here, thank you very much.
Even though you can't see any flares, you know exactly what's going on—you can feel by the wheelbumps where you are, if you don't want to look out the window. But an occasional glance out at the scenery passing by tells you how close you are to takeoff.
It's when you reach the 45—that turnoff that is only big enough for one B-24 at a time, where the pilot pushes the throttles to full takeoff power with the engine blast blowing harmlessly over Green Lane West and Baronet Stracey's lettuce patch instead of leaving a bunch of rough air for the next guy to have to takeoff through—that you know your life is about to undergo a radical change.
But that is for Future You to worry about, Now You decides, and everyone agrees not to think about it. Instead you look around for some duty you might have neglected. But Thorough You—the one who's On Shift today, has taken care of everything . . . how considerate of him, you murmur to yourself. About goddamn time someone does some work around here.
Anyone surveying the little who didn't know better would see a flaps-set, trim-tabs open, steely-eyed
damn, where IS John Ford and his camera crew when you need him but noooo he hadda be at Midway some flyspeck in the Pacific instead of on this hardstand where the grizzled RadioMan beats off the enemy one by—
But here you pause. Could it truly be the case that Ford and his crew are busy somewhere else, in spite of being aware of the far more cinematic elements going on right here in this Radio compartment . . . —?
there'd be a B-roll wide shot from behind pan over the Radio Operator as he checks his frequencies—no—is writing something in a logbook while the establishing shot focuses on the young man's set jaw is my jaw set? huh, how d'you set your jaw maybe just grit one side of your teeth, yeah, like that, shit I need a mirror not a fucking porthole how does a guy do any serious work in this amateur-hour production o lawdy lawdy shee-ite get me outta th—
So you decide that while you wait for Ford to reconsider you'll smoke a
—Hey Engineer, can I smoke yet? you yell up the turret to O'Connell.
“Absolutely!” he deadpans. “But do it in the bomb bay so you don't bother the non-smokers.”
King, who's still standing behind the pilots even though he's supposed to be behind you and the Engineer with Beyer for takeoff, yells over his shoulder “I don't mind, Rob, but the bomb bay idea is a good idea. Sit where those yellow things are at the back of the bombs.”
You laugh. “Those yellow things” are the arming tethers that lucky O'Connell has to remove just before the bomb run.
Gotcha, Nav, you shout above the din. Can you plot a route to Massachusetts after?
“I'm doing it now!” comes the reply.
Stop-lurch. Wait. Stop-lurch. Wait.
It's interminable—must be half an hour since we started.
You wonder where that 791st gunner you met at breakfast, Truax, is in the lineup. Jeez, he was jittery. I hope he knows what he's doing. Just one fuckup during assembly and ten guys vanish in a fireball. Twenty guys, even.
You know that even the best pilots fear Assembly and then formation, because they can be doing everything perfectly and some idiot can screw up and ruin everything. That's the reason that if you're not flying real missions they have you flying practice missions—almost every day, depending on the weather. You hate it but you respect the reasons behind it. Not many pilots are like Mose, and they need hours just flying that beast, without the pressure of flak and fighters.
It's good for them and it's good for you.
That skinny fuck Col. Shower is a real slave driver, hated by the crews, for his constant pass-cancelling and ordering practice missions when you were expecting a couple of days off. But the 467th has gained a reputation as the best damn group in the 2nd Division. Fewer losses, best bombing accuracy, best formation flying.
Wahoo. Fork out the tinsel. I'll stick it on my dog tag, so they'll know how distinguished I was when they remove it from my shrivelled crispy critter neck.
Maybe today will be a milk run . . . ? Nah, no chance.
The Luftwaffe is probably even now readying their thousands of flying demons and following the bomber stream by radar.
Hey—no . . . —SCYTHING THROUGH THE FORMATION raking, always raking, those rounds stitching great big rents through the thin aluminum like giant slug-breathing zippers or through the thin plexiglas of the cockpits or the Radio Operat—
Behind your closed eyelids you feel the band tighten, the buzzing now in your chest and getting more persistent as your imagination broadcasts scene after scene of falling B-24s and shattered metal and junk, the detritus of planes and bodies that you fly through and it's not like a movie, because it's real. You know it's real because you've seen it in front of your very own eyes and it's men who are in those planes, men just like you who have families and girlfriends and wives who are waiting, almost paralysed with fear that something will happen to their boy but counting the missions and praying but
will get the Dreaded Telegram instead
of hugging Oscar, Peter, Norman, Johnny or Bob at the airport
real soon, any time now, maybe tomorrow he'll be here, our boy
The sheer randomness of it all is the most chilling aspect . . . the continual helplessness at every second of every minute you're in that plane because you just don't know what's going to happen.
It's kind of like going 80 miles an hour on a remote ruler-straight two-lane country road. For a while it's a terror-hilarious thrill until a low-pressure front causes a tree to fall in the road 100 feet away, causing a landslide with giant boulders and iron ore, and Bigfoot. And Yetis. Lots of Yetis.
And then, always then, there was Schweinfurt.
It was before your time but the stories were still dominating conversations among all the crews even back in the States, only more so when you'd arrived. And it was all the stories about it that horrified you most even before your first combat mission.
It happened in August of '43, while you were still doing training flights at Westover or Wendover or Walkover (there had been so many) at a time when the Mighty 8th was still sticking an elbow in the pool to see if it was warm enough to jump in.
So far their efforts had not seemed to be making any dents in the panels of the Nazi war machine, so they decided to kick things up a notch.
At the time the stars of the show were the B-17s, which some journalist, awestruck because they bristled with so many guns, had dubbed “Flying Fortresses.” This was catchy and publicity friendly, so they were the ones who got all the glory.
They were sleek in appearence, had decent bombload capacity and seemed able to return with unbelievable amounts of battle damage. The pilots liked them because they were easy to fly and the crews liked them, well, because they had no other choice, and they were stationed in great numbers all over East Anglia, just like you.
There were, of course, B-24 groups, but it was always the B-17s you ever heard about. You yourself had no idea which was which when you started flying, and now you really couldn't give a shit. They did what they did, and you did it better.
But that August the higher-ups decided they wanted to show the world just what their vaunted daylight bombers could do. They'd been pounding it into the ears of anyone who would listen that their B-17s, if flown properly, had so many guns pointed in so many directions that Kraut fighters would run screaming the other way. (Whether or not flak would also run screaming the other way was never brought up.)
The Schweinfurt mission was the first time a large number of B-17s would be actually flying deep into Germany and bombing targets that were much further from home than they had been flying up until then. This meant that the fighters wouldn't have enough fuel to escort the bombers any further than the German border, leaving them to fly for many hours over enemy territory with no protection other than their own guns.
The British thought this was madness during daylight, and said so—they had tried it at the beginning of the war and had been cut to pieces—but your wise leaders had insisted that they had it all figured out.
Regrettably, this was about the time that the Luftwaffe, trying to develop defenses against constant RAF nighttime bombing, were seriously getting their act together in order to protect the Reich.
They had created a network of ground-based radar stations that spotted and radioed the position of the incoming RAF bombers to the ghastly night fighters that swarmed up from below like locusts, darting unseen in the darkness between the bombers and shredding them like threshing machines, creating a rain of metal, fire and human body parts that took a long, long time to reach the landscapes below.
And what was good for the RAF, they decided, was perfect for the 8th Air Force. They just shifted the whole operation from night to day, which wasn't hard, except that the Luftwaffe pilots had to fly around the clock, with no breaks or rest or time off, which tended to make them extra-cranky—kind of like giving a buzz-saw a sand-papering and a bath, then shoving it out the door with a “Mach schnell!” . . . not even a concrete drill for companionship and backrubs.
The generals knew all this, but they sent them regardless. What's a 10% loss rate, anyway? There were thousands more to replace them, already on their way from the States—one of them being you.
So they got together and they planned. They schemed, they sat around tables, consulted with weathermen, mission planners, mapmakers and village chiefs—just, not the men who would be flying the mission.
The architects of the preposterously intricate master plan were the fuzzy-headed, beetle-browed men who ruled the Mighty Eighth from on high—men who had spent all their lives sequestered with other men who shared their deeply insular worldview, which included few women, fewer friends, and often only a nodding acquaintance with the reality outside their oak-panelled walls.
For these men, this war couldn't have come along at a better time, and Schweinfurt had given them the opportunity to show the world just what their growing baby could do.
The results had been nothing less than catastrophic.
The Sheer Genius
P art of it was that the whole thing resembled one of those origami operations that the Japanese were famous for, requiring precise timings amongst widely disparate forces to the degree that if a fly on someone's windshield were to get blown off, the Great Torii at Miyajima would move a foot to the left.
Legend had it that one of the briefings had not gone well, that morning of August 17, 1943. After learning of the target, one veteran had yelled “Are you kidding? This was gonna be my 25th mission!”
Came the reply: “Aww, pipe down! This was gonna be my first!”
You'd have thought that it might have occurred to these planning geniuses that they were in a place called England? Where knights once sat around Round Tables to complain about, umm, the weather?
The tightly-coiled schedule these dopes had come up with—one huge group of bombers going one way with another huge group trying to create a diversion for the first guys by going another way—had derailed in short order when the groups that were supposed to take off 15 minutes after the first groups were delayed by—surprise, surprise—ground fog. Ground fog? In the countryside of East Anglia? Really?
But they weren't delayed for fifteen minutes. They were delayed for three hours.
The whole point of the 15-minute delay had been so that the German fighters, after encountering the guys going to Regensburg and thinking they could handle 'em, would suddenly be confronted with the second bomber force flying roughly the same direction as the first, except trailing fifteen minutes behind.
The idea was that the Krauts would conclude that both forces were going to the same target, to be astonished when the second force turned abruptly north in a perfectly-executed—
Oh yeah. What second force?
So instead of tying up the fighters so they couldn't land and refuel, this cute trick being one of the core concepts behind the whole double-strike strategy, it gave the fighters plenty of time to attack the first group of B-17s, land and refuel and go up to hit the second group, basically massacring both groups at their leisure. In fact, they even had time to land and refuel in order to hit the Regensburg guys on the way back.
Sixty B-17s had gone down. Six-hundred men either killed or captured or MIA. It had been an out-and-out massacre.
Christ. Why am I thinking all this now?
You try to concentrate on the codes you'll be using today, but it's futile. The buzz won't let you focus. Your mind drifts from Schweinfurt back to the RAF as the plane inches closer to the L.
Poor Brits. I can't imagine doing all this at night. Kill me, maybe, but I want to see the intestines spilling out instead of just feeling some warm and ghastly mess, or see O'Connell with half his face missing from an ME-109 rocket so I know instantly that he won't be needing that pipe any more, instead of groping around in the dark and finding the bridge of his nose in the wrong place . . .
Besides, they're goddamn sitting ducks, with night fighters flitting around like black moths
FEARMOTHS—?!
erupting every which way with cannons, rockets or even dropping bombs, the fuckers . . . Christ, I hate 'em and I'm gonna give them a bit of their coin back Hell, I'll pull those arming tethers instead of Con so I can send them some proper “O Tannenbaum” cheer PERSONAL-LIKE—
There was one particularly grotesque scheme that you'd heard about where the fighters—two-engined ones like the Junkers Ju 88—were outfitted with two fixed guns on top of the plane that pointed up at about an 80° angle.
The fighters would come from below, latch onto a Lancaster (crew of seven), position themselves just right and then fire directly into the gas tanks on the bottom of the fuselage, between the wings.
The Lancasters had no chance. Most of them just vanished in a fireball, which the German plane had to maneuver to avoid.
Some comedy giant dubbed the whole concept Schräge Musik—Music At An Angle.
Yep, when the reality of seven men vanishing from this earth in a cloud of volatile remnants in a fraction of a second was a topic for wisecracks, well . . .
These pricks need to be reamed from stem to stern until the only German spoken'll be in Hell those goddamn—
“Crew prepare for takeoff.” The tinny crackle in your headset catches you mid-thought.
Oh yeah . . . we're here.
Right at the point where you've fixed bayonets and are about to leave your trench—good old trench! Your home!—for the leap into No Man's Land.
Time slows.
The plane majestically comes to a stop, engines at half-power, droning their shifting, merging drone. It's the L, and the plane that was taxiing in front of you is about to take off. It's the Carner crew, the "Hi-rite" in Planner parlance, of Col. Shower's element. Mose will be slotting your element in behind them once you're up.
If we’re up
From your port the plant life bordering the runway here on the L looks beaten, oppressed. These luckless shrubs have been baked, roasted and fried by the superheated exhaust-blasts of countless B-24 engines labouring at peak thrust before takeoff.
You watch somberly as the torrents of scorching air from the engines of the unseen B-24 ahead of you begin to blur the plants into frantic yellow wraiths, twisting and flapping in a pointless effort to escape this horror; this shocking assault on their home nestled in the placid mists of rural England.
Bye, you sad little bastards. Maybe if I make this one I'll come out and water you.
Now the rising thunder of the unseen plane as it goes to takeoff power makes your seat vibrate. The buzz inside you creeps up a notch.
Crunch time.
“Cap'n, I see a tree at the end of the runway,” a voice crackles in your headset. It's O'Connell.
“Thank you, Flight Engineer. I'll go around it.”
The urge to laugh is overridden by the urge to choke. You reach around to where O'Connell's legs are sticking out from the top turret and punch him in the boot, and he flails to kick your hand away.
Mose is turning onto the L. The other plane, Carner's ship, is already halfway down the runway.
The engines begin to surge, props 3 and 4 now looking like platinum glass from your window, and you prepare yourself for what you know will be some of the most desperate moments of your life.
Will Mose make it? Will he get this behemoth, serviced and prepped by a bunch of kids who were in high school just a year or two ago, packed with two-and-a-half tons of high explosive bombs racked just feet from you in the bomb bay, plus another 23 tons—equivalent to about fifteen Chevrolet Master Deluxes—of fuel, men and metal, down a runway with no visible end until it's too late to do anything about anything, and clear that six-foot-high perimeter fence at the end of the runway?
It's a dicey proposition. If anything—anything—occurs that isn't supposed to occur in those 30-45 seconds between brake release and Decision Speed—the point at which Mose has to instantly decide whether to try to tackle the fence or to slam on the brakes—if anything at all unexpected happens, you will be atoms in a large cloud with everyone else in the plane in a FLASH-BOOM that will startle grazing cows a mile away.
O'Connell jumping down from the turret almost gives you a heart attack.
He slaps you on the shoulder with a barely audible bellow “Valhalla, here we come!” as he passes behind you and hustles himself into his station. But just a moment later you realise that he's back.
He puts his gloved hand on your shoulder and quickly leans in to shout over the escalating din: “Hey Robbie, you scared?”
You turn to look up at him. Does he have his serious face on or his goofy face?
Yeah, you shout back. You?
“I'm fucking terrified!” he yells, and you suddenly realise it's the serious face.
Don't worry. We'll do our jobs and we'll be okay. Okay? You put your hand on his and give it a few taps.
He looks at you for a second, gives a quick nod, squeezes your shoulder and he's gone.
You take the opportunity to look down past the bomb bay through the narrow tunnel to the rear to see if you can see anyone still moving around, but it's clear. Good. That's it, then.
“Here we go,” comes Mose's tinny voice through your headset, and you try to plant your left side against the bulkhead with your feet wide apart as solidly as you can plant yourself.
As Mose starts advancing the throttles while Jonesy holds the brake pedals down the whole frame of the plane starts to dance and the engines begin that RRRRROOOWWWWWWNNNNNN you know so well you grip the frame of your desk with both hands oh fuck oh fuck this is it Mose don't screw it up, please don't, please get it up
and the overloaded plane, which weighs more than all the tables and chairs and chandeliers and waiters at the Marquee Lounge at the Sands, at first seems hesitant to leave its perch, from which it has a clear view of the runway, the trees, the sky (the birds, the sunrise, the clouds the stars the universe); it holds and holds and seems to dither but then with a muffled screech of the tires suddenly free against the concrete it suddenly springs forward and you're beginning the roll and you hear Jonesy begin calling out the speeds, which get hard to hear in the din but you know them anyway—forty . . . fifty . . . sixty. . . and you're closing your eyes—NO!—if you're about to die you want a last look at the green things outside your port, the earth that you so take for granted oh god, don't take it all away from me, there are so many years I won't see but you believe in no gods so it's just you and the cards now
ninety . . . one hundred . . . one-hundred-ten
and the trees are really speeding past wait don't move so fast let me look at you just a few seconds longer what what we should be at V-One what's Mose oh CHRIST
and your world just SURGES upwards as if some giant hand had been waiting for you at the end of the runway and just pushed, right before the fence that you now watch rush past and begin receding, and suddenly everything is getting smaller and you realise Mose has done it yet again and it's over, jesus christ, it's over, I live to survive another day.
Now you close your eyes and realise that your heart is beating like a triphammer and a sheen of moisture is forming beneath the lining of your flight cap and on your upper lip in spite of the subzero winds that are now blasting into the plane through the gun ports in the waist, each of which is about the size of the bay window behind Aunt Ella's couch, but kinda different unless the glass were blasted out and it were laid on its end and the living room wall wasn't brick but aluminum skin less than the thickness of a nickel in most places and the calm breeze in Aunt Ella's garden were replaced by the howling winds scouring the summit of mighty Annapurna.
T here is deathly silence in the plane as you climb out from Rackheath, apart from the sonorous roar from the engines that fills every crevice of your little cell and will be your friend for the next six-odd hours. You'll be able to tell instantly from any changes in pitch or intensity in the drone what the pilot is doing, but you don't like any changes in pitch or intensity; you like the drone just the way it is—deep and steady.
You know Mose is going in a straight line for two minutes to gain speed and altitude. Outside you watch the little farms and meadows, looking so fragile and pensive under the grey mist that broods and plots around them—and you.
You know with the cold chill of experience that you and your plane are about to disappear into The White (as you call it) which will serve to make you and all the other planes invisible to each other for an unknown period of time; depending on the thickness of the cloud layer, you might pop out into sunshine at 7,000 feet, which might mean just ten to fifteen minutes of helpless terror, or 20,000 feet, which, at your full fuel-and-bombload weight you might attain in 30-40 minutes.
It never gets any better, any easier. For every man on board including the pilots this endurance test is almost as frightening as being in a cloud of ME-109s and Focke-Wolf 190s or trapped in vast sky meadows of flak . . . it's pretty much six of one or a half-dozen of another.
Each scenario is equally fatal if the cards don't fall your way, and “fatal” usually means instant terror followed by seconds or minutes—the last of your life—of indescribable madness and sorrow in equal measure as you know you're dying and can't tell anyone what it was like.
But you don't have to bother imagining because you've seen it with your own eyes . . .
Wait a minute . . . that guy doesn't have a parachute. No . . . it's not possible, maybe it's under his arm, no no no no NO—and it doesn't matter if he's you or Kraut; the horror is the same. A man's life is ending right before my eyes, oh god, oh god it can't be and in a perverse twist you tell yourself it's like a movie, it's not real, I'm watching a movie but you're not, you're watching a man's death and it's undeniably your two eyes doing the watching and the man doing the dying; there is no screen in between except perhaps the plexiglas of your port window, and always the slam of realisation that it could be you, it could be now, it could be in a few seconds, or a few minutes or an hour, but it could be you, dying in uncountable ways, the last moments not in a bed holding the hand of your mother but a shrieking jumble of incomprehension followed by the sudden and final darkness of Eternity.
“Red Leader, this is Green Lane Red 94, over.” Mose's voice crackles in your headset. You're almost at your two minutes and Mose is calling the lead plane of your squadron-in this case the 790th, code name Red—for instructions for the climb-out.
“Red 94, Roger. Go ahead.”
Mose: “Red 94, airborne and climbing to angels one-zero, heading zero-nine-zero. Any ideas how long in the milk?”
Leader: “Red 94, anticipate popup at 7 or 8-zero, climb power 14 minutes at this time. Watch your corners, John.”
Mose: “Roger, Red Leader, out of angels one-zero, left turn heading one-one-six. Corners clear, chicken wire fence'll keep 'em away.”
Leader: “Red 94, them chickens got wings, remember? Next left in six-oh minutes, heading two-niner-niner.”
Mose: “Wilco, Red Leader, watching chickens on the corners. Left turn six minutes, heading two-niner-niner. See you on top.”
You know that today, the lead plane is Homeward Bound, flown by Ted Conley—a superb pilot and good friend of Mose. The “corners” they're talking about are simply the four corners of the plane. In this vast, unsullied whiteness that you equate to being inside a giant ping-pong ball, you know that dozens and soon hundreds of planes are all flying solely on instruments, trying to follow predetermined headings and altitudes that theoretically will result in the formations that need to be assembled before heading out to the target.
Except some pilots are much better than other pilots. Which is a polite way of saying that some pilots are, well, not good pilots.
You know who they are, if not personally, then their names, because Mose tells you.
And you know that they're all around you, even now-maybe one just a hundred feet below you. An updraft for him or a downdraft for you, and . . . well, that would be the way to go, wouldn't it?
In a double fireball, your bombs and fuel exploding with his bombs and fuel, in a fraction of a second billowing to (you mentally run down some figures) what, 500, 600 feet wide in all directions? If any other planes were closer than that it would take them down too.
You'd seen what a B-24 loaded with bombs and fuel looked like exploding on the ground, and the fireball was huge. You actually had to raise your head to see the top of it.
Now imagine said collision in said cloud and said fireball. At 160 mph you'd be travelling the equivalent of two whole city blocks every second. If you were travelling in the same direction—which, of course, you were—and were a half a mile behind the explosion, you'd reach it in five seconds. Not enough time for your pilot to see the explosion, decide what to do, and do it.
Vapor trails, people . . .
Oh fuck, Robinson, ya should've stayed in Special Services, you stupid, stupid asshole. What were you thinking? So shacking up with actors in Miami Beach wasn't exciting—that guy, what was his name? Edmund O'Brien. He seemed destined for bigger things, but the rest, and you, ya dumb jerk, were funnelled like schmoes by the relentless propaganda into the War Machine, to be snatched up by some overhead robot crane and deposited wherever the fuck they needed you.
A replacement for the guys who were being mowed down by the busload by the Krauts. Yeah . . . buses in the sky, filled with eager beavers barely out of the pram, clueless as to why those flashing things were hurtling everywhere shooting at them and the other buses were falling like giant raindrops, spinning and plunging and making fireflowers on the landscape that became obscene mushrooms, growing grey and tall . . . weird . . . ten men? Really? That many men vanished from the face of the earth a few moments ago? All the things they ever thought, all the memories they ever had, all gone . . . maybe some of them would have been another Einstein, or maybe a Rachmaninoff.
Frequencies. Yes. Check the frequencies.
You decide you're done with looking out the window at the relentless whiteness. No view of Newport Beach. A tragic error in navigation. Sorry about that, sir, would you like a vodka martini on the rocks on the house? No, I'd like a fucking cigarette, and I'm going to have a fucking cigarette.
You're not at 10,000 feet, where the oxygen masks need to come on, so now's your chance. Pack out of your pocket, lighter behind it—on the desk for the duration.
Christ, it's getting cold. Must be minus ten, minus twenty. Centigrade, Fahrenheit, it doesn't matter at these temperatures. It's all minus and meat-locker frigid, but this is only a preview. At 20,000 feet it's going to plummet to as low as -50°, which is probably around what the surface of Mars is just before noon.
Nonetheless, you take off your glove, leaving it hanging from the electric cord that connects it to the rest of your suit, and quickly grab a cigarette. You pull down the scarf that covers your nose and mouth and put the cigarette to your lips. You pray that there's enough oxygen for the gas lighter to work.
Click-click . . . success! Zippo comes through again. You take a deep drag on the cigarette—you haven't had one for hours, seems like—and close your eyes as you luxuriate in the smooth sensation as the smoke goes deep into your lungs.
You know that smoking at 20,000 feet will be much more difficult, because the cigarette will almost refuse to burn in the low-oxygen atmosphere. But that just means it will last longer. And, for a party trick, you can inhale a deep breath of oxygen, blow it through the cigarette and create a miniature flamethrower. But not near the bombs.
You know Womack has to be smoking—he's the biggest smoker of you all. He takes puffs in between bites of his food, ferchrissakes. But you won't know unless you go back there, which you have no intention of doing.
But where to put it out? Some of the bombers have ashtrays, but they're always in different places, you have to hunt—yes! There's one. It's actually a car ashtray, welded onto the side of your desk in back, but better than putting it out on the floor, where it might roll back into the bomb bay.
You're all set. The fears are beginning to dissipate—for now.
Glove back on, cigarette dangling from your lips, you turn the dial, tuning in to the frequencies you might need-group leader, lead plane, assembly ship and so on. There's not much chatter—the Krauts are listening to everything. Not that it matters. You know they've already latched on to you and are tracking your every movement.
Now you just have to wait it out until you're clear of this white terror. You take some comfort in knowing that every man on board, including the pilot, is just as terrified as you. Nothing to do but number puzzles.
Sixty-four in this column and twelve here . . . yes, that should make . . . 768? No, that doesn't fit with the G column. Gotta move it to D . . . no, maybe B? Wait-what have we here?
Without warning you find yourself almost catapulted out of your seat. “Whoa!” you hear in your headset, with “What the fuck?” and your pencils and pads have flown away somewhere. You grab the desk reflexively as the plane begins to shudder and sway from side to side, then up, then down again, the engines whining their protestations with every lift and drop.
Then, just as suddenly, everything returns to normal and you're droning on just as before.
Propwash. Jesus, he must have been close.
Somehow, the plane must have found itself directly behind some other plane, unseen in the murk, whose propeller-cutting paths through the rivers of air had created the giant whorls in their wake known as propwash, which, if severe enough, could surprise inexperienced pilots into trying to compensate for the gyrations of their plane but in doing so overmanipulating their rudders or ailerons—or both, resulting in a loss of control, hardover or stalls from which they could not recover.
“Hey driver! Pull over. I wanna get off.” It sounds like Hubbard.
“Me too! I gotta take a leak.” Womack.
A pause.
“It is dangerous to leave the train while in motion. Please remain in your seats until the next station.” Beyer.
“Chatter, gents. Watch for other ships.” Mose.
Propwash is just another hazard in an endless list of hazards; but with Mose at the helm you know that propwash is not going to be the instrument that signals your final bow.
It's been great, folks, really a fine audience. You're all swell and I'm glad you could come tonight. Give a hand for the bandleader-Tony? You wanna come out and take a bow for these fine people? Give a hand-Tony Graziano, folks, Tony Graziano, and I'm Russ Robinson, your charming crooner . . . whaddya say, Tony? I Couldn't Sleep A Wink? Ladies and Mental Cases, Frank Sinatra's I Couldn't
There are still a couple pencils within arm's reach and you really can't be bothered to go floundering on the deck for the other escapees—somehow your scratch and puzzle pads have stayed put, so you're all good.
Then an abrupt squawk in your headphones: “Red Leader to Red Ballroom, expect blue ceiling at angels seven, 14 minutes.”
At last! You'll be out of this white minefield in about four minutes, according to the squadron leader.
Ballroom? Oh yeah . . . all 14 ships in the 790th.
It's a different name every mission, so the enemy never knows what's what.
As if.
You wonder how the Hunter and Baker crews are doing—it's they who share your hut. But you won't know for sure until debriefing.
Dealer Raises
D ebriefing . . . at present an event that for you may or may not take place. You've never looked more forward to an interrogation than right now. It and every other future resides in a dark cloud named Possibilities above a landscape called Chance . . . you know that your hand has already been dealt and you won't get to see it until the time comes.
If the time comes.
But every second that ticks by that you're alive is a second less that you have to spend in that formless world between life and death, where everything and nothing matters and all you can personally do to influence the outcome is by doing your job to your utmost abilities.
Because your life depends on it.
You just hope that every member of the crew is thinking the same thing.
In an instant, the white plaque in front of your face turns cerulean blue, then back again to white, as if some unseen hand were exchanging placards in some magic slide show. Blue. White/blue/white-white/blue blue blue.
Haven't seen blue since Coblenz. We're breaking out!
The top of the cloud layer is puffy cumulus and you're in and out of the puffs intermittently, but as your overladen ship climbs, the blue becomes dominant. And—no—black?
It's a fly on the window. Two flies! No . . . planes!
“Men, keep a lookout for other ships. Rear gunner, how's your view?” It's Mose.
“Uhh, a couple trailing . . . uh, two-thousand yards, one-o'clock low, Skip.” Pilarski.
He's got a Royal box seat to the action, with a 280° view from right to left, eternity above and earth below—the best seat in the house, by far. Or the worst, depending on the picture playing.
Currently it looks like a romance, but you know that the horrorshow, starring The Hun and featuring chariot races, wagon-circling, and lots of thrilling ambushes and showers of arrows, is coming up after the newsreels.
The newsreels . . .
that begin right after the Dutch coast and announce hostilities with unfriendly, even downright malign intent hey we're all human beings here aren't we what's with the black popcorn anyway oh yeah Huns like their popcorn black weird fuckers well we'll see how you like a little high-explosive rain on your parade you sons of bitches kill jews for jollies huh well let's see how you like the fun we're packing in the attic you're gonna LOVE the thousand pounders but the incendiaries, well they're our special treat from us to you Versteht ihr Idioten das klar?
Flies! More flies! You're glad the black specks that are popping out of the cloud layer are specks and not giant Olive Drab birds of prey suddenly materialising thirty yards above your wingtip, although your view from just one side limits your perceptions; just that scenario may be occurring on the port side of the ship.
Still, Mose would have taken care of that—and since you're not being dispersed in a blast wave at the moment you know that whatever planes are in the vicinity have to be distant enough to not warrant any comments from the crew.
For now, all eyes are on the lookout for the red/green flare of the lead ship. While you have a pretty good idea of what's about to occur, you've never been up with all the 61 planes of the Group. However, before ruminating further on that problem, Leading Lady just has to fall in with the 14 planes of the squadron.
Once that's done, then you'll assemble with the other squadrons at a predetermined fix that the mission planners stayed up all night devising to torture King, the navigator.
Right now the pyrotechnics above the rapidly converging fleet is a wonder to behold; all the flares are like July 4th and Times Square at New Year's, missing only the red/green you're looking for.
Then: “Red 94 to Red Leader, we have you in sight. Taking the onramp.” Mose. The flare must have gone up ahead of the plane where you can't see it.
“Roger that, Red 94. Who's your wing?”
“Red 94, oh-five-two right wing, should be joining us shortly.”
028 . . . that's the Rice crew in Silver Chief. They'll be flying right wing to your plane today. You've trained often with Johnny Rice and his crew—you're in safe hands.
Now it's just a matter of everyone spotting everyone else. Once the squadron is formed up, you'll proceed to the fix where you'll join the rest of the Group, which is going to take from 35 to 40 minutes, according to what they told you in this morning's briefing.
You're off the hook for now-it's time for one of the Chesterfields that the Ground Chief gave you.
As you're shaking it out of the pack, you nearly jump out of your seat as you feel a double clap on both shoulders. O'Connell.
I shoulda known.
“Don't be a hoarder, Staff Sergeant! Looks like you got enough for a squad of Russians!” You can barely hear him in the din.
Amerikanski! you bellow back over your shoulder—MAKHORKHA! . . . it's Russian slang for cheap tobacco, as you know from the Escape kit they give you at Briefing, but it's useless. He knows you'll fold.
You light your cigarette and hand over the pack. He grabs it, and you know what's coming, so you hand over your Zippo as well.
He lights his cigarette and gives you a couple of brief pats on the head as he hands your smokes back.
. . .
—you put your hand up over your shoulder in the universal gimme gesture and he slaps the lighter into your palm. You mentally vow to use a marked deck the next time you pla—
Oh yeah. Debriefing first.
Suddenly your headphones crackle to life. “What the fuck . . . ?” Sounds like Pilarski.
Hubbard: “Lancasters! Hey Skip, you seein' this?”
Your eyes jump to the window. To the west, above the gathering planes of your squadrons—you think it's above—you spot a cloud of black dots that are rapidly closing, coming in at right angles.
Jesus!
Hubbard has much better eyes than you, and you immediately know what's happening.
It's the fucking Brits coming back from some night raid!
As you watch, the dots quickly turn into planes, and you see the unmistakable profiles of Lancasters, four-engined bombers who ply the German cities every night, dealing death in 14,000-pound packets.
You gaze, mesmerised, as they approach, much, much faster than anything other than German fighters . . . you do some quick calculations and determine that if they're going 200 mph at a 90° angle to you they'll reach you in about ten seconds.
You just pray that their altitude is very different than your own, because there's no time for anyone to alter course.
“Hold on to your hats, men, this is gonna be interesting,” says Mose, with barely a shift in the normal pitch of his voice.
“Holy shit! Holy shit!” someone's saying over and over, and you have to resist a strong urge to duck.
And then they're bisecting your path, barely distinguishable they're going so fast, and your mouth just hangs open, the half-smoked cigarette dropping to the desk, as you thankfully watch them pass at least several thousand feet above you, their stream taking 15 seconds or so to go by.
A thin trail of black smoke is the only evidence that they were even there.
Oh man, some of them were shot up . . . maybe flak.
It seems a bad omen for you-the Nazis aren't collapsing into chaos, as everyone is hoping and praying. No “End of the war in '44” for you.
They're still the sons-of-bitches they've always been.
Your half-smoked cigarette has gone out—a sign that oxygen is getting scarce. You pick it up and relight it. No use wasting a good Chesterfield.
Outside you see Silver Chief taking its place off the starboard wing, about 100 feet above you.
Your two planes are in the High-Right Element. The other planes are staggered successively downward on the left side, which you can't see, with the lead plane, Homeward Bound, in the middle of the Lead Element of three planes, about 300 feet below and ahead. Then there's the Slot Element to their rear, and finally the Low-Left Element, which is in the same position as you look from above, but a good 1,000 feet below.
Poor guys—they're in “Coffin Corner”—the lowest and last element, most vulnerable to falling behind, because the air is thinner the higher you go, and the higher you go, the less the resistance, so you go faster.
Which means that the Coffin Corner guys are at risk of falling behind, even if they're going the same speed as everyone else. The thicker air slows them down.
And falling behind makes them Tail-end Charlie, ripe for the plucking by fighters looking for stragglers.
And flying Coffin Corner today is the Hunter crew, who share your hut, with 17-year-old Rabbit doing some of the gunning. You hope he's a good shot, because if his gun accidentally points too far upward, he can shoot some other plane in the formation with a burst of .50-calibre ammo-and nobody wants that.
Don't fuck up, Rabbit. Don't want to miss that 18th birthday.
But Hunter is a crack pilot, and you know he knows all this—he won't be falling behind today.
“Red Leader to all ships: Squadron complete, let's go on up and meet the folks.”
Uh-oh. You're going to be on oxygen any moment.
Time for a last Chesterfield. You light it from the last one.
Some crews like to go on oxygen at 8,000 feet, which is about the height of Bogota, Columbia, in the Andes mountains. Hell, if 350,000 people can walk around all day without oxygen masks, so can you.
Besides, the cigarette smoke protects you from the effects of lack of oxygen, as you well know. Doctors recommend cigarettes for a range of conditions, and you're sure hypoxia is one of them.
You read somewhere that there's a place in Peru that's at 16,000 feet, with a population of gold miners who have been digging for generations.
They must smoke a lot of cigarettes.
You look around to see if O'Connell has spotted you lighting a cigarette and is on his way to sponge, but he's in the bomb bay, probably looking at fuel-transfer gauges.
Excellent.
When you go on oxygen, there's a designated member of the crew who has to do oxygen checks every 15 minutes—it'll be Womack today.
Every crew member has a number, except the pilots, and Solly just calls the number and the crew member has to repeat his number back. Silence could indicate some kind of accident with the oxygen hoses, and someone, probably the one nearest to the guy, has to go physically check on him.
At 20,000 feet, it takes only a few seconds to lose consciousness. You've heard the stories of just such incidents, and they're grim. A waist gunner somehow disconnects his hose, slumps over, and no one notices it until they notice it, and by that time he's walking through the Pearly Gates, asking nearby angels if they've got a light. Then a Martini, easy over.
That's the first thing I'd do! No more Lucky Strikes—in fact, no more Luck! Why'll I need any? So they'll just be . . . 'Strikes'? Yeah, okay, so . . . 'VerGin and tonics'?
“Men, it's oxygen time.” Jonesy.
It's the first time he's spoken.
Mose must be having a cigarette, although for him that's quite the trick, because B-24s don't fly themselves: he has to have both hands on the yoke, which is kinda not like a steering wheel, (unless your dad's Lincoln's steering wheel had a “let's drop 1,000 feet now” function) at all times, especially when flying formation.
Updrafts, downdrafts, air pockets, sudden headwinds (or tailwinds)—they come suddenly, a little bit like being in a boat in the unpredictable North Sea.
Probably Jonesy is lighting the cigarette for him and putting it between his lips, although that would be letting smoke get in his eyes.
No—there's only one answer: Jonesy has taken over flying, while Mose relaxes with a fag, which is what the English call 'em.
Hell, what are you saying? You can just reach 'round the bulkhead between you and the cockpit and practically grab 'em outta the pilot's hands!
But not without first unplugging your headset, oxygen mask, interphone jack, power plug for your electric suit, letting go the waiters, telling the dealer he can go home, sorry for the trouble, hauling in the pot, dismissing the hat-check sweetie you've got your arm round—
Nah, you'd better get that mask on for now—you can relax over the target
Here we go again. This fucking thing . . . gotta get it right first time.
If you don't quite fit it onto your face—and sometimes even if you do—your breath will start to form ice crystals inside and out, which of course interferes with your smoking.
But it's one more inconvenience, along with your heavy flight gear, adding to your claustrophobia and discomfort.
One of the toughest jobs in the armed forces, goddamn recruiter says. Why didn't he just admit that it would be an amusement park in the sky?
Hose to connector: check.
No interference with electrics, no tangling with the fuel lines: check.
Side of mask pulls off easily for better cigarette access: check.
Oxygen flow: Yeah! Damn, this stuff really works! Now . . . where's the martini hose?
You'll find out if everything is indeed läuft bei mir—all squared away—when you reach 20,000 feet. But now, it's Chesterfield assembly time.
Only then is it safe to contemplate your relative distance to Eternity.
As you smoke, you idly hum the Air Force Song:
Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At 'em boys, Give 'er the gun!
But with your version:
Up we go, into the Krautland Death Zone
Climbing high into the flak
Killing Huns anywhere we can find 'em
Hitler Youth killing us back
Wordsworth might quibble with it—Coleridge, forget it; he'd make it The Rime Of The Ancient Aviator—but you might send it in to the Stars & Stripes. The editors will see the obvious merits of the updated lyrics and soon servicemen everywhere will be singing it.
Cigarette doused.
Right. Back to work.
Men . . . With Guns
A t the moment, your squadron is going to have to merge with the other three squadrons. You're all meeting at a predetermined fix called Buncher 6—a radio-wave source that broadcasts a precise location for you and the rest of the Group, over which you will circle until everyone's formed up—it'll take maybe 15 minutes, if you're lucky. Thirty if you're not.
But Shower is in the lead box somewhere, so you know that if the Headmaster's on board, the starry-eyed pupils, eager to avoid six of the best, will be closely following.
Then you'll all head for the coast, and Splasher Beacon 5—the last point before you begin your ride over the North Sea.
The North Sea . . . that's where the nightmare begins.
On all your previous missions—all five—hitting the North Sea was the starter gun for the real fun. Oh sure, takeoff and assembly were rough, but they weren't actively trying to kill you.
But count your blessings. You've made it this far—right?
Right.
But what is ahead is what almost can't be imagined. Takeoff and assembly are always bad, but it's pit-of-the-stomach fear. What's ahead is leaping, howling, exploding fear.
It's the kind of fear that even mountaineers never have to deal with, because at least they have some kind of control over what's going on.
No. This is a nameless, incomprehensible fear—it's sort of like having a man you don't know standing behind you with a gun pressed to your head. Sometimes he nudges it, as if to tell you you're next. That much closer to Eternity—
. . . while being exquisitely aware that he just fucking blew away the guy next to you . . . and the guy next to HIM . . . .
The difference between this kind of terror and any you'd ever encounter anywhere else is the 100% certainty that yes, right where you are sitting and thinking and doing, the architect of your demise could decide to drop in in one; six; thirty-nine seconds—every one of those scenarios not being something you imagine happening, but nearer to actually taking place than the man with the gun scenario, because after all, he's human—he might have pity.
Flak has no pity.
And the worst thing about it is that every moment you're in that B-24 bomber, you feel like that for potentially hours and hours—like there's an actual thing inside the plane, some pissed off, savage creature that lashes out at random for who knows why—a nightmare with which you are trapped in your little compartment for the duration, and, well, fuck—you might as well just agree that you're dead already.
You digest this paradox as you stare, sightlessly, through the port at the comforting tableau of sun-dappled Earth and sweeping blue sky. How can that be?
But this is just the warmup. Soon enough, a different kind of horror will take the stage, in itself more ghastly precisely because humans enter the scene.
There will be people—people much like yourself, highly-trained, dedicated, intelligent people—and they'll be doing their level best to kill you.
In some ways you find this almost impossible to understand. Why? Why would ever there be people who would not just be actively seeking to—no, going out of their way to. . . kill you? By any means at their disposal? Bullets, bombs, clubs, rebar, soccer balls, twine, balloons . . . ferchrissakes, you're fucked.
Oh, just shut the fuck up. Please, just—
The Voice of Reason momentarily steps in to try to quell the querulous quibble-chatter, with a final THE MIGHTY 8TH ISN'T PAYING YOU TO THINK, ROBINSON.
BUT — ! —you begin to protest, wanting to do the banishing yourself, but you relent. It'll keep.
You relax, despite yourself.
You console yourself that all that can be hauled out for in-depth review later on, perhaps as you inhale the heady aroma of the Corners-donated Camel non-filter you're absent-mindedly stroking through the serge of your inner flight suit pocket—which, if all goes well, will be lit the microsecond the signal comes through from Splasher 5, which is a navigational waypoint located near Cromer, a town on the coast due almost directly north of Rackheath. If the Fates pause their malign bickering about your impudent "insisting on persisting" long enough, obviously.
The plane is silent, notwithstanding the 1,200-decibel engine noise, which you don't even notice any more.
You wonder what the rest of the crew are thinking . . .
Pilarski's thinking about his dog. Womack and Hubbard are thinking about their dogs. O'Connell's thinking about O'Connell. I'M thinking about O'Connell. Everyone else is thinking about their dog. How come I don't get a dog?
On second thought, you know you could never get up early enough to—
“Guys, radio check.” Womack.
You wait for your number . . . since there are four guys in the front there are six of you in the back, and one of them is Solly, he starts with you.
“Six?”
Six good, you reply.
And so on down the line.
O'Connell, naturally, has to be different.
“I'm . . . GAAAAAKKK- . . . “
Even Mose laughs.
This crew—the only one you've ever known, and the same for everyone else—well, you'd go to the depths of Hell for every one of them. Inside yourself, you know that if it ever came to having to save one of them, but in doing so, condemn yourself—well, you know there would be no hesitations.
But what the fuck . . . I'm the guy with the supposed doctoring skills. Huh? With a first-aid kit?
T he A-2 First Aid Kit that you have stowed under your desk contains a variety of bandages, dressings, antiseptics, and other supplies for treating minor injuries.
Huh? Minor injuries?
There is no such thing as a minor injury aboard a B-24 Liberator bomber over Germany. Flak doesn't tend to cause a singed eyebrow. One bullet from a Messerschmitt-109 will tear your head clean off—no bandages necessary.
Most injuries will be incompatible with future poker games . . . arm at the shoulder? Death. Shrapnel to the head? Death. Spinal injury? Goooodbye cowboy.
However, if you are called into action, your secret weapon is morphine. The use of the stuff is strictly controlled, however. God forbid anyone become addicted after losing a hand or a leg.
Guy's on the floor bleeding out and calling for his dog, why be stingy with the dope? It just doesn't make sense. But in your kit there are precisely two morphine syrettes.
Sorry, buddy, you're most definitely not gonna make it with your intestines from here to Hell and gone, but hey! Doctor's on rounds! I have a shitload of aspirin—here, take two. The morphine is all gone—sorry, pal. Hadda take care of Hubbard's headache and Pilarski's piles. Why, Fido? Sure, I'll tell him.
The mind, already staggering, teeters.
But you're not worried. A nurse will come.
Hellooooo Sheila! My, my, my . . . wherever did you get those . . . epaulettes? Of course I need assistance! . . . whaddo I look like, Jimmy Stewart?
That thought leads to another: Jimmy Stewart, the Hollywood megastar, lately of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Academy Award for Philadelphia Story, is now freakishly your boss.
A pilot before the war, he joined the Mighty Eighth with as little fanfare as he could muster—an incredible feat, given the legions of hungry press hounds who were panting for a story—and is now the pilot of a B-24 with the 703rd out of Tibenham, an honest-to-goodness hero after a mission to Ludwigshafen, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with buttfuck clusters, Croix de Hair, and some other tinsel that kicked him up to Lt. Colonel before you could say Jack.
Oh yeah, you've heard the beer story.
Like, one of his crews managed to steal a keg of beer from the kitchen, and how Lt. Col. Jimmy went to check it out.
How he went to their Nissen hut one evening and surprised them sitting on their beds and chewing the fat. How he went straight over to the keg, which was covered with a blanket, and took a good look underneath.
How the petrified men, expecting a torrent of abuse, stared at him in expectant terror.
How he stood there, surveying each and every one of them, taking his sweet time, then saying “Carry on, men,” and walking out.
Jesus Christ. Imagine that being Colonel Shower!
“What . . . is . . . THIS I hear about a stolen piece of United States Army Air Force property? WHO is the designated for this hut? Talbot? Where is it? WHERE is it?”
Fuck. Hardass would put us all on report, then make us fly two practices a day, all passes—oh yeah, we don't have any-but he'd revoke 'em anyway. Why can't Jimmy be OUR Commander?
But he'll never be your commander. You hear he's transferred to the 453rd out of Old Buckenham or somewhere . . . from private to Lt. Colonel in four years!
Fuck that shit. After I finish the tour I'll be headed straight back Stateside. I'll appear in Mother's kitchen like a . . .
. . . a ghost?
The drone of the engines is picking up intensity as the plane strains to climb through the increasingly thin air. You look over your shoulder. O'Connell seems to be nodding off. You expertly flick a pencil stub at the side of his head. Shocked awake, he looks around wildly. He thinks the noise against his earphone was a Kraut bullet . . . he's so easily tweaked.
He spots you looking over your shoulder and you raise one eyebrow. He shakes a fist with the I'll get you! signal. But that changes to the universal gimme gesture, palm outstretched with beckoning fingers—at least, as well as he can manage with his sausage-fingered glove.
You pretend to be reluctant, but, shaking your head in disgust, the pack and the lighter go over your shoulder.
Thief!
But you're not too miffed. With your cleverly marked deck—the one with the tiny nicks you've carved in strategic locations on the cards you've expertly committed to memory, you're gonna clean him out.
He's never gonna know what hit him the next time his accomplice, Jerry "Jellybean" Johnson (the R/O from the Jensen crew, your 791st squadron-mates a couple of hardstands down, renowned for the licorice-flavoured black jellybeans that he downs by the jarload) pulls his trick of standing behind you and signalling your hand in morse-code blinks to a stone-faced O'Connell.
O'Connell doesn't know you figured out this schtick months ago after being tipped off by Zumalt, whom you rewarded by making him Assistant-Pokermeister on the spot.
Ya schnook, I'm gonna have Zoom run in and tell Jellybean there's an urgent telegram for him at the ComShack and you're gonna be saying hello to goooooodbye, a month's pay.
The bewildered look on Con's face as he realises that he's blind and you're raising him ten with nothing, but that your nothing is better than his nothing because you know you just dealt him a five and a two—that's gonna be a magnificent sight to behold, yessirree Bob.
And almost as soon as it has come, this one-act play sparks abruptly away, leaving in its wake only the pounding drone of the engines and the plummeting temperatures that are making the interior of the plane as cozy as a meat locker.
O utside your port, looking alarmingly small against the vast dark heavens, a lone B-24 keeps pace with yours . . . it's the Rice crew, slotted perfectly in with your element, as you knew it would be. But . . . The marked deck . . . a poker game. It seems unreal, belonging to another universe. Already, your last glimpse of the ground seems like someone else's dream. That world—that unreal world—now exists only in your memory.
The only thing that's left over is this plane, which once had a connection to that world—wheels on the ground, that beloved ground—and the people in it.
Although it's less than an hour in your past, the memories, so newly minted, seem somehow just a faded copy of the world from which they sprang. But the rules that govern which frame—the one in which all your senses seem preserved in one all-the-way-open apertural Great Temporal Pause that is a panorama of the senses that will be among those precious few to be consigned to your For Final Review compartment
where you'll flash before my eyes as we begin that big huge plunge no it can't be it can't
versus the flitting mundanities that make up all the rest and are swiftly forgotten—seem completely arbitrary.
. . . as if to emphasise this, just now, as you looked to make sure the walk-around canister of oxygen was where it was supposed to be, your eyes had alighted on the words stencilled above a fuse-box—B424 GUARD.
You remember precisely what you had been doing the last time that frame had flashed by: O'Connell had been kvetching (as always) as you stowed your gear and had been saying
it this way, Robbie: every time they shovel us into a new ship I can't find the fucking ashtray motherf
and you had indicated the weird oval object that seemed to have been hastily welded to the bottom of his tray.
why do I remember that now I'll never fucking forget waste of brainpower
—and then that snapshot your consciousness took; the one you know you'll be reliving until Eternity comes to claim you: the burnt-ash odour of lingering ground fog . . . the rasping metallic scrape of your boot on the concrete of the hardstand . . . the yells of the ground crew making last-minute adjustments on engines or bomb latches . . . the duotone atmosphere of despair and anxiety that shrouds everything stopped smack in its tracks by the serene tranquility that is the English countryside.
And all this, you reflect sombrely, has passed through your mind in the time it takes a fifty-calibre round to—
A blast of static in your earphones jerks you out of your reverie. The Germans are starting up their jam-making factories—they're masters at confections that interfere with the orderly running of a 14-plane box of Christmas treats they know are headed their way. Jammingen-Sie Deutsch?
The frequency you're on is the same one you'll need to talk to other ships—but it's not the only one. The wizards in Technical Services have multiple workarounds, and although the Fritzenheimers inevitably find and exploit them, this takes time, and it's usually long enough for you to complete missions.
But there's nothing there. Phantoms. Your friends on many a long night at Radio School . . . you know 'em all.
Your thoughts try to return to the philosophical issues that take you far from the precarious nature of this predicament that you presently confront, but duty calls. You'll leave all these hopes, fears and uncertainties to your crewmates.
Who are thinking about their dogs.
2000 planes. 20,000 men. Two whole divisions of infantry. Almost twice the marines who took Guadalcanal from the Japs. Over two years.
It's senseless, stupid. Going to bomb the fuck out of a bunch of idiots rendered witless by some strutting Wiseguy (because in the end they're just wiseguys, all of 'em, just with different schticks—Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin) it's like stamping on shadows. Just too damn many of 'em.
Yeah, no, but it's not senseless. Every Kraut that perishes is one less trying to kill you.
But this is a thought that umm, in estima non concernat est. Especially when delivered in your very best fake-Latin. Wha—
You suddenly realise that you've been sitting, oblivious to the cacophony of the engines thundering at climb power, the hissing crackle of 100 radios not tuned to any frequency, and the nagging feeling that somehow it's your turn to draw. My turn to—
But it flickers away.
It's getting fucking cold. No thermometer, but you figure by the numbness just above your mask that it's about -20. Maybe -25.
Fahrenheit, Centigrade, at these temperatures nobody bothers with numbers. They meet at minus forty and you'll be there soon enough if you're not already.
The poor, miserable gunners . . . the roaring winds coming in through their gun ports, which they can't close—the manufacturers briefly tried overhead metal shutters, but gunners complained that they just got in the way, and tended to fly off while the plane was plummeting to Earth.
They'd tried windbreaks on the hull—basically just raised areas that were supposed to deflect the slipstream away from the ports—but Mose hated them. He always said planes with these always felt sluggish, and sluggish was not a trait that would keep you roaring through a 25-mission tour.
You'd heard that someone had tried attaching pup tents to the top of the wing for the gunners to use to build themselves a little fire and warm themselves up, but these proved too difficult to zip shut.
In the end it was just hoped that acute frostbite and marble-solid trigeminal facial nerves would actually help in the dentist's chair . . . all said and done, a positive benefit-loss ratio.
But it was Pilarski, in the tail, who reaped the temperatures from all these screaming winds . . . sometimes you needed ice picks to haul him out. Thank goodness he was an imperturbable soul, laughing through adversity and shrugging off three-inch mantles of ice with casual flair.
“I don't mind, Robbie. I'm from Minnesota.”
All you can do about your face is feed it another Chesterfield, the procurement of which now requires you to leave your chair, risking pulling out your oxygen and electrical lines, to snatch back from O'Connell.
You curse as your lines stretch taut and reach over O'Connell's head to snatch your pack, which is wedged into a metal bracket between some dials. O'Connell barely looks up at this intrusion, seemingly engrossed in a dime-store thriller.
What the fuck? Who reads a thriller when we're actually IN one?
*Snap* *snap* *snap*—it's getting harder to get a flame from the faltering lighter, but you manage it and take a deep pull of smoke, some of which you deliberately hold in your mask because it tastes so much better than oxygen.
Uh-oh . . . you see planes. Many, many planes. You've arrived at Buncher-15, to meet the rest of the Group.
Mose will now carefully maneuvre, using his wits alone, staying tight with the wings, who also have to use their wits, into the slot inside the Group formation.
But he has a problem. A big problem.
The B-24, always a bear, starts becoming a whale when encountering ever-thinner air. Below 10,000 feet or so, Mose can just take advantage of the massive wingspan to plough through the ocean of air—just a few movements on the yoke are sufficient to keep the plane upright.
But past a certain height—around 15-17,000 feet, depending on the conditions—this is no longer enough.
To stay with his element, he now has to have a firm hold on the yoke—at all times. The unpredictable winds, thin though they might be, will constantly be trying to steer the plane, up and down, side to side, so Mose has to be constantly correcting. He just can't take his hands off the yoke. And pointing a massive hunk of metal, bombs and gasoline through the upper atmosphere with two hands is an almighty struggle.
Luckily, there's Jonesy, whose yoke is locked to Mose's, who can do what Mose is doing. He takes over when Mose is exhausted, which isn't strictly allowed, but Mose has told you many times that Jonesy is the best pilot he knows—ambitious, too.
He wants to continue flying whenever the war's over—an unlikely prospect at the moment—but right now he wants to get a crew of his own. Mose says the higher-ups are processing his application right now.
Anyway you twist it, it's bad news. Who's gonna replace him?
Mose is talking to the Group Leader, who just happens to be Col. Shower himself, along with the Manning crew. They're talking the usual assembly jargon, but you imagine it somewhat differently:
“Captain Lt. Moseley . . . tighten it up! You're 63 inches too hard to port of Captain Rice's wingtip! This can lead to slovenly habits, poor hygiene and docking of your pay! You're officially on report, is that clear, soldier? See me in my office at 0800.”
Aww, maybe you're too hard on Shower. Just think of all the medals all this hard training is going to lead to . . . Distinguished Frying Cross, for your egg skills on the coal stove back in the hut . . . Joke Leaves and Coasters for number of martinis downed . . . and most important, Congressional Medal of Crooner. This last would be—
Shite . . . gotta concentrate.
You straighten up the stuff on your desk-pads, pencils, cigarettes, lighter and so on—and decide to check out the Morse code keypad that you would have to use if somehow the radio went out. Which, of course, would mean that you would not be able to tell any planes what you were doing, and ditto for them. Or tell the tower that you need priority because the entire crew bailed out over the Channel and it's just you and the bombs.
Flares and Morse code; that was your arsenal if the radio died.
Not to worry—you were pretty fast on the draw with the Morse code transmitter. Dit-dit-da, dit-da-dit till the guy on the other end shouted over the non-existent radio for you to goddamn slow down, ya prick!
Yep . . . you can hear it in your earphones, through your dandy Radio Operator's Communication System, which is only for you.
When you start to really get the screaming-meemies, you can talk to yourself and hear it in your headphones. Or better yet, sing some Verdi. That'll drown out the flak and improve your vocal chords—you're actually looking forward to it.
Actually, I'm not fucking looking forward to it, you rebut the constant chatter in your head. The buzz is really getting serious, but it hasn't even put its boots on.
When those black puffs begin appearing, the buzz will completely disappear, to be replaced by a continuous, unremitting, incomprehensible terror, bordering on panic.
Encountering flak is like walking though a minefield, blindfolded, but there's no such thing as flak being scrubbed. The Hitler Youth manning the batteries don't have days off. That flak is in your future is as sure as the sun will—
If it rises, will I see it? If I'm not around, it will still rise. No days off for Mr. Sun. Just, a permanent day off for me. How can that be? How? Flak doesn't judge. It doesn't admonish. It doesn't choose this plane. It's completely and implacably random. Like drawing a pair of fours one hand and a straight flush the next. And NO ONE BUT ME WOULD GIVE A SHIT.
I'm just a statistic. A crew listed as KIA on someone's log.
But no. NO. It won't get you this time. You have a free pass, to obliv—
Getting the rising panic under control gets more difficult the closer you get to Armageddon—the Dutch coast. Sure, you've done it five times already, but it doesn't get easier—it gets harder. Because you've seen what flak can do to a plane and it's just impossible to believe.
That guy who got a direct hit to the wingroot . . . wing falls off and he's just hurtling in a spinning, end-over-end deathdive; that is, until the gas in the fuel tanks mercifully cuts the trip to Eternity in half. Of course no chutes. Why did the flak choose him and not me?
Stupid question, but that doesn't stop you from asking it. And dreaming it. Over and over and over again, the wingroot guy, tumbling through your days and nights.
You're never gonna unsee that.
The radio chitchat between Mose and other pilots informs you that the 61 planes of the Mightiest 467th Bomb Group (Heavy) are almost in their swarm positions—61 angry metallic bees off to raid the Hornet's Ne—
Third Reich . . . what genius came up with that one? Where was the Second Reich? The First? That one-celled moron making all this shit as he goes along. No . . . must be two-celled. One cell to make a wiener-dog and the other to build it a labour camp Hier essen oder raus? Raus RAUS—
—RUSS . . . !!
You somehow struggle back.
Work work work work WHAM
The sudden noise in your earphones is a shock. “Men, assembly is almost done.” Mose. “We'll be off to Splasher 5 shortly. Oxygen checks.”
Jesus. That was close.
Womack dutifully performs the oxygen check. No wisecracks from O'Connell this time.
You look over your shoulder to see him writing furiously in a notebook. Mission progress? Hydraulic internal-line pressures? Ancillary fuel-transfer formulas?
Nah, it's probably a letter to his dog.
Hey Thor how ya doin boy? Catch any squirrels lately? Dads in his combat box with hydraulics at 19.8lbs mean and oil lines A-okay 156 lbs./stat 52.782 when y2x - 5z = 3x don't get mom up in the middle of the night ya naughty pooch Dad loves ya!
You decide it's no use procrastinating: time to find out what the Krauts are sieg-heiling about, along with their beer and turnips.
You accomplish this with the LuftFlotte radio, which is separate from the Jagdgeschwader radio that's for the no, that's not it Russ you got it ack-ack-basswards ships and towers and all that kinda . . . flak.
You call this tiny radio—official name RC-259—Frederich.
It's mounted on the bulkhead under the big radio-official name SCR-283.
The big one, you call The Great.
When you were in training you originally called them Javol and Mein Fürher but that wasn't quite as hummable.
Okay, let's light you up, you Kraut bastards.
Then, from nowhere, your Harvard voice—that intelligent voice, that logical voice, the voice you trust above all —breaks in:
They're not ALL Nazis, Russ. In fact the Luftwaffe has possibly fewer Nazis in its ranks than any other armed service in Germany. You KNOW that. And "Krauts" . . . really? You can do better, Russ.
Your bristle of indignation quickly subsides. You are acutely aware that the truth never lies. It's just . . . puerile to call people names.
But when you had enlisted it had quickly become clear that the Service generally encouraged an Us & Them mentality, which involved a sort of hierachy governing the names for the numberless and unhuman foe. They ranged from the relatively innocuous—Nips/Fritzes—to the furiously derogatory: "Yellow Monkeys, Kra—"
Yes, Russ. That'll do.
Atmospherics blast into your headphones—squeals, hums, constant crackles and cosmic rays, but in short order, that voice whose growling menace needs no translation: Wir sehen euch, ihr Drecksäcke . . . which you process with a chill: We're watching you, ya fucks . . . you dial away, but this radio is tuned only to Luftwaffe frequencies, so no chance of hearing any English.
But what these voices in your ears have no reason at all to know is that you can hop right on in to the conversation and change the subject, if you want, from
. . . Achtung, dicke Autos Kurs Süd, Richtung De Haan / big cars of Amies proceeding south possible landfall De Haan /
to
An Zwei, Sechs, Sieben: Alle Vögel heim! Jabo-Alarm! Sofort abdrehen! / Fighter squadrons 2, 6 and 7 return to field possible P-47 threat!
the beauty being that they can't tell where it's coming from unless they're using a direction finder, which they definitely are, but they need time to pinpoint you. They can't tell the difference between you and their own, this concept only seeing the light of day only IF your German is up to snuff.
But you practiced set phrases with Krause over and over, and he showed you how to sound Bavarian, so, filtered through the usual crackles and hiss—nah, they'll never know you're not Kraut.
German, Russ, German.
Achtung, Jagdgeschwader 6, Sinken auf minus drei Meter! Schnell! (Hmm . . . is minus three metres deep enough?)
Time to talk to Mose.
Skipper, Radio here. Dach has our altitude. Schund gonna be waiting for us.
The reply is immediate: “Radio, Pilot Wilco . . . “ pause ” . . . can't wait to taste me some schnitzel.”
“No, skip, it's pronounced shitzel!” breaks in Womack.
“Think they got any sauerkraut? I like sauerkraut.” Zumalt.
“Krauts don't eat 'kraut. They inject it into their brains.” Hubbard.
“What brains?” O'Connell.
A few laughs. The many-armed beast is still alive!
Mose shuts it down, but these brief jokey interactions serve notice to all that the crew is managing their terror, and that calms everybody down.
No one wants to give even a hint of the escalating buzz that's triggering irrational and hellcrazy thoughts . . . but you know it's happening to all of them.
Even Mose has to deal with it—you know because he told you.
“For sure, Russ, ah get unbent up there . . . but ah gotta fly the plane. It almost works 'til that flak be shakin' us up. Gotta admit, sometimes it's bathroom-time and ah'm surprised ah ain't shit mah pants like a kid in the night got scared by an owl.”
All In Your Head
P anic is infectious, goes the military axiom, and you've seen it in action. Zumalt almost losing his mind after a flak burst close enough to shower the plane with shrapnel, which sounds exactly like someone tossing gravel on a tin roof. It means the boys on the batteries have got your range. Not a damn thing you can do but try to shrink into a cowering lump of inert gases.
That happened on Mission #3 to Eschweiler, and Hubbard had to leave his station to calm Zoom down, which was a heroic task when flak was bouncing the plane around like a pebble on a drum.
But you could hear Hubbard—everyone could hear Hubbard—saying “Shit shit shit fuck I can't it's . . . it's . . .” in as low a voice as he could manage, yet one in which his Mt. Everest of fear was palpable.
The entire crew was surprised to hear Hubbard saying what they'd been saying to themselves, as if he'd been reading their minds.
Lord's Prayer? Check.
A hundred different synonyms for “fuck” and then some additional ones invented on the spot? Check.
Alternately cursing, then beseeching the Lord of lords, wise and merciful and a total asshole? Check.
But standing in front of an open-armed St. Peter and his army of gorgeous-babe winged angels while tipping your crush cap to the Bearded Guy is not yet.
Not. Yet.
No need to think about what's coming. It's gonna come whether you think about it or not. It's gonna do what it's gonna do and it doesn't give a fuck about what YOU'RE gonna do.
Now is Now. Then is Then. Get off it.
There's only one way for you to ratchet down your personal panic volume: a number puzzle.
First, shut off the Krauts. It won't help anyone to know just how much they love you and how they all and set the table with knee mortars and hand grenades
Der deliciouß Mutti's treats gottinhimmel fur Sie Amerikaner flyboyß und
Oh yeah. Almost got the 54 into Column G. Okay, so 54 divided by . . .
You keep your head down and wrestle the numbers with furious intensity. You don't want to look out your window and see the Group all assembled because it means that Splasher 5 is just an hour or so in your future. Yes, that future.
Soon you have to think about getting your affairs in order.
Of course, you already did that back at Rackheath. You made sure your will was all squared away—you left your hobo stick and shoulder pack to your dog, which you don't have, but left all the same. Dad and Mother wouldn't want the funky raincoat and knee-highs, and they sure wouldn't want the six-year-old packet of mixed nuts, but your dog sure would, if you had one.
All the rest of all you have in the world, you left in your locker, to be pawed over hungrily by your hutmates after you were dust and ashes.
They wouldn't find much to their taste—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Santayana, Buch der deutschen Verben, Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, a couple of, okay, maybe six crime novels: Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and so forth—and a packet of six-year-old mixed nuts, maybe, salvaged from the rucksack to give to the dog you never had.
Serves the bastards right.
16 in F Column . . . jibes okay with D, but maybe move the 19 to A? Nope.
But the vigilant corner of your eye has not missed the flock of bombers outside the window, now all flying resolutely in the same direction.
However, you refuse to look at your watch. Splasher 5 will come when it comes. Give or take an hour from now.
2,000 bombers? How the fuck they gonna pull that off? Getting all the different groups to assemble over Splasher 5? Naw . . .
Your practice flights have never involved thousands of planes. And they aren't all going where you're going. You're pretty much in the dark about this mission parameters, but you know that your Combat Wing, which contains multiple bomb groups just like yours from nearby airfields, is generally going south.
You try to imagine the scene, which is not hard to do—all you have to do is multiply your biggest previous mission by about twelve.
All that aluminum, guns, fuel, bombs and men—20,000 men—flying around like misguided missiles in the sky. Groping in three dimensions like flies above a carcass, except without the compound eyes and lightning reflexes that let the flies do their thing without hitting each other. It's just fucking inconceivable.
Ten men. Updraft, rookie pilot, veteran above, WHAM.
From your window you've seen them yourself.
On the horizon, a bright flash, then maybe 30 seconds later the plane shudders, and that's it. Ten kids barely out of high school, maybe never dated but now will be dating angel-babes for Eternity . . . ten telegrams, ten lockboxes cleared, ten beds all clean and ready for the next ten men.
Double all that if the other plane also goes down.
Cheery thoughts. Cheery thoughts
Your musings are interrupted by a report from Shower's plane—the Group Leader—-that assembly is almost complete, in the usual code, of course.
Now it's off to meet the rest of the 3rd Force, which is all the other bomb groups in your Combat Wing, and
Holy Shit, it's not over till it's begun, and it hasn't even begun to begin.
Your entire group of 61 planes, so painstakingly coaxed into a precise 3-dimensional mosaic—well, perhaps “precise” is notional—now must maintain that formation, through the rivers and streams and walls and bridges that constitute the constantly-shifting moods of the upper atmosphere, each pilot welded to his controls and trying to keep his plane close, but not too close, to his boxmates, mainly by adjusting his speed, but also with small movements of his controls.
A downdraft and he immediately has to compensate.
But not overcompensate.
If the cards decide to deal out an unusual hand, maybe he will overcompensate just as the guy in front of him hits an air pocket. These crazy things happen . . . all the time.
The math comes back. The loss factor on every mission . . . five to seven percent.
If it were seven, you could fly 14 missions.
It's kinda like if you took your service revolver, removed the clip, dumped all the rounds on the table, then, with your eyes closed, took one of 'em off the table and put it in your pocket, then took the blank from your other pocket, dropped it on the table, mixed 'em all up good, put 'em all back in the clip, slappped it back into the pistol with a flourish and then handed it to your six-year-old brother with a grin. "Here. Your turn."
Someone's gonna get hurt.
For you, that means eight more missions and it's
no more movie matinees at Brookline Cinema starring George Raft and Carole Lombard, no more Scarlatti operas at Boston Palace, and no free tickets to anything, except to the green patchwork quilt 18,000 feet below.
Or the North Sea.
Or the Zuider Zee.
Or the German border at Aachen.
Or over the target (the name is still not coming to you)—oh yeah, Daun. How appropriate. Going on Daun . . .
Or maybe coming in to land at some unknown airbase because of the terrible ground fog and clipping a tree.
Fuck that noise. FUCK THAT NOISE.
Why is the buzz so bad this mission? It wasn't on for Metz. Or Bielefeld.
But it was for Harburg—don't want to be repeating that. Harburg times 25 . . . well, you'd just be a trembling, mumbling wreck. Like those guys . . .
NO.
You can't think about it. About them. You're not them. Completely different animals. Absolutely another species. Genera, even.
You start humming Verdi's Requiem. No, no, Rachmaninoff's 1st. Yeah. Good ol' Pavel. Or Sergei . . . was it Sergei?
How could you forget?
You'd actually attended a Rachmaninoff concert in 1939 . . . but this one was with the Great One conducting his own Piano Concerto No. 2 . . .
Rachmaninoff conducting Rachmaninoff! Now that was a story you'd be telling your grandchildren.
Heh . . . they'll never believe it. They'll never believe THIS.
But of course, that's if you ever have grandchildren.
As you try to parse this thought a glance at the mission clock reminds you that right now, cheery thoughts are SOP, and you're a SAP for thinking uncheery—nay, positively unpatriotic thoughts.
Uncle Sam needs me and my unparalelled ability to work a dot-dot-dash contraption while smoking, humming and being near-gibberingly stricken with unstinting terror, frustrating the Hun wherever he tries to hide the bastards why the fuck did they start this fucking war I'd be at Harvard earning my degree if the goddamn Japs yeah, it's the Japs, jesus, if I were over there I'd be dot-dot-dotting in ideograms no, idiot grams all 4,690 of them man, consider me as lucky as a royal straight flush with hearts with a ten-dollar stake and everyone with a pair of twos and—
Heitere Gedanken . . . heitere Gedanken . . . cheery cheery cheery
You try to sigh through your mask but of course it doesn't work. No matter . . . you have work to do! It's all so damn inconvenient. Why, why, why, Lord, can't I just go back to the waist and hang up my hammock and take a nap? I wouldn't be bothering anyone. You could bring your poem book with you! Huh? What poe—
You slap your cigarette pack to make one pop out and automatically raise it to your face, cursing as you remember your mask. You push it aside and put the cigarette to your lips.
Click-click nothing. Click-click nothing. Your lighter is anoxic. Heroic measures! You bang it on the desk and click extra-hard. A tiny blue flame. You'll take it!
Mask askew and cigarette struggling to stay lit, you tune back into KrautRadio to see what's up.
Jesus! This time no static, but a torrent of voices. They're overlapping and talking too fast, and on top of this, they're using code words, just like you.
Lucky you know most of them. It was a focus of Krause's class. He actually had samples on Gramaphone records, and the class listened to them and tried to figure out what they were saying. Krause put that into the monthly tests—everyone had to listen to one they hadn't heard before and write down what they thought the Krauts were saying.
One guy you kind of got to know was actually Polish—yep, there were Poles in the Mighty Eighth, and they were some of the best airmen in the world—and he knew some German already.
So naturally you went to the pub and talked in German the whole time. Since you wore the 8th uniforms, everyone probably thought you were speaking some dialect from Kansas or something.
Anyway, it was great practice, and it's really paying off now.
You listen in and try to snatch something from the chaos.
Let's see . . . okay, Kirchen 6 . . . (Church 6) . . . that's code for Jagdgeschwader 6 . . . the Reims boys. Not AGAIN.
Jagdgeschwader 6, a very large, very dangerous fighter group out of Reims, France, is also called the Horst-Wessel group, after the original UberFanatic martyr that Hitler decided to make into a Nazi Christ-figure after his death, complete with his own nauseating marching anthem, The Horst Wessel Song, which became the background music of Nazidom.
Well, at least it's not Wagner.
But these boys mean business. On a huge 8th Air Force raid to Kassel in September, some navigator's fuckup meant 25 ships—you weren't sure if it was B-24s or B-17s, but who gave a fuck?—were despatched within six minutes. 250 men whacked in one swipe of the swatter.
Just three months ago!
You decide to inform Mose, but you don't want to alarm the rest of the crew. You scribble the message—JG6/muesli—which tells Mose that JG6 already has cereal on the breakfast table.
He's just a few feet away in the cockpit, diagonally behind your station, so you reach around and tap Jonesy on the shoulder and wave the note. No sense on removing any of your lines.
But as you turn and catch a glimpse of the view through the cockpit window, you see that there's hardly any sky. There are just planes, rank after rank, some just dots above and some just hundreds of feet in front of you. Up, right, left, everywhere, the closer ones visibly drifting left and right and up and down like party balloons.
It inexplicably leaves you teetering at the edge of the last precipice of Reason:
They're too close, they're too close, we're gonna hit, we're gonna hit even though you know they're not but your mind will not accept that fact and just goes on an unhinged alto-crescendo to a tune only you can hear oh christ this is not possible some are just 100 feet from us oh, man, oh man, this is not good, not good at all and the phantoms in your headset become a choir and then a stadium roar in your head Sieg. HEIL Sieg. HEIL which just adds another layer to the buzz that you're having trouble controlling now, with intermittent waves that travel up your spine and into your chest and it's panic welling up that will take control of all your voluntary shit, involuntary muscles if you can't manage to shut it the faa—
. . . Your first mission you had almost lost it and it was only later that you found out that most of the crew, including Mose, had almost lost it too.
Mose losing it—we'd all be fucked.
But Mose hadn't lost it. And you hadn't lost it; to this day you don't know why. You were not rational, then, not rational at all.
Maybe it was O'Connell, who on the bomb run had rapped your shoulder and passed over an object that had fallen onto your desk. A hip flask . . . a hip flask.
It had been the most welcome liquid you had ever consumed.
Gin, whisky, schnapps—you had no idea. But just the taste brought you to 6 o'clock on a Sunday, reading a book on your bed in the hut and sipping scotch from just such a container, garnished by the unholy pleasure of lighting a fresh cigarette.
Speaking of which, you light another one from the dying embers of the last.
Deep pull. Deep pull. Back to your position. All's well. All's well sarr, 't'the 4th bell, hard'a starboard, look alive mateys, there be sharks, t'were nuthin' but a wanderin' albatross sarr
Oof. Getting out of hand. Right. Okay. What's
The storm has passed.
There is not a single reason in this world to be concerned.
. . . Krauts know the Fear-Moths are a-comin'. Watch the Parting Of The Blue Skies, meine kleine little butterflieger! Let the carnage begi—
—wait—"Fear-Moths"?
Not The Butterflies
O ne day in German school, Krause had asked everyone to write down all the nicknames they had for the Germans. You heard snickers around the classroom as everyone jotted down their lists. You didn't have to try very hard; in addition to the ones they used in the US forces, the English, having had the added impetus of an entire previous world war to spur them on, had quite a few of their own that were doing the rounds. The few foreign crewmen, too, found their own vastly amusing.
So the lists were long, and the snickers indicated the general tenor of the schoolyard-level sophistication of some of the epithets for the enemy that the men were passing around to each other.
When everyone was done Krause collected them and read them out loud, to much hilarity and self-congratulations all round.
Then: "Do you know what the Germans call you boys?" He paused for a second. "I don't mean you Americans, I mean you bomber boys."
Hmm. Tough one. You knew that the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had been hectoring the masses to refer to you as "Terror-fliers," but other than that, hmm. Amerikanischers?
Krause smiled. "They call you 'Fear-moths.'"
What? Fear-moths? The image of the bombers appearing as monstrous black moths against a bleak sky, or worse, on a dark night, their undersides reflcting the havoc they were wreaking far below, was chilling. God in heaven, who the fuck came up with that one?
A guy in the back, name of Kaminitsky, piped up "Didja say like the butterfly, sir? You know, except the ones fly 'round in the night-time? Those ones? I ain't ever feared no moths I ever seen, so that sounds like them Krauts needs themselves some Raid, 'cept the spray kind, not the bomber kind."
That drew a laugh from the small crowd. There were about 13 of you today. The weather had been keeping everyone on the ground lately, and you were taking the time off to get a little moth-power in your batteries for the storms you knew were in your future.
"Think like a German, gentlemen . . . why would a good Nazi use an English term to describe his enemy? Think!"
It came to you like a raindrop out of a clear blue sky. Your hand went up.
"Feldwebel* Robinson? Was sagst du?"
Das muss so sein . . . was sie meinen damit die Abkürzung für "vier Motoren."
"That's exactly it!" Krause clapped happily. "'Vier-mot . . . ' that is you, my friends, the kindly neighbours who drop by on a regular basis to share your favourite holiday, the 4th of July, with as many fireworks as you can carry, so entertainment is never far away from the festive volk of the Third Reich.
He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I hear that it's actually the Jagdgeschwader pilots who use this name . . . 'four motors.' From what I understand, my friends, the pilots of the fighter groups fear you very much indeed."
Fear us?
No . . . Fear MOTHS.
Fear-Moths . . . yes . . . !
Ever since then you'd adopted them, fed them your serge uniform jackets, and watched them grow.
You look around to see that O'Connell is back at his position, reading his book. Through the corridor from the bomb bay to the back you can see someone moving around—probably one of the gunners trying to get out of the wind.
Over the North Sea is where the gunners will test their guns.
Testing them over land could cause some cannon shell to fall and kill a grazing sheep; or Hell's Bells, maybe zinging off some Flight Engineer engrossed in a dime novel and taking your head clean off.
Well, don't miss and hit my secret weapon, pal.
Your secret weapon?
Through your bulky flight suit you pat something hard, just around your heart. And it's not your flak vest.
It'll come in handy when you're trapped in your seat on the run to the IP, when the flak will be pre-aimed to go off in a nice box just at your typical bombing altitude, and when Mose won't be able to take evasive action because otherwise he'll fuck up Beyer's aiming point.
About six minutes of being a gnat on a microscope slide . . . if ever there were a time for a cocktail—or two—to go with your black popcorn, that would be it.
“Moving up to ceiling now,” comes the voice in your headset. It's Jonesy, telling everyone that they're taking the ship up to the altitude you'll be flying when you exit the—
. . . exit the plane at the last safe goddamn place over which to bail out.
This thought barrels across the racetrack that your brain is using to see which parts of itself will achieve catastrophic meltdown first
coming up on the inside left it's the neocortex who's leading by a hair but now it's the thalamus, yes, the thalamus takes the—
You take a big drag on your anemic cigarette. The nicotine will surely restore what little remains of your rational cognitive functions.
Breathe, breathe . . . that's it . . . let's see here . . . bailing out over unfriendly territory . . . quick revue
You know that there'll be no time for any of this later, so you take advantage of the lull to ponder your options should you ever need to leave this plane wheels-up.
The choices are stark. You've never jumped from anything higher than the diving board at the indoor pool at Boston Latin.
“Parachute training” for your generation of cannon fodder had been a mere formality: they'd given you about an hour's lecture on the theory, shown you the way parachutes work, told you how to position yourself for landings, and that was that.
No gung-ho leaps from 8,000 feet à-la-82nd-Airborne to feel the thrill and get the, umm, hang of it. In fact, no leaps at all from anywhere—all because earlier in the war your Wise Leaders had discovered to their horror that having guys practice-jump from 2-story platforms produced as many as 10% casualties, and these weren't just bruised egos.
Broken ankles all the way up to broken necks could put young men in desk jobs for the remainder.
Mind you, 10 planes and their veteran crews out of 100 lost bombing the Reich was not bad, not bad at all! but 10% of perfectly healthy young men fresh off the boat?
Completely unacceptable.
So they came up with the prevailing doctrine that it's “undesirable” for airmen to even consider using USAAF property to go AWOL in any of the continent-spanning territories of Nazi Germany, including Occupied France, Lichtenstein or any other unfriendly damn places that don't serve corn dogs.
. . . “Gasoline-spewing raging infernos in bomb-filled aluminum coffins are no excuse to leave your post before the meal service,” says right here in Article 73, Section 21G.
It's actually a huge relief to know that when the moment comes and the flames are licking through the straps of your flight boots and the plane is in a flat spin and you're standing in the doorway looking out at the verdant landscapes below, preparing to—
Wait a minute—what doorway?
Indeed: for you there are no doorways through which to launch yourself into the Final Hand, maybe with a pair of twos in the hole, an ace and a four showing, and the view 20,000 feet below smirking up at you with a pair of twos and an ace showing-one card to go, with the pot being: Valhalla.
You don't know about anyone else, but you're gonna jump and jump on the bomb bay doors until someone opens 'em or they open themselves. That's your Emergency Egress strategy.
“Oxygen check.”
Whaaaa . . . !? It's only been fifteen minutes?
You've noticed this on all your previous combat missions . . . time slowing down. You figure that it's your mind proceeding at breakneck speeds that gives the illusion of time slowing down. When you're almost paralytic with fear, your primitive brain wants time to analyse the situation in a STAT!-type format; no dawdling around with unnecessary contemplations when you need to recall the distance between you and the nearest phone booth from which you can call 911 to come put out the fire consuming O'Connell's library of cheap trash-lit.
Womack's oxygen check passes you and goes towards the back. “Hey, Sol, we gettin' close ta Berlin yet?” asks Pilarski, in the tail, after confirming his oxygen status. “I'm still seein' Ft. Lauderdale.”
“Uh, yeah, Tail, Berlin to our right, but to our left for you folks on that side you can just make out the Chrysler Building just next to Benny's Deli and, uhh, some Kraut submarine pens.”
No one laughs.
“Hope we ain't goin' there today,” says Womack, unnecessarily.
Out of all the possible destinations you'd seriously rather not visit during your tour is the U-boat bases on the coast of Occupied France-truly colossal concrete structures built to withstand anything yet invented in explosive form, where the fleet of Nazi submarines go to repair and refit.
Besides being entirely useless ventures for any bomber force—they've been attacked a dozen times with no result by the English or by you—the bases are viciously defended, with your bomb squad losses guaranteed to be higher than that unimportant tenth percentile.
Of course, you're not going there today, but that doesn't change the fact that the entire coast of France now bristles with anti-aircraft installations regardless of what's underneath them, despite the best efforts of the post-D-Day Allied push. So your bible might need to be consulted if by some error in navigation you should find yourself anywhere near the ports of Ste. Nazaire or, gods punish the guilty, L'Orient.
No, today, according to King's charts, which you got a quick look at before he disappeared into his position in the nose, Hell Incarnate is your destination and you're getting there you know not how.
A brief, tense discussion had ensued just after you'd waylaid him on his way to the cockpit that went sort of like
Hey, Horatio, gimme a look at the charts. You'd grabbed the sheaf out of his hand and taken a look.
It had been then that the scope of this mission, the sheer scale of ambition of Messrs. Doolittle, Arnold, Spaatz & Co. had become all too clear.
“Hurry the fuck up, Russ, I'm late.”
But it had only taken a few seconds to appreciate just how devastatingly complex the situation you-your crew (10), your squadron (140), your group (610), your compadres in all the planes (~20,000) in all the Combat Wings (9), Forces (9) and Divisions (3)-now find yourselves in.
How the fuck do they expect us to pull this off?
The Mission Planners, in their infinite wisdom, who were plied with regular doses of benzedrine, coffee, an endless stream of cigarettes and plates of those weird English cucumber-and-water cress sandwiches they couldn't eat anyway (benzedrine appetite, you see) and besides, no time to spare in the Regatta de Havoc they were assembling like excited boys with three separate armies of toy planes, filled with toy men, thousands upon thousands, across an Olive-Drab silk-brocade-covered dining table that, if it weren't their parents', would have plenty of chairs, except all this—this whole damn shooting match that, at Briefing had all been reduced to one Good luck, Gentlemen, and good hunting . . .
Well, that was all you were to them, wasn't it? Gentlemen on some imaginary romp across an imaginary countryside. Perhaps on horseback. Yes, with hounds. Trying to trap some harried mammal only a few genetic steps removed from the dogs you're using to hunt it down—and then what are you going to do? Why, you're going to kill it.
Truth is, although you hadn't really had much time to parse King's charts and figures, you're already a whiz at digesting all sorts of stuff at a glance. You had to be, back at Boston Latin School, when you were just a kid, sixteen, seventeen, and your teachers had given you-the plural you, the luckless you, the you who were being pruned from the ranks like extra legs on a bowling ball-three hours of homework for after school. Not three, not four, but five days a week.
Like baseball, do ya, pal? A little hittin' around with the boys at the park after school? See ya there at 3 a.m.
Day in, day out, with soul-sapping monotony, three hours. THREE HOURS. Take it or . . . you'd better take it, ya potentially lazy prick, 'cause we got eyes. WE GOT EYES.
The regimen was so Draconian that few could hack it. Best friend Tommy Flaherty, a truly gifted tenor, was shed like a common choirboy a year before graduation. But somehow, you persisted. You never failed to complete the homework, not even when it took you into the wee hours, which was, well, always.
Some would have said that it was inhuman to make children spend their free time hunched over books instead of playing in the sunshine, but some would be thudbrained dullards not to grasp the benefits of such forced enlightenment. Memorising such vast quantities of facts, figures and ephemera at such a pace created the necessity for the development of shortcuts, memory tricks, speed-reading and other little stratagems that had no name, all of which came to you seemingly via natural selection. The obsessive puzzle problems that you were constantly refining were, however, the true proof of your very own mad genius.
However, all that was just your warmup coin trick compared with what was up next: The Passing The Harvard Entrance Exams trick. But were you worried? You, worried? Not a't'all worried!
No one else was worried, either. Your teachers were slapping themselves on the back for sending yet another Latin boy straight to the pinnacle of the summa cum laude of all the educational institutions all put together everywhere, by anyone, at least so far: Harvard University, Cambridge Mass. THE Harvard. Of legend. (Yup, that school, Bud.)
In fact, with your qualifications, no exam would be necessary; all you had to do was saunter through the gates. After that, a grateful acceptance letter from Harvard to the star pupil, the President of the Senior Class, the editor of the school paper, would shortly be arriving with the mailman. “Congratulations, Russ!” the beaming mailman would say as he walked up the drive. “I think this is the little something from Harvard that you've been waiting for!”
Then the shrieks of joy from inside your house would be ringing through the neighbourhood as everyone shared the good news. Around the dinner table that evening everyone would be talking over one another with excitement, hardly listening to your soaring visions of your gilded future. That was not to be.
It had been the numerous distractions that had been your undoing: the on-again, off-again radio gig of voice work that you loved; the copy-boy work at the Boston Globe; the school paper, Senior Class activities, baseball, and quite recently, the girls. Your grades had suffered. Not spectacularly, but they weren't the Triple-As that they needed to be for the Grandees that handed out the admission tickets. With the result that now ya hadda take the exam, ya bumptious cretin.
But there wasn't just one. It was several separate exams, each of which were a bitch by themselves—famously, absurdly, stupidly difficult, according to the lore handed down from on high. Apparently, Harvard didn't need more cretins, the rumours went, and the tests were the way to ferret them out. They were like shovels, the way they scooped up most of the deluge of applicants and summarily dumped them onto the sidewalk.
Science exam. Mathematics exam. History . . . English . . . Classics (Latin and Greek). Achievement tests, whatever the hell they were. Something new called a SAT. Uh-huh, I SAT on my ass while I hadda take this stupid test.
The one that was going to give you the most problems, however, was the German test. You'd chosen it as your extra language option because you'd recently been dating a German girl who was in the choir. Seriously, though, you could barely mumble “My neighbour is rich. Are you here for the Olympics?” It didn't look good. But by God, you were gonna learn.
You knew that this might be your last shot at the title. It would take all your powers and you weren't quite sure how you'd pull it off, but that Immortal Summer of '39, you raised your bootstraps to the heavens and plotted a strategy to get this new homework done. First to go were the distractions: Class Presidency, newspaper chief, radio voice actor, baseball, girls, everything . . . one by painful one-with very little notice. Many of the dumpees involved were not amused.
But you had to get on with it: three months, not three hours, of your head buried in books; it was a daunting prospect. First, quiet. Your house on Landsdowne Road, in Brookline, had a flat roof where you sometimes went to . . . stargaze. That would be perfect for the solitude.
So you told your parents that you had some day job and secretly began dragging your books up there so none of your friends would find you. Then you attacked the books as though they were hordes coming over the battlements, leaving the subjects that you knew would be the toughest for last, so they'd be the most fresh in your mind for the exams. English, with its Poetry and Literature, was quickly conquered-just a few remindings. After that, a few books on math, the sciences, general knowledge and, of course, the Classics, were disposed of in about six weeks.
Then you reread a lot of history, notably American history, because there was a big hoo-hah with it at Harvard, so you had to know the names and the dates, if not the stultifying verbiage. The German you left for last. It was a helluva thing, learning a foreign language from scratch. It would be impossible to have even a primitive conversation just by reading books for a few weeks. And German was one of the most difficult, with all its weird feminine-masculine-neuter prepositions, odd verb cases . . . a bit like Latin: accusative, dative, yeah, you're accusing me of dating your girl? Listen, Mac, I ain't laid a hand—and so on. But you knew they didn't want conversation. They wanted the Big Picture.
. . . kinda the same as what was on Nelson King's charts. You figured about a thousand words . . . two thousand bombers—
No one used more than that in a daily context. You didn't go to the butcher and say “I say, my excellent fellow, would you have in your esteemed supply of gamecocks a pheasant of recent extraction?” You'd say “Gimme that chicken right there.” So you broke the thousand down and learned them one at a time, then added 500 more for padding, since you were at it anyway. A few stock phrases and some opera lyrics and you were done. That August you took the tests. And you aced them. Your scores were, well, through the roof.
Now, approaching 20,000 feet and looking down at the emerald tapestry below, you try to make some sense of this sprawling nightmare that those men in offices, now packing away their charts, graphs and protractors in some building in London, have prepared for you. . . all I gotta do is turn it into numbers . . . let's see here . . . three divisions, of which we're Number Two, and those guys are slotting into the pipeline right about—
—but it doesn't work.
Diverting, distracting, disrupting: nothing you're currently trying to do is able to hold off the relentless harassing assault on your efforts to stay rational by the forces of . . . here you struggle. Evil? No particular evil at the moment.
Yet all the same you can't shake the feeling of being waylaid on all sides by . . . something not with your best interests in mind. It's an almost-constant gnawing at the edges of your sanity by some fluid combination of futility, terror, sorrow, helplessness and a few other peripherals that you might disperse in one location only for them to fill the gap at another.
Christ. I'm never gonna make it. Seven percent may be seven percent but that's all just theory, right? Flak guns don't have theories. Like walking through the woods and stepping on a wasps' nest. What . . . 100 square miles and you step on the only wasps' nest between Pocatello and Jackson? Yeah, could be, could be . . . wasps didn't plan to be there any more than you planned to step on 'em. But you stepped on 'em anyway, didn't you?
This tortured logic finally redirects the storm in your head to a somewhat-manageable tumult, but it's enough to turn your attention to what's important:
Matches.
Yup, up here your lighter will no longer light, but matches might; that is, if you perform your magic trick of blowing oxygen that you've just inhaled through the cigarette onto the match as it's flaring, then swiftly inhale the sulphourous mess through the cigarette and deep into your lungs, then chase that with a blast of oxygen.
For you, the whole procedure is so routine that you barely notice you're doing it.
The familiar ritual is so reassuringly ordinary that you're momentarily transported to your bunk on a Saturday afternoon with a book and a wee dram o' the wisp.
You pat the wee dram that sits in your jacket pocket. Oh, you can betcha I'll drink you, you sly devil. Just not . . . yet.
You half close your eyes as you smoke. The sun is coming through your window and blasting off your desk. As you watch, it very slowly traverses from right to left, indicating that Mose is making a wide turn.
And all of a sudden there's a clue as to why you're so tense . . . a trick of the light catches that small projection from the otherwise-smooth skin of the plane . . . that shark-tooth of flak that had almost penetrated the hull during your last mission.
How come the ground guys didn't iron it out? So it would sit there and remind me that, umm, better luck next time?
Man . . . 20,000 feet above salvation of any kind. I'll never get out of this deathtrap. It's a one-way thrill ride: one way how it all ends well and 100 ways how it ends badly.
Your mind flashes quickly though the 100 scenarios that you've either seen yourself or heard from others, plus a few provided free of charge by your dutiful imagination:
incineration
falling from great heights
parachute fouling on a propeller
Messerschmitt 13mm round to the stomach
flailing helplessly in the flames of the burning radio compartment
trapped against the inside of the plane by centrifugal force as it spirals to the ground
watching a fellow crewman die in surprised horror as he contemplates the mess below his belt
taking a flak burst to the—
All that takes only a second or two because your mind is racing from the adrenaline flowing as if from a firehose. It's plain you're ready for any scenario, which is an ideal way to be if you're going to be the fighting man the Mighty Eighth wants you to be.
It might seem sometimes that you're losing your mind with these kinds of thoughts, but you know you're far from alone. It's not even the hurriedly-mumbled confessions of your crewmates, in which they describe such fits of terror that they thought they might leap from a gunport to just make it all stop . . . it's seeing the wrecks of guys who can't fly any more being led by MPs to the dispensary; their haunted stares and halting steps betraying a final accounting of the sheer stress of constantly being afraid, day after day after day.
But yet another cruel cut enters these men's personal hells because they think they've let their pals down. That somehow, some way, they're that brutal word: Yellow. They've become instant non-players; kicked out of the sheltering camaraderie of the Team. In some ways that's more devastating than their mental collapse. Forever to be has-beens; also-rans; almost-were's.
The return to their hometowns won't be the ecstatic reunion with family and friends, a visit with the mayor and an article in the local “-Post-Dispatch” . . . just quiet whispers and downcast eyes wherever they go . . . for life.
But they have no choice in the matter—no, none a't all. There is no differentiation by rank or missions flown in this grim club that no one wants to join: Lieutenant-Colonels, Majors, Sergeants, medal-winner heroes, non-specific crew and ace top-gun pilots . . . the succumbing is quick and startling, but it is usually complete. Rare is the day on which a man rejoins the Land of the Previously-Lived; the devastation is unsparing and in most cases total.
The shrinks have various names for it: Neurasthenia; Combat Fatigue; Battle Stress and a couple of others; but the Mighty Eighth in its infinite wisdom has its own name for it: Flak-Happy.
And bless their pointed little heads, the higher-ups have devised a solution to the problem: Flak Shacks.
These are places where the Flak-Happy Notshots are sent to have a week's R&R-rest and recovery—after which they theoretically return to their jobs, joyous and refreshed. This “solution” is often the last stop; the edge of the abyss from which no man returns-the last chance to “straighten up” before being unceremoniously booted out of the fraternity.
No one knows exactly why some men crack and others don't. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with IQ or strength of character. Tough guys go down just the same as the Sensitive guys (the ones who read or play an instrument and generally shun team sports). It doesn't even seem to have any link to number of missions flown. It can happen to a guy on the third mission or the 21st.
Even though no one thinks any less of them, they think less of themselves.
You'd gone to pubs with that guy Willoughby, a gunner from the Swearingen crew; he was a real crackup and seemed to have his shit wired tight, all his chips in the pot. You never talked about missions—he was from the Midwest, around where you'd grown up with the Bachmanns in Milwaukee, so you just shot the shit and drank your ales, and Willoughby was all smiles.
Until Magdeburg, in August. You were still training and hadn't flown your first mission yet, but he was 10 combat missions in and Magdeburg was his 11th—unlucky 'leven straight to heaven—
The flak over the target was intense, and he was at his gun port when the ship next to him, name of Miller, took a direct hit to a wingroot and fell apart then and there.
“I saw a guy trying to bail out but he hit the tail before he could get his chute open . . . Russ, he almost got tore in two, I swear," Willoughby said, a week or two after the fact as you sat in your usual seats at the King's Head in Norwich. You were appalled.
Are you sure he didn't just bounce off? Did you see any more chutes? You tried to give him some outs—some way of persuading himself that it all turned out okay; but he wasn't listening . . . he was reliving it all in the echo chamber of his mind. AWOL until further notice.
“The look on his face . . . he was so surprised . . . “
You never saw him again. After a couple of more missions, Willoughby was fried. The captain, Swearingen, put a word in the right ears and Willoughby was relieved of all further duties as a combat crewman. He disappeared into the vast sea of damaged goods: the desk clerks, the supply drivers, the bean counters, the cook's assistants.
Would you ever crack, ask to be taken off the flight line? Become a shambling shadow of your former self, scarred for life, mumbling down sidewalks, scaring up pints of the hard stuff . . . could it ever happen to you?
You do a quick run down the numbers.
Not a chance.
The roar of the engines changes pitch slightly and you note that Mose has straightened out—it's likely he's slotted you in to the five-sided Wing assembly racetrack that you saw on King's chart.
Last stop before the North Sea, but getting 2,000 planes into some kind of order isn't going to be easy. You know from experience that many factors come into play with these things—things that don't come to mind immediately, like that the planes on the outside of the racetrack will be going slower than those on the inside, so they'll continually be falling behind if they don't adjust their speed to compensate.
And since you're the lead plane in your squadron, you know that Mose and Jonesy are having to up their game, the effort of which is already driving them to the brink of impossibility.
“Flying a B-24 is a bitch, Russ. Maybe a son-of-a bitch too,” Mose had told you after the second or third mission.
“Ain't like no B-17. This is like drivin' a tractor 'pared to pushin' a pram. An' that's when you'se jes' flyin' practice aroun' the English countryside for Colonel Shower. You get into combat, well . . . ya gotta have twelve eyes an' six arms 'cause you jes' don't have any ah-deeah 'bout what's aroun' the next corner.”
His Alabama drawl—the one he falls back into when he's off duty—somehow magnifies the chill of recognition at the not knowing, all the time, every flight, if this second will be the last you ever spend on Earth, and even that without your feet on the ground.
You feel almost guilty for sitting behind him smoking your cigarettes while he's battling the wind and eyeing his gauges and making sure he's where he's supposed to be because there's no plane ahead of him to follow.
He simply cannot make any mistakes. Nine other men's lives hang in the balance. Not only does he share the terror all of you feel; on top of that, there's that constant tyre around his neck of being responsible, of being the sole person accountable for not only your lives, but as lead plane, potentially the lives of the men in the entire squadron . . . 140 of them, to be exact.
Your musings are suddenly interrupted by a thump on your shoulder from behind. It's O'Connell, maniacally raising and lowering his eyebrows. Uh-oh. But he just hands over a piece of note paper. You try to decipher the doltish scrawl.
Ohhhh . . . it says “Game?”
You consider your options. Seems Mose is taking you out of the racetrack that you've been in now for around 30 minutes, so you know your flight time to Great Yarmouth—your southerly exit point from the English coast—will be at least another half hour or so.
Until then you don't have much to do; it's still radio silence and the idea of listening to the Huns to hear what you've heard dozens of times before (including Krause's lessons) is not an appealing one. You give him a thumbs-up.
Huns know the Fear-Moths are on the way. Me and O'Connell passing a few anxious minutes playing Tick-tock-die ain't gonna change their plans much.
Indeed, changing plans is not a beloved quirk of Hunnish nature, no sirrreeeitain't.
But regrettably for you—not you in particular, but all of you—your crew, your Squadron . . . Group . . . Combat Wing . . . Force, Division(s)—plural, because, well, three of 'em—who are even now still issuing forth from innumerable air bases all over England and containing, you calculated from King's charts, over 20,000 eager crewmen in the service of this Mighty Eighth Air Armada, for the express purposes of wreaki— . . .
The thought cuts itself off, but only because it knows what's coming: that ghastly, impossible thought that
it can't be
. . . according to your Group Communications Officer, they don't just know you're coming, but their detection equipment is so sensitive that they've known you were coming ever since the first Mighty Eighth Radio Operator—or pilot, or ground crew, hell, does it matter?—flipped the switch on his radio on for the very first time.
Maybe before you were even awake.
The German ground defense crews had probably stopped counting how many of your planes were on their way across the Channel long before yours took off, so the safe bet is that, with several hours' advance warning, by the time you get there they're gonna be ready to hit you with everything they've got.
Their bases over the occupied continent may have dwindled with D-Day five months before, but dwindled does not mean disappeared.
What the hell difference does it make? Dead is plenty dead—you can't get much deader'n dead.
(all those ME-109s and Fw 190s revving up those buzzing moth-swatters, not to mention all those children on those murderous flak batteries)
You struggle: How can a human being deliberately send tracer, fuel, and dynamite-filled packets of ghastliness, each and every one capable of ending a human life with not a microsecond's grace . . . here is John Smith, there was John Smith—in less time than it takes to clap your hands once— . . . on purpose?
It's difficult to attribute any of it to the purposeful machinations of a person with whom, in some parallel universe, you could be sitting at a bar chatting over a schnapps.
And suddenly from nowhere
all the individual men in all their individual planes, all 20,000 of them—you SEE THEM—
your mind's eye sweeping over the thousands of tiny figures as they move about their planes—doing all the little things you know they're doing to bring some sense of normalcy to their reality—perhaps trying to light their cigarette (and failing), or answering a call of nature (unhappily, in the unheated suites the Mighty 8th has furnished)—all of them young men just like you.
And you know that all of them—just like you—are trying to come to terms with the impossible possibility that this—THIS VERY MISSION—might be their last . . . at the same time confronted by that non-negotiable obligation to every man in every plane, from Colonel Shower on down to 17-year-old playground escapee Jerome "Rabbit" Collins, that if there are any failures, they shall
NOT
be
—
Go on . . . ?
. . . I were to perform my duties in a lackadaisical manner—
Yes?
or be negligent in any way, large, small or microscopically tiny—because their safety is MY safety, the lives of the men in the plane—the crew . . . my FRIENDS—could be . . .
—If 'cause imagine if I suddenly had to replace Horatio and give Mose directions home, or pull an injured Beyer out of the front and take his place on the IP so we can at least complete the mission, right? or Jesus, how could I replace O'Connell? I know NOTHING about fuel-transfer ratios or manifold pressures fuck, if I make it I'll force him to teach me everything he knows, him and Jonesy too, maybe not how to take off, but how to put 'er on auto and bring her in someplace that isn't German oh, man oh man, we're screwed if someone got creamed and there was no one to take his place . . .
I swear—if I make this one I'm gonna do ALL that. Next time we go up I'm gonna be the Swiss-army knife 'round here . . . hell, I'll
I'll—
Ahh . . . all brave sentiments indeed . . . but do you really put that much faith in your ability, well-meaning or otherwise, to influence whether or not an air current suddenly moves down while the plane moves up and a German cannon shell careens through the strut holding up your desk and—
passes harmlessly over your head because you were picking your lighter up off the deck or
—or . . . or—NO . . . —!
Yes!
"No" is precisely correct, Technical Sergeant Russell J. Robinson, Radio Operator of the Mighty 8th Army Air Forces—precisely because it's not up to you.
You can make any resolution you like, any vow to up your game or improve your odds, but it's the dealer who shuffles the pack—not you.
Isn't that just the way it is?
The dealer has always shuffled the pack and always will shuffle the pack.
Right?
maybe so, may be indeed so . . . but
. . . don't mean I gotta LIKE it.
So lemme see here . . .
. . . bet low on that wingtip nipping that dandelion on the runway and raise 'em when it's Mose doing the nipping . . .
. . . and Joey doesn't shoot off the ailerons or Zoom don't trip in the bomb bay, or the Germans don't—
. . . ALL that stuff doesn't happen . . .
. . . —well HELL YEAH, why not?!
Yessirree, there is the distinct possibility that, despite the size and strength of the forces arrayed against me and the seeming—no, REAL mathematical certainty of the near-hopelessness of this position in which I find myself ensnared, with no help nearby nor chance of friendly intervention on or even OVER the horizon . . .
. . . no, there's is no doubt in my mind at all that I'll be collecting ALL their paychecks on Poker Night.
You signal to O'Connell: You first. ♣
