by John Hersey
We were in for a shock. The day was just one long fog of confusion. To begin with, the field order called for an indicated air speed during the climb of one hundred seventy miles per hour, and for a lot of the crocks our Group was flying that was too much of a strain. There were eight aborts from our Group on the way out, and as luck would have it the lead plane of our element turned back before we’d even formed up our squadron, to say nothing of our Group, so we and the other wingman of the element washed around up there not knowing whom to join up on. In the air one group looked like another. We flopped around and finally tacked onto the wrong squadron of the right group.
It was obvious, besides, that we weren’t the only ones who were screwed up. My heart sank. Was this the glorious combat in which I was to be asked to lay down my trifling life—trifling, that is, to everyone but me? Looked as if somebody had done a snow job on us. This shambles didn’t look like the raw material of a proud communiqué of the kind I’d swallowed whole so often.
Marrow, on the other hand, grew more and more elated. Just before we had boarded the ship at stations time he had gathered us in a knot, and he had said, “You can’t be hurt in the plane with me. My mother told me I brought luck in the house.” We sincerely believed him. His great square face was working and was wet; he was perspiring with patriotism, it seemed, with hating to wait for the desirable fight ahead.
And in the air, while everything was utterly confused and a hundred things were going wrong, he shouted in his throat mike: “Carry on! Carry on!” (He had learned that this was what we should have said to the Coldstream Guards at St. James’s gate to unfreeze them. Were the poor guys still standing there?) He kept checking things like mad, now peering down at a dial as a killy hawk hovers above a field mouse, now shouting a reminder to some member of the crew. But in his euphoria Marrow was also recklessly abusive to the rest of us. Sailen would call up with some timid, conscientious observation from his mantrap of a ball turret, and Marrow would shout, “What’s the matter, Junior, you nervous in the service?” At one point I told him that because of our fast climb the cylinder-head temperatures were all pretty high, and he said, “What are you, Boman, chicken s—?”—as if manliness consisted in burning out your power plant. Yet at the time, for some crazy reason, we were buoyed up by his hateful calls. He was having such a good time that it seemed churlish to feel confused, disappointed.
My own greatest strength was that I had always considered myself weak. I was an old chum with anxiety, irritability, restlessness, sleeplessness, headaches. It was nothing new for me to rally my defenses. In the long run I suppose this was why, on that final mission to Schweinfurt, I found I had deeper reserves than Marrow. The one thing a war lover cannot deal with is the imminence of defeat.
But I suppose I had another strength that day which was even greater: ignorance. I simply didn’t know what was going on around me, and I had to learn about what happened over the target much later. The mission was to have strong R.A.F. withdrawal support, but over Lorient itself we were unprotected, and I was given to understand later that enemy fighters reacted to the tune of fifty or sixty, and that they came in from all directions, but particularly from ahead, in waves of four to seven aircraft approaching in co-ordinated attacks, and that a couple of FW-190s dropped the new time-fused aerial bombs on us from wing racks, and that there was a continuous-following flak barrage that was vicious and accurate—but of all that I saw only a brief flicker of a rounded wingtip and a few puffs of blackish smoke.
Just before the initial point, where our bombing was to begin, Max Brindt called me on the interphone and said, “Come on down here a second, Bo, help me figure something out.”
So during the run I was down in the greenhouse with a walk-around bottle of oxygen peering over Max’s shoulder—I don’t believe he ever did find in the ground haze the power house alongside the sub base that was supposed to be our aiming point—and Marrow, who was not yet subtle in his evasive tactics, was roller-coastering the nose, up and down, and once, while I was standing beside Clint Haverstraw leaning over Brindt, we swooped downward so hard that Clint and I left the floor, and for a perceptible moment we hung suspended in mid-air, like swimmers in the fluid of eternity, surrounded by weightless objects floating around us: a cushion, a log book, somebody’s parachute. Buzz pulled up, and I landed on the floor in an immobile crouch with everything dragging down; my face felt like a tired old bloodhound’s. Haverstraw, who felt compelled to reduce all human experience to numbers, figured later that at the moment of strongest centrifuge, I had weighed four and a half G’s, or six hundred seventy-five pounds, or, as Haverstraw said, “in British terms, forty-eight stone three.” That remained for me the memorable experience of my first strike against the Hun—being, for two seconds, as heavy as a circus freak.
When we had broken away and the Spits had picked us up—I did see them because of the nice, cautious habit they had of pulling up their wings out beyond range, so the triggerhappy Yanks would recognize their brothers in arms and not plug them full of fifties—and we were gurgling along over the Atlantic in the raggedest formation since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, I experienced for a few moments my kind of thrill from flying. We were, for a short first hitch of a dogleg, on a course for Penzance, and looking out at the ocean of atmosphere I began to daydream about pirates of the sky. I was free from the stifling confines of reality on the earth. I was a happy child again.
Buzz interrupted this mood, coming up on interphone to tell Max Brindt that when Max had shouted, “Bombs away!”—which Max had done as he toggled the bombs in response to the ships around us, without the faintest idea of aiming—that he, Marrow, had had the best feeling he’d ever had in his life outside of intercourse. That was not exactly the way he put it, however. He gave us a laugh.
It came time to let down. “Prien!” Buzz shouted. “Shall we descend to fart?”
At twelve thousand I took off my oxygen mask. It was sopping with drool and sweat, and I realized that I had been terrified somewhere along the way.
We landed, and one look at the expressions of Red Black and his boys in the line crew made me think maybe we’d done something great, after all. I was so pooped I could hardly drag myself out of the plane.
By the time we reached the interrogation room, Marrow looked as composed and blasé as if he’d flown most of his tour. There was a Red Cross girl handing out doughnuts, coffee, and cigarettes, and she was really a sad case, but Marrow went up to her, looking as springy as a high-hurdles man, and he said, “So this is why we fly.” She really was an exhibit. She was, but for great bosoms attached to her like a mail carrier’s endless burden, surely a man. She was bound to be a man in disguise. Yet Marrow flirted with her as if his life depended on her charms.
After a while he came over to me and confidentially said, “You never can tell about those ugly ones. Sometimes they’re hot as a pancake.”
“Down, Fido,” I said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Boman,” he said, “caution never earned me a single dime.”
We didn’t have anything to tell the interrogator, except that we’d probably missed the aiming point by a mile and that the enemy planes had all zipped past us before we’d had a chance to fire a single round in anger.
Our whole crew stood around for a long time afterwards talking about our day; we were like men in a decompression chamber. Someone asked Handown how he could remain so calm all the time. He said he’d felt tense over the target, but he kept busy and just wouldn’t allow himself to dwell on the possibility of disaster. “It’s like I have a governor in my head—shuts off the juice when the worrying begins to go too fast.” Prien was a bit more carefree than a man with a tendency to flatulence had a right to be. Said there’d been some white flak. Looked sort of like popcorn.
23/
We had no sooner had supper than they hooted another alert at us. This was not funny. We had had o
ur blooding, our first mission; we’d been through the rites of initiation. The reaction was setting in. We had learned that over Lorient Woody’s Wooden Pecker, Woodman’s ship, had been shot down; no parachutes; ten men, exactly like us, dead. One drink had made me feel as if the top half of my head were made of Vermont marble. My legs hadn’t been so tired since New Year’s Day two years before, and that was because I’d stayed up all night, dancing, drunk. I was mincemeat, ready for the flak house after my first sortie…and then the Tannoy opened up, with its deep but tinny sound of doom, and said we were going right out again the next morning. Up at two, briefing at three.
I went straight to bed. It is hard to know what I thought about when in bed, but not sleeping, in the days before Daphne; or rather, it is hard to recapture the quality of the thought, for Daphne opened up my mind, set me free in ways I had never been free. I cannot return to what I was before. That night, at any rate, I never did tumble all the way down into deep sleep; I groped around in a haze of thinking-dreaming.
They sent us next day to bomb the Focke-Wulf aircraft factory at Bremen, and this was without question the worst engagement the Wing had ever been through. Of one hundred fifteen Forts that went out, nine aborted and sixteen were lost. We could thank our stars that we knew so little about what was going on. A blurred horror is more blur than horror; perhaps this is why ignorant and stupid men seem to have no nerves.
We took off at nine thirty at thirty-second intervals and assembled over the base, and our Group flew to Thurleigh and made a big sweeping turn to the left and fell in behind the Thurleigh group, a thousand feet higher, and together the two groups rounded out the full circle and headed for King’s Lynn, whence we were to leave the coast of England; two more groups joined up on the way. We left King’s Lynn exactly at zero hour, at about ten thousand feet, and we steadily clicked up over the Wash to twice that high.
Over the North Sea Handown in the top turret spotted a lone Fort way out ahead at two o’clock. We used the clock system for spotting, which meant thinking of the great round pan of the earth’s atmosphere as the dial of a clock, face up, in the sky, and that we were at its hub, and that twelve o’clock was dead ahead, six o’clock dead astern, and that the other hours pointed their various directions. The Fortress that Handown saw at two o’clock seemed to be black, and others of us saw it, and we wondered how any ship had got so far from the formation; maybe it was a weather ship. We had theories but none right, because that Fort—we later learned—was one the Germans had reconditioned after a crash landing, and it was a spotter, and it radioed ahead our course and speed and altitude, so Jerry was up and ready for us at the target. We saw the spotter often later on; it was Kid Lynch who called him The Black Knight.
Looking back, I see that those pilots in front of the bulletin board before our first mission had been right: Marrow was a greenhorn. He actually enjoyed that frightful second mission, to Bremen. I was infected by his off-handedness. The whole show seemed unreal to me. I became fascinated on the bombing run by the puffs of flak—the sudden formation of cute little clouds, as if by trick photography in a movie; you could imagine it done to music, with Paulette Goddard, bare to the waist, appearing in the middle of each burst of fluff. Unreal, unreal. I saw some enemy fighters this time, but it was hard to take them seriously, because all I could get was a feeling that they were skidding. They weren’t flying, they were sliding sideways. The impression was a product of our speed plus or minus theirs. When they came at us head-on, the rate of closure was six hundred miles per hour, but it was never a bee line; they skidded.
“Look out,” I yelled once, but I’d forgotten to cut into the interphone.
Somebody on our ship fired a gun, and Handown shouted into my earphones, “It was a Spit.”
“Spit, my ass,” Farr said. “The God-damn bastard!”
A smell of the Fourth of July drifted forward into the cockpit and eventually came in through my mask, and I saw a dark beach, and dimly my father bending over with a glowing piece of punk in his hand, and then Father running, and the basic whoomp, and a flat crack overhead, and the mops of blue and green light up above, and finally the drifting smell of burnt powder, and my laughing delight—not so much, I think, at the noise and colored sparks among the stars as at the sight of Father running as if all his sternness toward me had suddenly turned on him and was chasing him as fast as he could go in the heavy footing of the sand.
“Oh, holy Christ, there goes Old Crow!” Prien screamed in the phones.
“Any chutes?” Handown asked.
Sailen spoke in a quavering voice. “If this God-damn turret sticks, will you come and get me out, Neg?”
“Relax, Junior.”
Now I see that, wet behind the ears though Marrow may have been, his mind was fully alert to the one thing that mattered to him: the attack, the huntsman’s kill. Buzz prepared everything, including us in the crew, well in advance. “We’ve come a long way,” he said several minutes before the initial point, “so let’s not waste it. You all through arming, Max?”
“S—, yes,” Brindt said.
When he toggled the bombs, Brindt gave out a yelp: “Banzai!” After the mission Haverstraw told me that as Brindt saw his bombs dropping down he couldn’t contain himself and jumped up and down on his seat like a baby celebrating the flinging of a stool into world—Brindt who was so bland and taciturn on the ground.
Our losses were frightful—though you couldn’t have proved it by me—on our return flight, when the edge was off our keenness, and, in the middle of the worst of it, Marrow reached for his chart-board and held it up for me to see. Behind his goggles his eyes were like Eddie Cantor’s. Clipped to the board was a Varga nude. All I could think was that it was thirty-four below zero in the cockpit, but Marrow pawed the picture with a hand in a flying mitt.
As soon as our escort picked us up and the enemy fighters left us, we had a lot of elated chatter on our interphones. I was supposed to keep phone discipline, but Marrow himself was in on the racket; what could I do?
“Their flak is lousy,” Marrow shouted.
“Don’t say that,” Handown cut in, with mock alarm. “If you got to say something you can say, ‘I jus’ hope their flak ain’t any better next time.’ Man, you got to be more careful.”
“Their flak is lousy,” Marrow shouted again.
At the interrogation after the mission, Marrow had his chart-board under his arm. We caught Steve Murika for our questioning, and I sensed that Marrow was talking a bit too big. But Murika was dead level with Buzz, till, on being questioned about types of enemy aircraft, Buzz held up the clipboard and said, “Look, I even took my recognition chart along.”
Murika didn’t seem to think that that was According to the Rules of the Game, and he stiffened.
Marrow saw this, and he said, “No, listen! I search and I fly, too. No one searches better than me. I surprise myself. That’s why I get tired, see, I got to rest my eyes once in a while”—and he held up the picture and made his eyes look as if they were resting comfortably.
24/
On the way out from the interrogation hut Marrow asked me if I planned to go to the officers’ dance that night. I said I was pretty tuckered, I didn’t know. What really was on my mind—a reflection that would have been the last to enter Marrow’s—was that I was a new hand, with only two missions to my credit, and I guess I figured it would be somehow inappropriate for me to mix it up with the experts.
To my surprise, however, I found myself taking the day’s second shave and a hot shower back at our hutment, and I got into my good uniform, and I ate a big supper, for me, and around nine thirty, when a fleet of R.A.F. buses and vans, bringing girls from Motford Sage and Cambridge and Ely, began to pull in at the turning circle in front of the Number One Mess, I was already established inside, at a table back against a wall not far from the bar they’d set up, with Marrow and Maltitz and a jerk named Benni
ng whom nobody liked.
There was some thrashing around—I saw legs in skirts, and I tried to work up a little ache in my chest in honor of Janet, my so-called fiancée, back in Donkentown, but nothing happened—and everybody but us went by and shook hands with two old curtain rods who were the official chaperones, and then the station orchestra, with The Pike Rilling Jive Bombers printed on the big drum, began to let go from a wooden platform with a banner over it proclaiming the Group motto: Our Foot on the Hun’s Chest. That was the Englishy influence of the first Group C.O., Walkerson, whom the higher-ups had practically certified out on a Section Eight, as a madman. I couldn’t take my eyes off the face of the alto-sax player, who inserted the reed of his instrument in one corner of his mouth and looked lopsided and grotesquely earnest.
There seemed to be a great deal of confusion, and friend Benning, who wouldn’t have known the difference between a wedding and a wake, finally figured out what the trouble was. There were a lot of extra girls. Among those who had come to the dance were a scattered few in uniforms of WAAFs, WRENs, ATs, and FANNYs, but most were starchy young hopefuls from the homes of merchants and farmers and professional men in the nearby countryside. Decent girls with potato-and-brussels-sprout complexions. The extras stood around in awkward clumps awhile, then began to sit together at tables. Benning said they were dead men’s drags. The Wing had lost a hundred and sixty men—sixty-four officers—that afternoon, and a good number of the officers who were missing from our Group must have had dates for the dance, and their girls had arrived all keyed up for a flurry with the Yanks, only to learn that their escorts had not come home from Bremen.
One hundred and sixty! It was beyond my comprehension. I had been worse shaken by the image of one ship’s having gone down the day before, Woodman’s.
“Gret naht fuh scavengers,” Maltitz said.
