The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “All right, Prien,” I said, “give somebody else a chance.”

  Thus I kept so-called interphone discipline. I wished, for all our sakes, that I had cut him off sooner—not that the new weapon he described frightened me, or would frighten my crewmates, in itself. No, it was the newness that was upsetting, the fact that there was some new, unknown weapon at large in the sky, not fearful because it made bright flashes larger than the airplanes that carried them, and bursts as black and twice as large as flak, but fearful simply because it was new. The Germans were constantly throwing new things at us: timed bombs dropped from above us on little parachutes, rockets, air-to-air dive bombing, flak bursting in different colors. And always it was the novelty that frightened us more than the device itself. What was it that frightened us so about the newness of new weapons? Was it some prescience in us—the fateful fear of true prophets? Yes, I think we were afraid, even so long ago as that, that the enemy might suddenly produce a newness that would be final. End us, the war, the world, all at once.

  We were over Eupen. I had made it.

  “All right, let’s have some chatter, here,” I said. “Call in your sightings.”

  “Ten o’clock, high,” Handown said, and stopped.

  “Give,” I said.

  “Friendly fighters,” Handown said, masking in formality the depth of his feelings, “returning to base.”

  ‘The sons of bitches,” Farr said, as if the Thunderbolts had no limit to their range and were simply betraying us.

  4/

  My next compartment of time, until we should reach our next goal, a course change at 49°45’N–08°20’E, roughly between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, was to be twenty-nine minutes, and I can only say that in those minutes we were under the most vicious and prolonged attack we had ever seen, and in that time there began, subtly but unmistakably, the transformation in Marrow that I had expected, hoped for in shame, and feared.

  Within seven minutes of the departure of our escort three new German attacks came up to us. The first two were still with us. Some seventy fighters were honoring us with their attention.

  “Coach” was still out there, an ME-109 jogging along, out of range, telling his colleagues what to do.

  Just beyond Eupen he began engineering a series of frightful pack attacks, supported by smaller waves. First we would get as many as twelve FW-190s or ME-109s, flying abreast, attacking on nose or tail, from level or slightly above or below, and this pack would spray us with twenty-millimeter tracers and other calibers, firing continuously on approach, passing through the formation, and, if from the rear, flying straight on to hit the forward task force. This sort of attack had an effect as of a concentrated barrage, and it was supported by free-lance assaults by flights of two to five fighters, which came in from three, nine, and eleven o’clock, level and below. Individual planes attacked, meanwhile, from wide angles at the nose and tail, high, level, and low, and from directly above. The packs abreast alternated with charges made by entire squadrons of fighters in line astern, and there were nose attacks by from seven to fifteen aircraft in javelin-up formation—coming in, that is, in succession in a line staggered upwards in altitude, each following plane higher than the one before it. While the pack attacks were being made, the solo attacks, often by cannon-firing or rocket-firing planes, swerved away just within the range of our fifty-caliber guns, so it was hard to get a crack at them.

  By this time the cirrus had thickened, and at the end of a pass the fighters would pull up sharply and disappear in the cloud cover, and I guess they’d re-form above it, because in a few seconds they’d come screaming down through it, all set for a new swipe at us.

  I have told all this as if I had clearly seen and understood the intricate teamwork at the time. No, at the time it was only a series of glimpses, vibrations, whiffs of powder in our plane, shouts about the great sky-clock, curses, and exchanges about roller coasters, swoopers, triple threats, split asses, and, alas, falling Forts.

  “Oh, Jesus”—Junior Sailen, who, being underneath, saw so many go down—“there goes Rats Wouldn’t Stay.” Chong. Benny Chong. The Minnesota menace. A great kidder; eyes as still and remote as the lakes in the forests of his own north country. Benny, gone down. So many jokes in the hutment with Benny Chong.

  A long silence before the next word was called in.

  Then Handown. “O.K., watch it…. Three o’clock high. You take it, Bragnani. I got one up here.”

  5/

  I saw a plane with a yellow nose and a bright red spinner. At a distance the fighters were skidding shapes—profiles from the recognition cards; the FW-190s, ME-109s, ME-110s, and JU-88s were easy, while the less familiar ME-210s, DO-217Es, and HE-113s were harder to spot, but they were all there, all of them, the entire battery. A Focke-Wulf with one wing black and one wing white. Mostly the fuselages were blue, gray, and green. Orange nose, and spinner, too. They whisked by, and I understood them to be menacing, yet still they were somehow unreal. Red and yellow noses. I was used to the skidding, now. I took the skidding as a matter of course, but the concept of purposeful, murderous enmity was still, after twenty-three missions and part of a twenty-fourth, hard for me to grasp. One plane was checker-boarded all over. The ME-210s were painted silver, and the JU-88s were gray, black, and silver. After our fighters left I saw an FW-190 painted like a Thunderbolt and an ME-109 with R.A.F. markings. A flight, abreast, of ships with wings striped black and yellow, like the bodies of bumblebees.

  These exotic markings were disquieting, because they spoke of individuality, differentiation, and not of machines but of men within. I thought for a second of the dead German boy in the crater that day of the field games at Pike Rilling.

  Did the Germans see, as they flicked by, the sultry nude with her legs bent and spread on The Body? Did they have a disturbing sense, seeing her, of the man Marrow in our ship?

  6/

  He was pestering the gunners.

  Six minutes after Eupen the first two groups of German fighters broke off. I could see the ships peel out, wherever they were, and dive down.

  But the minute they were out a fresh batch pounced on us—and that was the way it was going. As we flew we could see the fighters coming up from fields miles ahead of us, and when any had to fall out and land for gas there was always a new flock coming along to take their places.

  Prien started an oxygen check.

  “Hurry it up,” Marrow said. “Snap out of it, boy.”

  That was the fastest check we ever had. All ten men responded.

  Everywhere I turned my eyes something was happening. I chanced to look out my right window, down to our low group off to the right, and just then I saw a Fort, afire all along its fuselage, flip up and over like a griddlecake and go out of the formation; fire seemed to be pouring out of both inboard engines, or maybe gas tanks.

  “Who was that?” I sharply said.

  Prien, knowing what I’d meant by the question, said in his flat, cold voice, “Leader of the high squadron of the low group.”

  Curly Jonas. We all knew that was Curly Jonas, our Air Ops, in Baggy Maggie, Buzz’s partner in the intrigues of the Group, Buzz’s special friend, next to me. I waited for Marrow’s reaction, for I expected him to lash out at the mother f—ers in Wing who were trying to kill us all all all.

  But Marrow seemed not even to have registered that last exchange.

  “Farr,” he said, “get on the ball. Get that gun going.”

  Farr was truculent. “What the f— you think I’m doing—playing checkers with Bragnani?”

  “All right, all right,” Marrow said. “On the ball.”

  He was bothering the boys. It was not like him.

  The sergeant gunners were maintaining continuous watch on their assigned sectors and firing when needed, and they were talking back and forth with the best discipline we had had, I’d say, since the Bremen raid on June thi
rteenth, when we’d felt that everything had clicked for us. Far more was happening now than on that day, yet the interphone didn’t rasp with overlapping shouts. The gunners in whose zones of search the planes were sighted called out what they saw and notified the positions that were most apt to get a shot at the passing fighters. We even heard from Lamb once in a while. Handown was alert and cool. Prien talked in his flat voice like a man watching and describing flights of birds or the descent of leaves in the autumn. Farr was surly, and Bragnani, like a dumb wall, echoed him. Sailen was quiet, soft, small, but he was very much there. And up forward Brindt and Haverstraw, on the nose guns, talked on interphone with the assurance of the officer class. Only one thing was uncommon. Marrow was ragging us all—not with the zestful abuse he had so often dealt us, of a powerful man bursting with his aggressive vitality, but in a monotonous, hounding, thoughtless, steady drumming of naked impatience.

  I became very worried, for I felt as if responsibility were coming at me like a flight of planes abreast in the sky. I dreaded it because the kind of responsibility I saw coming was in direct conflict with the vow I had taken to myself, about combat, about war, some three weeks earlier.

  “Come on, Handown. Come on, come on.”

  7/

  The dangerous quality of caution I thought I had noticed in Marrow in the earlier phases of the mission, an over-carefulness which then had had to do with the workings of our ship, now appeared to be spreading in him, and had begun to be evident in his handling of The Body’s defensive tactics.

  One aspect of Marrow’s genius as a combat aviator had showed up, especially in the middle missions of our tour, in the subtle, intuitive, rippling movements with which he endowed The Body in order to make her contribution to the defensive fire system of the formation as great as possible. If he was flying wingman, for instance, stacked lower than the leader of the element, and to the leader’s right, and an enemy plane dived down from above and to the left, Marrow would almost imperceptibly slide out from under the leader and hike up alongside him in order to uncover as many of our guns as possible to fire at the plunging enemy. Or if he was leading the low squadron, and it began to receive level head-on attacks, Marrow would ease and ease and ease all six of his ships upward and across until they were more in trail with the lead squadron, so that the butting Germans would be forced to pass closer to the other formation’s guns.

  Now, however, as we flew down the green corridor south of the Ruhr and north of Luxembourg and the Saar, under attacks which seemed to have an ever-increasing complexity, and which were still aided by the now thinner plate of cirrus overhead, it seemed that Marrow was piloting us not so as to make a flexible and honorable phalanx with Bins’ element but only so as to keep us—himself—alive. The fact was that he was using Angel Tread, Erector Set, and Gruesome Twosome as a triple shield. Rather than opening out to uncover our guns he seemed to want to huddle us under the mothering wings of the first element.

  A ship had been called in at ten o’clock high. Handown had claimed it. “I can’t get at it, Major. Give me some air.”

  This happened more than once—crewmen asking Marrow, as they had seldom needed to do, for room to fire without hitting friends.

  Marrow did not answer these calls but instead discovered the means of finding fault with other crewmen, as if he were changing the subject in an argument that was going against him.

  Our men saw that two planes had fallen back out of the high squadron, after those first terrible passes, and from the positions of the gaps, before the formations filled in, they figured out that the cripples were Big Bum Bird and Miss Take, Perl and Stedman. They were as good as gone. Perl, the thinker. Dopey Stedman, always saying, “Hunh?” As good as lost. What the Germans wanted, above all, was to knock us singly out of the formation, for stragglers, wanting the mutual support of the group’s many guns, were easy prey. Prien saw one of the straggling Forts turn away and dive down, evidently in the hope of hedge-hopping back to our base, or at least into France, where, if the men bailed out, civilians might be helpful.

  And so the roll call of casualties was growing. Rats Wouldn’t Stay, Baggy Maggie, Big Bum Bird, Miss Take. Chong, Jonas, Perl, Stedman. And thirty-six other men. And we were only about two thirds of the way to the target. No planes had yet been knocked out of our own squadron.

  8/

  Prien ran an oxygen check. Lamb didn’t answer.

  Ordinarily Marrow would simply have tapped my shoulder and given me the thumb, pointing backwards to indicate that I should get back there and see what the matter was. But this time Buzz called out on interphone, “Lamb! Lamb! Come on, boy, speak up.”

  There was a note of incredulity and appeal in Marrow’s voice, and for a second I thought how different this was from Marrow’s voice the night he had hazed Butcher Lamb, flakked him up—Butcher on his knees on the concrete floor of his Nissen hut, marrow standing over him with eyes bugged out, tearing up the snapshot of Lamb’s girl.

  I arose from my seat without being told and hurried back to look into Lamb’s silence. To be truthful, I was glad to get to the curving, shut-in parts of the plane, where I could not see the sky. I paused in the dark, cramped space on the catwalk of the bomb bay, but then thinking what might happen if there were a direct hit on a bomb, I scurried, rodent-like, aft to the radio room.

  I found Lamb at his radio desk, with one gloved mitt holding his log book, closed, and the other pressing a novel open on the table. I saw that his headphone was not plugged into his jack. He was bending over the book, squinting at it through his flying goggles; his oxygen bladder expanded and contracted like a bullfrog’s. As a reader he looked very far out of his element—a man from Mars, or a deep-sea diver, trying to peer through some viscous, unfamiliar element to see if he could discern the meaning of life on a printed page.

  Lamb did not stir as I entered through his bulkhead door, and I moved close behind him, and holding my walk-around oxygen bottle high I leaned over his shoulder and read:

  “…We have too much on our hands and Black Carlos, though his radius is small, is king of this particular quarter. Apparently he is using his position to pay off an old score….”

  Poor Lamb! Poor Lamb!

  He had come down from his gun, I could see, probably to check his circuits and make an entry in his log, and he had become engrossed in an open book on his table—Hell Let Loose, it was called—and here he was, a million miles from war, on a roan horse moving on a sun-drenched landscape as the tallies of frontier hatred, revenge, lust, and justice were crudely, simply paid. It was better, I guess, than being on the way to Schweinfurt, Germany, and I had to press myself rather hard to tap him on the shoulder.

  He came back to the war with a pronounced jump. He looked up at me and as if by reflex held up the log for me to see. He wasn’t goofing off, he was making an entry, see? Indeed, he whipped off his right mitten, dexterously split the book at the right page, grabbed a pencil, and wrote:

  “1430. Time check.”

  So he had been there since before two thirty. It was now two thirty-four.

  I returned to the cockpit, plugged in my oxygen, my suit heater, and my headset, and I told Marrow that Lamb was O.K., had just left his gun to make an entry in his log and had been disconnected.

  9/

  During the time I had been in the radio room, the sun had come out. We had flown beyond the enormous flat cloud that had caused us so much grief, and we had broken now into the uncovered day. Now there was nothing above us but pure, dry sky—and the wonderful sun that splashed its light so fiercely on our silvery ship. I looked out on the wing and saw a dizzying pool of glare between the engine nacelles. The sun was somewhat behind us, but its being out made me feel warmer and more relaxed in my seat.

  Blessed sun! This zone above all clouds, where the sky gave hints of its interstellar blackness, had always been for me even more beautiful than the myriad forests and cav
erns of weather that one traversed nearer the earth. This high, clear area had seemed to me, since my first tropospheric training flights, the place where twentiety-century man was destined to explore—as near to freedom and the life-giving sun as he could so far get. For emotion: Up, up, up! The thrust of Chartres, the steel-boned towers on the rock of New York, Sequoia sempervirens—these things, the sight of which in photographs had moved me deeply as a young boy, were upward reaching, and the uppermost place of all, during the years in which I flew, was this clear cup of crystal in the teen and twenty thousands of altitude. Yet that afternoon, for the first time, I inwardly shuddered at these thoughts which I had nurtured so long. With Daphne I had for the first time come face to face with life on the earth; in my terrible, wrenching interview with her the day before about Marrow, and about ourselves, I had, for the first time in my very young years, been forced to look life right in the eye, and I had seen the possibility of doing something more than pretending to be alive, with or without her. The illusion of being alive that she had so intensely given me all along, even before this shattering talk, when I believe I had had little more to give than pretense, made me realize that life on the earth contained possibilities of heights I’d never imagined, and that my thrill in climbing the sky had been flight, in the sense of escape, from the real life on the earth that I had not been ready to live. I had been free up high because I had not had the understanding or the generosity to be alive on the earth below. This was a spurious freedom, and in that first moment under the open sun, that afternoon, a desire for life, real life, a life in which I faced truths about myself and could therefore be able to give myself to others, began to seize me.