The War Lover

by John Hersey

  So far as I could see, The Body had not been touched. I remembered the sight of the plane at the hangars, after the Kiel raid when we’d run into trouble with our own incendiaries, with an engine pulled out and hanging by chains from a derrick; she had looked so mutilated on the one side, like a turkey half carved. And I remembered how wild Marrow had been—because the idea that his ship was untouchable had been taken away from him. As I went forward to my seat I thought how much I would have liked to believe in that old Marrow magic again.

  When I got myself established I took the controls, but I soon found that it was a mistake, because at that point idleness was poison for Marrow.

  Max, who was going to be the lead bombardier for the whole task force, began to try to get all his ducks in a row, so he would not be the cause again, as he had at Hamburg that time, for a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn. He wanted to check some of his data a good long stretch ahead—dropping angle, disk speed, drift—with Holdreth’s bombardier, Colfang, who was supposed to be deputy lead bomber for the task force and for the Group, and should have been in Max’s shoes.

  Max knew that I had the controls, and that Marrow was just sitting there, but he now called Lamb, not Marrow, on interphone and asked whether the command set was tuned in so he could talk with Holdreth’s toggleer.

  “I’ll do that talking,” Marrow said.

  “I want to talk straight with Colfang,” Max firmly said.

  Marrow yielded; or rather, he said nothing. This was certainly not like him.

  I was flying along through the windowpane sky. Instead of holding position in a formation, it was now my job, as lead pilot, to clamp onto our course as if on steel rails, and to make quite sure that our indicated air speed did not vary. I had never had the sensation before of stepping out ahead of a whole procession of Forts. I was too tired to feel good about it, but I didn’t feel bad, either. Of course, having the pressure of the fighters off us was a big help.

  Brindt and Colfang were calling back and forth. Max was the best I’d ever heard him in a squeeze: steady, orderly, calm. But Marrow kept butting in, harassing Max in the monotonous, nasal, nagging tone we’d heard him use all morning.

  I thought about reminding Brindt to fuse his bombs after he got all his information checked, but then I remembered my determination not to take any part in the killing process, and then I thought of my compromise on all that, and that made me think for a moment of what had led to the compromise—to begin with, the mix-up with Daphne over our meeting in London; or had it been a mix-up?…

  I couldn’t let myself think about any of that, because it only led to my thinking about Daph and Marrow, and about what she had told me about him.

  I looked at Buzz. He was sitting tensely straight, with his right hand on the wheel and his thumb on the call button. I was worried about him; I had to help him last through to the target, because I wanted him to be in charge of the bombing. The least I could do was to keep to the terms of a poor compromise with myself.

  “Target surface pressure?” Max asked on the radio.

  “Two nine point five two inches,” Colfang said. He was coming in as clear as B.B.C. in the officers’ club.

  Marrow broke in. “Come on, Max. Get cracking. Don’t forget you got to arm your bombs.”

  “Get off here and let me get finished,” Max said. We weren’t used to having people talk that way to Marrow on our crew. Not without a word of answer.

  But there was no answer. I saw Marrow still sitting up as straight as if he had a poker in his vitals; very tense, but silent.

  I figured he was better off flying than sitting there like that, and I said, “How about taking it back, Buzz? We’re almost at the i.p.”

  It was two minutes after three, and we were due at the initial point at eight past.

  Marrow took the controls without a word.

  Max had finished his verifying, and he called me and asked me to arm the bombs for him. Of course I’d been checked out on how to do that; we all had to be able to fill in for each other, because, as Marrow said, this was a man’s racket, people got bumped off.

  I said, “O.K.,” before I realized what I was agreeing to do—to fix our bombs so they could kill.

  I began unhooking myself again, and I was thinking: I could go back there, and fiddle around, and not set the fuses. Nobody would ever know.

  “What settings?” I asked Max.

  The five-hundred-pounders were to be one-tenth nose, one-fortieth tail.

  “Rajah,” I said, my tone broad and jaunty.

  I went back there and stood on the catwalk in the bays trying to decide what to do. I couldn’t take too much time. A lot was going through my head: duty; thou shalt not; Hitler; Daphne; months of training; my dream, with Max in it; the radio room of The House of Usher; the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air; what Marrow really loved; Daph’s father killed while trying to rescue the wounded; Nelson in wax; the burning chute…

  I saw a mouth. (My eyes were closed, and my forehead was leaning against the bulkhead at the forward end of the bomb bay, and the vibration of the ship was getting into me.) It was Daphne’s, and it was shaping words, and it came to the part about what the rest of us have to do….

  I found myself arming the bombs. I worked fast. There were ten bombs to fuse.

  I went back to my seat, and I had been re-connected only a few seconds when Clint Haverstraw announced we were at the i.p.

  At that Neg Handown produced, with a zany cheerfulness not the least forced, a falsetto anouncement: “This is your stewardess, Miss Candycrack. We are approaching Newark. Please fasten your safety belts and observe the no-smoking signs. Thank yoohoo.”

  Then another voice—was it Farr’s? “Ram it, Negrocus.”

  Marrow came out of his lassitude with a sudden fury at this, demanding, in a shrill, snapping voice, that we keep interphone discipline.

  We did in fact fasten our safety belts here at the beginning of the approach to the target, because of the possibility of the plane’s being thrown about by near misses of flak.

  At the initial point the great combat boxes broke up into their component groups, three to a box, so the groups, after following each its own briefed zigzag course to the target, could cross the target on different courses and bomb independently, one by one. The planes of each group would toggle their bombs on signal from its lead bombardier—at the moment when the other toggleers saw the first bomb fall out of the lead plane. Max, in other words, was to be responsible for the bombing pattern of our whole Group. After the target the groups, again following briefed routes, would rejoin each other in the vee formations of combat boxes at the rally point.

  Brindt was silent as he worked, and I assumed that this meant he was calm and doing the best he could, but Marrow began to prod him, with a running fire of heckling questions.

  We had gone onto Automatic Flight Control Equipment at the initial point, which meant that Max was flying the plane through the bombsight, and this left Marrow idle and impotent, and he gradually worked himself into a rage.

  It was to take us eight minutes from the initial point to the bomb line, and we were following the prescribed zigzag, for both timing and flak evasion—straight on for thirty seconds, a fifteen-degree turn to the left for thirty seconds, a thirty-five-degree turn right for forty seconds, and so on, back and forth, until we would hit the actual bombing run seventy seconds ahead of the bomb line. I saw that we were not getting any fighters, but the flak looked pretty bad. During all this Max was flying us through the AFCE, and Marrow was getting louder and louder.

  When we were about three minutes out Max finally blew up and said, in a grim, level voice, “Listen, Buzz, shut your big God-damn mouth. I’m doing O.K. We’re going to bomb good—if you’ll stop bothering me.”

  Thinking back I realized then the significance of a whole series of challenges to Mar
row on this day—my own during the preflight, Lamb’s about the tuning crank, Junior Sailen’s startling one when he had called Handown, and now, for the second time in a row, Max’s.

  This time Marrow did not fall silent but began a torrential monotonous spewing of filth and abuse. He was so mad he couldn’t see—not at Max any more, but at the whole situation—and his babbling was, I think, even more disturbing than had been his triumphant shriek at the first closure with enemy fighters.

  Marrow was quieted at last by the queer shuddering of the ship as she let go her cargo, and by two words from Brindt, spoken not with Max’s old aggressive exultation but in simple relief: “They’re away.”

  Marrow took back the controls and stopped shouting.

  2/

  All in all, Max had done a beautiful job, everything considered. Pictures taken on the raid showed that eleven of our Group’s bombs fell within a thousand feet of the aiming point, and twenty-three within two thousand feet. This compared well with the —st Group, with a one and five record, and the —th Group, with zero and three. Two or three groups did better than we. As to the actual results in damage, our public-relations people put out a brave story that night about the raid’s having given the German ball-bearing industry a nasty knock: “…severe damage…gutted…destroyed…” But a cooler appraisal, sent on by the British Ministry of Home Security the following week, after extensive reconnaissance, told a depressing story of futility and waste of men and machines, for we lost that day thirty-six bombers. In fact, the attacks on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt caused relatively light damage. Two of the three main plants that produced bearings, Verenigte Kugellager Fabrik Werk II and Kugelfischer, were hit; the engineering firm of Fichtel and Sachs was slightly hurt; V.K.F. Werk I lost only an office building; and Deutsche Star Kugelhalter was untouched. The damage at V.K.F. and Kugelfischer was estimated to result in between one and four weeks’ loss of output, which might amount to a loss of only about one week’s supply of anti-friction bearings available in all of Germany. The sad fact was that the ball-bearing plants were ready for re-attack immediately after our raid, because the reduction in the rate of output was so very small.

  Of course I learned all this much later, but when I did learn it, it seemed to put that whole day into a new, a much sadder perspective. We might better have stayed at home.

  3/

  Marrow was flying again, and I had one hand lightly on the wheel in order to be able to press the talk button in case I needed to say something, and right over the target, not far beyond the bombing line and just after we had taken the sharp left turn that would carry us almost due north to the rally point, at 50°37′N–10°34′E, nine minutes away, I suddenly felt as if I were getting an electrical charge through the wheel. I looked across and saw that Marrow had both hands off the wheel, above it, and his hands were open, so he, too, must have experienced the same shock. He was already looking at me, and I heard him say, “Jesus, the wiring’s shorted somewheres.” That was what I thought, too. “Neg,” Marrow began, “the wiring…”

  Gingerly I approached my hand to my wheel and touched it. It was dead; it was all right. I nodded to Marrow, and he took hold again.

  I said, “We must have been hit.” The shock must have been a factor of the blast on the elevators, reaching our hands through all the gears and ratios of the cable system.

  I hardly had the sentence out when Junior Sailen called and in a tight, small voice said, “Number three’s smoking.”

  One familiar word, “Braddock,” flashed through my mind; then something possessed me to answer as if I had been in command. “O.K., watch it closely,” I said. “You watch it, Junior.”

  Maybe I took that liberty because the number-three engine was on my side, or maybe I did it because of something about the way Marrow was behaving. I don’t know; I had acted on an impulse.

  We reached the rally point at twenty-five past three, and Marrow buckled us around on a tight turn of less than ninety degrees, and our high and low groups, having cut away from the target on intercepting courses, hitched on to form our combat box. The second box joined up and came in trail with us.

  “Still smoking,” Junior said.

  I was watching the manifold pressure on the number three, and I saw it begin to drop, and then it began really to skid, and I was aware that the prop might run away any minute, and, cool now perhaps because of that day of rehearsal on putting out fires that Marrow had given us, I proceeded, without checking with him, to move the mixture control of number three to the off position, and I cut the booster and pressed the feathering button for that engine and closed its cowl flaps. The propeller wouldn’t feather for the longest time but staggered along and wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t quite feather, and again I was afraid that the r.p.m. might wind up tight like a windmill. But finally the blades feathered all the way, so they were slicing the wind, and with two or three twitching jumps the propeller stopped.

  Marrow, far from complaining about my having stopped the engine without asking his permission, merely said, “Give me some coal. I got to get this speed up.” We were supposed to cruise at one hundred fifty-five after the target, and we were running slow on account of the dead engine.

  I jacked up the r.p.m.’s in the other three engines.

  Then I said, “Kill the fuel to number three.” I hadn’t meant to put it that way, but it had come out as an order.

  Marrow did what I had asked him to do. Didn’t say, “Yes, sir,” but obeyed.

  I asked Junior how that engine looked, and he said he couldn’t see any more smoke.

  Prien came in on interphone from the tail, saying, “I’m sick. I feel as if I’m going to be sick. I didn’t ever puke before on a raid. Oh. Don’t let me pass out. I feel sick.”

  Of course it was Handown who said, “Take your mask off or you’ll drown yourself. Use a helmet shell if you got one. Then get back in that mask in a hurry. Don’t worry, Prien, we’ll put in for a Purple Heart for you, boy.”

  Now Marrow, suddenly the old Marrow from nowhere, said to Prien in his familiar, self-assured voice, not angry but hard, “Listen, son, you’re a God-damn yellow-belly. You pull yourself together.”

  This momentary restoration of the old rough Marrow worked magic for Prien. He must have gotten his mask off all right, but he didn’t unplug his throat mike, and we could hear him gag. A few seconds later I asked, “You O.K., Prien?”

  He answered that he was, and he ran an oxygen check.

  Handown said, “Lieutenant Boman, you suppose we ought to shift the gas around in the tanks, empty that number three?”

  Handown had by-passed Marrow and put that question straight to me.

  I said, “I guess we better had.”

  4/

  Once Neg and I got started shifting gas, we really went to town. We saw some of the holes the flak had driven through the right wing—Neg said from the upper turret that he could see the ground through one of them—and we were worried about losing gas, because we couldn’t afford to lose a cigarette-lighter full of fuel riding on three engines that far from home. So, with Handown on the valves in the bomb bay and me on the gauges up forward, we started transferring fuel back and forth, trying to outguess the holes, and what with half a dozen tanks to deal with, we worked that way for the better part of half an hour, and we were just about satisfied, when Max, from the nose, called in a flight of twin-engined fighters coming up from two o’clock, very low.

  Handown scrambled back up into his turret, and I said, “All right, everybody, sharp eyes.”

  We had scarcely noticed the respite we had had from fighters for the past hour and ten minutes, so much had been happening. This was a deeper penetration than we’d ever made, and the Germans presumably hadn’t been set up to cope with us so far inland.

  We were near Hackenburg, about twenty miles southeast of the Ruhr. It was seven minutes past four.


  There seemed to be about twenty-five fighters in the attack that was coming up. Their first passes were at the combat box in back of us, but soon they began mixing it up with us, too. Our experience up to that time had been that the pilots of German twin-engined fighters had been relatively inexperienced and cautious, and that they had often used to lob rockets or time-fused twenty-millimeter shells at us from outside the range of our fifties. But this bunch apparently hadn’t heard about the timidity of the twin-engine boys, for they came in with a determination, persistence, and savagery such as we had seldom seen.

  Not long after the attacks began, Clint Haverstraw called up and said, “Would you come down here a minute, Bo?”

  I said, “What’s the problem?”

  “This next course change,” Clint said. “Help me check it.”

  That was a peculiar request, coming from Haverstraw, because on all the missions we had flown he had never asked for help. Max had, more than once, but never Clint. I tapped Buzz on the shoulder and pointed below, and he nodded. I undid everything and crawled down into the nose and found Clint sitting at his desk, shaking like a man with d.t.’s. I plugged into the oxygen line on the left side of the compartment and bent over the desk, and Clint shoved some figures at me, and while I was trying to make them out, I saw him check his oxygen gauge on the right side, and it was low, and he pulled his plug out of the permanent system and put it in a walk-around bottle, and I said, “That’s no good, you use my system over here, I’m going back to fly in a minute.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m O.K. for a while.”