Rush to Glory

by Robert L Hecker

  Hal was amazed that his hammering heart had not burst, and it was minutes before he could release his fists from their death grip on a stanchion. He had cheated death, but the incident had made him realize the fragileness of an airplane. A B-17 looked monolithic, as strong and solid as a mountain. But the strength was an illusion. It could destruct in an instant, taking everyone on board with it.

  That same night the nightmare had started. Since then, fear had never been far away. Where had it come from? He had never been afraid of death. But the capacity for fear must have been hidden somewhere inside. Were there other horrors, unsuspected, waiting for the right moment to spring into existence? There was no way of knowing.

  One good thing. The fear always comes in moments of quietness like this one in his bed so that he was able to fight through it with his eyes open, staring. And he had always won, always been able to continue flying, because there was no other course; none except complete surrender.

  Today, high in the pale English skies, he would be called upon to conquer a different fear. This one also had a terrible familiarity; the fear of failure. He had lived with it as long as he could remember. Soon, men who had proven themselves in combat would be judging him, probing for flaws, evaluating his skill, and his courage. And once again, he would be forced to deal with a part of himself that in the sanctuary of home he had never encountered.

  But not yet. Thank God. Not yet. With a groan, Hal turned on his side and willed himself into the escape of sleep.

  He woke in the half-light of early morning to find Ken Cossel shaking his shoulder. “Time to get up,” Cossel said. The navigator’s skinny legs were sticking out below his trench coat, but except for wooden shower clacks, his feet were bare.

  “Okay.” Hal looked at his watch. 0600. Cossel reached over and shook O’Reilly. “Come on, airplane commander, sir. Rise and shine. Lead us into the glorious dawn.”

  O’Reilly’s voice came from beneath a twisted pile of bedding. “Screw off, you bastard.”

  “You’ll miss breakfast.”

  “Call me for lunch.”

  Cossel grinned and clattered the length of the barracks to let in a swirl of fog-laden air as he went out the front door. Hal eased out of his bunk to the icy concrete floor. He was grateful for the dying heat coming from the two pot-bellied stoves in the aisle. He shrugged on his trench coat, slipped on his G.I. shoes, picked up his shaving kit, and walked out into the morning.

  Dawn pearled a mist that clung to the earth. He wondered if the air of England always held the damp coldness that soaked into buildings and bones with a permanence that defied the application of heat. July was supposed to be summer, but he had never been warm since arriving in England.

  There was just enough morning light for him to see that at the rear of the wooden barracks, beyond a sagging barbed wire fence, was a rolling grassy English pasture that sloped toward a line of trees that seemed to be standing sentry in the field, the nearest attempting to protect the far end of the barracks, its gnarled branches struggling to hold on to an aging crop of leaves. Only the sky, pale blue through the mist and crisscrossed with the dissolving vapor-trails of the departed bombers and escort fighters, belonged to the twentieth century—one more war for the bloody lands of England to absorb.

  When he entered the nearby latrine building, he was greeted with odors of damp earth and steaming water and stale urine. Cossel was out of sight in the back, taking a shower. Hal hung his trench coat and shorts on a nail with his towel. He dug a bar of soap out of his kit and walked into the shower room where Cossel’s pale body was enveloped in steam. Despite the steam, he was cold, and he hastily turned on the hot water of the one remaining shower. Half the holes in the showerhead were plugged, and the others shot water at unpredictable angles, but Hal crouched gratefully under the largest concentration.

  Cossel said, “Don’t worry about the flight today.” He turned off his shower and began toweling himself vigorously. “It won’t be nearly as bad as some of the training missions in the States.”

  Hal doubted that. “This Captain Marshall? Is he tough?”

  “He’s okay. Just look at it as another check ride. That’s all.”

  There was an unfriendly flatness in the navigator’s tone that brought a flash of anger to Hal. Cossel was just like O’Reilly and Fox. They knew full well that the squadron commander was going to kick their regular bombardier off the crew to make room for his brother.

  Hal turned off his shower and reached for his towel. “Look . . .” he said suddenly, then paused, wondering why he had spoken. What could he possibly say that would cut through Cossel’s and the other crewmen’s disgust? He took a deep breath. “Just to set the record straight,” he said. “I don’t want to break up your crew. It wasn’t my idea.”

  Cossel rubbed his hair with his towel. “There’s no point in talking about it. As far as I can see, Schultz is out, and you’re in.”

  “I just want you to know. . . .”

  “That you’re a nice guy?” Cossel interrupted, his voice bitter. “You’ve been railroaded just like Schultz? Okay. So, who gives a damn? I get in the beast, and I show it where to go, and I come back. I do that thirty times, and they give me a D.F.C., and I go home. That’s all I care about. You and your brother can take your lousy politics and shove it!”

  Cossel whipped on his trench coat and stalked away. Watching him go, Hal wondered how much of the outburst had come from the heart and how much from nerves. Whichever it was, he knew that the others shared the navigator’s feelings.

  A short time later, when he walked into the mess hall, Captain Marshall, the group bombardier, was already there sitting with O’Reilly, Fox, and Cossel. With their leather B-3 jackets, O’Reilly, Fox, and Marshall wore scarves made from parachute silk. The white scarves gave them the dashing appearance that made so many men join the Army Air Corps. Hal noticed, however, that Cossel did not wear a scarf, and he wondered why.

  Marshall was a small, blank-faced 1st lieutenant who appeared to be about thirty, older than Hal had anticipated. When O’Reilly introduced them, Marshall shook Hal’s hand, and Hal was conscious that he was being carefully sized up. Hal thought he detected a trace of contempt in Marshall’s manner, and again he was flooded with quick anger. He wanted to shout in Marshall’s face that he didn’t give a damn about being on a lead crew! He didn’t want the VIP treatment. Like Cossel, he only wanted to fly his thirty missions and go home.

  But he ate his breakfast of oatmeal and watery powdered milk in silence, grateful that O’Reilly’s early morning grogginess also kept him silent. And Fox, the big, blonde co-pilot, looked as though he would be sleeping through most of the mission.

  They rode out to the personal equipment room in Marshall’s Jeep where Hal signed a Hand Receipt Issuing Form and was issued equipment for high altitude flight: an A-10 oxygen mask, an A-11 helmet, an F-3 electrically heated suit with cloth inner gloves and leather outer gloves, felt inserts for A-6A fleece-lined boots, a fleece-lined jacket, a throat mike, and a parachute harness with its Quick Attachable Chest-Pack parachute. He was also given an A-3 bag to store any individual items of equipment. No Mae West today since they would not be flying far out over water.

  “This place we’re going,” Captain Marshall explained as they struggled to pull their heated suits on over their regular O.D. wool clothes, “is a big rock in the water off the coast of Scotland. In the Irish Sea. If the weather’s clear, it’ll stick up like a sore thumb, so you won’t have any trouble spotting it. We’ll be dropping from twenty thousand feet. If you do okay on long runs, we’ll try a couple of short ones.”

  Hal nodded. He wasn’t particularly worried about the actual bomb drop. He had done well in training at Carlsbad Air Base in A-11s and in advanced and phase training at Ardmore in B-17s. He might even get a shack if he could see the target and had enough time on the bomb run.
/>   “What was your average C.E. in Phase?” Marshall asked.

  “About a hundred twenty feet.”

  Marshall grunted, “Not bad.” Neither spoke as they pulled on sheepskin-lined jackets over their electric suits and struggled into their parachute harnesses. Hal put on his helmet, leaving the oxygen mask and intercom plug dangling to one side, and picked up his briefcase and chest-pack parachute. Their heavy arctic boots made a soft thudding on the rough wood floor as they lumbered out the door and down the hall.

  At the field, Hal was surprised to see that the hardstands were unrevetted. Bombers Parked in a row would be sitting ducks for a strafing attack. Obviously, none was expected.

  When he saw O’Reilly’s ship, Hal shook his head with dismay. He had been expecting one of the sleek new silver jobs with lots of armor plating and bullet-proof windows. But Marshall led the way to an old, brown-painted B-17G that had been patched in so many places it looked as though it had a bad case of acne. More than fifty bomb symbols painted on the nose embellished the picture of a pretty girl sitting astride a smoking bomb. She was wearing an enchanting smile and little else. Under the picture were the words, “O’Reilly’s Dog House.” Some enterprising character had crossed out the “Dog” and had painted above it the word “Mongrel.”

  Near the crew chief’s ladder, used to climb into the ship through the forward hatch, Cossel introduced him to Staff Sgt. Tony Polazzo, the Flight Engineer and top turret gunner. Instead of using the ladder, Hal walked around to the aft door and climbed into the deserted waist section. He moved past the snubbed waist gun mounts and the empty ball turret, through the radio room and on into the bomb bay. Ten blue-painted 100-pound practice bombs were stacked snugly on the inboard racks, five on a side.

  Hal checked the Bomb Rack Selector Switches, then went forward, working his way through the cramped confines of the upper turret supports into the cockpit. O’Reilly was sitting in the left seat, Fox in the co-pilot’s seat completing their preflight check using a well-worn checklist. Polazzo was leaning between their chairs, peering at the instruments as the pilots ran through the checklist. Although every pilot had performed the routine innumerable times, they were required to use the checklist. The procedure was too lengthy and complicated to trust to memory when leaving out even one minor check could result in loss of the ship and its entire crew.

  “How many we got?” O’Reilly asked, looking back over his shoulder while he kept his spot on the checklist with his finger.

  “Ten,” Hal answered. “They’re okay.”

  “How’s the oxygen?”

  “I haven’t checked it yet.”

  “Well, get on the ball. We gotta breathe, even on these damn practice runs.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hal looked at the A-12 Demand-type Oxygen Regulators for the left and right main systems. 425 psi. Auto mix. “Both lines okay,” he said, but O’Reilly was concentrating on his checklist, and, if he heard, he didn’t bother to answer. Berating himself for forgetting, Hal worked his way through the bomb bay into the radio room. He wasn’t sure if they would be carrying a radio operator, but he checked the radio operator’s oxygen system and his regulators. They wouldn’t need gunners on the practice mission, so he did not have to check their systems. On the way back to the nose, he checked each of the ten A-4-type walkaround bottles and their regulators. All were fully charged to 400 psi, which, in an emergency, would last about nine minutes if a man didn’t hyperventilate.

  Back in the cockpit, Hal lowered himself into the well between the pilot’s seats and crawled past the closed nose hatch into the cluttered nose section. Cossel was asleep, leaning back in his navigator’s chair with his feet propped on the small desk beside the navigation Gee box. Marshall was sitting on the floor under the right cheek-gun, with his back against the bare stringers of the wall, his eyes shut.

  “How many we got?” he asked. “Ten?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hal said. “Ten.”

  “Okay.”

  Checking his oxygen supply, Hal noted that the crew chief had attached a portable recharge valve and regulator to the bombardier’s oxygen outlet so it could provide oxygen to two men simultaneously. He moved to the bombardier’s chair in the greenhouse and placed his briefcase and parachute on the floor near his right foot. Then he pulled the cover off the Norden Mark XV bombsight and began the familiar pre-flight check. This was something he always enjoyed.

  Unlike the pilots, the checkout procedure was not so complex that he had to refer to a checklist. He clicked the starting switches, heard the faint hum of the gyroscopes, and felt at ease for the first time since he had reached the base. He did not think of the bombsight as an instrument of destruction. To him, it was a marvelously intricate piece of machinery, designed and constructed with the precision of a Swiss watch.

  When he finished checking the bombsight and the Bombardier’s Instrumentation Panel and the bomb release switches and bomb bay door controls, he entered the ground temperature, barometric pressure, and the wind velocity and direction in his computation book then leaned back in satisfaction. He had made no mistakes. If Marshall had observed his checkout procedures, he gave no reaction.

  Outside, S/Sgt Klein, the B-17’s crew chief, took up a position in front of the port wing beside a wheeled fire extinguisher. He acknowledged O’Reilly’s call out the window of “Clear” with an answering “Clear.” After a moment, the crew chief raised his hand in acknowledgment of Fox’s hand signal that he is starting the number one engine. A whirring sound indicated that Fox had pressed the starter switch, and the starting flywheel was building up speed. When Fox pushed down the ‘Mesh’ switch, the clutch bit in. The propeller ground around, hesitated. Then the Wright Cyclone engine coughed smoke and flame, caught and roared into life, its 1200 horses spinning the three blades of the big prop into an invisible blur. One by one, the other three propellers ground around until their engines roared into life, filling the cabin with a synchronous roar.

  A few minutes later, after the two pilots completed another long checklist, O’Reilly motioned to the crew chief to pull the chocks from the wheels. When the crew chief signaled to O’Reilly that he had done so, O’Reilly revved up the number one engine, and the ship swung out from the hardstand and clumsily rolled off down the perimeter track. It was almost a half-mile to the end of the runway, and O’Reilly proceeded cautiously. With the tail wheel on the ground, he could not see over the high nose, and he maintained his position on the perimeter track by steering with the outboard engines while watching the edge of the concrete from his side window so that he would not run off into the soft grass and get stuck. Shortly before they reached the end of the runway, O’Reilly stopped and revved up each engine to clear soot from the spark plugs caused by the rich fuel mixture.

  When they turned onto the take-off position at the head of the runway, Hal got up and started to brush past Marshall on his way back to the waist.

  “Where you going?” Marshall said without opening his eyes.

  Hal stopped, stooping under the low ceiling. “Back to the waist. For the take-off.”

  “Oh,” Marshall said.

  When Hal saw that neither Marshall nor Cossel were making any move to go back to their regulation take-off positions, he hesitated, then settled into the bombardier’s chair and fastened his lap belt.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” Marshall drawled, though he still hadn’t opened his eyes. “You’ll get used to taking off up here. Besides, if you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it.”

  “Okay.” Marshall’s attitude did not make sense. There was such a thing as minimizing the chances of ‘getting it.’ Hal was aware, and he knew Marshall and Cossel were equally aware that the nose compartment was the most dangerous place to be during takeoffs and landings. A collapsed landing gear or a ground loop or almost any sort of accident could telescope the nose like an accordion. Riding in the
nose during takeoff was forbidden in the States, but apparently, combat crews had little regard for safety.

  But there were compensations. From the bombardier’s seat, he could look straight down the narrow ribbon of concrete. The runway looked woefully short, much shorter than the training fields in the States. Apparently, there was a shortage of real estate in England.

  As O’Reilly ran through his pre-take-off check, Hal felt his stomach muscles tense. The tone of the engines deepened as O’Reilly increased the pitch of the propellers. O’Reilly released the brakes and walked the throttle forward. The big bomber shuddered and began to roll. Hal anchored himself to the seat with both hands and listened to the four churning engines, straining to hear the first cough or sputter that might send them crashing nose-first into the surrounding low hills.

  But the engines continued to sing their deep song. As the speed increased, Hal felt the ship lighten, fighting the hold of the black-streaked concrete. But the plane appeared to be moving with maddening slowness even though the end of the runway rushed toward them with terrifying speed. Hal looked at his airspeed indicator, which was a duplicate of the pilot’s. 120 knots. With a minimum gas and bomb load, they should be in the air by now. What was wrong? Hal strained forward, trying with his body to give the ship momentum.

  “Take it easy.” Marshall’s lazy voice reached him above the roar of the engines.

  Hal looked over his shoulder, and Marshall grinned and continued, “O’Reilly likes to pretend this is a P-47.”

  Hal felt the big ship surge into the air as O’Reilly suddenly pulled back on the control yoke, and centrifugal force drove him against his seat as the big bomber whipped into a steeply banked climbing turn.