Rush to Glory

by Robert L Hecker

  “Where’s Cossel?” he whispered.

  “The lead navigators are still in their own briefing,” O’Reilly explained. “They hardly ever make the general briefing.”

  “There’s Schultz with Hollister,” Fox said as he looked back over the sea of faces filling the room. “How come he needed a bombardier?”

  “They lost theirs on that Coblenz mission. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Fell out, didn’t he?”

  “Fell out?” Hal said in surprise. “How could he do that?”

  “Friggin’ idiot,” Fox said. “A couple of his bombs hung up in the bomb bay. The release mechanisms froze, I guess. Anyway, he went back to kick ’em out. But he had to lean on the inboard bombs to reach the outboard. When he broke it loose, all of them went. The damn fool wasn’t hanging on.”

  “Didn’t he have his chute?”

  “Nope. You know how cramped it is in there.”

  “That must have been a hell of a ride,” O’Reilly said. “I wonder how long he stuck on the bomb before he fell off.”

  It was hot in the room. Many of the crewmen had already donned their heavy flight clothing, and they were beginning to sweat. And despite the rumor that this was to be a milk run, the flight crews were nervous. If the Luftwaffe chose to come up, a milk run could quickly turn into a massacre. Hal rubbed a film of sweat off his face.

  Suddenly the MP at the front of the room snapped to attention and shouted, “Tenhut!” Hal stood up with the others as Colonel Sutton and the briefing officers came in and took their places on the dais. There was dead silence while the MP marched briskly down the aisle to the doors at the rear of the room and closed them from the outside. Then Colonel Sutton said, “At ease,” and everyone sat down.

  Colonel Sutton took a long, thin pointer from a wall rack and tapped the oilcloth covering the map. “The target today,” he said, “is of prime importance.”

  He suddenly jerked a pendant at the bottom of the oilcloth, and it roll up like a window shade. Green yarn traced a route on the map from their base in England to the target area, which was marked with a large red arrow. When the crews saw it was an easy target, there was a quiet flutter of voices; someone laughed. Now they knew for sure it was a milk-run. It struck Hal as odd that when the lead crews had walked down the aisle past the lead-crew members, no one had tried to ask them what the target was. Maybe they didn’t want to know. If it was going to be bad, they were better off not knowing until the last minute. If it was good, they could wait.

  Colonel Sutton tapped the target area with the pointer. “Submarines are raising hell with our supply lines, and you know what that means. These submarine pens have got to be destroyed.”

  The colonel paused for effect, and Hal heard Fox mutter, “Cut the bull and let’s get going.”

  “It’s a relatively small target, so you’ve got to hold a good tight formation when you release your bombs,” the colonel said grimly. “Get in there and clobber them. Hit them so hard they’ll never come back!” He turned dramatically and handed the pointer to Major Deering. “Major.”

  Major Deering stood up slowly and took the pointer. “These are concrete reinforced submarine pens, so you’re carrying armor-piercing 500-pound bombs,” he said. “When you reach the I.P. here off the Frisians, you’ll split up and bomb by Squadrons. Each one of your leads has his target. You’ll salvo on him.”

  He went on to explain the flak corridors on the route in and out.

  After he sat down, one by one, the other officers stood up and gave their briefings, beginning with the weather officer and ending with the group leader whose last act was to give a time hack so that all the crews could synchronize their watches.

  At 0445, it was over. As the target was again hidden, someone said, “Tenhut,” and everyone snapped to attention while the colonel and the briefing officers filed out.

  The personal equipment room was not only too hot, but it was also a madhouse that reeked of gun oil, burning charcoal, and human sweat. The men all seemed to be talking at once as they lined up at the long counter to check out electric suits, helmets, oxygen masks, fleece-lined B-3 jacket and boots, Mae Wests, throat-mikes, parachutes, and other articles of flight equipment. When the supply sergeant handed Hal a heavy paper sack, he asked, “What’s this?”

  “Cookie bag.”

  “Cookie bag?”

  Cossel, standing beside him, chuckled. “They give us a sack of cookies and candy bars. After seven or eight hours, you tend to get hungry.”

  “Oh.” Hal hefted the sack. “I’ll get fat as a pig.”

  “They’re not all yours. Bombardier gets the officer’s sack. The enlisted men have their own.”

  Hal put the sack in his A-3 bag beside his chest pack parachute. One more thing to worry about.

  When they finished dressing, the crewmen waddled out of the room, carrying their equipment bags and briefcases, the dangling hoses of their oxygen masks swinging like elephant trunks.

  Hal found a place on a bench and slowly pulled on his electric suit over his pants and shirt. So, this was it—the major league. At last, he was going out to face the enemy. He had expected to feel exultation on this day of days, but it did not come. Maybe later. The expected thrill of battle would surely grip him when he was high over the target, pitting his life against that of the enemy. When the flak was thick, and the enemy fighters were boring in, that’s when the glory rush would come.

  After buckling on his parachute harness over his fleece-lined jacket and Mae West, Hal picked up his A-3 bag and briefcase and clumped out into the night.

  He was walking toward a waiting Jeep that would take him and other crewmen to their planes when Luke appeared beside him and pulled him aside. Luke was chewing at a cigar, and its acrid odor almost made Hal choke.

  “How about it, kid?” Luke said. “You ready for the big one?”

  Ready? To die? Now, yes. But later? . . . if the bony hand of death reached for him, would his carefully nurtured fatalism hold fast? He would not know until the long-anticipated moment arrived.

  What he had not anticipated was his total lack of fear. There was an unreality about the entire scenario. It felt as though he was standing outside himself, watching a movie. Hal Bailey, the future schoolteacher, leading a Squadron of B-17s on a bombing mission against the might of the Third Reich. It was unreal. So how could there be fear?

  He said, “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  “Damn right, you are. I figured we’re due for a milk run. Yesterday we hit Stuttgart. This’ll be a good one to get your feet wet.”

  “What if it isn’t a milk run?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Luke took the cigar from his mouth. “Marshall says you did a damn good job. And he should know. Just pretend it’s another practice mission.”

  Hal almost laughed. Salvoing five-hundred-pound bombs on the heads of people was not exactly like dropping practice bombs on a rock in the middle of a bay. “I’ll try to hold that thought.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Luke said. But there was more hope in his voice than confidence. “Do a good job, and I’ll see if I can get you guys a three-day pass.”

  “Don’t worry.” Hal started to move away, then turned back. “One thing I can’t figure out, Luke.”

  “Yeah. What’s that?”

  “If my being here puts you on the spot, why did you ask for me?”

  Luke stared at him; his mouth clamped around the dead cigar. “You think I’m that stupid? I didn’t have a damn thing to do with your gettin’ assigned to the four-oh-one. Some smartass in Division must have thought of it.”

  “Oh,” Hal said. “What about the squadron? You fixed that, didn’t you?”

  “I had to. As long as you’re here, I’ve got to keep an eye on you.”

  “Is that necessary?”
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br />   Luke stared at him as though he resented such a stupid question. “You’re friggin’ right, it is. I know what kind of guts you’ve got, and I know what kind of thinkin’ you do. If you go soft, I’ll be the one who gets the shaft. And you hear this good. If that happens, I’ll kick your tail up between your ears again.”

  Hal knew what he was referring to. When they were in high school, or rather when Luke was in high school, and he was in the eighth grade, they had kept a few chickens in the back yard of their home. In Fairview, almost everyone had a garden and a run of chickens. Usually, their father killed those to be eaten, but one day he sent Luke and Hal out with the ax to kill one for Sunday dinner. Hal was to hold the chicken with its head stretched across a log while Luke wielded the ax. But he couldn’t do it. At the last minute, he let the chicken go and refused to help catch it again. Luke had beaten him unmercifully, but Hal had ground his teeth together and refused to cry or change his mind. As a result, Luke had been forced to go back to the house empty-handed. Their parents had laughed, and the laughter had whipped Luke into a black rage that had lasted for weeks.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Hal told his brother. “I’ll do my job.”

  Luke grunted and walked away. Hal shook his head in disbelief. Not even a ‘Good luck.’

  A Jeep was just leaving for the flight line, and he piled in with four other crewmen for the ride out to the dark shapes of the B-17s. When he arrived at O’Reilly’s ship, he could see the vague forms of the enlisted crewmen who were already fitting the breech mechanisms and barrels of their 50-caliber machine guns into their gun mounts and blast barrels and cursing when they barked their knuckles on the icy metal. Hal heaved his A-3 bag and briefcase up through the open hatch into the nose section, then he moved to the nose of the big bomber to inspect the chin turret. The squadron armorer had left the turret slewed up and to the right to give the bombardier easy access to the twin .50-caliber gun mounts.

  Beneath the turret lay the breech mechanisms and barrels of the guns. Even dissembled and lying on the concrete, the dark metal parts looked deadly. After each mission, the barrels and breech mechanisms were returned to the group armorers who cleaned and checked them so they would be ready for the next mission. It was a real chore to carry the heavy mechanisms, and Hal reminded himself to thank the crewman who had brought his for him.

  Standing on the crew chief’s ladder, he installed the mechanisms and set the headspace. He then checked the two ammunition magazines to make sure that the armorer had filled each with the maximum 365 rounds. He threaded the ammunition belts through the feeder troughs and clicked the first rounds of the big, efficient looking .50 caliber cartridges into place. He wished they were 20mm shells like the German fighters carried. Firing at the rate of 850 rounds per minute, each of the B-17’s guns could put out a veritable stream of bullets. But .50 calibers were simply bullets; they did not have the range, nor did they explode upon impact like the enemy’s 20mms, which were true cannon shells.

  Hal turned away. The best defense was luck. In every mission, somebody got killed, and somebody lived. It was all a matter of chance. He would soon know if he was lucky or not. But there were ways you could improve the odds of survival.

  Hal went to the wooden box containing steel helmets and separate pieces of flak suits. Invented by Dr. Malcolm Grow, an Air Corps surgeon, the flak suits consisted of canvas front, back, and groin pieces armored with strips of manganese steel. They helped protect vital organs ak shrapnel and small-caliber machine gun bullets. Four fleece-jacketed crewmen were already picking out pieces for themselves. They looked up when Hal approached.

  “How’s it going, lieutenant?” It was still dark and difficult to make them out, but the one who spoke had staff sergeant’s stripes painted on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Fine, Sergeant,” Hal said. “By the way, I want to thank whoever brought my guns out?”

  “That’s okay. I figured you wouldn’t know where to get ’em anyway.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have. Well . . . thanks.”

  “My name’s Bucky Adel. Waist gunner.” He stuck out his hand, and Hal shook it solemnly. Adel was well set up, athletic, with his helmet shoved carelessly back on his head to show blond hair. Hal judged him to be about nineteen.

  Adel jerked his thumb toward a short, chunky buck-sergeant beside him who was grinning widely. “This is Beau Caplinger, the tail gunner, and . . .” he nodded toward another buck-sergeant who was taller than Caplinger but who looked younger than either of the other two men, “. . . this is Willy Osborne, ball turret, and . . .” he indicated the fourth member of the group, a short, powerful-looking youth about Adel’s age with a round, dark face, wide chest and shoulders and straight black hair. “. . . this is our crazy Indian waist gunner, Chief Gorno.”

  Hal shook their hands while Caplinger said, “Where’re you from, lieutenant?”

  “California. A little town called Fairview.”

  “Yeah? The chief here’s from California, ain’t you, chief?”

  The chief produced a short grunt from deep in his chest, then added, “Yes,” as though he were afraid his utterance would not be understood. Hal didn’t want to know where the chief was from, or any of the men. He didn’t want to know them well at all. But he had to be polite. “What part of California?”

  “Up by the Oregon border.” The chief had a deep, resonant voice, and Hal was surprised that he had no accent. For a reason he did not want to analyze, he rather expected a native-American to have an accent.

  Caplinger said, “I’m from San Antonio. You ever been to San Antone, lieutenant?”

  “No,” Hal said. “I’m afraid not.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Caplinger,” Adel groaned.

  “You want to check our guns ’er anything, sir?” Willy Osborne asked.

  Hal knew why he had been asked. In addition to being the oxygen system officer and the first-aid officer for his ship, the bombardier was also the armament officer. “No,” he said. “If you can’t make them work by this time, I sure can’t.”

  They laughed and went back to picking out stray pieces of flak suit. They would place the extra pieces around their positions in the plane as a kind of armor plating. Hal found a steel helmet and chest, back, and groin protectors, and carried them to the ship where he heaved them up in the nose beside his briefcase. It occurred to him that Cossel might be short of time when he arrived, so he went back and picked out a similar ensemble for the navigator.

  “Hey, lieutenant,” Willy Osborne called. “You need an ammo can?”

  “An ammo can? What for?”

  Osborne walked over and handed Hal a metal .50-caliber ammunition can. “We’ll be in the air six hours, maybe more. And you know how altitude makes you feel like you’ve been drinking beer for two days.”

  Hal remembered all right. The reduction in atmospheric pressure made the bladder expand, so most crewmen had to seek relief during the flight. In the States, the missions had only lasted a couple of hours, but even then, it was often a problem to hold out until they landed. “There’s a relief tube by the bomb bay,” Hal reminded.

  Osborne shook his head. “Gets iced up. And they didn’t build these things with bathrooms.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Hal took the ammo box and tossed it into the nose section. One more of the fine points of combat they hadn’t covered in the instruction manuals.

  He walked back and entered the ship’s aft door. In the waist section, the armorer had secured several boxes of .50-caliber ammunition. These were for the waist gunners as well as extra ammunition for the other gunners.

  On the forward side of the radio room, he opened the door to the bomb bay. Twelve five-hundred-pound bombs, suspended by their twin lugs from stainless steel B-7 shackles, were hanging neatly one above the other with four on each inboard rack and two on each outboard rack. He chec
ked the shackles and made sure the thin arming wires running to the nose and tail spinners on the fuzes were secure and that the safety cotter pins were in place. They were the first real bombs he had seen loaded and ready to go, and they looked deceptively clean and sleek. If he didn’t know their purpose, Hal felt that he could even admire their aerodynamic lines. But when a bomb dropped from the bomb bay, pulling the arming wires free so that the arming spinners could spin away, it was the most destructive force ever invented by man. Each one represented shattered buildings, shattered lives, shattered dreams. And these were small. The British regularly dropped 2,000 pounders on their night missions. And occasionally they dropped 4,000 pounders. It was impossible to imagine their destructive power, the number of buildings they could destroy, the number of people they could kill.

  Hal rubbed his hand across his eyes. What had he told Luke: I can do my job.

  He edged back along the 10-inch wide bomb bay catwalk and ducked through the aft door into the radio room. He opened the opposite door into the waist section and was about to step through when he almost bumped into a crewman entering. He was older than the other men with faded blue eyes and weathered skin. In a voice that carried a slight twang, he said, “’scuse me.” He stepped back so that Hal could duck through the door into the waist section.

  “Thanks,” Hal said. “You the radio operator?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Bernard’s the name. Ed Bernard. You’d be the new bombardier.” Hal nodded. Bernard’s voice did not show either approval or disapproval. “You need any help, just yell.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Hal picked his way carefully past flight gear that the gunners had piled in the waist and swung himself out the waist door.