Rush to Glory

by Robert L Hecker

  Hal glanced at the airspeed indicator. 150 knots. At this altitude, that translated into a true airspeed of around 200 knots.

  “We’re coming up on Hitler domain,” Cossel said. “You guys keep your eyes open.” And he received a chorus of “Uh-rogers,” in acknowledgment.

  Far ahead and off to their right, pinpoints of blackness appeared in the center of a group of tiny ships. Flak. German antiaircraft fire. Suddenly one of the planes disappeared in a burst of blackness only slightly larger than the others. Hal knew that the black bursts had just destroyed a B-17. While the German gunners were experts at tracking targets with their visual and radar sights and could even target individual aircraft at 25,000 feet, they generally threw up a box barrage and let the aircraft fly into it. In a barrage formed by a hundred or more guns, it seemed impossible that an aircraft could weather the siege without some damage. And yet, it required almost a direct hit to bring down one of the rugged B-17s or B-24s, which often returned home with large chunks shot away. From high altitude, they could fly the hundreds of miles back to England from deep inside Germany with two engines dead, provided they were not spotted by German fighters who dearly loved to pounce on a lone bomber. If a heavily damaged plane could make it across the freezing waters of the English Channel, they could land at one of three emergency landing fields . . . Marston, Woodbridge, Carnaby . . . that had runways hundreds of yards wide and miles long.

  “They’re getting clobbered,” Hal heard O’Reilly say. “So is that group up ahead.”

  Hal jerked his attention to the group directly ahead of them and slightly lower and saw that it, too, was being heavily hit by flak.

  “They’ve set up flak batteries on those islands,” Cossel said. “I guess intelligence didn’t know about them.”

  “They do now,” Fox said.

  As Hal watched, two ships trailing smoke peeled out of the formation ahead and fell in twisting spirals toward the sea far below, and his mouth was suddenly dry.

  Their group leader banked slowly to the right, toward the concentration of flak as though attracted by its deadly siren song, and O’Reilly followed, swinging slightly out and away from the lead squadron. “This is the I.P.,” Cossel said calmly. He could have been asking for seconds on dessert.

  “Bernard,” Cossel said. “You’d better start the chaff.”

  “Uh-roger,” the radio operator answered, indicating that he would begin dropping bundles of thin aluminum strips out of a special chute. The strips would be dispersed by the wind, forming a cloud that was designed to reflect the radar of the German antiaircraft guns.

  “Okay,” O’Reilly said. “We’re on our own. Autopilot comin’ on. Bailey, it’s all yours.”

  “Uh-roger.” Hal clutched in the directional gyro, then said, “Bomb bay doors coming open.” He threw the handle to open the doors and felt the ship jerk as the air sucked into the open bay.

  Following mission directives, Hal eased their squadron further away from the lead squadron, swinging toward their target, which lay slightly off to the right. Ahead of them, Hal could make out the blue waters of Dollart Bay. To the north was the city of Emden where its dock area that was their target; it was so far away he had to use the bombsight’s extended vision to pick it up. He unclutched the bombsight gyro, refined his gyro bubbles, then lined the dock area up in the sight. He felt the plane bank as he began to kill the wind drift with gentle touches of the course-knob. He had plenty of time, so he eased around in nice easy degrees. He was grateful for the amount of concentration the task required. The familiar mechanical operations absorbed him so completely that he forgot the flak, forgot that this mission was deathly real and not simply another training operation.

  He flicked the trigger up to the automatic position and set his bomb interval switch to ‘salvo.’

  In the bombsight optics, he watched the rate-hair edge up on the distant docks. When it reached the target, he clicked on the rate motor; then he carefully adjusted the drive so that the rate-hair held evenly and smoothly on the center of the target. With minute turns on the course knob, he killed the infinitely small remaining drift so that he had both the course and rate hairs holding steady, the place where they crossed centered precisely on target.

  Suddenly, the big plane lurched, and at the same instant, a black puff of smoke appeared in Hal’s field of view.

  He jerked away from the bombsight and looked around. Huge bursts of greasy black smoke marred the pristine sky. Flak! The German’s were shooting at their formation. They could all die in an instant.

  The wonder of it kept him from being frightened. Besides, the flak did not look dangerous. He had expected eruptions the size of a cumulus cloud with the power of an unleased hurricane. These bursts looked too small to be lethal.

  Suddenly a black puff burst so close that Hal heard a report like an exploding shotgun shell, and the plane lurched like a wounded bird. Behind Hal, there was a sharp spanging sound, and he twisted to see a jagged rent in the roof.

  “Hey!” he heard someone scream. “Jesus! Look at Hollister. Look at Hollister!”

  He looked quickly to his left and saw the ship positioned off their wing erupt in a geyser of flame and smoke. The force of the explosion threw their plane up and out in a violent surge, and Fox and O’Reilly momentarily cut off the autopilot while they struggled to bring the ship back into position. But where Hollister’s ship had been only seconds before, directly off their left wing, there was nothing now but clear, empty space. The big bomber’s death had been clean and quick. One moment the ship had been effortlessly skimming the sky, the four engines easily turning the heavy propellers into silver discs. Now it was as though it never existed.

  But it had existed. And Hollister. Hal stared at the vacant spot in horror, his brain numb with disbelief. Dead. Hollister. Schultz. All of them. No one would ever see them again.

  He felt a horrible emptiness deep in his chest. His eyes burned, and his mouth opened in agony. He wanted to beat his fists against the cold metal of the bombsight and scream that it was not true. He had to believe that they had merely dropped back in the squadron or were gliding somewhere below. He could not allow himself to believe that ten men were now nothing but burned and torn flesh plummeting toward the earth.

  Cossel’s voice in his ears shocked him. “Schultz was in there.”

  For once, O’Reilly’s voice was somber. “That’s all she wrote,” he said.

  There was a pause. Then Hal became aware that their ship was still rocking and swaying through blasts of flak. From his position in the tail, Caplinger cursed and said, “There goes another one.”

  “God-damn-it!” Willy Osborne said in a high thin voice. “I’d a hell of a lot rather get hit by fighters. At least you get to shoot back.”

  O’Reilly said, “Back to you, Bailey. How much longer?”

  Hal snapped his attention back to the moving indices on the bombsight. When his voice came, it sounded strange and harsh in his ears. “About thirty seconds.”

  The bombsight’s gyros held the optics steady despite the sickening lurches of the ship as Hal again fine-tuned the rate and course hairs until they held steady on the target. It was a good run.

  “Jesus,” Polazzo said. “This is a hell of a long bomb run.”

  Abruptly the plane rocked from a close burst, and a voice shrieked in Hal’s ear. “Oh, God! I’m hit. Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  The voice paralyzed Hal. His hands began shaking, and they came away from the bombsight.

  “Oh, God!” the voice moaned over and over. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  “Who are you?” O’Reilly asked, his voice flat. “Who’s hit?”

  Hal swung around. Not Cossel. Please. Not Cossel. He could not face seeing him die.

  “It’s Bucky,” Chief Gorno said. “He’s on the deck.”

  “Help him!” Hal�
�s voice on the intercom was edged with panic. “For God’s sake, help him.”

  “I’m trying. There’s blood all over! I don’t know what to do.”

  Hal twisted to his feet and wrenched loose his mike and phone connections. He ripped loose his oxygen tube and jammed it into the walkaround bottle. As he lurched back past Cossel, he saw the navigator’s face muscles moving; he was yelling behind his oxygen mask, but Hal couldn’t tell what he was saying. He didn’t care. Adel was dying. He had to help him.

  In the pilot’s cabin, he stood up to shoulder past Polazzo, and he felt someone grab his shoulder, forcing him to turn. O’Reilly was twisted half around in his seat, clutching at him with his left hand, his oxygen mask dangling. The veins in his forehead stood out sharply as he screamed above the roar of the engines. “Get back there. Get on the sight!”

  But Hal lashed out at O’Reilly’s arm and knocked it aside. Polazzo moved out of his way, and he careened through the tiny door out onto the bomb bay catwalk where the sudden blast of air from the open bay almost swept him from his feet.

  Then he was enveloped in the horror of his nightmare. Except for the narrow steel beam beneath his feet, there was nothing between him and the ground thousands of feet below. Nothing. And the rushing wind was trying to tear him from the catwalk.

  Only the memory of Bucky Adel’s screams kept him from flinging himself back through the door. He forced himself to move further out on the catwalk, his hands clutching the inboard bomb racks. He had inched to the middle of the span, balanced between the racks when the bombs let go. Like Hollister’s plane, they were there one instant, and the next, they were falling into the void. Hal watched in a fascination of horror as they appeared to hang directly beneath the plane in a deadly cluster, the tiny propellers on the fuzes spinning merrily, then they drifted back and away, growing smaller and smaller until they were lost against the darkness of the distant earth.

  The thin, wind-whipped arming wires beat against his legs and feet, bringing him back to reality. What had made the bombs let go? Had O’Reilly salvoed them from the cockpit? Had O’Reilly tried to kill him?

  `He lurched through the aft door and fell to the radio room floor just as O’Reilly closed the bay doors, cut off the autopilot, and swung the ship in a turn away from the horror.

  Hal lay weakly, trying to force his mind to let go of the memory of the falling, dark objects. He remembered then that he had left the bombsight running with the trigger up. The bombs had gone out automatically when the driving indices had come together. So, it hadn’t been O’Reilly. Why had he been so quick to believe that it was?

  He pushed himself up and through the other door into the ship’s waist section.

  Bucky Adel was lying on the floor, writhing slowly, while Chief Gorno crouched over him, clutching Adel’s left thigh with both hands, trying to stem a flow of blood that soaked his clothing. It was like a snapshot, a picture without color or sound: the blood, both on the floor and Adel’s hands and clothes, was black, his face white, and the rest gray, all shadow and light and equally unreal.

  Now that he was faced with harsh reality. What should he do? As the first-aid officer, he was supposed to know how to take care of situations like this. But this wasn’t a classroom. And Bucky Adel wasn’t pretending.

  He knelt beside Chief Gorno and looked at Adel’s leg, and the feeling that it was all a picture vanished. This was no illusion. Adel had lost consciousness, and with that knowledge, Hal was able to move. He plugged his oxygen tube into the main circuit, ripped a first-aid kit from the wall, and opened it.

  When he stripped off his gloves, he immediately felt the bite of subzero cold.

  Using the first aid kit’s scissors, he cut a long slit in Adel’s flying suit and folded the cloth back from his leg, forcing his mind to ignore the blood.

  What he saw sickened him. Adel’s leg, just above the knee, was almost completely severed. It was held together by ragged pieces of flesh. Blood pulsed over the flesh and the cloth to the floor where it froze in shiny black pools. Only the hands of Chief Gorno holding pressure on the main artery on the inside of Adel’s thigh had prevented the gunner from bleeding to death already. With the cloth cut away, the chief was able to shift his grip to the bare skin, and the flow of blood diminished to a trickle. Hal plugged into the intercom. He couldn’t find the plug for his earphones so he couldn’t hear his own voice, and he couldn’t be sure anyone else could either. “Caplinger, Osborne, anybody. We need some help. Somebody give us a hand.”

  Nobody came. He looked down the long passage toward the tail. He could make out Caplinger beyond the jumble of braces and machinery of the tail wheel, but still, Caplinger didn’t move. And the ball turret continued its random twisting and turning as Osborne searched the sky for enemy fighters.

  “God-damn-it!” he screamed. “Somebody give us a hand. He’s bleeding to death!”

  Still, no one came. Chief Gorno looked at him and shook his head, and Hal realized then that no one was going to come. If Adel was not going to die, it would be his doing. The knowledge was strangely calming.

  Hal realized he had to work fast. His hands were growing numb. And Chief Gorno’s hands had to be freezing. He found the tourniquet in the first aid kit and wrapped it around the upper part of Adel’s thigh. Then he wadded up one of his gloves, pushed it over the main artery, and twisted the tourniquet until it cut deeply into the white skin.

  When Chief Gorno cautiously took his hands away, the bleeding had stopped. But Hal knew the tourniquet would have to be loosened every few minutes or gangrene would set in. Both his hands had stopped being painful; they were numb, and without his heated suit, the numbness was spreading, creeping over his body. Around the wound of Adel’s leg, the oozing blood was beginning to freeze, forming little black ice crystals against the white flesh. After sprinkling Sulfanilamide on the wound, Hal ripped two thick compresses from the first aid kit and tried to tape them over the ragged wound. But they would not hold, and Hal knew that if Adel’s life were to be saved, he would have to finish the job, cut away the mangled flesh, complete the amputation.

  There were needle-tipped morphine Syrettes in the first aid kit, and Hal squeezed one of them into Adel’s arm. Then, while Chief Gorno held the cloth of Adel’s clothing aside, Hal took the scissors in both hands and began to cut. Closing his eyes did not help. He could feel the blades tearing through the flesh, and the revulsion was almost overpowering. But finally, the leg was severed completely, and he was able to push it aside and apply the compresses.

  He loosened his tourniquet, and the compresses reddened wetly; then, the outer edges froze and held.

  He took off his B-3 Jacket and covered the bandaged limb, wrapping it carefully. Then he injected Adel with Sulfadiazine. When he finished, he was shaking from the cold. Chief Gorno noticed and unplugged his heated suit. He plugged Hal’s suit into the outlet and turned the rheostat up full. Hal reached to check the connection to Adel’s suit, and it occurred to him that he had not received a shock when he had cut through the wires. The flak must have short-circuited the suit, cutting off the current.

  That meant Adel would be as cold as he was, although he had begun to feel the heat flowing back into his suit. If Adel wasn’t kept warm, he would freeze to death before they could get back to the base, even if his wound didn’t kill him. Maybe it was only the lower part of the heated suit that was out. The F-3 suites came in two sections, a pair of overall-like pants and a vest. The plug-in connection was in the pants section, but there were redundant wires through the sections, and he might get a little heat in the vest. He checked the connections, then pulled his oxygen mask aside and yelled in the chief’s ear, “We’ve got to keep him warm. Give me your jacket.”

  Gorno nodded and stripped off his fleece-lined jacket. While he was wrapping it around Adel, Hal unplugged his suit again, transferred his oxygen to the walkaround bottl
e, and crawled down the long passage to the tail. He tapped Caplinger on the shoulder, and the tail gunner swung around with a startled jerk.

  “Give me your jacket!” Hal yelled. Caplinger looked at him incredulously.

  In sudden anger, Hal shouted, “God-damn-it! Give me your jacket. It’s for Adel!” Caplinger nodded and struggled out of his chute-harness and fleece-lined A-3 jacket and handed the jacket to Hal. Hal dragged it back to the waist and tucked it around Adel. He went into the radio room and collected Bernard’s jacket.

  When he returned to the waist section, Chief Gorno was back on his feet, peering out the waist window on the lookout for German bandits. Hal thought Gorno had deserted Adel, and he felt a surge of anger that quickly vanished. There was nothing more the gunner could do for Adel. His job now was to get them back to England.

  After bundling Adel in the jackets, Hal plugged in his mike and this time, the earphones. He had expected the intercom to be alive with chatter, but instead, it was strangely silent. “O’Reilly,” he said.

  “What the hell’s going on?” O’Reilly’s voice answered. “I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes.”

  “Adel’s lost a leg. I had to stop the bleeding. But his heated suit is out. I need your flight jackets.”

  There was a click, and the line hummed slightly as O’Reilly held the button down. “All right,” he finally said. “Come on up.”

  After he had collected the jackets, Hal turned to crawl back, and O’Reilly grabbed him by the shoulder. He unfastened his oxygen mask and leaned close to Hal. “How’s he doing?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know, but at least the bleeding’s stopped.”

  “Okay. Keep in touch.”

  Hal glanced at the altimeter. Twenty-one thousand feet.

  “Can you get down lower?” he yelled.

  O’Reilly pressed his push-to-talk button while he held his throat mike against his Adam’s apple with his free hand. His lips moved as he talked to Cossel. Hal couldn’t hear what he said. He took a drag of oxygen and turned back to Hal. “We’ll be over the channel in five minutes. We’ll let down fast.”