by Chris Lynch
I call him Boyd.
These are my brothers. And we are just now touching down onto the Shipdham tarmac as both the bombardier and the navigator are yelling at me to make more room for them. The space the three of us have to share is like a small greenhouse, toughened glass panels surrounding us and held in place by steel frames that are fitted with .50-caliber machine guns sticking out left, right, and straight ahead as the world hurtles toward us or we hurtle toward it, but it doesn’t really matter which because the hurtling has most surely begun either way.
The first thing a person needs to know about England is that the weather is rotten. That’s a bad thing if you have to walk around and go to school and pick up groceries for dinner. It’s an absolutely diabolical thing if you have to fly an extremely bulky four-engine monster carrying nine crew and up to twelve thousand pounds through constant fog and rain up to your cruising altitude of twenty thousand feet.
And to fly through all that blindly until you emerge into something like daylight, and do it all merely to get into formation, requires so much skill, precision, and coordination among men and machines that it’s almost unfair to ask us to then go and take that formation into a fight someplace.
But that’s just what the job requires.
Our first mission, we’re sitting on the runway waiting our turn and the whole of Shipdham feels like an earthquake of giant angry bees coming right up out of the earth beneath us. It’s the rumble of five bombardment groups, more than a hundred four-engine heavy bombers all cranked up at once, and it is among the few things that I would say inspires real awe in a guy.
About a quarter of them are B-24D models like mine. The rest are B-17 Flying Fortresses, which are the movie stars of the Eighth Air Force, despite the fact that our ship is bigger, faster, climbs higher, has far greater range, and carries a bigger payload than the Fortress. Actually, it does pretty much everything you want and need a long-range heavy bomber to do better than the B-17 does, but to hear guys talk, you’d think that nobody noticed those minor details.
“Have to admit,” Lieutenant Bell says as our group pulls into line behind a B-17 group lifting off just ahead of us, “that is one handsome aircraft.”
And that is the whole thing right there. The B-24 is not as pretty. A familiar joke from the other crews is that the Liberator is the box that the lovely B-17 Flying Fortress came in. So it gets the Life Magazine articles and all that, while we’re just here to go about our business of crushing fascism and saving the world and incidental stuff like that.
I hate the B-17. It’s like the New York Yankees of the USAAF.
Things are moving along faster now, as the fog has let up just a little bit. We’ve been inching along at a rate of one takeoff every forty-five seconds — which is a lifetime on a runway when the adrenaline is burning like acid in your chest — but we’ve pushed it to one every thirty seconds now. The sky is filling up quickly with airpower, although mostly we have to go by the sound since you lose visual contact with each aircraft practically as soon as it leaves the ground.
We are only a few positions from the front now, and if we don’t get up there soon, I’m going to explode and set all the other ordnance off as well. The closer we get the more exciting it gets, but the fear is there right along with it. And the cold. That’s one flaw of the B-24 we have to acknowledge, is that it’s not quite airtight. We don’t have a pressurized cabin, which means when we get to ten thousand feet we have to put on our oxygen masks. That, on top of the gear, which in my case is the full head-to-toe leathers, with the lamb’s-wool lining. We have the choice of that or the electrically heated flight suits that some of the guys are wearing, but after one too many stories of them shorting out and even catching fire, I decided I would live and die with the hides of good old American farm beasts wrapped around me.
“Here we go, boys,” First Lieutenant Ormston announces over the radio as we watch our group’s assembly ship take off, then our lead ship, then hear our own four beautiful brute engines begin that crazy revving up and up that rattles your ribs and tells your heart you are about to sky.
It’s almost unbearable, the roaring, rattling, juddering sensation as we get up to speed and then off the ground, following nothing we can see. Quickly, we bank left as the big bird simultaneously climbs and goes into the wide racetrack oval pattern that every other plane is flying in just as blindly. There will be no more radio communication until we all finally get into formation, so it feels like pretty hairy business before we even get to the fighting part.
“What’s the point of the radio silence anyway?” I say as I lean hard into the farthest forward reaches of my glass nose cone to see whatever I might see.
“Well, because we’d all kinda like to reach the target zone before getting the whole bunch of us blasted back to the ground, knucklehead.”
That’s Lieutenant Gallagher, whom I was not asking.
“Think about it, McCallum,” Lieutenant Bell says. Being a navigator he tends to answer questions with more fact and less jerk than certain other crew members. “I mean, occupied Europe — which means, basically, one big, giant Nazi Germany — is right there.” He points from his position on my left, across to the equally gray and indistinct swirl of sky on my right. You can’t even see right there right there, so his point is a little washed out.
“They monitor everything all along the English Coast,” Gallagher snaps. “Probably hearing this conversation right now, so maybe you should button your lip before they realize what a green bunch of dummies we’ve got for gunners on these boats.”
The military has a lot of rules, to keep order. That is understandable. That is also the only reason Lieutenant Gallagher isn’t collecting his teeth up off the floor of our cozy compartment right now. I’m going to have to find a way around some rules before all this is over.
The target zone itself almost doesn’t count as a long-distance bombing run. We are headed for a heavy industrial part of France, near the Belgian border — in other words, as Bell might say, the nearest edge of Hitler’s Europe. Our targets are steelworks, engineering factories, and railroad manufacturing operations. It almost feels like we are bullying fat duck targets that are just gonna squat there while this force of nature swoops down to pound them into dust. But, they started it.
It is bone-cracking cold already as Bell informs the pilot that we are within fifteen minutes of clearing cloud cover. It has taken over an hour of ovalling just to get us this far, and the low groans of approval heard throughout the ship show just how little it will take now to get us enthusiastic again. I have never been so cold. Gallagher and Bell, on either side of me, are wearing the heated suits, though the small amount of heat I can sense off them must be more than they themselves are feeling. They are shivering and punching themselves to keep warm.
We have all got our gas masks on now, and the air is very thin as the Liberator bursts through the last of the cloud cover into brilliant sunny sky. My heart jumps. It feels like I am the very tip of a rocket, flying at the front point of the plane, nothing but glass between me and the incredible sight of a hundred heavy bombers swarming and finding formation twenty thousand feet above earth.
First we locate the assembly ship for our bombardment group. There are five BGs on this mission and each flies its own assembly ship that is decorated in some wild pattern or other strictly for the purpose of getting each group gathered as quickly as possible, and then for the groups to assume the overall formation as we embark on our assignment. Achieving, and maintaining, the strict formations that are key to the success of any raid with these great numbers of massive planes is complicated enough to hurt my head and make me glad to be nothing more than a machine gunner.
We find our assembly ship instantly, with its checkerboard paint scheme, and within minutes my twelve-plane squadron is assembled and then linked up with the three others that make up our BG. In no time, the other four groups have done the same and we see all four crazy-quilt assembly ships bank away wi
th their zebra stripes and polka dots and head back to base. That leaves each group’s lead ship now in charge as the full in-formation assault team tears across the sky and across the English Channel to finally see what damage we can do.
There has never been anything like this in my experience. We have done hours and hours of training at high altitude, target shooting, mock bombing runs, and learning the fine art of formation flying. But that had been with our own squadron, then with several, which made the deal complicated enough. But this, this field of airpower we’re marshaling now, is at least three times the size of any grouping I’ve ever even seen. Here above the clouds we absolutely own the entire sky. I get a rush of a feeling that we cannot get to the target area fast enough because we are, frankly, unbeatable the way we are right now. I keep sneaking peeks, like a tourist or something, looking at the big bombers either side of us, way off ahead, beneath us and above us. The greenhouse canopy under which I work has to be the most remarkable theater seat in the whole world. Or above it.
“Eyes on the road, batboy,” Gallagher snaps, looking up at me from his station right down on the floor. He’s already at the bomb sight. He’s at the center, really, of everything we do on this ship. I’d hate to ever say it to his face, but he is pretty much indispensable, doing all the fine-tune calculations to make sure when we go out to bomb something it gets bombed. Otherwise we have been a big, fat flying nothing just wasting resources in the sky. There is even a point where the bombardier actually has control of the aircraft itself for the crucial seconds prior to dropping our load, after which he graciously gives the pilot something to do again.
Still, from where he is, at my feet, I could give him a pretty good kicking without the mission necessarily losing anything.
“Really, McCallum, eyes straight ahead now, total focus,” Bell says from behind me, where he’s taken up his position at the navigator’s table.
You can feel it, even if we still can’t see anything except us. Us, and us and more us in every direction. Pilot Ormston chirps his directions and updates in as chopped a manner as possible, never wasting an extra second on chitchat, and he communicates a lot with it all the same. “Descending,” he says sharply, and we all sure feel it now.
I am gripping the handles too tightly on my .50-caliber machine gun and staring as straight as my bulging eyes can manage. The compartment has three of these weapons fitted into the nose structure, and the truth is, you’d need all three to be able to cover all the necessary angles to defend this section of the aircraft competently. My only strategy is to approach it like I did in the Eastern Shore League when I had to face a pitcher with a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball and only limited control of it: dig in, don’t flinch, just flat out guess on the location, and above all, start swinging at the first twitch of motion.
Hank hated that method when I told him about it. He probably hated more that most of the time my guesses were spookily accurate.
“Whose idea was this daylight raiding thing again?” Gallagher growls, peering steadily through his bombsight.
“Wasn’t mine, I can tell you that,” I say.
“Well, that rules out the batboy as the number one suspect,” he sneers, using a hated nickname that is establishing itself far too securely. I never even told anybody about my playing in the A’s system, so the rat must have his own intelligence sources. I’d like to thank all involved with a couple of knuckle sandwiches.
As the whole formation starts diving at an even steeper angle, still above the cloud layer, another big collective sound joins in with the thunderous roar of our engines.
“What am I hearing?” I call out, my rookie nerves overriding training and composure.
“Fighters!” Lieutenant Ormston snaps.
“From every corner!” Couley, the engineer, adds.
“I guess we can assume they’re not ours,” Bell jokes, slapping his navigator’s table with a vicious laugh.
That’s one thing American bombardment crews are always questioning, and British crews are always mocking, about USAAF strategy in this theater of the war. We’re the only ones crazy enough to go out bombing in whatever passes for daylight here. And, for the most part, we do it without any fighter escorts looking out for us along the way.
We can do anything, under any conditions, without needing any ol’ escorts, either. I guess.
“Dead ahead, three o’clock, twelve o’clock, seven o’clock!” Lowrie the copilot yowls.
All in one devilish, magical moment, the sky opens wide up below and before us like there was never any cloud littering this sky today. And the air all around fills with enemy fighter planes, Messerschmitt Bf 109s, Focke-Wulf 190s. There is a trio of them scorching so directly toward the very tip of the nose of this plane you could swear they had it out for me personally.
Batatatatatatatata. Battattaataatatatatatataa!
My entire body feels it as the Browning .50s pound the air and the Luftwaffe fighters with more fury than I could ever ask for. Two of the three fighters peel off left and right, as the third keeps bearing down like he’s intending to come right through the window. He’s firing away exactly as I am and I hear several large rounds ping and zing off the fuselage before I score big, getting a bead on the underside of his left wing and riddling it as he banks straight up over my head. The engineer’s position behind our pilot has its own gun turret and he picks the guy up as I concentrate on the next flurry coming on.
The whole ship is ringing with machine-gun fire from both waist gunners, myself, topside from Couley, and holding the fort way at the back, tail gunner Boyd.
Suddenly it’s a bit more crowded but I don’t mind too much since it’s Bell, away from his table and manning the left-side machine gun, blasting away at the same bunch targeting me. There is a third gun mounted to my right, but Gallagher is completely glued to his primary concern. That bomb sight on the floor is his only view of the world at this moment.
The German fighters are fast and dodgy, but the Liberator is packed with a lot of firepower for a strategic bomber, so we give as good as we get. But their ability to penetrate into, and move almost effortlessly within, our immense and precise formation, is more than a little bit unnerving. They appear and disappear like speedy nightmares, drilling rounds into our wing and side sections before vanishing and reappearing on the other side of the plane, or just above it. And there seem to be hundreds of them.
I jump from the center gun to the right-side one when threats increase over there. Through all the smoky chaos, Gallagher remains deadly zoned in and applied to his task, our task.
And despite the fierce resistance designed to at least disrupt our progress, with every passing second we are closer to our targets. We can see them now. We can see the factories and the steelworks that soon nobody will ever see again.
“I love daylight raids!” I yell, just about over the sound of my guns as I pepper the side of a Messerschmitt so close I could have spat on the pilot’s face if I could have gotten my window open. I see him trailing something, heavy fluid in a steady stream, as he spins away and limps out of the fight for today, or maybe forever if it all works out right. The thrill I feel at the sight of the failing plane, at my lethal work, makes me want to break away somehow and follow him till I can witness the fantastic, awful end. I hope the plane dies. I hope the Nazi fighter pilot dies. And I hope he manages to take out three or four more of them when he hits the ground.
“I’m killin’ ’em, Suzie,” I say as I switch back again to the center gun, “just like you said to.”
I wonder if Hank’s gotten to kill anybody. Most likely not. His station, his situation, chances wouldn’t come along all that often. It makes me sad for him, and more murderous, too.
“Hang on boys, hang on, doin’ great! Keep it up!” That’s Gallagher, his eye sockets essentially welded onto the sight’s eyepiece. He smells blood, and we just have to get him to it.
But that is proving to be a lot harder than I’d have thought. These fighter
s, kids’ toys next to the bulk of what we brought, are disrupting everything we do. The precision of the formation, so critical to the bombing strategy, is getting pushed and unbalanced by the relentlessness of the fighters’ attacks. There is firepower of all kinds filling the air, bringing yet another shade of gray to these smoky skies, and we are in a real dogfight to the death.
There is a shocking great crack and commotion as two Liberators ahead get drawn just far enough out of their assigned patterns to clip wings. One of the planes dips sharply in the direction of the ground while the other struggles back into position.
The diving plane is trailing smoke from one sputtering engine as the pilot wrangles it level but flies his ship back in the direction we came from. He’s flying straight into the face of our formation for a breathless moment before diving lower still and sailing beneath us.
The formation is off, some squadrons drifting farther out to the perimeter than they should, as we press on to the targets below while fighting off the devils above.
“Lining her up, Lieutenant!” Gallagher calls at the very instant we hear the first note of that unique and beautiful song of bombs whistling down. Our lead ship has opened up bomb bay doors and is letting fly with a blizzard of five-hundred-pound bombs that are racing down, then p-pow p-pow-p-pow pow pow exploding, decimating the railroad operation that for only a few seconds looks just like the recon diagrams we studied. In an instant, it looks like fire, rubble, and not much else.
Our group banks beautifully, like we are one perfect steel creature on the wind, off to the coordinates to the east, just there, where the time comes. Gallagher takes over, hollering like a madman as the bomb bay doors open wide, the whistlers sing all the way to their destination. And again, p-pow p-powpowpow, the eruptions as those vital war-machine facilities pop right off the map.
As we sail over the top of them, one after another of our assigned targets takes the pounding. The dogged Messerschmitt and Wulf fighters clearly don’t want to concede and they fight us even as we make our sweeping arc to leave. Boyd gets most of the action now as the fighters get a good long look at our elite fleet, tail-gunner style, and you can finally feel the fuel running out of this scrappy firefight.
