Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  At the start of his tour, Heller wasn’t troubled by forthcoming assignments. “I wanted to see what was happening.… What I’d seen in the movies,” he explained. “I wanted to see parachutes. I wanted to see planes going down in flame. And I would say close to half my missions were milk runs. There were no German fighters in Italy by the time I got overseas. So all the opposition came from anti-aircraft fire, and if I went on missions and … there was [not] any [flak,] I was disappointed. I was stupid.”

  The novelist William Styron, a fellow veteran of the European war, put it another way. “[The] smell of romance … is what you got for going off … and getting your ass shot off,” he said. “And that is, to me … the metaphor for the strange bargain one makes as a young man, going off to war. The allure was so extraordinary, the allure, the glamour, the gold bars, the tailored uniform—for what? To … get your ass shot off.”

  Yet few of the men questioned the war’s rationale. “I saw it as a war of necessity,” Heller said. “Everybody did.… Pearl Harbor united this country in a strong and wholesome and healthy way.” And at first, island life for him was relatively “comfortable,” he recalled. “[A]ll decisions were made for me, and I found I liked that … because none of the decisions being made seemed to be particularly abusive. I was being treated very well, even by the German anti-aircraft fighters.”

  * * *

  IN THE FORMERLY SECRET, now declassified, “History [of the] 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bombardment Group,” compiled by Captains Homer B. Howard and Everett B. Thomas, the primary goal of the group, in Heller’s time, was “Medium level bombing of bridges,” with the secondary, “low level” aim of “strafing … gun positions.” Heller flew his first mission on May 24 over Poggibonsi. The night before, he received his assignment and knew he’d be flying with Joe Chrenko. At a briefing with the pilots, he was handed maps and a list of targets. The maps indicated all known antiaircraft gun positions.

  He was issued a flak suit—essentially an apron with metal plates sewn inside it—a fleece-lined leather flight suit, and a parachute. After breakfast, the following morning, he and the rest of the crew were driven in a large truck to a plane sitting on a runway. The ground crew, charged with maintaining the plane (often, these men slept on the runways beneath the B-25s), had stocked the bomb bay, loaded the machine guns, fueled the plane, and patched the flak holes it had gotten on previous missions.

  Heller, quiet, tense, apprehensive, peed in the field and then slipped inside the “hothouse.”

  The engines boomed (there were no mufflers, and the exhaust system consisted of just a simple straight pipe). Once in the air, the gunners fired a few rounds into space, a test, and then everyone concentrated on their individual tasks. On the mission to Poggibonsi, thirteen planes coordinated their movements, settling into tight formations known as “boxes,” each box consisting of six Mitchells (with one extra bomber, in this case). The box was a vertical and horizontal arrangement of half a dozen planes, configured in such a way that they could protect one another and maintain a precise pattern for the drop.

  A Mitchell B-25 could carry up to three tons of explosives.

  A fifty-caliber machine gun swung on a ball swivel in front of Heller’s face. On this particular flight, he didn’t have a Norden bombsight. He had been told to tug his toggle switch the instant he saw the bomb-bay doors open on the lead plane.

  The account of the mission in the squadron history recorded “many direct hits” on the railroad tracks leading to the main target—the bridge—with “possible hits on the bridge itself.” None of these “possible hits” was Heller’s. Nervous and distracted, he had released his bombs too late, and he knew it. Flak activity was “nil.”

  Later that day, he flew a second mission, this time to Orvieto. “Scant and inaccurate” flak; “complete overcast on target[;] cumulus up to 20,000 [feet],” said the report. The planes returned to base without releasing their bombs.

  He had done it: survived his first day. No one had shot at him—either that or they had missed by miles. Maybe this was going to be a cinch.

  He flew seven more missions that May, encountering “meager, inaccurate” flak on just two occasions. Over Tivoli, on the morning of May 26, he and his group “failed to spot the target,” a railroad junction, and “laid a compact pattern” somewhere west of their goal. Almost as an afterthought, the account concludes, “A hospital along side the primary target received several direct hits.” The following day, with “ground haze” obscuring the target, a railroad bridge at Pietrasanta, he wasn’t sure what he’d struck, but his group dropped ninety-six five-hundred-pound bombs. On the twenty-ninth, twelve Mitchells, including Heller’s, pounded a viaduct at Bucine (about twenty-five miles southeast of Florence) with forty-eight one-thousand-pound bombs. They scored direct hits, but the report noted that, prior to the drop, crewmen observed what “appeared to be a gaping hole in the center of the viaduct from previous bombings.”

  Missions completed, the crews checked in their flak suits and parachutes, collected ritual shots of whiskey, and returned to their tents to tell stories of the day and mix drinks in their infantry helmets.

  * * *

  ON QUIET NIGHTS, when the air was mildly gusty, and the constant rustle of a tent flap sounded like a man marching determinedly to the ends of the earth, Heller swore he heard the dead Okie snore.

  * * *

  FROM THE AIR, the island’s tidy shape resembled a battleship. The men called it the “USS Corsica.” Sometimes they felt as cramped, living on the island, as if they were stuck in the hold of a ship. In sunny weather, the countryside was pretty: silhouetted saw-toothed mountains, cork trees, and groves of bamboo, a gently canted terrain covered with flinty soil, and curling, blue-green waves lapping nearby beaches. But the men grew restless contemplating beauty. Their fishing privileges were severely restricted, so they wouldn’t hamper the natives’ livelihoods. A movie screen stood on a hillside, but the army’s choice of films was rarely inspiring (Deanna Durbin in Honeymoon Lodge was shown the night after the attack on the Bucine viaduct). “People think it’s a joke when I say that [among soldiers] the most hated man in the world was not Adolf Hitler. He was Frank Sinatra,” William Manchester said at the USC symposium. “[W]e would see pictures of Frank Sinatra, who was surrounded by girls our age, trying to kiss him,” and the men would yell. Whenever Special Services showed up to screen sex-safety films, the corpsmen hooted and laughed themselves sick.

  Sickness often restricted activities, recreational and otherwise. Soldiers “had dysentery all the time,” Paul Fussell recalled. “You can imagine how hard it is to believe in the high and noble purpose of the war when you can’t control your own bowels, and you come up to the … commander to make a snappy report on something and all of the sudden your bowels move, noisily, right there, and perhaps his do as well, only he’s a major or lieutenant colonel. This is the atmosphere. Everything is a mess all the time.” The misery was compounded by frequent heavy rains. “[H]alf the squadron was inundated” by a particular downpour, stated an entry in the War Diary. “[S]everal inches of water … tended to make a rowboat out of [each of our] happy homes.” On wet nights, Heller huddled beneath a poncho, next to Ritter’s stove, adding up the money orders he planned to send home—sometimes four hundred bucks a pop.

  When the sun came out again, some of the men entertained themselves by flying daredevil stunts (squeezing between flagpoles or buzzing the beaches at astonishingly low altitudes, especially if local women happened to be sunbathing). Just before Heller arrived on the base, two pilots had died, crashing into a mountain.

  On July 15, Heller encountered his first “accurate” flak of the war. The squadron set off to destroy bridges and a fuel dump four miles north of Ferrara. Eleven days earlier, four planes had been holed over these targets; the men knew the place was hot. As he approached the IP, the initial point of the run, Heller went over in his mind everything he had to consider: What is the rate of clos
ure? How fast are we coming in? What’s our elevation? Level, level …

  That night, the War Diary reported, “Seven planes [were holed] and one man [was] seriously wounded.… [Sergeant] Vandermuelen got it through the side.”

  The next day, the record noted, “Vandermuelen died at 0200 hours. The Ferrara bridges [are] getting to be a jinx for us.” Around camp, boys said Vandermuelen’s midsection had been severed. Reportedly, he had moaned, “I’m cold, I’m cold,” until the moment he died.

  Then, on August 15, something happened to Joseph Heller. Over Avignon, flak pierced his plane, tearing apart the gunner’s thigh. That day, three other B-25s went down. Among those killed was Earl C. Moon, the copilot on Heller’s journey overseas. “Flak: Heavy,” the squadron history reported. “Red hanging puffs.… 5 chutes seen coming from [a holed] plane, 1 failed to open properly. Left engine [caught] fire and right engine was out.”

  As his plane veered and bucked, descending, then shooting back up, Heller patched his gunner’s leg. Like Sergeant Vandermuelen, the kid, Carl Frankel, kept saying he was cold. Heller responded with “sickly attempts at solicitous and reassuring platitudes,” he wrote. “When I went to visit [Frankel] in the hospital the next day, he must have been given blood transfusions, for his Mediterranean color was back, and he was in ebullient spirits. We greeted each other as the closest of pals and never saw each other again.”

  The war changed for Heller. The 486th’s War Diary said the corpsmen hoped to “forget about the [Avignon] mission,” but Heller couldn’t let it go. “Ferrara … had [already] assumed in my memory the character of a … nightmare from which I had … escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenious kid in a Grimm fairy tale,” he wrote. Avignon calcified this fear. He understood the situation clearly and unequivocally: “They were trying to kill me.… [The fact] that they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill me.”

  He wanted to go home.

  Eight days later, he hurtled into the air again, terrified. The 488th had been ordered to bomb the bridges in Pont-Saint-Martin, over the Settimo River, in northwest Italy. Having received the codes and radio frequencies to use on the mission, Heller settled into 8U. His friend, Francis Yohannan, occupied a sister plane, 8P. Six months later, these two planes would collide in midair.

  That day over Pont-Saint-Martin, August 23, 1944, the Americans hit the bridges they were after but also badly damaged the center of town. Roger Juglair, a village resident, has calculated that 130 civilians died during the bombing run, a fact Heller probably never knew for certain. (The 489th’s War Diary said, “This period was one of ordinary activity with nothing special to note.”) Among the dead were several children who had been attending a sewing class in a kindergarten when the bombs struck. “I’m not aware of any of our consciences ever being bothered [by any of our missions],” Heller once said. “We didn’t talk. We didn’t sing patriotic songs; we sang risqué versions of other songs. I don’t recall anybody being troubled by the bombs we were dropping.” The men just wanted to do the job and get the hell out. A possible exception on the mission to Pont-Saint-Martin was 2nd Lt. Clifton C. Grosskopf, the pilot of 8K. He later reported his bombs fell wide of the target because he committed “pilot error” while “executing evasive maneuvers.” There had been no flak; Grosskopf’s account is odd, says Daniel Setzer: “[O]ne can only conclude that the pilot … took it upon himself to wrest control of the aircraft from the bombardier before the bomb run was completed in order to avoid bombing the village.”

  In Catch-22, Heller would describe “bombing a tiny undefended village, reducing the whole community to rubble”—a mission whose “only purpose [was] to delay German reinforcements at a time when we [weren’t] even planning an offensive.” Perhaps he thought of Grosskopf when he wrote, “Dunbar … dropped his bombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face a court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done it deliberately. Without a word [to anyone] Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission.”

  * * *

  AT THE END of August, Heller was promoted to first lieutenant.

  In mid-September, after flying forty-eight missions, seven of them through “heavy” flak, he felt unusually jumpy about a scheduled run to Bologna, a notorious hot spot. He was not slated to make this run, but he shared his comrades’ worries, fears that mounted as nasty weather delayed the offensive. After the second cancellation, the War Diary noted that the “men [were] … apprehensive.” On September 16, when planes finally left the ground, the log recorded jauntily that “exacerbated nerves” had been “ameliorated.” To the crews’ surprise, they encountered moderate flak, and the mission was deemed a success. Back in his tent, Heller slipped money orders into envelopes. Whatever his nerves were, they were not “ameliorated.”

  * * *

  “THE FIRST AMERICAN SOLDIERS [marched into] Rome on the morning of June 4 [1944], and close on their heels, perhaps even beating them into the city, sped our congenial executive officer, Major Cover, to rent two apartments there for [recreational] use by the officers and enlisted men in our squadron,” Heller said in his memoir. With the apartments came “cooks and maids, and … female friends of the maids who liked to hang out there.”

  In a separate account, Heller wrote, “[F]ellow fliers were coming back from Rome with … scintillating narratives of high life.… They spoke, rhapsodically and disbelievingly, of restaurants, night clubs, dance halls, and girls, girls, girls—girls in their summer dresses and skirts strolling everywhere on wedgie shoes with lofty heels and thong laces winding up … to the calves like gladiator boots.”

  When he finally got to Rome, in urgent need of downtime, his comrades told him the “most valuable phrase” for romance was, “Quanta costa?”

  Major Cover’s apartments overlooked Via Nomentana. “[We] had horse-drawn cabs when[ever] we wished,” Heller recalled. In Closing Time, he noted—through the eyes of a character he said was based on him—“On the second day of my first leave there I returned from a short stroll alone and came back just as … Hungry Joe [whom Heller always claimed was based on Francis Yohannan’s tent mate, Joe Chrenko] was getting down from a horse-drawn cab with two girls who looked lively and lighthearted.… ‘I’ll treat you,’ [he said to me].” Heller continued:

  He let me start with the pretty one—black hair, plump, round face with dimples, good sized breasts—and it was … thrilling, relaxing, fulfilling. When we switched and I was with the wiry one, it was even better. I saw it was true that women could enjoy doing it too. And after that it has always been pretty easy for me, especially after I’d moved [back] to New York … and was cheerily at work in the promotion department at Time magazine [as Heller would be]. I could talk, I could flirt, I could spend, I could seduce women into seducing me.

  One thing he never forgot: Rome was a hell of a lot cleaner than New York.

  The Hotel Bernini Bristol, at the bottom of Via Veneto, housed the American Red Cross Officers Club. Heller and Chrenko would drink there after hours and get breakfasts there in the mornings. Occasionally, in the club, Heller ate a hot dog for lunch, but always they were sorry echoes of Nathan’s.

  “Killing time between meals and other pleasures … one sunny afternoon,” Heller and Chrenko “chanced upon a small storefront advertising itself as The Funny Face Shop,” Heller said. “[W]e went inside to have our faces sketched.” The young artist, who had been struggling to make a living during two foreign occupations, first by the Germans, now the Americans, drew caricatures of tourists. His name was Federico Fellini, the same Fellini who would one day make a name for himself as a brilliant filmmaker. “The drawing of me was exceedingly accurate,” Heller said. “Not until Fellini drew me did I ever appreciate I had a nose.”

  He admitted, “We knew next to nothing about the city and its history.” Instead, he studied the “sanctioned night spots.” In the clubs, “there would be at least one female singer belting out just awf
ul renditions of American hit-parade ballads, along with a small band containing a violin and accordion attempting American swing. Inevitably, some mournful Italian would warble ‘O Solo Mio’ and a missing-Mom song.”

  One afternoon, Heller blundered into what he thought was the reception area of a restaurant. He saw “about twenty calm enlisted men waiting patiently on straight-backed chairs … calm until, with instantaneous consternation, they [recognized me as] an officer.” He suffered “a second or two of shocked embarrassment [and] turned around and fled.” He never returned to the brothel.

  Other clubs held tea dances in the afternoons, then became rollicking dance halls at night. One evening, in one such club, an older British officer introduced Heller to a “girl named Luciana who wanted to dance more than he did.” Heller said, “I was a lousy dancer … but she was worse, and so, it seemed, was everyone else.” Luciana worked for a French company in a nearby office. “Alone with her in a café later I made passes,” Heller wrote. “She declined to come back with me to the apartment because, she said, it was too late.” She promised she’d drop by the following morning before work, if he gave her his address. He did, but didn’t think he would see her again. The next day, “[t]o my utter amazement … I was sleeping soundly when the maid awoke me to announce [Luciana’s] arrival. She would accept no present from me when she left, not even a token gift for carfare and such, and I have been in love with her since, and with all women of generous nature.”

  * * *

  THE ROMAN PARTIES made it even tougher to abide the USS Corsica.

  Other R & R spots had their charms. On the island of Capri, Heller was captivated by the legend of the Lucky Little Bell of San Michele. “Once upon a time a little shepherd lived [on Capri] and he was the poorest of the poor children of the place,” began one version of the story. One night, in the darkness, the boy lost a small sheep he was tending. Fearing he would be punished for his carelessness, he wondered what to do, when he heard the faint ringing of a bell. Believing this to be the copper object on the missing animal’s neck, he ran up a hill, past thistles and pebbles. A burst of light stopped him in his tracks. San Michele appeared to him, riding a white horse. “My boy,” said the saint, removing a modest bell that hung against his breast. “Take this and always follow the sound of it and it will keep you from danger.” Since then, the boy’s life had been filled with sweetness.