Photographs of Heller in his tent, back on Corsica, wearing his flight jacket, reveal a tiny copper bell pinned to his collar, just above a round patch bearing the squadron’s insignia, a busty nude female wielding a lightning bolt, straddling a bomb.
On one of his last flights, on the morning of September 23, 1944, Heller was assigned to chaff detail. Instead of bombs, his plane would carry bales of aluminized chaff. The crew would drop them to confuse enemy radar. The assignment came at the last minute. Word reached the squadron that a German division planned to tow the Italian cruiser Taranto into a deep channel in the harbor of La Spezia—a large seaport—and scuttle it to create an obstacle for Allied troops. Commanders called on the 340th to destroy the cruiser.
“Because we carried no bombs, we could go zigzagging in at top speed and vary our altitudes,” Heller wrote in Now and Then. Also, he said, “I shrewdly deduced there was no need for a bombardier [on this flight].”
He perched behind the pilot, wearing one flak suit and wrapping a second suit around his legs and groin. Tightly, he gripped his parachute pack (something he couldn’t do when cramped inside the nose cone). The pilot and copilot were new to the squadron and didn’t know what to make of him as he sat behind them. “It’s okay,” he told them with more authority than he felt. “Let me know if the German fighters show up and I’ll go back [down below].”
The sky grew thick with flak. The tail gunner broke his thumb while tossing out chaff. When the pilot banked up and away from the harbor, Heller turned his head. He felt, he said, “greatly satisfied with myself and … with all the others as well. We were unharmed; the turbulent oceans of dozens and dozens of smutty black clouds from the … flak bursts were diffused all over the sky at different heights. The other flights were coming through without apparent damage. And down below I could watch the bombs from one cascade after another exploding directly on the ship that was our target.”
For this mission, the 340th Bombardment Group was awarded the Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. After nine more flights—the last on October 15—Heller was done. Initially, he’d expected to fly fifty missions. Later, he was ordered to complete seventy. He wound up flying sixty. “I have not been able to get an answer as to how he managed to end his tour of combat with ‘only’ sixty missions. The limit had been set to seventy,” Daniel Setzer says. The 487th’s War Diary concedes, “The rules governing the disposition of combat crews changes so frequently … it’s difficult to determine who will and wont [sic] go home.” Heller made no bones about the fact that he was terrified. Like several of his comrades, he was “flak happy.”
The raised mission limit appears to have caused more consternation in the 488th Bomb Squadron than in any other unit. The War Diary entries for October and November 1944 trace a growing disquiet in the camp: “Many of the crews … have reached 60 missions and consider themselves done” (October 3); “Morale is none too high, everyone seems restless” (October 5); “Maj. Cassada told crews that they would have to fly more than 60 missions” (October 24); “Maj. Brussels, Group Flight Surgeon, spoke at noon in the dispensary to the crews who are sweating out rotation. All of them have between 60 and 70 missions” (November 23).
Given Heller’s schoolboy reputation as a loudmouth, it’s possible he helped lead a mounting opposition to the raised limits, and demanded flexibility in the rules.
In November 1944, bomb squadrons from Corsica flew forty-eight missions over the Brenner Pass. Two hundred and twenty-four planes got holed; five were lost. Heller spent most of that month in his tent. He sent money orders home. By absentee ballot, he voted for FDR.
In December, “two chaste beginners, both lieutenants freshly shipped overseas, moved into” the tent Heller shared with Ritter. “They replaced a pair who had finished their tours and already left.” One of them brought a typewriter. The dead Okie remained. A “huge and invisible divide [existed] between me [and the newcomers,]” Heller wrote. “I was through,” and they had several more missions to try to survive. A photograph taken inside the tent that month shows a group of men gathered around a Christmas cake. Ritter retires into the shadows, gazing warily at the pastry, as though it might explode; Bob Vortrees, a pilot recently wounded in the hand by flak, cuts the cake awkwardly with a large and serious knife; the newbies, Hy Tribble and Emmit Hughes, whose smiles couldn’t be more forced, look on; Heller sits apart from the rest, cupping one hand in the other as he holds a cigarette and leans forward toward the typewriter.
* * *
IN EARLY JANUARY, just before shipping home, Heller, along with two of his buddies, Tom Sloan and Hall A. Moody, did R & R in Cairo. No trips out to the pyramids for these boys, just nightclub after nightclub. Their hotel swarmed with American and British officers, as well as American oil workers on their way to Port Said. Heller didn’t know anything about the Mideast petroleum reserves these men spoke about so excitedly. His favorite place in Cairo was a steak and shrimp restaurant called Pastrudi’s. Dominating the center of the dining room was a Reuter’s news ticker. You could munch and drink and watch the world come spitting out of this machine. One night, a few blocks from his hotel, Heller was accosted by child beggars with suppurating sores on their faces and limbs. It was a vision of Hell, far worse than the Frenchified Inferno along the Coney Island boardwalk. “There were flies in inflamed eyes,” Heller said.
A week or so later, he paced the streets of Naples, waiting for the ship that would carry him back to the States. The moment he had gotten off the plane there—the last time, in many years, he would fly in any kind of aircraft—he felt a young boy tug his sleeve, offering him his sister at a very low price. The “skinny, smiling girl in a thin and ragged coat standing behind him … reached out to rub my groin,” Heller wrote. He scurried off the runway and lost himself in the city. “It was cold and dreary,” he said. “[N]one of that radiant kind of prodigal gaiety that had practically vibrated in … Rome and Cairo, an air of continuous carnival.”
On the ship, going home, he ate apple pie in the officers’ mess. Most of his cabinmates got seasick, and Heller was one of the few people returning to the dining room each morning and evening. “At breakfast the fourth or fifth day out, after we had passed Gibraltar and were well into the Atlantic, I took my seat at an empty table and was stunned … to find myself being waited upon by a lieutenant colonel, with a major working as his helper and a captain doing the tasks of a bus boy,” he wrote. As it turned out, a ground-unit commander who had grown impatient in Naples while waiting for transport had volunteered his men for menial duties if they could be squeezed aboard ship. This particular morning, all the lower-grade fellows were vomiting back in their cabins, so the cooking and cleaning fell to the higher-ups. In his mind, Heller commanded the vessel.
5. “I Don’t Love You Any More”
“[T]HERE WERE[N’T] MANY young men who came out of World War II … who did not believe that the world had been saved for democracy and that there was this vast … sunny plain of peace that was going to last forever,” William Styron said.
Back in Coney Island, the sun wasn’t shining, and whatever satisfaction or confidence Heller may have felt aboard ship on his way home clouded over quickly. Aimless and depressed in the days before Lee suggested he go to Grossinger’s, he wandered past the ash heap that had once been Luna Park, as shaky on his feet as if he had been battered in a bumper-car frenzy. The Luna Park disaster had been a bonanza for his pal Lou Berkman, who was working now in his family’s junk business. Berkman and his father picked scaffolding, pipes, lumber, and asbestos out of the moldering debris and sold it all. The rest of Heller’s friends weren’t doing so well. Abie Ehrenreich was still missing overseas. And George Mandel, who had gone to Europe with the infantry, had been shot in the leg in Holland. While recuperating in a military hospital, he heard about the Battle of the Bulge, to which his unit had been ordered. He checked himself out, eager to rejoin his comrades. A sniper shot him in the head. He had survived—his condition un
certain.
* * *
HELLER STORED his Lucky Little Bell of San Michele on the scuffed wooden floor beneath his bed in the barracks at Goodfellow Field. He thought of it each time the West Texas wind carried the lowing of sheep across dry, brittle plains. The mail had brought him no word about his short story, and he hadn’t heard from Shirley.
From outside his window came a burst of unintelligible language. A group of Filipino officers had just arrived on the base for a taste of American flight training. They had not flown since the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, and they were more than a little rusty. Heller felt glad he had nothing to do with training. (His flight record for March 1945, signed by Capt. Ernie E. Groce, confirmed that “No Flying Time [was] Accomplished at This Station.”)
Heller was one of a “great number” of combat returnees assigned to San Angelo in the spring of 1945, according to the History of the 2533rd AAF Base Unit (Pilot School, Prim-Basic) at Goodfellow Field. “Almost without exception, the … returnees … required more time to adapt … to flying [again], the cause … being that all had suffered combat fatigue … and apparently had not had sufficient time to recuperate from the rigors of combat flying.”
The account went on to say that now that the men had been reassigned, “it is impossible to state how these officers will work out.” Most of the men had “no administrative experience. They are in general pilots who flew their missions and returned.” The base commanders felt overwhelmed by the heavy “rotation policy” and “rapid turnover” of individuals, many of them traumatized by their time overseas. The returnees’ morale was low, “with separation from the service the ultimate goal of the majority of personnel.”
* * *
ANOTHER MAIL CALL. Another silence from Shirley. Heller lay on his bed with a copy of Flight Time, the base newspaper, studying its breakdown of the military’s impending point system. Men would be discharged according to points they’d accrued, the tally based on number of dependent children (twelve points each), length of military service and time of service overseas (one point each per month), and number of medals earned (five points a medal). The magic number was eighty-five.
Sixty missions. Surely that, by itself, was enough.
Stan Kenton’s Orchestra, featuring the singer Anita O’Day, was scheduled to play a Goodfellow concert—the first time a “name band” had performed on base, according to Flight Time. Heller would have rushed to see Duke Ellington, but Stan Kenton he wasn’t so thrilled about. Trips into town, these days, were less fun than they used to be because local businessmen had begun to complain about soldiers loitering rowdily in the streets. Colonel Gunn had established “courtesy patrols” in town—more MPs—to improve the “military discipline of personnel at this station.” The paper listed upcoming movies at the base theater: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dillinger, featuring Edmund Lowe and Lawrence Tierney, and a frittery Tracy/Hepburn concoction, Without Love, also starring Lucille Ball. Apparently, a USO show was in the works. It would highlight Spanish dancers and a local magician. So much to look forward to.
There had been nineteen training accidents in the past four weeks. Communication problems with the newly arrived Filipino officers were not likely to improve that number.
Eighty-five points. He didn’t have enough. Did he?
Why hadn’t he heard from Shirley?
In his lassitude, in the heat and grit and boredom, it was easy to believe that Grossinger’s had been a dream, the redhead he had met just another glamour shot in the back pages of Flight Time. In the paper, pictures of beautiful women always appeared next to photos of infants labeled “Papa’s Pin-Ups.” (What was the message here? Unlimited sex and family sentiment? The good life—doubled—for which you boys have been fighting so bravely? You can have it all?) He had to concentrate to convince himself he really had met the girl in the far-off Jewish Alps, and to remind himself how the moment had occurred, so he could relive it until the memory was embedded in stone.
A dance contest. A bottle of champagne. A smiling young girl.
Now, at Goodfellow, as more days passed without encouragement from Shirley, Heller began to suspect something was wrong, and he phoned her. He was right. “My mother got cold feet,” Erica says. “My grandparents [were] convinced … she was making a mistake. They were his biggest fans.” She recalls, “There was a famous family story about him riding to New York on a milk train from Texas, to get her to change her mind.”
“Milk train” could have been a euphemism for any form of cheap travel, but given the time and place, the phrase probably should be taken literally. “Trains that made stops at most every small town and even a few of the larger farms were called ‘milk trains’ because one thing they did was to pick up the fresh milk,” explains David Wood of the Railway Museum of San Angelo. According to Wood, nine milk trains and seven “doddlebugs,” or self-contained motorized cars also carrying passengers, left San Angelo daily in 1945. The trains went to Fort Worth, Texas. From there, several routes were available to New York—most likely through Kansas City and Chicago.
Heller’s mission to retrieve his girl probably occurred in late April (we know, from some of his statements, that he was back at the base in early May). “Obviously, he was quite persuasive,” Erica says.
“It was Shirley’s mother who [really] took the initiative when I was alone with her one afternoon in her living room,” Heller recalled in his memoir. “‘Barney thinks,’ said Dottie, with the devious premeditation that was second nature to her and occasionally endearing—it was likely that Barney, the husband, had no inkling of what she was up to—‘that it’s because you don’t have the money that you don’t give her a ring.’”
“Give her a ring?” Heller blurted. “What for?”
“To get engaged to be married.”
Now, that’s persuasion. Dottie knew how to get things done—at Grossinger’s and now on the Upper West Side.
“I had money enough for the ring,” Heller wrote. “[Dottie] made the purchase and billed me just $500. [Immediately,] friends and families on both sides were delighted with the match. I was a young and unformed twenty-two and a half; the bride had just passed twenty-one. Almost every fellow I’d grown up with in Coney Island was getting married at about that time.”
Ring on finger, kisses offered, assurances made, he returned to Texas to finish serving his time.
* * *
“V-E DAY”—May 8, 1945—“was pretty banal for me,” Heller told a Newsday reporter. “I was … at [the] San Angelo Army Base in Texas. We knew V-E Day was coming, but didn’t know what day it was going to be. Finally, we heard the announcement over the radio. The day came and went. I don’t remember any great celebration.” The mess hall served a cake, but that was all. “[T]he men were mostly concerned about the point system.… Everybody was asking, ‘How many points do you have?’”
Combat returnees rejoiced that Hitler had apparently killed himself in a bunker somewhere at the end of April; they had known victory in Europe was imminent. On May 8, President Harry Truman celebrated his sixty-first birthday and dedicated the victory to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, who had passed away on April 12. Nationwide, flags remained at half-mast. At Goodfellow, Flight Time made sure the returnees didn’t get too giddy. Right after V-E Day, rumors circulated on military bases that the VA had announced plans to release from active duty between 200,000 and 250,000 soldiers. Flight Time insisted this story was “without foundation,” and quoted Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to the effect that soldiers would not be released “en masse.”
A few days later, the paper cautioned military personnel that “the war is about half over.” Flight Time ran a piece attributed to the “Camp Newspaper Service” that read, in full: “The State Department has made public evidence of German plans for continuing to fight for world domination even after total military defeat. The evidence was collected by various Allied Governments, and is based on reliable information, according to State Department
officials.”
Meanwhile, Goodfellow’s new swimming pool was now ready for use, and all the men on the base were required to take a swimming test.
Dust storms showered the pool; some afternoons, the air turned so brown, the only things visible, more than a few feet away, were telephone poles staked here and there. Towels, clothing, beds, and food smelled of loam. Whenever someone smashed a Ping-Pong ball in the rec room, puffs of dust rose from the table.
Heller sat on his bed, counting and recounting his points.
Later, he claimed he left Texas in mid-May and was officially discharged at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, on June 10, 1945, one of the first men released under the new point system. Records obtained from the Military Personnel Records Facility of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis do not say how many points he had. At rough glance, the total appears to fall short of the required minimum. Chad Dull, currently the base historian at Goodfellow Field, expressed surprise that Heller was released before the end of the hostilities with Japan. This odd timing, combined with the fact that Heller came home without flying his required seventy missions overseas, logging no flying time in Atlantic City or San Angelo, invites speculation that he received medical dispensation for an early release. He told a doctor in Atlantic City he couldn’t fly anymore; at San Angelo, he was clearly one of a number of men pegged as suffering from combat fatigue.
Just One Catch Page 12
