The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

The rest of the crew had arrived already besotted from having been to a pub down in Grimsby. My complaint was lost amid their din. On this first night I wasn’t able to discern the names of every man I was to fly with—a dozen officers from other crews in our wing had arrived along with the rest of ours. While Navigator Smith might have enjoyed poking fun, when drunken Brits got to talking I found myself swept away in a sluice of words. I receded into my warm pint and observations of these men in their dark blue uniforms.

  Next morning we went to the mess for a light load before briefing for that night’s run, at 1300 hours. This being my first run, I listened to the chatter of the crewmen around me. We were to take a quick run over the Channel, to the small Hanseatic city of Bremen. Other than Bremen’s being near the northern coast of the country, this destination meant little to me. As my crew departed I came to try to get some sense of the significance of this path.

  “Our plan,” Navigator Smith said when I asked about our mission, he being navigator and so the most obvious person to ask about a flight path, “is to fly in an aeroplane and drop some four-thousand-pound blockbusters on Jerry’s head. What more do you need to know?”

  I said nothing, finding Navigator Smith unlikely to be my ally, and was ready to depart when another of our crew came up alongside us.

  “Ease up, Percy,” he said. This new face belonged to our bomb aimer—and also the front gunner, as that crew member did double duty on a Lancaster. He was a troll at just under five feet, a Canadian called John Gallsworthy. Within moments of meeting him I came to see he would be the antidote to the absence in my routine of Clive Pillsbury. Gallsworthy was an oafish, pigeon-toed nineteen-year-old who acted and spoke with the benefit of an education far beyond his years. Not long after we met we would find we had in common a great love of the classical and contemporary painters my mother had introduced me to when I was a boy. Gallsworthy had taken two years of courses in the history of art at McGill before the war. He stashed by his bed half a dozen books full of the paintings of Constable, Géricault, David, and Delacroix, and I came by a redoubled education in the history of British and French painting from my acquaintance with this thick-bodied pug.

  We returned to our Nissen hut to begin flight preparations.

  “To start,” Gallsworthy said, “you should know that not only is our navigator Percival Smith a difficult case, but the pilot you’re replacing was his closest friend all the way back to their days at Eton. He’s predisposed to a certain acrimony toward you. A number of the boys in One Hundred Squadron were with them in a first-year class at King’s College, and after training they were left to pick crews. They all chose to stay together—but you and I and the Aussie, Ford, were forced upon them.”

  As he would be every time I saw him, Gallsworthy was smoking. He took a deep drag. In my memory I see a middle-aged man drawing upon his ancient cigarette, though Gallsworthy wasn’t yet twenty.

  “Losing Binghamton has been very hard on Percy Smith. Don’t take what you get from him to heart. But, still, you might prepare to be at the center of his sights for the coming weeks.”

  All the men in the crew, with the exception of their pilot, had been flying together for the past year. They were the only Lancaster crew to have remained intact since the beginning of the bombing of the Ruhr Valley, having spent better than four months flying in Lancaster S859, S-Sugar. Having lost Binghamton only a week before had undone their imperturbable sense of identity—as flies to wanton boys we are to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

  I was to be the new face in this bunch, a group that before my arrival had been on one of the first bombers in the now-famous Thousand Bomber Raid on Cologne—the greatest success of the bombing campaign to date. There was a level of upheaval from having lost one of theirs, and a pride for their successes.

  In addition to providing this reading of Navigator Smith, Gallsworthy proceeded to run through the unofficial flight preparation with me, reminding me of what I’d learned more than a year ago in elementary training: One must shave to maintain a proper seal on the oxygen mask he would need above five thousand feet. Most of the gunners wore three pairs of socks, and I might consider doing the same. Above all, one had to know where his parachute was at all times and where his Mae West—what we called the inflatable jacket for a water landing—was, for as S-Sugar had been flying patched up but intact for dozens of runs, its luck was bound to shift.

  Gallsworthy interpreted apprehension on my face and finished by saying, “Tonight is to be an easy run.”

  I took this as a great relief, and I said so.

  “Don’t go taking it as that,” Gallsworthy said. “Just hold yourself together. We always draw an easy run before a serious one, to boost morale.”

  5.

  At 1700 hours Gallsworthy and I jumped a truck to the airfield. Navigator Smith was focused, along with Flight Engineer Smith, on securing something under the nacelle on our side of the plane. Erks performed a check of escape hatches, panels, tires. We climbed into the waist of the plane. I moved up to the cockpit, where I took my place next to the pilot I would soon take over from, the Aussie, Mark Ford, who was to become an officer and would move on to training new pilots. He had huge hands, was notorious for demanding silence from his crew, and I was to learn before long that as much enmity as I’d experienced from the rest of his crew, doing away with him would come as a kind of welcome departure for many men in S-Sugar.

  We taxied behind another Lancaster. As we began to roll there was a great noise from the engines and into our headsets Ford said, “Six oh five,” and I looked at my watch and repeated it. Ford said, “Check the oil” and I said, “Oil okay,” and he said, “Flaps twenty-five degrees,” and I repeated it, and he said, “Radiator shutters automatic,” and I repeated that. We taxied farther and a flash of light came from the flight tower, and while Ford pushed the throttle forward with his right hand, I took it palm-up with my left and pushed it full again, an activity I found easiest done with my right glove off, just as I had for that switch back in my Spitfire.

  Our path to the North Sea was conducted in Ford’s officious silence, save for the moment when we rose past five thousand feet and he called for us to put on oxygen masks. We’d lifted off with the sun at our backs. As we passed over the verdant landscape on our way southeast again, my memory was granted a new layer: In odd-shaped green field after odd-shaped green field were the dark borders of a Cézanne, whose paintings Gallsworthy had lingered upon in his books. Forever the face of each crew member is reconstituted in my mind now in the image of those plots of land. As we traversed the easternmost airspace over England, Navigator Smith called out our coordinates at each turning point and Ford and I made our turns until we were over the North Sea.

  Gallsworthy had made clear after the briefing that defenses would be densest over Cuxhaven. We were to be on the alert.

  We rendezvoused with a squadron of Spitfires to our starboard, who waggled their wings in greeting and joined us as we came into formation with the rest of our bomber squadron. Our wings were not ten yards from theirs. At altitude, I replaced my glove. It was cold up there. I buttoned the fur collar of my jacket and every few minutes I thought to waggle my toes like the Spitfires’ wings. Gallsworthy had warned me the night before of pilots who had been taken off flights for weeks because of frostbite they’d received at thirty thousand feet. I’d been in hospital enough and wasn’t going to take any chances.

  “Open eyes and clear minds,” Ford said. “Coming up, Cuxhaven.”

  Thirty seconds later, orange bursts lighted within clouds below. The closer we came in our approach to Cuxhaven, the more we heard the explosion of flak, until for the first time I felt our plane concuss—Ford banked left. We were so tight in formation we nearly clipped the wing of a bomber not ten feet from the Perspex of our cockpit.

  McSorely came over the interphone: “Jerry—port quarter—two o’clock—closing.”

  Messerschmitt 110’s arose in echelons so close I could see
each pilot’s face and they opened their guns: a fluid expansion of night against dark crepuscular sky. In the brown light, flak explosions lit the double-finned tails of three Me110’s. Red and orange tracers corkscrewed and bullets plinked our side. I dropped my right glove again. I was about to jam hard against the control column and bolt to the airspace below, far out of formation, when a Spitfire came hard on that Me110’s starboard. A contrail of smoke leaked from its back. It turned straight down on a perpendicular vector in the half-lit evening sky toward the dark earth.

  “Got those fuckers!” Gallsworthy called.

  Ford admonished him to keep off the phones unless there was imminent news—I thought to argue that my friend the front gunner’s comment was news, and imminent at that, but now I was caught in reverie at how we would soon enough be plummeting toward German soil just as that Me110 had. I rode the rest of the way to our target in a state of tense readiness, having for the first time been hit by Luftwaffe fire. In my months of desire to join the RAF, I’d thought of nothing but the chance to kill Nazis who had sent my parents to their deaths, who had dropped the bomb that had killed Glynnis, and the one I felt must have killed Françoise. But there was no German here, no Nazi—just aeroplanes and flak as likely to destroy us as we were them, and the darkening evening. Amid this trance I was barely even cognizant of the moment Gallsworthy called out over the interphone, “Bombs away!” and we gained altitude, my feet pushing down ever so slightly in my boots, our Lancaster relieved of six four-thousand-pound blockbusters and dozens of incendiaries.

  I looked behind me as fire rose from the ground now choked by smoke and aglow as we banked left for our return flight. Ford tolerated more banter over the interphone now that the bombs were away, and as it had been decided we would take a northern route back to our airfield to avoid Cuxhaven, there was less concern about flak and Luftwaffe convoys. My eyes were fixed on the now-black night as we entered the wee hours of the morning until at some point I became aware of a kind of whining in my ear, which was in fact a voice saying over and over again, “You alive, West? West?”

  “Yes, yes, sorry,” I said.

  It was the voice of Navigator Smith over the interphone, employing that new surname I hadn’t grown accustomed to yet. “So you’ve seen your first flak now, haven’t you, Polack?”

  I began to explain over the interphone that I wasn’t Polish, but a Czechoslovak, when I heard Gallsworthy say, “He’s done his job, hasn’t he?” Navigator Smith cut him off to ask what it was that kept me from answering him when he called after me the first dozen times. Luckily for me, Ford said he’d heard enough until we were back at base.

  “Would you like to land us, West?” Ford said.

  We descended through the clouds now built up below. I landed and we were taken to debriefing and then to sleep. Late the next day, I awoke to Gallsworthy’s declaration that the crew was going to the Rooster’s Peck for a pint of mild.

  At the pub, I’d barely sat down before Navigator Smith raised a glass.

  “To the greatest pilot S-Sugar will ever have,” he said. He looked me in the eyes, then looked back over the faces of the crew. “Vance Binghamton.”

  They all raised their glasses. I raised mine.

  “What are you raising your bloody glass for?” Navigator Smith said.

  “I was joining your toast.”

  “Because you knew Vance Binghamton?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Because you’re fit to fly his Lancaster?” I didn’t say anything. “Then don’t raise your cunt glass. We’ve all lost our pilot. What’ve you lost, Pilsudski?”

  I looked around and found the whole crew awaiting an answer, or looking down into their drinks. The lights grew bright and my neck was all sweaty.

  “There was a girl killed by the Germans,” I said. “Françoise.” By which I of course meant Glynnis. But I didn’t have time to correct myself. Now my whole crew was just sitting there looking at me. For a moment I perceived only seriousness in their faces, until my nemesis spoke up.

  “Well, if you’re grieving, at least we won’t have to hear about you biting the nipples off WAAFs,” Navigator Smith said. At last the focus shifted from me as the table swelled with laughter. Even mid-upper gunner Pinehurst, who had only treated me with respect, was laughing, if nervously.

  Gallsworthy came to sit in the chair next to mine. He explained this vulgar comment by Navigator Smith. In our wing, there was an infamous Polish crew known for their sexual exploits, but whose reputation among the WAAFs had taken a turn when a story was passed around about a teen from Warsaw who was so aggressive he had bitten the nipple off a girl from Coventry.

  “But,” I said to Gallsworthy, “I’m not Polish. I’m a Czechoslovak.”

  McSorely overheard our conversation and said it didn’t matter to Smith—and it didn’t matter to him, either. As the silence after this comment grew, Gallsworthy suggested McSorely might like to play a game of darts. I hadn’t ever played. Gallsworthy asked if I’d like to learn.

  Navigator Smith said, “Oh, we’ll teach you.”

  Smith and McSorely formed one pair, Gallsworthy and I another, and we played a game called Cricket. Throwing the darts was difficult, a skill I’d never encountered. These Brits were so practiced at it I’d never catch up. Gallsworthy had played at a pub near his home before he enlisted, and he was quite good. After a half hour the score was close. Navigator Smith took his throws and missed all three of his shots at the nineteen he and McSorely needed to close out. He’d just missed his mark with the first two darts, but the third clanked off the wood of the board and bounced back to the floor near him. It stuck upright in a floorboard.

  “Bloody hell!” Smith yelled.

  As with many men who are for some reason or another constitutionally angry, he was as hard on himself as he was on everyone else.

  I went to retrieve the two darts stuck in the board.

  Suddenly pain pinched my right shoulder.

  “What the hell’re you thinking!” Gallsworthy shouted.

  He came over and pulled out the dart that had punctured my shoulder. We both looked at Navigator Smith. Even McSorely was staring at him. Smith colored at his neck. The blush overtook his face.

  “It slipped,” Navigator Smith said. “Or I didn’t see him there. Or something.”

  It was clear from his pinched, stoic face that he knew exactly what he’d done, and it was clear what he’d intended. Gallsworthy took me off to the infirmary, where a WAAF nurse sewed the wound up with just a couple of stitches and discarded my bloodied undershirt. After that, I steered clear of Navigator Smith when I could.

  6.

  Our aerodrome was quiet for the next week as we lived most of early July under the misty scrim of northeast fog. Each morning we woke for another day of refresher classes in aircraft recognition. The puncture wound in my shoulder scabbed over and the stitches were removed. Navigator Smith and I ceased to make eye contact. The S-Sugar crew awaited word of our next major attack. It was during this time I began to settle into the kind of routine that makes one’s endeavor feel as if it is in fact his life. Finally, it was announced that we would be sent over a defenseless Belgian town near the German border, and after that flight came off without any trouble, Flight Officer Ford informed me I would take over as pilot of S-Sugar on the following night’s raid. I was to bring my crew for debriefing at 1300 hours.

  There was talk all day about how our Belgian run was a cheesecake mission to give us rest for one more serious. We were a scrub yet again that evening due to the density of the mid-July cloud cover.

  Thursday, we were due at a briefing midafternoon. Our wing commander got up and read some saber-rattling from Bomber Harris about how the mission we were about to undertake was the most important of the bombing campaign to date.

  Our target was Hamburg.

  All of Hamburg.

  In addition to being the site of the Krupps factory, where many of the ball bearings necessary to the Nazi
war machine were manufactured, and the biggest U-boat factory in all of Germany, Hamburg was a populous city deep within German borders. We were to hit either or both factories. We were to damage German morale. Bomber Harris made it clear this attack could turn the momentum of the war. This was our opportunity to take out specific targets, to drive German morale to a nadir.

  It wasn’t lost on any one of us that part of our mission was not to kill Nazis this time. It was to kill Germans, Nazis or otherwise.

  Wing Commander Pennington turned to a map detailing our flight path from the aerodrome deep into German airspace. We would be going deep enough that we couldn’t alter our direction—Manchesters flying with us, with smaller fuel tanks than the Lancasters’, would continue on all the way to North Africa—and the approach would place us not over Cuxhaven, but over the Kiel Canal and Lübeck, both of which were notorious for the intensity of Luftwaffe aerodromes, which sent up hundreds of fighters each time they spotted us.

  “No way we’ll get past all those Me110’s,” Navigator Smith said.

  Wing Commander Pennington assured Smith and the rest of us that there was something new awaiting the Luftwaffe that night to protect us.

  We had a temporary second pilot on this flight, along to observe before taking over his own bomber. He turned out to be an acquaintance of Gallsworthy from his Initial Training Wing, a Liverpudlian called Rowlandson. He was charged with loading S-Sugar with this new weapon we were to use against the Germans. After our briefing he and Gallsworthy, who as the bomb aimer would deliver our secret weapon, went off to discuss it.

  I went back to our Nissen hut, where I shaved once again. While I was shaving, Navigator Smith came into the latrine. I hesitated for a moment, but it was too late to turn around to leave. I was shirtless, and I still had a large gauze bandage on my right shoulder protecting my wound. Smith looked up and saw the patch. He didn’t acknowledge me.

  I harbored some hope he might provide me a bit of a wider berth given that there were just the two of us. No matter how acerbic a man might be, it has been my experience that if one finds himself alone with him, just two men without any further audience, an interaction might grow easier.