by Jim Shepard
The CO announced the time and they all set their minute hands to it, and he called “Hack!” and they started their watches again.
“Good luck,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”
“What?” someone asked.
The group broke up, navigators heading off in one direction, bombardiers and radio ops to pick up their information sheets, the gunners to the flight line lockers. Piacenti, Ball, Lewis, Snowberry, and Bryant walked in a line carrying parachutes and flak vests to the armament shop to pick up their guns. They piled everything into two jeeps and rode to Paper Doll minutes ahead of everyone else.
The guns were slid into their steel frames and locked in the stowed position for takeoff. The turrets were turned to face the rear. The five of them stood beside the plane, checking the layers of gear and waiting for the rest of the crew. Bryant hunched near the enplaning hatch on the fog-colored underside and dandled his finger around the connecting ring of his oxygen hose. Lewis went off into the mist a few feet and urinated through the circle of his thumb and forefinger.
Gabriel arrived with everyone else and gathered the group in a circle for some final instructions. He talked about the need to communicate on the bogies but to otherwise stay off the interphone. He cautioned Snowberry and Bryant to keep alert for fighters at twelve o’clock high and low, and said some of the scuttlebutt was there’d be a big diversionary raid which might tie up a lot of interceptors to the south. Snowberry was wearing a button he’d gotten from the New York World’s Fair, which read I Have Seen the Future. Gabriel peered at it, and asked if there were any questions. His cap had been pummeled and soaked in water to affect the fifty-mission crush, and when he moved, his unconnected oxygen hose and interphone cable flapped and gestured.
No one else spoke. They lined up to enplane.
“Do the bear dance, Bean,” Snowberry said, and Bean startled Bryant by hopping from one foot to another, back and forth, looking for all the world in his heavy gear and flight suit like a dancing bear. They had all seen this before, and laughed affectionately. Bryant had not. He felt suddenly he was outside even this group. When had Bean started a bear routine? Who had encouraged it?
Piacenti, climbing in ahead of him, turned and displayed an old orange warning tag from the Norden bombsight, and grinned. He slipped it inside his flight jacket and clambered up into the hatch.
Bryant hesitated before the opening, having missed the point.
“Do-it-yourself superstition,” Lambert Ball said behind him. “Can’t beat it.”
They individually ran their preflight checklists from their dark stations, calling in over the interphone. Bryant stood at the flight engineer’s panel and then at Gabriel and Cooper’s shoulders, double-checking their run-through.
They waited. A full hour passed. Bryant felt as if he were wearing a constricting and damp pile of laundry. “Stormy, if you’re wrong, we’re gonna kick your fucking ass,” Lewis murmured over the interphone. They heard rain patter lightly on the fuselage and everybody groaned.
“Isn’t this weather something?” Piacenti cried. He sounded stuffed up. “Sun for the tail and rain for the nose.” Their chatty informality over the interphone was not official operating procedure, but among the crews a certain amount of radio sloppiness was considered masculine.
Bryant climbed into the padded sling in the dorsal turret for a look around. Across the tarmac he could see shining water, broken by birds.
Above them a green flare arced rapidly and crookedly away and immediately the cockpit was furious with activity, Gabriel taking Cooper quickly through the checklist: Alarm bell/ Checked, Master switches/On, Carburetor filter/Open, and Bryant slipped back to his panel to check the engine status. From there Gabriel ordered him back to the bomb bay to the manual shut-off valves of the hydraulic system, so they could check the hydraulic pressure. “No hydraulic pressure, we’re back to Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal,” Gabriel liked to say. Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal was simple: the B-17, Lewis said, was not lighter than air, and when it came down for the wrong reason, it came down hard.
He could hear the whine of the inertia starter in the wing and the engines caught and fired, and the plane shook with the sound and the concentrated horsepower and Tuliese yanked the chocks away. They began to inch forward. His last glimpse up through the dorsal Plexiglas before resuming his takeoff position behind the pilot was of the mist lifting obligingly like a gray theater curtain.
They taxied behind the other Forts, a long parade of dull green ships, along the perimeter track to the end of one of the short runways, and waited, locking the tail wheel. Four thousand or so feet away were hedges, and a low fence. The planes were nose to tail, foreshortened enough from Bryant’s vantage point to seem an awesome and comic traffic jam.
The ship ahead of them throttled up, hesitated, and began to roll, the grass on both sides of the tarmac flattened by the propeller wash, and gravel and bits of paper flashed up to make gritty sounds against the windshield.
It disappeared into the haze throwing up big wings of spray and they followed its lights, edging up and to the side. Gabriel set the brakes and advanced the throttles all the way. The engine sound created a physical overpressure on the ears and the plane strained and shivered against its locked wheels. Bryant kept an eye on the oil pressure and rpm’s. Gabriel’s hand played over the brake release knob as if refining the drama, and then he released the brakes.
They did not rush forward, they never did, and Bryant hated the disappointment of the fully loaded 17 simply rolling slowly forward after all that straining and racket. He hunched and unhunched his shoulders hoping to affect the acceleration. The tarmac began to wheel by and Cooper called the airspeed in increments of ten, his calls coming more quickly, and Bryant caught a glimpse of a black-and-white-checkered runway control van disappearing along a side panel window and began to feel the great pull of acceleration on his shoulders, and at Cooper’s call of 90, 100, the engines’ sound changed, and they could feel the tail come up, and at 120 Gabriel pulled them off the ground, the hedges and fence rolling softly past the nose, and they bucked and swayed but gained power and swept high over some trees.
They broke out of cloud near their assembly altitude, and Bean gave a fix on the radio beacon of their assembly plane. All around them B-17’s were popping from the clouds trailing mist and carving into the blue sky above, looking for their colored squadron flares. Group leader ships at higher altitudes were firing yellow and green flares in graceful parabolas. Each squadron circled in its section of sky waiting for completion, a horizon of small groups at play, and Bryant watched in wonder from his turret the planes sweeping by opposite and above in a dance of leviathans. Their squadron, Pig Squadron, consisted of two vees of three planes each, with their vee fifty feet ahead and below as the lead vee. With two other squadrons they formed an extended vee, and soon a fourth squadron filled the slot behind them to complete a diamond. They matched with another group after forty-five minutes of laborious circling and maneuvering, and finally came out of a long wide sweep and headed toward the Channel together with a staggered and shaky precision. Above and behind him he could see Boom Town and Geezil II, their belly turrets already cautiously turning.
The Channel eased brightly beneath them and he could see the bulge of East Anglia receding beyond Paper Doll’s huge tail. He could not make out any evidence of their expected fighter escort. He imagined hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots over Holland and northwestern Germany scrambling for their sleek monsters, and clouds of silhouettes from his aircraft spotter charts rising to meet him, Plexiglas canopies glittering over the fuselages with the heartlessness of the eyes of insects.
He double-checked the seal on his oxygen mask, the heavy gloves giving him little feel for what he was doing. Lewis and Piacenti were clearing and testing the guns, and the plane shook, and already he could pick up the ugly cordite smell through his mask. He felt the tremor of Snowberry firing beneath him, and cleared his own gun
s, pointed away from the aircraft above, and squeezed the thumb triggers on the hand grips that controlled the azimuth and elevation of the guns, and the twin fifty calibers on either side bucked and fired visible tracers with a lazy, drooping sweep. Then everything was silent against the steady background of engines and slipstream. Smoke puffs trailed from the guns of Boom Town and Geezil II.
He swung the turret around at medium speed, the gun barrels tracking the horizon smoothly. The ease of the electronically operated controls reminded him of a ride at a fair. Track the Jerries, five cents, he thought.
“Shouldn’t we turn back?” Piacenti called in. “My gun’s not working.”
“What do you care?” Lewis said. “When do you ever do anything with it?”
They rendezvoused with their expected escort, RAF Spitfires. The Spitfires waggled their wings out of range to show off their markings before approaching, a precaution against trigger-happy Yanks. They roared ahead to the front of the formation, their razored contrail streams like scratches on the ice of the sky.
They continued to ride. The altocumulus and cirrus high above them were sheeted and pebbled like the silvery lining of a shell. His electric suit and sheepskin jacket and pants kept him unevenly warm, but the air was bitterest winter, 40 below zero at altitude. Bryant worried about his suit shorting out from sweat or urine and had heard enough frostbite stories. The air came in blasts through the openings for the gun barrels, and for comfort’s sake he found himself turning away from Paper Doll’s nose. His eyes and temples ached under the goggles and strap.
The interphone crackled and Snowberry’s voice came over low, singing. “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” he crooned. Contrails began to unfurl from the bombers above them like long streams of white spun sugar, or cottony bandages unrolling endlessly from the engines. They reminded him of enormous wakes from motorboats. The effect with a large bomber group was spectacular. The spectacle was lamentable, considering their position. “When we’re up that high and putting out that kind of contrail signature, I think Rommel in North Africa can see us coming,” Gabriel had once told him glumly. Ice had formed on the upper seal of Bryant’s mask, and there were smallish crystals on his goggles. “Where the treetops glisten/And children listen,” Snowberry sang.
“Can it,” Gabriel said.
Bryant struggled with his mask. It was dark and cold and smelled heavily of rubber, and condensation inside it was dripping down his neck and freezing. He thought of the water freezing in the rubber hose, of oxygen starvation, and his hands shook. Every so often Cooper called them to check in, for that reason. It was Lewis’s private terror that in the tail he’d only be reached too late.
They were over the Dutch coast. There were little thumps and pings occasionally, and Bryant watched smallish clouds with interest as they appeared and drifted backward through the formations.
“It’ll be easier over the target,” Eddy said over the interphone. “Without these little clouds.”
“Little clouds, my butt,” Gabriel said. “That’s flak, you idiot.”
Bryant gave a start. They could feel the delicate musical sound of the light shrapnel. The plane lurched and straightened out.
“That one s.o.b.,” Lewis said. “He’s set up right at the end of the Zuyder Zee. I can see his flashes.”
A burst shook Geezil II above them, the ship rocking and sideslipping.
“He is hot,” Lewis said. “Dick Ott used to call him Daniel Boone. Up yours, pal.” They could hear him chatter his guns out at the ground below, uselessly.
There was a minor commotion.
“Piacenti’s sick,” Ball commented. “We put it in a box, and left it in the bomb bay.”
“War is hell,” Snowberry said. “They shoulda thought about this when they invaded Poland.”
“What’s the matter, Duce?” Lewis asked. “Nervous in the service?”
The plane lurched again dramatically and Bryant felt a momentary terror that they’d been hit. “Wop Barf Kayoes Ack Ack,” Lewis said. “What a story.”
The Dutch coast was disappearing behind them and Bryant was beginning to feel a good deal more excited and frightened. Wherever their fighter escort had been, it was around now turning back.
“‘You fiddle with my shrimp and then you turn me down,’” Lewis sang. “‘You know I can’t do nothin’ till my shrimp’s unwound.’”
“All right, can it,” Gabriel said. “I mean it.”
Bryant could see the cirrus clouds as ice crystals at this height, rippled and thin and extending for hundreds of miles. Around the tail the flight’s white contrail streams converged in a vanishing point like a burst of illumination.
“God a mighty,” he murmured. He felt a peculiar and foolish excitement and a pride in where he was and what he felt was about to happen.
Hirsch called in their position quietly. They were now all looking for fighters, 540 men in 54 airplanes. Bryant swiveled the turret slowly, searching through the polished perspex for the dots. He tried to concentrate, fighting the cold and the plane’s shaking and the erratic ghost flecks from the defects of his own eye. He tested a speck’s integrity by immediately shifting his eye; if the speck shifted with it, it was phony, a momentary unreliability. Bad peepers, Lewis said, killed more people than bad anything else.
Bryant slipped a flight glove off, and touched the gun triggers lightly. The cold metal seared him and he jerked his hand back and fumbled with his glove. He went on watching, his fingers burning with a steady and painful pulse. Cooper called another oxygen check. While they ran through it, each station calling in, Bryant sang to himself the lyrics of “Paper Doll” as some sort of talisman.
Lucky Me! and Milk Run had closed on either side and wallowed nearer, wingtips already alarmingly close to Paper Doll’s. He could see the dorsal gunner in Lucky Me! peering up to the east, a bunched scarf flashing white beneath his chin. They were closing the combat box, making it tighter to concentrate the defensive fire. Above him Geezil II floated down closer, the bubble of its ball turret still rotating slowly.
“Bandits! Bandits!” Lewis called. “Comin’ through past me! What the Christ are you guys lookin’ at?”
Two planes at two o’clock, someone else yelled. Four at two-thirty.
Bryant swiveled the turret around to the front right, his guns tracking over the outboard Wright Cyclone, and six or eight fighters flashed by underwing, gone before he could register them.
The flak was everywhere around them, billowing in round puffs with strings of larger shrapnel trailing downward like legs. He was sweating, he realized, spinning the guns in an attempt to follow the action, his ears filled with bandits being called in and curses.
He spun to face front and angled the guns up to catch an echelon of four fighters coming down across and through the flight, their wings winking light even at that distance. They began taking on features instantaneously and he could see colors, insignia, letters, radio masts, yellow noses, then they flashed past—Me-109’s, he understood. He turned the turret again, his gloves light on the controls, and a fighter leaped at him like an apparition, impossibly close, shocking him immobile, and was gone. Its squared wing seemed to have passed through his turret. The burnt powder smell was thick even through the oxygen mask: everyone else was firing, and Paper Doll was trembling with the power of the recoils. A Messerschmitt spiraled by the nose with pieces tumbling back from its wings.
The air burst right before them, it seemed, just above Hirsch and Eddy in the nose, and he could see red fire within the black cauliflower shape and the air jarred like water in a bowl. The shrapnel rang over the plane like someone hitting it with steel pipes and Bryant shook on his sling until the world came back to level in a long slow sway. He found himself looking through the Plexiglas at another echelon coming around again and finally came to, in some way, and swept his guns around and up and framed in the glass of his gunsight a fighter’s blinking wings as it grew toward him. The fighter was shooting at them, he could
see, and the hits sounded around him like thunder and hail on his father’s tin shed, and he became aware of Gabriel screaming at him over the interphone to open up, for somebody to check on Bryant. The German’s tracers flipped and curved by and he hunched his shoulders in the turret instinctively. His thumbs squeezed and the guns deafened him and wrenched with recoil, and tracer streams wove out and toward the fighter which was already gone, flashing its half-S curve beneath them to loop back for another pass. He could hear and feel Snowberry below firing after him, and Lewis.
One Fortress from the flight was trailing smoke from two engines, and falling back. He couldn’t identify it, and didn’t have time. Even at that distance he saw holes stitch by magic in a line across the wing and upper fuselage, and the plane staggered in the air. Its gear fell, and it sheared away and slipped beneath his line of sight.
Another echelon came through, and everyone fired forward, Snowberry’s and Eddy’s and his own tracers braiding and coiling out toward the fighters, and he raced the turret around firing as they roared past in an attempt to track them.
He swept the turret the opposite way, feeling overloaded, overwhelmed. On the interphone Cooper called out bandits reforming ahead, Piacenti tracked one for Lewis, Ball was yelling something. Snowberry said, “My parents’ll kill me. I get killed now, my parents’ll kill me.”
A parachute went diagonally by, the man pulled at a crazy angle by the squadron’s prop wash.
Cooper and Hirsch announced the start of the initial point of the bomb run. From there to the main point of impact they’d be on automatic pilot, coupled to Eddy’s Norden bombsight, flying straight and level. The usual comparison was to metal ducks in a fairground gallery. Ahead of them the flak was concentrated into a barrage box in the area the flak gunners knew the formation would have to fly through. Bryant had heard it referred to as iron cumulus and now he saw it. The shells were all exploding at the same altitude—their altitude—and the detonations merged to form a low black anvil. The first planes of the flight were already pushing into it and he stared in wonder at their apparent survival even as the bursts approached and surrounded Paper Doll.
