by Jim Shepard
“We had a little fight,” Bryant said. “This has been some night.”
“Big night before a big day,” Snowberry said bitterly.
They walked on. Snowberry lined a rock off a postbox with another kick. He and Jean had not parted on the best of terms, either. “She said I was a spoiled brat,” he said. “Just out of shorts, and that I wasn’t going to give her the runaround. Then she turned on the waterworks.”
“She’s had some tough breaks,” Bryant commented.
“Ah, God,” he said. “Lewis warned me.” He bent over to discover why a stone he’d kicked hadn’t moved. “I shoulda known better. The thing is, she’s great.”
From somewhere around them a dog growled. They could see nothing but a few lights.
“I don’t need that right now,” Snowberry said. “I don’t need a dog bite.”
They waited, and then went quietly on. Bryant said, “What do you think about Bean?”
Snowberry made a dismissive noise that sounded like spitting. “Don’t you get it yet?” he said. “It’s all of us.” Down one of the turnoffs a horn blared and wavered. “Lewis is right. We’re not ready for this. There’s something big tomorrow now, and we’re not ready. We were taking that picture today and falling all over ourselves for downing that poor sorry bastard and it hit me: What are we ready for? What happens when we run into a shitstorm? On the run to Kassel they went through our formations like shit through a goose. I never even got my guns on them.”
“You sound like Lewis,” Bryant said. The conversion was not reassuring.
Snowberry snorted. “You should start thinking for yourself, and stop worrying about who sounds like who. How long has he been trying to tell us all this stuff?”
Bryant resisted the notion that Snowberry had reached a level of awareness that he had not. “I don’t see it that way,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t think we did so bad at Kassel.”
“Oh, yeah. Well. You didn’t even make it that far. Kayoed by the oxygen mask.”
“Don’t be a little asshole,” Bryant said. The “little” was a measure of how wounded he had been by Snowberry’s crack about the mask. “What good does it do to talk like that?”
“Look at this hand,” Snowberry said. Bryant couldn’t see it in the dark. “Christ.”
“Oh, God, let it be a milk run,” Snowberry added, minutes later, in a small voice. “Oh, let it be a milk run.”
He lay on his back and thought of his father.
It still seemed impossibly early. Somebody in the latrine was scrounging magazines from the trash drums. Lewis was where they had left him. Ball was asleep. Piacenti was playing solitaire, possibly; the cards were in unsteady rows beside him on the bed and Bryant could hear the faintest tapping as he laid one upon the other. Bryant had asked, on one of those interminable hunting trips when the plodding or the sun or the rain had finally angered him into courage, why he could never carry the gun, even when his father was obviously tired.
You can’t carry the gun, his father had answered. You’re a danger to yourself with a pointed stick.
The day he was to leave for the induction center, his mother had wrapped some pears and an apple together in a waxed-paper bundle for the train, and had urged him to say goodbye again to his father, waiting on the porch. His uncle Tom’s final words to him had been an admonition not to forget the following advice for getting by in the service: If you can move it, pick it up. If you can’t, paint it. If it moves by itself, salute it. Jeez, Bryant had thought. Here I am going away to something like this and that’s the best he can do? His father had been facing away from the house, gazing out over the clotheslines crowded with wash below.
“I should go if I’m going to be there by two-thirty,” Bryant had said, thinking, Turn around. Tell me I’m doing the right thing. Tell me you’re proud of all this. An inverted bright red shirt on the line waved, bye bye, bye bye.
“I’ve tried with you, Robert,” his father had said. “Your mother and I have tried. We hope you’re doing the right thing.”
He remembered lying on a cot in Florida with all those mosquitoes, thinking, You son of a bitch. If I ever get famous I’m gonna claim to be an orphan. He groaned aloud.
“Easy, trooper,” Lewis said from the opposite bunk. “Save your energy.”
He hadn’t been good enough for his father. He hadn’t been good enough to fly. He hadn’t been good enough to make bombardier, or navigator. He was an aerial gunner, and a flight engineer, and no one thought he could hit a barn at six feet and Tuliese didn’t trust him near the engines. He tried to calm himself with images of his own competence and grew frustrated. He tried to see himself again pouring fire into the hapless Messerschmitt they’d shot down, and saw instead the elusive lines of the others flashing through the formations, defeating easily the fastest manipulations of the turrets. He saw the cart-wheeling Lemon Drop, with that poor schmoe’s foot, and the Fortress from the Hamburg mission sailing into the hill. He lay under the sheets covered with sweat and dreaded the moment Lewis would notice his terror.
After a while he sat up. His feet hurt. His head pounded. The hut was darker and the sweat smell was stifling. Nearly everyone was awake. He could tell by the breathing. A little army of insomniacs, all listening, waiting, paying close attention to the night. He got off his bunk and started to walk and a voice said, “Watch the glasses, bub.” He headed for an upright shape on Lewis’s bunk. It turned out to be Snowberry.
Lewis was lying as he had been hours ago, hands behind his head. It seemed to Bryant a feat of some sort.
Snowberry whispered, “Somebody can’t sleep,” and Lewis grunted. Bryant slowly crouched beside the bed. They were quiet, and he felt like an intruder.
He became aware of another sound, a quiet and asthmatic sort of sniffing. Snowberry’s head was turned from both of them and he was crying.
Lewis wasn’t saying anything. Bryant was at a complete loss. He grimaced when he felt his own mouth trembling. Snowberry stopped for stretches, and swallowed, or made little tsking sounds with his tongue on his teeth. He did not rub his eyes or nose. Lewis seemed to be helping, though he didn’t move.
When Bryant’s knees hurt enough, he stood. Snowberry was still turned away. He crossed quietly to his bunk and climbed back into it, pulling the sheet up to his chin, remembering his grandmother in the doorway. He did not look back over at Snowberry and Lewis. He stared at the ceiling of the hut, which rippled in the darkness. He thought, tomorrow is just another mission, and, you need to sleep, and he closed his eyes to the ripples and to calm himself thought of Audie sitting blind and imperturbable in the Plexiglas nose while Ciervanski took her picture.
Someone hit the lights and he came out of what seemed a daze thinking something was wrong. He squinted and opened his eyes to slits and his watch said 1:15 a.m. All around him men were groaning and cursing. Snowberry was sitting upright already, blinking painfully. Lewis said, “Oh my God,” at the extent of his fatigue and the inhumanity of the hour.
With a refined touch of cruelty the orderly on wake-up duty read the bomb group’s timetable instead of repeating up-and-at-’em exhortations: breakfast, 0200; briefing, 0300; stations, 0515; alert, 0530; taxi, 0540; takeoff, 0550. “0550, gentlemen,” he repeated. “Let’s go.” He wasn’t going. He would be filling out forms and loafing around the day room for the next twelve hours while they did God knew what. Men swung without looking when he shook their covers, and near the door a gunner stood and shoved him with such force he cleared a bed and landed on his back. He lay stunned and winded with his arms and legs in the air like a baby’s. His breath returned with the sounds a long-distance runner makes.
“Hey,” he said, scrambling to his feet, alert for a general uprising. “Hey.” He was used to verbal abuse, and his voice registered his acute sense of the unfairness of physical abuse. He negotiated his way to the door and turned, a hand on the frame. “Stay in bed. See if I care. I hope they break all of you.” He turned off the lights and
left, affecting triumph, but everyone was up.
They dressed. Bryant had saved for this mission a fresh pair of long underwear. The idea was to have something to absorb the pre-takeoff sweat before reaching altitude and the paralyzing cold. The hope was that the wait before takeoff would be short, to minimize the soaking the underwear had to absorb.
Bean was powdering his feet. Bryant borrowed some of the powder without asking. He pulled on his beat-up GI shoes. That was the prevailing wisdom: in case of hard luck, something comfortable enough to walk miles in, and dirty enough not to arouse suspicion.
Bean and Lewis, Snowberry and Ball were all without discussion putting on their best Class A uniforms—olive drab, pressed and folded wool—beneath their flying suits. Ball carefully straightened a leg and his pants fell as if new, creaseless, to the shoetops. Bean was straightening his cuffs with a special slow care. Even Lewis was working on his tie, struggling slightly with the knot: none of them held any hope that this would be a normal mission, and they were not going to be killed or captured in the worn General Issue they usually wore.
At breakfast the coffee kept coming, and was served in thick white mugs that were pleasing to handle and drink from. Every cook in the squadron was on duty, and they were asking the men in line how each wanted his eggs done. There was ham and corned beef hash and bread and a little butter. They sat before their trays staring at the excess in wonder and fear. The place was packed with crews, including guys they recognized who had to have arrived within the last week, some of whom looked younger than Snowberry. Bryant thought: Suppose we’re in formation next to some of these guys?
Ball was evidently thinking the same thing. He said, “Man, if we’re incompetent, what does that make them?”
Everyone was talking about Berlin. Bryant was able to eat all of his hash and none of the eggs. Beside him Lewis and Snowberry ate without speaking. Bean sat before his plate and did not move. Piacenti drank three mugs of coffee and went back for more.
In the briefing room there were not enough seats, and men were leaning against the walls. One young staff sergeant who looked as if he were wearing his father’s jacket sat on the floor next to the door, his eyes half closed and his mouth ajar. The extra people crowded toward the front, peering closely at the sheet covering the mission board in an attempt to see through it.
“The pulley,” Snowberry said. They were squeezed into the second row. The pulley was near the top. All the yarn had been used. They looked at the bare metal spindle with the hope there had been some mistake. “Christ, where’re they sending us?” Lewis asked. “Arabia?”
It took some time to get everyone quiet enough to begin. “I know a guy,” Lewis said wistfully, “flew fifty missions, two whole tours, and never fired a shot.”
The Ops captain stepped up to the sheet. He put a hand on it and looked at them.
“Can you imagine milking something like this?” Snowberry said under his breath. If they could have killed the Ops captain at that moment, they would have.
The sheet was pulled back. The red yarn went all the way through Germany nearly to the Austrian border.
The room was in total shock. The Ops captain who’d pulled the sheet stood quietly beside it, hands clasped, and leaned forward and gazed at it again, as if wondering if the silence were due to an empty board.
The room exploded. There were protests and loud exclamations. One group was booing. Everyone was shouting questions. Bryant sat silently and thought, What idiot dreamed this up? Lewis said clearly through the noise, “Look at the map. Their entire fighter strength has to be within eighty-five miles of that course. How many fucking fighters do you think that is?”
Snowberry was white. “How can we go that far without fighter escort?” he asked.
It took five minutes to calm everyone down. The briefing continued.
“Schweinfurt,” Snowberry said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
A major whom Bryant hadn’t seen before centered himself beside the screen, eclipsing the captain. “The primary targets,” he said, lowering his volume as the crews quieted, “are the three major ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt.”
Bryant and Bean looked at one another. What was next? Zipper factories?
“Bomber Command tells us that this is the most important target ever attacked by aircraft. This is the big deal, gentlemen, as you can see.”
He pointed to the board, as if there were something further to emphasize. “Now this is a revolutionary way of employing the strategic bomber, and you men are the first to be a part of it; we will mount a sustained attack against one especially vital industry, rather than spreading ourselves thin over a number of targets. Schweinfurt is what we call a bottleneck target, gentlemen. Nazi fighters—and a whole hell of a lot of other things in Germany—run on ball bearings. Hundreds of ball bearings, thousands in one plane alone. Seventy-six percent of those ball bearings, seventy-six percent of all the bearings in Germany, come from Schweinfurt. Get Schweinfurt and you get seventy-six percent of the bearings that make the Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts go. I suspect that that is an item of personal interest to you men.”
“Ha, ha,” someone said from the back of the room.
The major continued.
“There will be, simultaneously, a mission against the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg.” He pointed.
“Probably the second most important target ever attacked,” Piacenti whispered.
“The second most important target ever attacked by aircraft,” the major said. A sheet was pulled back from a second smaller board and the Regensburg mission was outlined. The men stared. The number of planes now involved in this joint mission was staggering.
“The Messerschmitt factory produces some three hundred fighters a month, a full thirty percent of the total. The idea, gentlemen, is to break the Luftwaffe fighter arm. To break it for you men, and to break it in preparation for the planned invasion of Europe.” He paused. “I don’t think I’m giving too much away to tell you men that,” he said.
“Couldn’t we just keep going after airfields, like Le Bourget?” Piacenti asked quietly.
The screen came down. They were shown photo blow-ups. They were given details of the three targets. The impossible German names for the factories they shortened to KGF, VKF 1, and VKF 2. They learned that Kugel meant spherical in German.
They felt worse receiving elaborate explanations. It seemed un-military and un-Army for their commanding officers to be so willing to confide in them. They did not expect to know precisely why they went on missions. There was not going to be a vote. They nursed the possibility that they went on some of the missions because somebody somewhere simply felt like sending them. The major spoke again of the critical concentration of ball bearings.
“We got ’em by the colones,” Piacenti said.
“Have you ever heard such dog shit in all your life?” Lewis said. “After we do this, all the machines stop. Germany surrenders.”
But they were incompletely focused on the importance of the targets. What most interested them was the length of yarn line. Their fighter escort range, drawn in an arc through the Netherlands with a blue pen, covered a forlorn fifth of the distance.
The line-up of formations and squadron positions was still concealed. It made a great deal of difference in the defensive boxes whether they were in the center, or on the leading or trailing edges, where the heaviest casualties were.
The crews were waiting for that unveiling. They had quieted and sat in orderly rows and everyone behind Bryant looked too young. The crew of Murder, Inc. had that stenciled over their left front pockets. Bryant was reminded of a school assembly.
One of the Murder, Inc. gunners, a skinny Polish guy named Skink or Strink or something like that, caught Bryant’s eyes with his own. “It just goes to show you,” he said, across the intervening row, “how important the little ball bearing is to our mechanized world.”
Bryant stared at him a moment longer, and turned back around.
“Who is that guy?” Lewis asked.
“Now we’ll talk about the opposition,” the major said.
He pointed to concentrations of black X’s—their symbols for German airfields—lining the yarn route, little visible manifestations of bad news. “Men, we’re going to be straight with you. There’s no hiding the fact that these raids are going to be hazardous.”
“That’s why you’re going to be straight with us,” Snowberry said audibly and bitterly.
“Mission planners have been able, as you can see, to choose routes avoiding the worst of the flak areas, and both targets have never been attacked before, so they’re believed to be lightly defended.” He indicated the blank spaces at the bottom of the map surrounding Regensburg and Schweinfurt. “In addition, Bomber Command has planned diversionary raids on German airfields at Bryas, Lille, and Poix, and the railway yards at Dunkirk and Calais. We’ve never even flown this far into Germany before, so they’re obviously going to be surprised.” His pointer stopped and tapped along the yarn up near the Dutch border. “The problem is that fighters are obviously going to be the danger of the day. I’m not going to mince words. We’re going to be flying through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense and deep into their homeland.”
“Oh, mince, mince,” someone said.
“And the length of the mission prevents any elaborate zigzagging or avoidance of these areas.”
“Some fucking colonel thought this one up,” Lewis breathed. “Some fucking desk-bound colonel of a bastard.”
“The Regensburg force is not coming back. They are going on to temporary airfields in North Africa. We, on the other hand, are going to turn around, and come back through those same defenses.” The crews were noisy with anxiety again. “The expectation is,” the major said, getting louder, “that the Regensburg people, going through before us, will catch most of it going in. And that we’ll catch all of it going out.”
The men sat. This was worse than they could have imagined. Bryant absorbed the information that followed with less than perfect concentration.
