by Bill Mesce
“You’d be surprised what you can live with, Harry,” I said. “I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine in your worst dreams; things that make this — ” I tapped my hollow leg “ — look as trivial as a child tearing the wings off flies. It’s an old war, Harry. There’s no novelty left in it.”
“I’ve already been lectured once this week. Spain, China...I’ve heard it. I don’t need to hear it again.”
I smiled mirthlessly. “Oh, this is a much older war than that.”
“How far back do you want to go?” he snapped. “Versailles? Bismarck?”
“You’re thinking on the wrong scale, Harry. Charlemagne was only yesterday and so was Caesar. Go back before Cain coshed poor Abel, before Paradise, to the first war when the angels fought. That’s a lot of blood over the dam since then. This isn’t even a ripple in the flood. Let it go.”
The truth of it withered him like a collapsing balloon.
“Can I ask you something? I’ve been doing my lessons, and as I understand your courts-martial, the officer who calls for the trial — ”
“The Convening Authority.”
“Yes, well, he’s the chap that picks the officers for the jury. Originally, that would’ve been Halverson, but when DiGarre sacked him, that fell to DiGarre, so he would’ve been the man picking your jurors. Both counsel can challenge any juror, but DiGarre would pick the replacements, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And all courts-martial verdicts automatically go to the Court of Military Review before being set, and the defendant can take his case further, to the Court of Military Appeal, and even all the way up to your Supreme Court. You couldn’t possibly have expected a guilty verdict to stand up to all that, could you? Providing you could somehow coax, arm-twist, and/or beg a conviction out of a DiGarre jury? Well, did you honestly think you could get it to stand up? You couldn’t actually have thought you’d’ve win?”
He shook his head slowly. “It would have been on the record that no matter what else happens in this war, what happened at Helsvagen on August fifteenth, 1943, was not an act of war committed by soldiers. They murdered a town, Eddy! It would’ve been on the record that even in a war, you are accountable for your crimes.”
“That would’ve been enough for you?”
He shrugged bleakly. “It would’ve been something.”
It was all so painfully clear on his face: the frustration, the self-doubt, and the nearly complete lack of comprehension. That complicity of agonies elicited a pang of recognition and when he turned to me, surprised, I realized it was in response to my sigh. I had felt everything he felt, only it had been a long time ago.
“You’re feeling like the sole rational voice among the insane,” I said, and he nodded. “You wonder why you’re the only one who can see the great wrong here. You wonder how such things can happen. What kind of men do such things? What moves them? I’ll wager you’ve been over the biographies of these men a dozen times, thinking there must be some clue there, some taint of villainy, something that makes them different from you or me. But you’re looking for order in a disordered universe. There is no ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Just us.”
He began to shake his head, but I cut him off. “I told you, Harry: I’ve witnessed every malfeasance one human being can visit on another; experienced one or two — ” I tapped my wooden leg in illustration “ — close up. I’ve recorded it all and sent it home for the entertainment of my readers, this gallery of the grotesque we call news,’ because that’s my job. And from that vast, unpleasant experience I can tell you that if you’re looking for that definitive insight that will let you sleep at night, you won’t find it. You want to know why such things happen? They happen.”
“It’s not that simple.”
I shrugged grimly. “It only sounds simple. Before this war is over, there’ll be a million Major Markhams, maybe more. They’ll all have done something they wish they hadn’t, something they’ll want to forget, something they’ll never tell their children. They’ll do those things because that’s their job. And by that time, what may or may not have happened at Helsvagen will be just a raindrop in the flood.
“It may also very well be by that time — and I suppose this is a sad thing — you will come to stop wondering about these things. You grow...numb.”
I reached out a comforting hand and laid it on his forearm. “Sorry, old man. If you want comfort, don’t ask for the truth. Ask for this.” I poured him another splash from the bottle.
We finished a last drink, and then he let me guide him to my bed, dumbly shuffling along as I pushed him down atop the bedclothes. By the time I’d loosened his tie and pulled off his shoes, he was asleep.
He did not sleep long, and when he awakened I invited him to join me for breakfast at a patisserie I knew, but he declined. I suggested an afternoon at the pubs come opening time, sitting outside in the summer air sipping pints of Courage ale until we became silly and shrugged off the dark humors with a good binge. But he’d have none of it and I knew — knew even then — it would take more than a pint of Courage to clean out what gnawed at his vitals.
“I just want to go home,” he said.
I promised to ring him on the morrow for lunch and he nodded agreeably.
Big Ben had come round to another hour as I watched him trudge off from my window, his slope-shouldered, stodgy form growing smaller down the street. He brought to mind a verse from Thomas Gray:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I crawled into my kip and was soon asleep, but found no rest in it. Toward late afternoon I roused myself, had some lunch and a pint at a nearby pub, and then afternoon became evening and I was still at the pub.
What had I used to do with myself? I wondered. Those days when there wasn’t some story to chase, a column to write? There were colleagues I could join at the pub, us buying each other rounds and grousing about “the job,” but colleagues weren’t friends. Family? My parents rested under a moss-crusted marker in a Stonehaven graveyard I’d not laid eyes on in years. Except for Cathryn, it hardly seemed to have been much of a life.
Such grim musing kept the drinks going down until I stumbled home late that evening and dropped into bed in a blissfully blank liquored stupor. Only an urgent knocking at the door stirred me the following morning.
I answered the door snarling and growling, but froze at the sight of the messenger in the hall. I recognized him from Harry’s narrative, this gawky figure in American uniform, corporal’s chevrons, and confused demeanor: the infamous Corporal Nagel. He carried a sealed manila envelope marked with my name and the caution “Personal.” The corporal offered no explanation other than to say that Major Voss had ordered him to see that the envelope was placed directly in my hands. It was the major’s last instruction.
“They shipped him out,” Nagel explained. “Orders came in yesterday. He just about grabbed the train for Liverpool. He went out last night on an OB convoy for the States.”
I thanked him and he asked if I wanted him to wait. I couldn’t imagine what he imagined I would want him to wait for, and I began to understand why Harry could not mention his corporal without wincing. Before I could shoo the young man away he begged my pardon and told me he couldn’t stay.
“Got another fella coming in later this week, they tell me,” he said. “Got to get the office ready for him,” and off he went.
I closed the door, sat on my bed and opened the envelope. Inside was a file folder, and in the folder photostats of what seemed to be some sort of after-operations report. There was also a scribbled note:
Eddy —
Tried calling but no answer. No time to come by.
The girl should know about this. Tell her for me.
Take care.
— Harry
Then, scribbled across the bottom
of the page in what, compared to the measured script above, appeared to be a hasty afterthought:
Do what you can for her.
At approximately five o’clock the morning before, during the very same time when Harry was spinning out his long and woeful story to me, an orderly at Elsworth Airfield, lighting his way with an electric torch, entered the dark, shared room of Major Albert Markham and Captain Jon-Jacob Anderson to nudge them awake for their first mission with their new unit. The orderly woke Markham first, and would remember that it took considerable shaking to rouse the major from his deep sleep. “There’s few sleep that good before a mission,” he’d recall. Then he turned to Anderson.
The captain was already awake, and it was the orderly’s impression that the captain had been awake for some time. The orderly noted a faint glimmer in the gloom of the floor, and his light illuminated a piece of hammered tin by the captain’s bunk that had been used as an ashtray. It was filled to the brim with butts. As the beam of the orderly’s torch swept across the captain, Anderson’s face glittered with beads of perspiration. Later that morning, when the orderly returned to make up the bunks, he would notice a human outline left on the captain’s bedclothes, a silhouette imprinted by sweat.
After the orderly made his rounds of billets in the Quonset hut, he returned to each room to see if any of the pilots required assistance suiting up. Markham dismissed him with a polite and appreciative smile, assuring him they were just fine on their own as he and Anderson helped each other on with their burdensome flight kit: thermal underwear, flight overalls, .45 automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, heavy fleece-lined flight trousers, and boots. The rest of their kit they carried over their shoulders to morning mess.
Heeding the 52nd Fighter Group’s CO’s admonitions, contacts with Markham and Anderson had been friendly but reserved since the duo had arrived at the aerodrome two days earlier. Still, there had been discreet tokens of support from their fellow fliers: a round of drinks at the Officers Club, conspiratorial winks. The men of the unit didn’t know the details of Markham’s and Anderson’s predicament, but knew all too well that it was two brother warriors on one side and “deskbound brass hats” on the other. They didn’t need to know more than that to extend their support. Their squadron commander, a heavy-browed captain from Colorado named Matthew “Big Matt” Berger, told both with inordinate deference that if they required anything they should not hesitate to ask.
Markham, it would be remembered, was friendly, open, relaxed, made a point of wishing all who made greeting good luck on the day Anderson made the same attempt, but there was a tinny quality to his jests and apparent enthusiasm for the day’s action. Still, they thought he — like any of them — was entitled to deal with his stresses as he saw fit. So they played along, commenting appreciatively on his hearty appetite when he forced down a second helping of breakfast that day; the young flight lieutenant the captain hadn’t noticed in a corner stall of the latrine would not mention to his fellows seeing Anderson vomit up that very same breakfast not long after.
After morning mess they all trekked to the briefing hall, where they took notes on the small pads clipped to their legs regarding the target (U-boat pens at Emden), weather conditions along the line of flight, course changes and escort assignments, altitudes, radio frequencies, code designations, flak and enemy fighter concentrations, time and point of rendezvous with the B-17’s coming up from Bushy Park, notes on developing enemy tactics. Then it was on with the rest of their equipment — the heavy flight jacket, the dragging parachute, the bright yellow Mae West — after which jeeps ferried them to the flight line.
The sun was up now, the morning growing warm and humid, more so for the pilots encased in their fleece-lined flying clothes. The coveralls of the ground crews were already dappled with sweat from the fueling and gunloading procedures. The ground crews had just finished the pre-flight cockpit checks as the pilots drove up.
Anderson, still playing the jaunty cavalier, called his crew to help his foreshortened figure — weighed down with his flight kit — onto the wing of his ship. He made some light-hearted remark that perhaps as the armor-drenched knights of old had been horsed, the ground crews should similarly use a winch to raise up the pilots and lower them into their cockpits. The ground crew laughed. “Good idea, Cap!” one called out.
Markham’s ground crew chief was a weather-beaten mechanic from Idaho with a son half the age of his pilot. The crew chief greeted his new charge with a proper salute, which Markham returned, but then he broke the formalities by taking the chiefs hand in a warm handshake. “Always like to stay friendly with the people who make sure it flies.” Markham smiled and nodded at his P-47.
The crew chief, who would long remember the incredible poise of the young major, stood on the wing by the open cockpit as the other crew members helped strap Markham into the cockpit. Another crew member ran strips of adhesive tape over the muzzles of the ship’s eight .50-caliber guns to keep out dust during takeoff. The chief reported a satisfactory pre-flight cockpit check. Markham nodded again and thanked him, then pulled on his lined gauntlets, throat transmitter, and leather flying helmet. Connections were made for Markham’s transmitter and helmet earphones. Then, the crew cleared the ship and the chief leaned over into the cockpit.
He explained how Elsworth was an old RAF aerodrome and the runways had not been designed with the weighty P-47 in mind. “Till you get used to it, the line chief’ll be at the runway,” he told Markham. “You watch him. He’ll have you crank ’er up higher ’n’ you’re used to, but you wait ’n’ he’ll give you the signal to let her roll. After a coupla times you won’t have no trouble.”
Markham thanked the chief for his consideration and said, “See you soon.” The chief clambered off the wing and joined the other ground crew members along the taxiway.
At 0802 a green flare was fired from the control tower mezzanine. All along the flight line pilots clicked their ignition switch to “starter,” energizers whined, then the switch went to “engine,” and with a cough and plumes of blue exhaust the four-bladed propellers began to windmill. Engines caught, roared, propeller blades disappeared in transparent, glimmering discs. Leather-clad heads bowed in the cockpits to check gauges, fingers flicking at the glass dials to make sure indicator needles swung freely. One by one, as the engine mercury rose halfway to the red line, pilots raised a gauntleted hand to signal “ready.”
Markham’s crew chief would remember his pilot holding his hand above the rim of the open cockpit, cupping his fingers to catch the prop wash like a child catching the breeze out the window of a speeding automobile. “Like he didn’t have no care in the world,” he would recall.
The crew chief signaled his men to pull the wheel chocks clear. With a second flare from the tower, the line of Thunderbolts began to slowly rumble down the taxiway. Each moved in a sluggish zigzag to keep the following aeroplane from being buffeted by its prop wash. Ground crew walked along each side of the tarmac as markers for their pilots who couldn’t see the borders of the taxi way over the thick nose of the P-47.
The slightly understrength group — thirty-two ships in all — moved onto the runway in two-ship elements. Markham and Anderson moved on together, the fourth pair of the second squadron. They wheeled their ships to point down the stretch of tarmac and cranked their cockpit canopies closed. They looked for the line chief by the side of the runway, spied him whirling a small red hand flag in rapid circles, signaling them to rev their engines higher. They moved their throttles to full rich and stood on their brakes as their ships began to shudder and buck with the rising crescendo of the engines. When the line chief was pleased with the pitch of the engines, he brought his flag down in a slash and Markham and Anderson released their brakes and began trundling down the runway. Slowly, each eased six tons of aluminum, steel, petrol, and ammunition into the heavy morning air. The landing gear retreated into its wells and soon Markham and Anderson had joined the fighters above the field, where they circled
until the entire group was airborne and assembled.
The group flew east, picking up their B-17 Flying Fortress charges heading northeast over the Channel in just a few minutes. The fighter squadrons separated into their assignments with Markham and Anderson an element in the high squadron. They armed the electrical firing systems for their wing guns, each letting loose a short test burst, then flew well clear of the Fortresses while the bomber gunners test-fired their own guns.
The mission’s first Initial Point turned the formation east, the Thunderbolts above and below the Fortresses, jinking to keep pace with the slower bombers. The flight was quiet, with the exception of some scattered and ineffectual ack-ack from the coastal defenses west of Amsterdam. East of Amsterdam, after crossing over the Ijsselmeer, the formation hit their second Initial Point and turned northeast. Only a few minutes after their turn, Big Matt Berger’s wingman flipped his motor to get the captain’s attention. He directed Berger’s gaze to the two Thunderbolts slowly pulling away from the formation. The two fighters had the sun behind them so Berger could not identify them. He hand-signaled and then waggled his wings to get their attention, but the fighters continued drifting off. Berger contemplated breaking radio silence to call the ships in, or even flying over to herd the pair back into formation, but his paramount responsibility was to the bombers. He held his position.
A minute or so after Big Matt Berger had been warned about the drifting aeroplanes he saw them both fly into a cloud, a small, solitary nimbus that seemed to be waiting for them. He could hear no noise above the din of his engine, but within the cloud he saw a sudden explosive flash; moments later, bits of shining aluminum rained out of the cloud, fluttering earthward like metallic snow.
Before the incident truly registered with him, “Bandits!” crackled over his headset, and he saw the low squadron dropping their belly tanks and peeling off to engage a gaggle of Focke-Wulfs hurtling upward at the bombers. Berger loosed his own drop tank, his squadron following suit, and followed them into the fray.
