Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Afterward, as they consumed their ritual waffles and champagne, Frank said: “I’m beginning to think we may stay out of this war after all. Even if the Germans eventually beat the Russians, they won’t have the strength or inclination to attack anyone for a decade. By that time we’ll be strong enough to maul them if they come our way.”

  “Last week Adrian predicted we’d be at war with the Germans and the Japanese before Christmas.”

  “The Japanese?” Frank said. “We’re negotiating with them. I don’t think they want a war with us. They’re using themselves up in China, like the Germans in Russia.”

  Hope, love, his yearning for peace, were so visible on Frank’s face, Amanda reached out to touch it. Never had she felt more whole, more certain that her life was complete.

  The telephone rang. Was it Adrian? No, he was in Washington. But it probably was someone else from Buchanan, invading Eden with a problem in the design or engineering departments. Amanda brooded. She considered demanding the removal of that telephone.

  Frank was on the phone. But he was not doing his Chinese houseboy routine. He was not doing anything. He was standing with the telephone clutched against his ear as if he had been turned into stone.

  “Fly as many planes as possible to smaller airports!” he shouted. “Get all our design and engineering papers underground, as deep as possible. Bury them in a ditch if necessary. Stop the production line and send everyone home for twenty-four hours. We have to assume we’re a primary target.”

  He put down the telephone and blinked into the sunlight. “Adrian was right,” he said. “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor this morning. They sank most of our battleships. Maybe now our dimwit admirals and generals will start believing in air power.”

  War was in Frank’s voice. Rage and revenge and death was in his name. The five letters no longer named everything beautiful in the world. Frank was part of the ugly flood that was swirling through Eden with all war’s flotsam, gouged bodies and smashed homes and shattered planes.

  Now Amanda knew what her mother had felt twenty-five years ago. She understood the undertow that had dragged her down into madness. It was not weak genes, as her vile brother Gordon claimed. It was the destruction of Eden. It made a woman welcome the obliteration of her mind, her memory.

  “Don’t,” Frank said, trying to brush the tears from her cheeks. “I know how much this means to you—”

  “It’s the end of this. The end of us.”

  “Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini—all of them together can’t do that.”

  Amanda shook her head. “The war will change everything. It won’t be the same country. It won’t be the same California.”

  “But we’ll be the same.”

  “No. You’ve already changed. I’ll change too.”

  “Maybe we won’t see each other so often. But why should we stop loving each other?”

  “The love won’t stop. It will always be there. But we’ll stop living in it the way we have this year.”

  “If I have anything to say about it, that won’t happen.”

  Amanda watched him fling on clothes for the trip to the factory. “It’s happening already,” she said.

  BOOK FOUR

  THE YANK AND THE SKYLARK

  “Geoffrey!” Sarah Chapman said, as the tall airman in his bomber jacket strode past her.

  Geoffrey Archer squinted into the spring sunlight, simultaneously managing to look past Sarah—or through her—across the runways of RAF Bedlington. Geoffrey was what Sarah and her friends at St. Agatha’s School called a Profile. Deep-socketed eyes that suggested haunted thoughts of lost love or suppressed sexual desires, a resolute mouth that intimated a readiness to face death with dauntless courage. (Romantic mush, but that was the way seventeen-year-olds thought in 1943.) At a dance at the Grantham Country Club for the pilots of the nearby air-base where he was training, Geoffrey had been Sarah’s constant partner. Only when the band cut loose with a boogie-woogie beat did he abandon her—explaining that he detested American dancing. Sarah liked to jitterbug but she meekly agreed with his condemnation and sat out the jive, watching her friend Felicity Kingswood swirling her skirts to mid-thigh on the floor with a peppery Welshman.

  At the end of the night, as they stood on the terrace drinking punch, Sarah had told Geoffrey a secret she had withheld even from her parents. She was planning to join the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force when she graduated from St. Agatha’s next month. “The WAAFs are an absolutely rotten idea,” Geoffrey said. “My brother says they do nothing but muck up procedures wherever they go.”

  Stunned and angry, Sarah had said good night to Geofl-rey without a kiss and conferred with her friend Felicity, who downgraded Geoffrey from a Profile to a Poltroon. Now here they were, face to face again nine months later.

  “Oh—hello,” Geoffrey said.

  “I didn’t take your advice about the WAAFs, as you can see,” she said, gesturing to her crinkly new uniform.

  “Too bad,” Geoffrey said. “Everything I’ve seen so far here at Bedlington has only convinced me my brother was right. You’d be doing much more for the war effort working in a factory or nursing in an army hospital.”

  Off he went into the sunshine, leaving Sarah in a stew of embarrassment and fury. She had been at Bedlington exactly one week and so far she had found very little that pleased her. Most of the pilots, those beings she had hero-worshiped since girlhood, seemed to share Geoffrey’s opinion of WAAFs. Their aircrews and the ground officers at Bedlington were not much better.

  Things had started going wrong the first day, when Sarah made the mistake of strolling in the front door of the former guardhouse that had been converted into the Waafery—their headquarters building where the CO and officers lived. The CO, who looked like the Queen Mum having a permanent tantrum, had excoriated her for such a breach of etiquette. Mere privates used the back door, as befitted servants. Imbued with a healthy detestation of England’s class system thanks to her father and one or two radical teachers at St. Agatha’s, Sarah had almost strangled with rage.

  Worse, the so-called officers of the WAAF administrative staff were so foggy, they did not even know what an RTO—radio telephone operator—was. One suggested they go to the orderly room and learn to read timetables and absorb other information necessary to train railway transport officers.

  Sarah and Felicity and three others were the first RTOs to reach Bedlington, and everyone, male and female, seemed baffled by their appearance. Someone finally sent them out to the Watch Office, a square box-like building on the edge of the airfield’s perimeter where male RTOs talked to incoming planes over upright microphones. An officer wearing the rings of a squadron leader on his sleeve hemmed and hawed and confessed no one had warned him of their arrival. He suggested they take a weekend pass while he figured out what to do with them.

  On fourteen shillings every two weeks, none of them had the train or bus fare to go home—if they had the desire. Like Sarah, most of them had spent exhausting months convincing their parents to sign the waiver that permitted them to join up and they did not want to face inevitable interrogation and admit even a moment’s disillusion.

  Now Geoffrey Archer’s epitome of male condescension! Steam all but flowing from her ears, Sarah stormed back to their brick hut filled with facing rows of iron beds and told Felicity about the latest insult. “Let’s show the bastards we know where the grass is greener,” Felicity said. “The Yanks are having a dance at Rackreath. They’re sending over a bus to the village at seventeen hundred hours. Get on your war paint.”

  “Wizzo!” Sarah said, displaying her RAF slang in an ironic mode.

  Best blues were pressed and buttons polished with Silvo (rather than Brasso) until they looked like the genuine expensive article. Shoes gleamed; freshly laundered shirts and collars were sacrificed without a murmur. Jane Newhouse was the only one with silk stockings. The rest of them had to tolerate the government’s lisle. They all washed and set their hair and combed it just
a little longer than the regulation length, so that it curled on their collars and below their ears. Sarah enjoyed the sensation of shaking her head and feeling her dark brown curls swing softly, loose from the ribbon she usually wore.

  Finally came the makeup. Beneath her mother’s puritanical eye, Sarah had never worn any. Felicity had introduced her to buying theatrical greasepaint for lipstick and eye shadow. It was much cheaper than commercial makeup and looked perfectly natural, if it was used with care. At Jane’s suggestion—she was in her twenties and talked a lot about attracting men—Sarah blended a spot of greasepaint along her cheekbone to give her pale skin a bit more color.

  A dash of Evening in Paris here and there and they were ready. They gamboled down Green Lane, an old Roman road that ran across the airbase and continued between low hedges and budding trees to the thatched roofs of Woodbastwick village. A tan U.S. Army Air Forces bus was purring on the narrow main street. They joined a dozen women from the village and rode across the wide Norfolk plain, as level and green as the top of a billiard table, past more villages like Woodbastwick full of the timeless tranquillity that inspired visitors to murmur “There’ll always be an England.” It was hard to believe that across the North Sea were ninety million Germans and their fanatic führer, determined to make that remark an anachronism.

  War. Sarah could not quite grasp the horror with which her parents said the word. She knew her mother had lost two brothers in France during the Great War, as the textbooks called it—and her father had been shot down and badly injured in the Royal Flying Corps. But to her this second Great War was still an adventure, a marvelous opportunity to escape her mother’s dominating grasp. Besides, they were going to win this time without so much slaughter. The Americans had come into the war early—instead of waiting until the last possible minute, as they had done in 1917. Her mother was quite bitter about the Americans for waiting so long the last time.

  Sarah had no such prejudices. Individually, Americans were creatures she had only seen in the movies. Craggy—jawed cowboys in ten-gallon hats who said “howdy” instead of “hello”—or squat gangsters who said “troo” instead of “through”—or wiseguys who called women “Babe.” She shared her father’s admiration for their industrial and military might. As senior designer for de Havilland Aircraft company, he was awed by the statistics that emanated from Washington, D.C.. “Last month the Americans turned out three thousand planes,” he said one night at supper, shortly before she left for the WAAFs. “Three thousand planes!”

  That was twice what England could produce in a month. It meant victory was guaranteed. It entitled Sarah to regard her plunge into WAAFdom as an adventure, with no darker overtones. Mother could brood on England’s losses, on another generation of broken hearts. She was eighteen and the world was enormously exciting. It teemed with brave men in hurtling planes, defying death and a vicious enemy. She loved them all—at least, she did until she met Geoffrey Archer and the assembled male supremacists and attendant female dodos of RAF Bedlington.

  The American dance was in the Rackreath officers’ club, in a big darkened room with a bar on one side and a band jammed against the opposite wall. The band was playing Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” with a wild intensity that made Sarah’s flesh tingle. The whole room reverberated with the music and a cacophony of voices from the crowd of airmen around the bar. There was a frantic undercurrent to the voices and the jitterbugging couples on the floor. Everyone seemed to be flinging themselves into the party with something very close to frenzy

  There were no introductions, no formalities. The women trickled along the wall and stood shyly waiting for something to happen. It did not take long. The womanless drinkers around the bar stormed toward them in a cheerful, chortling mob. The village girls were snatched onto the floor like slaves off an auction block. It took a little longer to reconnoiter the WAAFs.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got beautiful eyes?” said a deep confident voice. Sarah gazed up at one of the handsomest man she had ever seen. He was well over six feet with a profile that capitalized the entire word, a tough mouth and thick dark hair combed straight back à la Robert Taylor. “I think my nanny used to whisper that to me in my cradle,” Sarah said. “After her, you’re the very first.”

  It was such an obvious come-on, she felt her irony was justified. It was also a way of warding off the impact of his overwhelming maleness. He led her out on the floor before he bothered to introduce himself. “Cliff Morris, California.”

  She realized he was slightly drunk. That did not disturb her. Hard drinking and planes more or less went together. Her father often came home “snookered,” as her mother called it. Her mother did not approve, of course. But her mother approved of very little.

  “Sarah Chapman, Sussex,” she said. “Are you a pilot?”

  “Captain of the Rainbow Express,” he said. “What are you doing in that uniform?”

  “Not much of anything for the moment. But I expect to be talking to pilots like you in a week or so—in the RAF. I’m a radio telephone operator, stationed at Bedlington.”

  “You may be talking to us too,” he said. “A half dozen of our flying wrecks went into Bedlington after the last raid. You’re fourteen miles closer to the North Sea. That can make a lot of difference when you’re operating on one motor.”

  Totally unaware of what the Eighth Air Force was experiencing over Germany, Sarah expressed surprise. “The communiques are all so upbeat,” she said. “Have your losses been heavy?”

  Cliff Morris seemed to hold her a little closer, as if he needed warmth or comfort. “We lost a hundred and sixty-eight planes over Schweinfurt last week. In our bomb group the losses were fifty percent.”

  “My God. How many missions have you flown?” Sarah asked.

  “Sixteen,” Cliff said. “We were one of the first to get here. We’ve had the privilege of learning the hard way.”

  Sarah felt an enormous surge of sympathy. This man had come six thousand miles—from that state with the exotic name, California—to help fight England’s battle. He was talking about the deaths of his friends—his own death—with the calm steady voice of courage.

  “My father’s a tremendous admirer of your bomber, the B—Seventeen,” she said.

  “Oh? You should see the list of things I just sent to my father—stepfather, actually—telling him what’s wrong with the damn thing.”

  “Your father’s in the aircraft business?”

  “He’s head of production for Buchanan Aircraft.”

  “Oh, I say. This is a coincidence. My father’s with de Havilland. He often talks of the man who founded Buchanan—was his name Frank?”

  “Frank Buchanan’s practically my uncle. I’ve known him since I was six years old. My stepfather started the company with him.”

  “My father and he worked together before the first war, designing planes for de Haviland.”

  In the shadowy room, her eyes burning from the cigarette smoke, the brassy music exploding in her ears, surrounded by the swirling swaying bodies of the other dancers, Sarah felt an aura envelop them, a compound of sympathy and fatality and attraction. Cliff Morris’s arms crushed her against his broad chest as he talked excitedly about Buchanan Aircraft and its future. Planes were going to change the world after they won the war and Buchanan was going to be among the leaders in designing and making them. Frank Buchanan was a genius who would keep them perpetually ahead of the competition.

  Into Sarah’s mind flashed a vision of a dynastic marriage in the grand tradition. Her brother Derek would rise to power and fame in de Havilland while Cliff Morris rose to similar heights at Buchanan. She would be the link between them, urging each to greater and greater achievements, to better and better planes to defend the Anglo-American empire and preserve a peaceful world.

  Cliff led her across the floor to a table where a half-dozen men were sitting with glasses of liquor in front of them. Five had English girls in their laps, two of them behaving amo
rously. “Hey, you bums,” he said. “I found us a lucky charmer. This girl knows Frank Buchanan. Knows what a great designer he is. Wait’ll you see the job he does on our flying coffins after he gets my letter.”

  He introduced Sarah to the crew of the Rainbow Express. They were a blur of names and titles—bombardier, waist gunners, belly gunners—except for two. One was the tail gunner, Mike Shannon. He was distinguished by his diminutive size—and the presence of her friend Felicity in his lap. The other man was the navigator, Dick Stone, who did not have a girl in his lap. Cliff drunkenly insisted Sarah should talk to Stone. “He doesn’t think we should be bombing the goddamn Nazis,” Cliff said. “Tell him what the bastards did to London.”

  Sarah did not know much more about what the Germans had done to London than anyone else who read the papers and listened to the radio. “Why don’t you think we should be bombing the Huns?” she asked Stone, trying to make a semi—joke of it.

  “I don’t think anything of the sort,” Stone said. He was a swarthy, square-jawed young man with horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a rather scholarly air. “I think we should be bombing them more accurately. To make sure we aren’t killing women and children—or destroying irreplaceable cultural treasures. I’m all for bombing military targets.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone bombs?” Sarah said.

  “Miss Chapman—I don’t want to upset you—but the British in my opinion are becoming mass murderers on a scale infinitely beyond Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Your night raids on German cities don’t have even a pretense of attacking military targets. They’re terror bombing, pure and simple—or should I say impure and simply horrifying?”

  Sarah was simultaneously angry and bewildered. It was the first time she had ever heard anyone connect morality and airplanes. Heretofore planes existed in a world beyond morality, the transcendent universe of the sky. They were an escape from the trivial groundling world of shoulds and shouldn’ts that her mother was perpetually invoking. She knew planes could be as maddening as an inconstant lover, as dangerous as a loaded gun. But she never thought of them as vessels of morality.