Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “See what I mean?” Cliff Morris said. “How would you like to have a navigator like this guy? To make it even worse, he’s Jewish—you’d think he’d be cheering every bomb we dropped.”

  “Hitler and his crowd are anti-Semites. But I think the German people’s anti-Semitism has been exaggerated,” Dick Stone said.

  “I’m not qualified to comment on their anti-Semitism,” Sarah said. “But I think your opinion of the RAF should be reconsidered, Mr. Stone. I might even say the same about your comments on the Eighth Air Force. Captain Morris has told me about your terrible losses.”

  “Trying to bomb the lousy military targets he says we’re missing half the time,” Cliff said. “I say so what.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dick Stone said. “I’ll reconsider. I may even change my mind if Cliff reads Goethe’s Faust and tells me how people who can produce that kind of literature should be bombed into extinction.”

  “I’ve read Goethe’s Faust,” Sarah said. “It’s wonderful poetry, but I don’t think the Germans have learned much from it. Wouldn’t you say it’s a warning against the danger of gaining the whole world and losing your soul?”

  “I’d say Faust is a warning against loving a woman too much. A woman who seems to embody the whole world.”

  Dick Stone said this so softly, so calmly, in a voice that was such a contrast to the shouts and laughs and wisecracks flying around them, for a moment Sarah was ashamed of her reckless attack on him on Cliff Morris’s behalf. The man was a thinker. At eighteen, she had never contemplated the possibility of a man who shared his thoughts with a woman. Men were like her father, creatures with short tempers, rough jokes, long obscure silences.

  They sat down and Cliff poured Sarah a drink from a bottle on the table. It was her first taste of bourbon whiskey. Its sweetness made her think it was an American version of sherry—which her mother allowed her to sip at her graduation party. Anyway, Mother was a hundred miles away. She was on her own, an adult woman with a grudge against the RAF and an exultant sense of exploring a new world.

  There were more dances, more drinks. More discussions with Dick Stone, who still lacked a girl for his lap. Someone explained that Stone had made the idiotic mistake of getting engaged before he left home and he was being faithful to his fiancée. “He’s a veritable tower of rectitude,” Sarah said, still feeling some of Cliff’s hostility to the scholarly navigator.

  “A tower of Stone,” Cliff said. “Full of bullshit. Come on, Stone, take a drink, at least. I don’t like it when I get drunk and you stay sober.”

  “I have too much respect for my stomach to put that rotgut into it,” Stone said.

  “The guy’s a snob. That’s his problem,” Cliff said. “He thinks he’s better than everybody else. He even thinks he’s got a better stomach.”

  “Maybe it is,” Sarah said. “It’s made of stone.”

  “I’ve got stone feet too,” the navigator said. “Want to risk a dance?”

  Out on the floor, they swayed to a raucous version of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” “Are you Jewish?” he said.

  “Catholic,” Sarah said.

  “Ah. That explains your innocent look. You remind me of several very protected Jewish girls I knew in New York.”

  “Are you engaged to one of them?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. If she was here, I’d give her some advice. Instead I’ll give it to you. Go home while the going’s good. This party is bound to get wild.”

  “Leftenant Stone,” Sarah said. “You are one of the most—most presumptuous men I’ve ever met. Why is it bound to get wild?”

  “Because we’re going back to Schweinfurt the day after tomorrow. A good half the people you see dancing around you won’t be here next week.”

  “That only makes me want to stay! What kind of a shirker do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re a sweet beautiful girl who should have stayed home with her mother.”

  “If you knew my mother you wouldn’t say that! For your information, Leftenant Stone, women are not going to accept condescension in any form after this war is won. We’re helping to win it and we’re going to demand respect as our reward!”

  They returned to the table and Sarah declared her independence from Lieutenant Stone and his obnoxious advice by demanding another drink of bourbon. The room careened and she was on the dance floor doing a lindy with Cliff Morris. Her skirt was up her around her waist and she was laughing boldly into his handsome face. She felt as if she were in midair, performing a preternatural stunt. In the middle of her laughter she remembered what Dick Stone had told her about Schweinfurt and almost wept. Was it possible? Would half of these laughing young men die in burning planes the day after tomorrow?

  Unthinkable. She wanted to be powerful enough to prevent it. Another drink of bourbon and she was sure she possessed some sort of supernatural power. She would bestow it on Cliff, on the Rainbow Express, at least. If she could not protect them all she would protect him with her sheltering arms, her bursting heart.

  They were outside in the cool spring night. A million stars crowded the incomprehensible sky. Dozens of couples were wandering across Rackreath Air Base, disappearing into the woods and fields that surrounded it. Air bases in England were inserted into the countryside with a view to doing as little damage as possible to existing farmland and orchards. The trees and grass were only a few yards beyond the runways.

  “Dick Stone told me you’re going back to Schweinfurt the day after tomorrow,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “I want you to know I’ll be thinking about it. Thinking about you. Praying for you.”

  “Praying?” Cliff said. “You’ll be the only one. My mother stopped going to church when she was six. My old man—my stepfather—never went. How do you pray? I’ve never even tried.”

  “You—open your heart to God. You talk to Him.”

  “If He’s there.”

  “He’s there.”

  “You’re the one I want to open my heart to. Can you open yours? I loved you the second I saw you coming in the door. I know that’s a crazy thing to say. I know we’ve only been together a few hours. But when I look at you something like a prayer forms on my lips.”

  They were on a country lane between more low hedges. A sweet scent of new-mown grass rose from the fields. Nearby was the babble of a Wordsworthian brook. Cliff Morris took Sarah Chapman in his arms and kissed her for a long time. His hands moved slowly up and down her body, along her outer thighs, down her arms, over her breasts. “Say yes, Sarah, please. Say yes so I can get that plane off the ground the day after tomorrow. You can help me do it. With that prayer in your heart.”

  “Yes, oh yes, Cliff. Yes yes yes.”

  Off the lane the ground was soft, moist with night dew. Cliff spread his coat on the grass and slowly undressed her, whispering over and over: “You’re so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.”

  It was innocent, Sarah told herself. Her heart was overflowing with compassion and pity. This gift of herself, this prayer of herself was the least she could offer this man who was facing violent death on England’s behalf. Juliet would have offered herself to Mercutio, Ophelia to Hamlet if the plots had given them the opportunity. It was a Wordsworthian parable for the twentieth century, love among the daffodils beside a babbling brook.

  Except for certain things that Wordsworth forgot to mention. The brook at ground level had anything but a sylvan breath. It was probably the sewer for one or several nearby villages. Nor did sweet William or sister Dorothy ever encounter this mass of maleness on top of her blotting out the stars, this tongue plunging into her mouth, until her lungs, her whole body was bursting.

  Lawrencian. That forbidden genius whose books were smuggled into St. Agatha’s with the risk of expulsion by certain girls who read them between the covers of other books in study hall, their eyes wide with astonishment and glee. Sarah had yearned to be one of the smugglers but all she had
done was skim selected passages copied out and passed from hand to trembling hand. Were men that way? Was any woman that way? She simply could not believe it.

  Now it was happening here in the Wordsworthian countryside, abandon in the daffodils. In a swift sure thrust Cliff entered her. With a flicker of pain came the flash of awareness that he had done this before; he knew exactly how to lay her down, open her thighs, lunge. Did it mean Dick Stone was right, she should have stayed home with Mother?

  Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage. Poetry was answering that obnoxious question. Her spirit, her heart was the skylark in the cage of home, of Mother’s perpetual prohibitions, in the larger cage of St. Agatha’s with its frowning nuns and old-maid lay teachers. It was her heart in the cage of her body, her timid heart, partaking now of male courage, from an explorer of the skylark’s home, the sky. She was bursting out of the cage of girlhood into womanhood, adulthood, into the word that gave meaning to a woman’s life—into love.

  Marvelous thoughts but the reality somehow failed to live up to them. The brook’s odors assailed her nostrils; Cliff was stroking her with drunken, careless ardor, his weight crushing her into the grass, his mouth against her throat. She tried to let go, to give herself to him, the night, the vanished sky. They were one thing, a kind of plane, soaring into faith and hope and trust—and prayer.

  Yes, her prayer for him was on her lips, it flowed into his body. But she did not feel a similar flow from him. She wanted to soar with him, to hurtle beyond earth, beyond Lawrencian orgies into the happiness that belonged exclusively to those who conquered the sky. Nothing else could justify the sin they were committing, the implicit awful condemnation that was always in Mother’s eyes when she argued against joining the WAAFs.

  Before she could begin to soar Cliff gave a shuddering groan and came—a tremendous gush that lifted her at least to treetop level with a surge of inexplicable sweetness. She cried out with a wild mixture of pleasure and regret. The sky, the stars, remained blank behind his massive shoulders and head.

  They spiraled down to the waiting earth. On the other side of the brook there were similar cries and groans of pleasure. Sarah found it somehow disillusioning to realize they were not the only ones in England performing this ancient rite. Earthbound ideas crowded her dazed mind. She had given herself to this man. She had surrendered what she had vowed she would never yield, without the certainty of deep and abiding love.

  “What do we do now?” she blurted.

  “We do it again,” Cliff said. “Again and again and again. Whenever we get a chance.”

  For a moment Sarah almost wept. There was too much male delectation in those words. They revealed things she did not want to confront. “You do love me?” she said. It was almost a wail.

  “Of course I love you. Get dressed. I’ll drive you back to Bedlington. We’ve got a long day tomorrow getting ready for Schweinfurt. And a longer one the day after that.”

  “You’ll be all right. I know you will. I know it!”

  “Sure,” he said. “Just remember. Be there to pray me down.”

  “I know you’ll be all right!”

  She was omnipotent again. Love’s goddess, ruling the sky.

  RAINBOW EXPRESS

  “Grab your cocks and pull up your socks, here we go!” Cliff Morris shouted over the intercom.

  Down the rain-slick runway at Rackreath Air Base raced the B—17E with a red, white, and blue rainbow painted below the left cockpit window. She was fighting for airspeed with two tons of bombs in her belly and a ton of high octane gasoline in her fuel tanks. In the pilot’s seat, Cliff poured on the power. The four Wright R1820 Cyclone engines responded with a deepening roar. When the airspeed indicator read 110, he gently pulled back on the control column and Rainbow Express, all thirty-three tons of her, lumbered into the air for her seventeenth mission over Germany.

  “Ain’t she beautiful?” Cliff shouted over the intercom.

  “She’s got my vote,” Mike Shannon whooped. He was hunched in his tail gunner’s seat, watching the rest of the 103rd Bombardment Group take off behind them. No one else aboard the Rainbow Express said a thing. Their morale was as low as the rest of the 103rd, which was as low as the rest of the Eighth Air Force in the spring of 1943.

  Below the cockpit, in the Plexiglas nose, navigator Dick Stone hunched over his charts and remembered what Colonel Darwin H. Atwood had said when the 103rd Bombardment Group reported for training at Kearney Air Force Base in Nebraska in mid-1942. “Don’t get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You’ve got dirty work to do and you might as well face the facts. You’re going to be baby killers and women killers.”

  Tall and balding, Colonel Atwood had been a professor of modern history at Stanford before his elevation to rank and power. He seemed to carry history like a burden on his slumped shoulders. An unspoken pain lurked in his squinting eyes. If he did not know better, Stone would have sworn he was Jewish. Atwood knew all about the strategic bombing campaigns of World War I, which had killed hundreds of civilians in Paris, London, and German cities in the Ruhr.

  Dick Stone was vulnerable to doubts about bombing German civilians. His paternal grandfather had been a professor of German literature at the City College of New York. Born in Germany, he was one of those Jews who were forever torn between admiration for its culture and dismay at its virulent anti-Semitism. He loved Goethe, Heine, Schiller and insisted on Stone learning German as a boy so he could read them in the original.

  The pilots in the 103rd despised Colonel Atwood. For that reason alone Dick Stone was inclined to defend him—or at least take him seriously. Atwood had given some thought to what they were going to do over Germany. As far as Stone could see, none of the pilots had ever had a thought beyond their arrogant affirmation of their flyboy status and the inevitable superiority of the B—17.

  Cliff Morris personified the goggles-and-scarf tradition Colonel Atwood struggled in vain to eradicate from the 103rd Bombardment Group. On their first flight Cliff had buzzed the field at fifty feet, missing the tower by inches, according to the terrified traffic controllers. Colonel Atwood threatened Cliff with a court-martial. “I was trying to give my crew some positive leadership,” Cliff replied. “It’s in short supply around here.” When the outraged Atwood reported Morris to the commanding general, nothing happened. Morris’s stepfather, a World War I ace, knew bigger generals.

  Everyone in the Rainbow Express’s ten—man crew except Stone soon worshiped Cliff Morris. He made them feel like fliers. They joined his campaign to outdrink and outscrew every other airman in the Eighth Air Force. Stone went along on their “reconnaissances” in Nebraska and in England but he remained aloofly sober and disdainful of the girls they picked up. He was a rabbi’s son and he felt he owed his father moral allegiance, even if he no longer agreed with his theology. Rather than try to explain anything so complicated, he cooked up the fiction of being engaged to silence Cliff Morris and other nee-dlers in the crew.

  “Hey, Stone,” Cliff said as they reached their prescribed height of 20,000 feet and plowed through the icy sky toward Schweinfurt. “You got Little Miss England so upset with your criticism of the RAF, she couldn’t wait to show me how true blue she was.”

  “What was blue? Once you got rid of her uniform,” said Beck, the bombardier, who preferred London prostitutes to nice girls.

  “Her eyes, you miserable whoremaster. I didn’t have to pay for it either. The old record is still intact.”

  Cliff was inordinately proud of his ability to seduce women. They all listened while he gave them a condensed version of his line with Sarah Chapman. He always talked about a seduction as if he were a movie director setting up a scene. Dick sighed and wondered what Sarah Chapman thought of it now, two days after she sobered up.

  “You should have heard the stuff she babbled on the way back to Bedlington,” Cliff said. “Something about a skylark in a gale trapped in a cage. She got so excited we stopped in a lane just
outside the base and did it once more for good measure.”

  “Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage,” Dick Stone said.

  “That’s it, Shylock. What the hell does it mean?”

  “It’s from a poem by someone who feels spiritually trapped and discouraged,” Dick said.

  A groan filled the earphones. “Don’t knock it, you fucking atheists. She’s gonna pray us back,” Cliff said. “We could use some prayers flying this miserable crate.”

  Back in the States during their training, when Cliff was not talking about girls, he talked about the B—17. Again and again he proclaimed it the best plane ever built. Family pride was partly involved. Buchanan Aircraft was turning out hundreds of the big bombers under a contract from the original maker, Boeing. Cliff had named their bomber after the Buchanan company symbol, a plane soaring over a rainbow.

  Now no one, including Cliff Morris, was sure of the B—17’s superiority, though he usually tried to disguise his doubts with bravado. On the first few raids over Germany their losses had been light. Everyone assumed the Germans were afraid to attack the Flying Fortresses, with their bristling array of machine guns. Alas, the Luftwaffe was only reorganizing its defenses, which had been devoted to defending the fatherland against British bombers by night. The American decision to bomb in daylight and prove the precision of the Norden bombsight and the invulnerability of the B—17 took the Germans by surprise. But not for long.

  Soon the sky above their targets was thick with ugly black bursts of .88 millimeter shells. An .88 could knock out a Sherman tank. When it struck something as fragile as a plane, the results were horrendous. B—17s exploded into fragments, broke in half, spun down with wings or tails gone. Out of the sun hurtled swarms of Focke—Wulf and Messerschmitt fighters firing 20— and 30-millimeter cannons. Formations dissolved. B—17s began burning all over the sky or spinning down with dead pilots and copilots in shattered cockpits. Instead of the eight or ten planes that they had expected to lose on each mission, they started to lose sixty or seventy. Whole squadrons were wiped out.