Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  He sat back, his shoulders sinking a little. He said, “All right then. You report to Dickerson this afternoon. Dismissed.”

  We stood and saluted him and we walked toward the door, first Helen and then me. Behind us he said, “One more thing, ladies.” Helen’s hand was on the doorknob. We turned to look at him. “If you tell anyone about the work you are doing, you will be executed.”

  At noon on July 13, I reported to the Group Operations Building. The officers looked up when I walked in.

  “Velva Jean Hart?” The voice came from a tall and lanky man. I guessed he was in his thirties.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain Putnam. Your squadron commander. I want you to meet your pilot, Captain Baskin, and your navigator, Second Lieutenant Glenn. Officers, your copilot, Velva Jean Hart.”

  Captain Baskin was close to forty and made me think of Daryl and Lester Gordon, boys I’d grown up with back home—short and beefy, with a head as square as a cinder block. He slapped me on the back and told me it was good to have me aboard, and then he said, “You and me, we’re going to get along fine, just so long as you remember who the pilot is.” He sounded as though he were shouting every word.

  Second Lieutenant Glenn was as small as Captain Baskin was large, slight and neat, not a hair out of place, with the look of someone who liked to stay inside reading books or studying mathematics. He held out his hand to shake mine and I was surprised at how firm it was.

  He said, “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” and his voice sounded just like home.

  Before I could ask if he was from North Carolina, Lieutenant Colonel Heflin cleared his throat and began our briefing. The wall behind him was covered with a giant map of Europe, and it was stuck with pushpins, each one holding up a small piece of colored paper. The map showed mountains and rivers and forests. Looking at it, I could almost see the villages and the people and their houses.

  At the back of the room, Lieutenant Colonel Dickerson, squint-eyed and sour, stood watching. With Dickerson, Helen and I had gone over the B-24 Liberator and the general rules of flying drop missions into a combat zone: First and foremost, don’t get shot down, and if you do, don’t tell anyone anything about your mission. He’d spent two days with us, and that was it.

  It was up to Captain Baskin and Second Lieutenant Glenn and me—under the direction of Captain Putnam—to choose the route and draw up our own flight plan. After the general briefing ended, we went over our map, a smaller version of the one on the wall. We looked for the presence of flak, or antiaircraft fire, on the S2 flak maps, and selected our route and the checkpoints we would make on the way to our target: Rouen, the capital city of Normandy, France. The only thing I knew about Rouen was that it was where Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake.

  Captain Putnam said to me, “The best thing you can do is memorize the route to the drop zone so that you never have to use the map. The top pilots can read their way by moonlight, memorizing landmarks and finding their way on their own.”

  Second Lieutenant Glenn said, “The trick is to fly in a dogleg pattern, which means you never fly a direct course for longer than thirty miles. This is so we can avoid antiaircraft guns and night fighters. Obviously we want to make sure we get in and out and don’t get involved in an air fight.”

  I felt a terrible chill run through me, just like I had dengue fever.

  He said, “Sometimes you have to fly miles farther into enemy territory after you complete a drop so that you can disguise the actual drop zone. You never know if an enemy’s tracking the plane or if maybe they got tipped off that you’re coming.”

  Captain Putnam and Captain Baskin started arguing about the route, and I looked down at our target, at the word Rouen, which was just a dot on a map of France.

  Second Lieutenant Glenn leaned toward me and said, “Why are you here, Velva Jean?” He said it low, as if he didn’t want the two captains to hear him. “Why did you agree to this? What kind of mission are you on?”

  I looked him square in the eyes and thought of all the things I could say, starting with my brother and how he was missing and how I needed to find him, to make sure he was okay and alive, and then going on to the WASP and Jacqueline Cochran and all those men at Camp Davis who said we shouldn’t be here, that we shouldn’t be flying at all.

  I said, “I want to be a weapon of war.”

  At 1800 hours, two hours before takeoff, our crew met up in Squadron Operations at the crew room they had assigned to us. I was dressed in my Santiago Blues, my beret pinned to my head because if I crashed in France, I didn’t want to risk losing any part of my uniform.

  The weather operator gave the latest weather report to Second Lieutenant Glenn, and he handed in our flight plan to Captain Putnam. Lieutenant Sullivan gave me crew kits to hand out to everyone, and these contained candy and chewing gum, cigarettes, flares, first aid kits, and emergency packets.

  At 1900 hours, Helen and I sat in the mess hall pushing our food around on our plates while the men ate and ate and ate. I said, “I’m not hungry.”

  She said, “Me neither.”

  I said, “Do you know what kind of drop this is?” The one thing they hadn’t covered in all our hours of briefings was what our mission was—who were the men we were dropping (they called them “agents”) and who was waiting on the ground in France to receive the supplies we were carrying.

  She shook her head and pushed her tray away. “Listen, I think we need to have a way to send each other a message, you know, if we get shot down. Some sort of code something or other. A poem.”

  “Or a song,” I said. This was regular spy stuff, and I was surprised at Helen for thinking of it.

  We eventually decided on “In the land of crimson sunsets, skies are wide and blue,” which was from a hymn to Avenger Field, the song we’d sung at our graduation. If we crashed and were somehow stuck or even captured, we could say those lines to folks on the ground, hoping they might repeat them somewhere else and then the message would get carried along. This way we’d each know that the other one was okay.

  At 1930 hours, Captain Baskin and the crew and I were driven to our B-24 Liberator, which was already loaded with the containers and packages to be dropped. Some of the men on my crew weren’t happy having a female copilot. In the hours before takeoff, a few of them had gone to Lieutenant Sullivan and asked to be reassigned.

  Except for Second Lieutenant Glenn, none of the men would look me in the eye or say anything to me, not even “thank you” when I handed them their crew kits. While we rode, I glanced from face to face, wondering if they knew about the newspaper articles, if maybe they’d sat up late the night before with scissors, cutting out one story after another.

  As we climbed out of the car, my heart started going faster and faster, like it was racing down a hill. I was wearing a fleece-lined flight suit over my Santiago Blues and boots, carrying a pair of GI shoes, the smallest pair of men’s shoes they had, which we all carried in case of a crash.

  The rain and clouds were gone, and it was the clearest night I’d ever seen, with a moon so big and bright it looked like you could touch it. The B-24 stood waiting like a gigantic metal monster, black as the night. I told myself that flying a B-24 Liberator across the English Channel to France wasn’t any scarier than flying an AT-6 over the San Francisco Peaks or a B-29 across the North Carolina mountains or a B-17 across the ocean, all of which I’d done.

  I sat in the cockpit next to Captain Baskin, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the throttle, engine rumbling. The B-24 wasn’t as sleek as the B-17. It was a heavy plane, as wide and ugly as a freight train. It wasn’t made to be pretty—it was made to haul bombs high and far.

  Helen and I knew the B-24 like our own faces, thanks to our WASP training, but these B-24s were different. The ball turret had been taken out and only the tail and top turrets were left in. The hole where the ball turret used to be was lined with metal and covered by a plywood door that hinged in the middle. This was called the Joe hol
e because when it was time for the drop, the door would come off the hole and agents—called Joes—and supply containers would be dropped through it with parachutes. Flash suppressors had been installed on the guns, flame dampeners had been installed on the turbosuperchargers, and blackout curtains hung over the waist-gun windows. This was so that we were as invisible as possible. All the lightbulbs were painted red and the bottom of the bomber was painted black so that enemy searchlights couldn’t spot us.

  The entire plane was blacked out except for one dim light in the navigator’s compartment. I flicked on the fuel booster pumps and then reached for the accelerator switch. Captain Baskin advanced the number three engine throttle to one-third open, and then I pushed the accelerator switch, holding it while I jabbed at the priming switch. I pushed the crank switch, and the engine coughed and wheezed before catching. The captain took us through our checks—oil pressure, vacuum pumps, anti-icers, deicers—and then he taxied out to the runway, where we went through the last checks before takeoff. I called out the airspeeds as he held the throttles against the stops, and then the B-24 broke ground at 110 mph. Captain Baskin and I went through one more series of checks and then we took off.

  As we climbed higher into the night, the B-24 gaining speed, I breathed in and out, in and out. It was good to be flying again, even if I wasn’t lead pilot and even if I couldn’t make out anything below me—because of the blackout, the ground was dark as tar. Second Lieutenant Glenn’s voice was in my ear, giving us checkpoints, telling us coordinates, but I had the same itchy, mean feeling I always got when I knew I should be able to do something that I wasn’t being allowed to do—like flying the plane or finding the way.

  I thought about Upottery to the southwest of me and Omaha Beach to the southeast and I wondered what would happen if I took over the Liberator and pointed it toward either place. And then, instead, we headed for France.

  FIVE

  We crossed the English Channel above six thousand feet because it was easier to avoid antiaircraft fire up high. The old hollowed-out bomber rattled and coughed. As we reached the shores of France, Second Lieutenant Glenn and the bombardier started working together on the navigation, and Captain Baskin took the plane to two thousand feet because the lower you flew, the less chance you had of getting hit by a night fighter and the less chance you had of being spotted by the enemy by either sight or sound or radar detection equipment.

  The bomber bucked this way and jigged that way, and I wondered what Captain Baskin saw that I couldn’t. I kept my eyes trained out the window, watching for lights. Around 2100 hours, I heard Second Lieutenant Glenn in my headset: “We’re closing in on the drop zone,” and then the dispatcher shouted, “Running in!”

  We were making the drop near Rouen, which wasn’t all that far from Paris. I looked through the glass at the ground below and thought about Gossie.

  Suddenly, the plane shuddered and the B-24 lurched, nearly rolling over on its side. Captain Baskin swore into his headset and righted her again. He said to the rear gunners, “Where in the bloody goddamn hell is that coming from?”

  Looking back through the window, I could see the tip of the right wing glowing red, smoke spinning out and away from us into the sky.

  One of the rear gunners said, “I think it’s ground fire.”

  The other gunner said, “Schräge Musik.”

  Whatever that was sounded terrible. I said, “What is it?”

  Captain Baskin shouted, “German night fighter. Upward firing. Damn things get you from below where you can’t spot them.”

  The bombardier sat on a swivel seat in the glazed nose reading off landmarks to Second Lieutenant Glenn, who was shooting his fixes and giving the captain directions. The turret gunner, who was also the plane’s engineer, reported on the engines, saying we’d lost the number two engine but the other three were in working order. I knew we’d be okay with only three engines as long as our fuel held out, and as long as we didn’t lose another one. Captain Baskin turned the vacuum valve to the good engines. The radio operator sat in the upper fuselage just aft of the cockpit, and I could hear him telling headquarters about the attack.

  Then I heard the rattle-rattle-rattle of machine guns from the rear of the plane. The rear gunners swore and then one of them said, “Nine o’clock,” which meant it was to the left of us. There was another rattle-rattle-rattle and then the other rear gunner shouted, “I’m hit!” The radio operator swung around and grabbed the second waist gun and started firing, the used-up shells hitting the floor like hard, metal raindrops.

  From the middle of the plane, the waist gunner, who was in charge of dropping the agents and supply containers through the Joe hole, climbed into the top turret. A minute later, he shouted, “Bastards nearly shot my head off!”

  I strained to look, my hand on the wheel, on the throttle, hovering over the controls, the trim tabs. Captain Baskin said, “Take your hands away, Hart! You think I need a girl to help me fly this plane?”

  I was so surprised I yanked my hands away and sat with them on my lap. Captain Baskin was gripping the throttle so hard his knuckles had gone white, and his jaw was so clenched up it looked as if it would never come unhinged again. That great, heavy B-24 was quaking and bobbing and pitching, and all around me the men on the crew were shooting or barking orders or shouting to one another, working together, everyone but me.

  The captain said, “I want you all to fasten and adjust your chutes,” and then he asked Second Lieutenant Glenn to plot their position again. The plane filled with the smell of gasoline, so strong it burned my nose, and Captain Baskin ordered the bomb bay doors retracted in case we had to bail out. He lowered the nose and pushed the power levers to their stops, and then leveled off with plenty of airspeed, and then he cranked the aileron trim wheel to bring the wings level again so that the bomber would stop rolling toward the dead engine.

  I sat there in a fury, not allowed to do anything, the restraint straps digging into my waist and chest and shoulders. Somewhere over the coast of France, one of the rear gunners hit the night fighter, which exploded like a firework. I watched as it dove downward and disappeared into the black of the water. I heard the splash in my mind even though the only thing in my headset was the sound of men whooping and hollering and congratulating one another, and the sound of my own pulse pounding like a man’s fist.

  Captain Baskin said, “Let’s make the goddamn drop,” and there were cheers in my headset as he pointed the nose of the B-24 south, back toward Rouen.

  When we were just a few miles from the target area, we all looked out the window, searching for the flashlights of the reception party. There would be three high-powered torches placed in a row, with a fourth at a ninety-degree angle so that we would know the direction of the drop. Captain Baskin selected half flaps and made the run in at 135 mph, which wasn’t much above stalling speed. He circled the drop zone once and then the bombardier guided him in and the B-24 went in low, till we were about six hundred feet off the ground. Behind me, I could hear the agents lining up at the rim of the Joe hole.

  And then I saw them—three faint flickerings of light. From where I sat, they were beautiful. Bright spots in the middle of nothing. A series of stars blinking in a row.

  Captain Baskin began lining up with the lights. He dropped to three hundred feet, which meant I could just make out figures on the ground, and I guessed that these were the members of the reception party. I wondered who they were and where they came from. And that’s when I saw that the people on the ground were holding the flashlights, but there were people behind them—just shadows on the tree line—with helmets and uniforms and guns. Something flashed again and again, and one of the rear gunners said, “Ground fire...”

  I said, “Pull us up.” Granny always said I had eyes like a cat’s, able to see far and wide, deep into the dark, deep into the blinding sunlight, farther than anyone.

  Captain Baskin shouted, “What?”

  I said, “Pull us up. The Germans have
got them.” I could hear the dispatcher giving orders to the first of the agents. I turned in my seat, even though I couldn’t see him, and hollered into my headset, “The Germans have got them. Stop the drop!”

  In the headset, the dispatcher asked the captain if this was true, and then the bombardier started shouting, “Pull her up! Pull her up! Get us the hell out of here!”

  The captain tugged on the yoke, which controlled the elevator, to pull the nose up, and at the same time he advanced the throttles for more power. From inside the plane I heard a roar, like a thunderclap, and the B-24 shook so hard that I waited for it to explode. The waist gunner swore and then he said, “We’ve been flak-blasted. Shell exploded... inside waist... torn in two...” The radio buzzed and clicked, and I could barely hear him. Another jolt, another blast, and the plane jerked hard to the right and then dropped down even lower. This time we were shot in the nose.

  I looked over at the captain, and he didn’t say a word. The plane flew along at 130 mph, 120 mph, dipping back down to five hundred feet, four hundred feet. I said, “Captain, get us out of here!” And that’s when I saw the blood dripping onto his flight suit.

  I grabbed the wheel and slammed back the throttle and pointed what was left of the nose of that great, hulking bomber into the sky. I shredded the rudder and elevator controls to try to maintain directional and altitude control. I said into my headset, “Throw all the extra weight overboard, and get yourselves above the weak point.”

  I heard the men scrambling, and one by one they showed up behind me. I didn’t turn to look because I needed to bring her out straight and level. I poured on more power to overcome the drag. The B-24 felt like it weighed twice as much as the B-29. I shouted, “Get your chutes ready!” before I remembered that Captain Baskin had already ordered them to do this. And then I began to sing.

  In a cavern, in a canyon,