Now here he was ready to dive, almost wing to wing with his Schwarm of three other fighters, the sun warm on the back of his flying helmet. They were seconds away from it. Frey’s mouth was desperately dry but he resisted the temptation to reach for his water bottle and have a final swig. He might miss the formation leader’s signal to go.
The lead Messerschmitt tilted its wings and dived. The rest of the Jagdgeschwader followed behind with well-trained precision. There were fifty of them in that fighter group, up in the sky that morning. They had missed the bomber stream on the way in. That had been a great pity and deprived them of the opportunity to down these beasts before they dropped their bombs, but they would make sure plenty of the huge machines didn’t get home.
Frey was set to squeeze off his first volley and waited until the Fortress was bang in the middle of his sight. He felt the fuselage of his tiny Messerschmitt tremble as his machine guns and cannon poured fire into the looming silver bomber. He was too busy concentrating to really notice whether his shots hit home, too concerned to make sure he flew between the gaps in the tight combat box formation.
Frey came out of his dive, the G-forces pinning him hard to his seat and making even the simple action of pulling back the control stick a matter of sheer strength. He realised he was soaked in cold sweat and waited a few seconds for his head to clear. A B-17 near his target had exploded dangerously close as he made his pass.
As he prepared to climb again for another go at the bombers he noticed his controls were sluggish. The engine was misfiring and something was clearly not right. Heinz Frey was not a coward, but he knew when it was time to leave the field of battle. He radioed his commander to tell him what had happened. Then he turned his Messerschmitt away from the bomber stream and headed for the nearest airbase. He was not going to throw his life away in a failing machine, and if he was lucky his fighter would be easily repaired and ready for the next assault. It was a shame, he reflected, that he had not caused any significant damage.
CHAPTER 15
In the nose, Bortz had followed the diving Messerschmitt all the way in, realising at least seven seconds before he fired that this one had the Macey May in its sites. But Bortz had never really mastered the intricacies of the remote-controlled Bendix chin turret. Even in training, his aim had been barely acceptable. Bortz was a highly skilled bombardier so they had turned a blind eye to his poor shooting. Cain was there too in the nose, firing one of the single side-guns just beside him.
Burnet stood behind them, just by the passageway up to the cockpit, peering with undisguised fear through the great Plexiglas nose cone, and realising all at once that all that lay between them and Luftwaffe cannon shells and bullets was a transparent plastic shell.
To their right there was a huge explosion. A Fortress next to them had disintegrated and was falling out of the sky. Bortz turned round to Burnet and shouted, ‘Did you see that?’ but even as the words left his mouth he realised he was talking to a dead man. Burnet lay sprawled across the narrow passage with the top of his head blown off and a look of wide-eyed astonishment on his face. You could see the grey mass of his brain among the bone and hair.
The Messerschmitt swept past the Macey May’s right side. Ralph Dalinsky rattled off a volley. The tiny Messerschmitt was too close and going too fast to have any real chance. If he hit anything, it would be a lucky shot. And Dalinsky was sure he hadn’t been lucky.
Harry, under the wing, saw the Messerschmitt as it flew away and had more time to get a bead on it. He fired a long burst at the limit of his range and thought he saw something fly off the fighter.
Another Messerschmitt buzzed past almost as fast as the eye could register. Then Harry felt the ship shake and could see fragments flying off the wing close to his turret. The shots had landed right on the fuel tanks and his heart froze as he waited for the wing to catch fire and the Fortress to start to plummet.
‘Captain, that last pass caught us on the right wing,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I saw it too.’ The voice was Dalinsky. He sounded as frightened as Harry was feeling. ‘Bits were flying everywhere. Could ignite any second.’
‘OK, understood.’ Holberg’s voice was calm and collected. ‘Keep looking for fighters. Engines are still running OK. Those tanks are self-sealing. If there was going to be a fire, it would have caught by now.’
Harry didn’t know how Holberg managed to keep calm like that.
‘Two Fockes, three o’ clock low,’ cut in Dalinsky again.
That one was for Harry. He spun his turret in an instant and let off a long burst.
Dalinsky was firing too – he was still in his field of vision.
‘Watch that ammo, boys,’ said Holberg. ‘Can’t have you running out of bullets while we’re still half an hour off our fighter escort.’
The German fighters vanished as swiftly as they had arrived. Harry breathed deep and shivered. He was freezing cold. In all the terror of the moment it had not occurred to him at all. Now here he was, covered in sweat at twenty thousand feet. He felt for the electric plug on his heated suit and realised it had come out of its socket. Once that plug was back in he could feel a life-giving warmth spread throughout his body, thawing his bones.
Harry carried on scanning the skies, but as the adrenalin dropped he began to feel sharp pains in his knees. His flying suit was chafed and there was blood around both knees. At first he though he must have been hit, but quickly worked out what had happened. The gun bolts on either side of his legs had been rubbing against his knees. He had been so caught up in the fighting he hadn’t even noticed. They were really starting to throb now, but at least it was just surface bleeding.
‘Twenty minutes to the Dutch coast and we should pick up our fighter escort there,’ said Stearley.
Bortz spotted the escort first. ‘Little friends at one o’ clock high. And, hey, we’ve got the RAF with us too,’ he reported. A squadron of Thunderbolts swooped over, turning tightly in the sky, keeping a good two thousand feet above them. Another squadron of Spitfires pulled alongside. Harry had never seen these beautiful planes in flight – just photographs. It felt good to have twenty-four fighters flying with them. It reminded Harry of how he used to feel when he went out with his big brother, knowing he was looking out for him.
Harry Friedman realised he had stopped breathing as Holberg made his final approach. Only when the wheels hit the concrete runway did he draw a deep breath again. The Macey May taxied over to her hardstand and the crew piled out to stand on firm ground. Most of the surviving Fortresses were back now, although there was a smouldering pyre at the end of Runway C, close to the hay barn by Grange Farm. Fire trucks were racing towards it, sirens blazing, but from what Harry could see, there wasn’t anything for them to do once they got there, except maybe make sure the fire didn’t spread to the barn.
He noticed an ambulance heading towards them too, and wondered who on the Macey May had been injured. He turned and counted them all – Holberg, Stearley, Bortz, Cain, LaFitte, Skaggs, Hill, Dalinsky, Corrales. They looked tired and sweaty, a little spooked with shock and fatigue even, but none of them was wounded as far as he could see.
‘What’s this about, sir?’ he asked the captain.
Holberg looked grey. ‘Burnet’s dead. Something took the top of his head off. Let’s leave it to the ambulance boys to get him off.’
CHAPTER 16
Kirkstead, East Anglia, October 2nd, 1943
Harry woke up next day to news that had carried all around the English-speaking world. John Hill showed him a copy of The Times over breakfast.
Life magazine journalist and photographer Edward ‘Eddie’ Burnet has been killed while flying over Germany with the US Eighth Air Force.
The article went on to outline his illustrious career.
‘Jeezus, Harry, will you look at that! He survived the Spanish Civil War, Dunkirk, the Blitz, and then he gets killed flying out with us. That’s gotta be a bad omen.’
Just as Harry was sear
ching through the article to find out more, they were interrupted by the genial figure of Ernie Benik.
‘Hey, boys,’ he said. ‘We gotta ground the Macey May for the next forty-eight hours. Get her patched up properly.’
Harry hoped they would take them off operational flights and not expect them to fly in another Fortress. It would be good to know no one was going to die over the next two days.
Holberg called them together that afternoon. ‘Good news, boys,’ he told them as they all stood beneath the nose of the Macey May. ‘We all got forty-eight-hour passes!’
You could get to London in two or three hours on the train. The whole crew had been talking about taking a trip there ever since they had arrived at Kirkstead. Harry thought of Tilly, but she worked in the factory during the week and so wouldn’t be free to go on their daytrip to Norwich so he would have to wait for another time to invite her out.
They all travelled down on the train from Norwich and were at Liverpool Street station by six o’clock. John had been to London before and knew all about the ‘tube’ – the underground railway that would get them anywhere in the city centre in a matter of minutes.
First stop was Rainbow Corner – the Red Cross club for American servicemen in Piccadilly. The tube was crowded and it was almost impossible to stick together. As they emerged from the underground at Piccadilly Circus they were overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of the city.
In the autumn twilight the pavements were overflowing with servicemen and women from every imaginable Allied nation. Just walking from the station exit to the club on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue they heard French, Dutch, Polish and several languages they could only guess at.
Every American serving in Britain, and probably everyone in America, had heard about Rainbow Corner. It was the sort of place the news magazines never tired of running features on. They all knew it never closed, and they all knew it served ice-cold Cokes, and burgers just like they made them at home. Holberg had also told his crew that this was the place where the staff sorted out your London accommodation for you.
So they sat at the bar, eagerly engaging other American servicemen in conversation, and discussing what they wanted to do, while the resident staff made phone calls on their behalf. Corrales and Dalinsky hit it off with a guy in the bar who seemed to know exactly what to see and do around London.
The crew all had different ideas. That especially suited Harry, who had started to feel uncomfortable with Skaggs, who he’d noticed bristling angrily when he saw a black American GI with a white girl. Harry shouldn’t have been surprised – Skaggs was always very short with the black servicemen who worked in the kitchens and in the maintenance squads.
By the time their hotel rooms had been booked for the night it was nine o’clock. Harry and John had a place in Bloomsbury, not far from Euston Station. They were given a map and instructions to be there for eleven thirty at the latest.
Corrales and Dalinsky had decided they wanted to go to a burlesque show. Skaggs tagged along. Harry saw them disappearing from the bar, their new friend promising they’d ‘see more ass than a toilet seat’.
Holberg and his lieutenants decided to visit Covent Garden Opera House – converted into a nightclub for officers ‘for the duration’.
John and Harry had simpler pleasures in mind: a meal and a nice old-fashioned London pub.
By the time they left the Rainbow Club it was properly dark and the blackout was still very much enforced. It was disconcerting being in the middle of a mad mass of milling people, all intent on having the time of their life.
On the busy roads buses and taxis crawled through near gridlock, thin beams peeping from covered headlights. Above the buildings, searchlights still criss-crossed the sky, and they had been out in the street for barely a minute when the air-raid sirens began to wail.
So did John. ‘Just our luck,’ he cried with genuine despair. ‘A frigging air raid.’
But no one took a bit of notice. Even when nearby anti-aircraft guns started up, everyone just ignored them. ‘When in Rome …’ said Harry, and continued on, swept up in the crowd.
They found a restaurant barely a minute or two from the Rainbow Club – Lyons Corner House Brasserie, close to Leicester Square – and ate ‘fish and chips’ which, they had been assured, was a British delicacy. The battered fish was tasteless and nothing like the fish fried in matzah meal that his mom cooked for him back home. John whispered it was probably whale. Harry liked ketchup with his fries, but that was not available. He had to make do with salt and vinegar, which he thought was pretty unpalatable. In fact he wouldn’t have eaten his chips if he hadn’t been so hungry. The poor quality of the food made Harry feel homesick and he wished he was in a Brooklyn cafe eating salt beef on rye with mustard.
They left the restaurant to wander the streets. Even in the moonlight Harry could make out the great landmarks he’d seen in films and books, like Piccadilly Circus and Regent’s Street. But bomb damage was everywhere. Whole blocks had been levelled in the Blitz.
‘Hey, John, just think, this is what we’re doing to the Krauts,’ he said. But even as the words left his mouth he didn’t know whether it was a statement of grim revenge or an admission of guilt.
They found a pub easily enough. The centre of London had hundreds of them, and they ended up in one they really liked, just off Oxford Street, called the Pillars of Hercules. Inside its cosy bar they mixed with scores of people from all over the world – US servicemen, Free French soldiers, and plenty of locals all happy to talk. Drinking with a British airman from London, they discovered they were paid at least four times as much as he was. When it was time to go, John offered to buy him a couple of pints ‘to keep him going’. The man looked offended, rather than grateful, and John and Harry left in a hurry, sensing things could turn nasty.
They walked back towards their hotel in Bloomsbury, arms around each other’s shoulders, singing Al Dexter’s ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’. A couple of girls wearing bright red lipstick approached them in the street, taking their arms, and asked if they were going their way.
‘Come and have some fun with us,’ the girls chimed.
John shook the girl off his arm. ‘Ladies, thank you, but no thank you,’ he said stiffly.
The girls tried to cajole them into going with them but left with a surly, ‘Spoilsports, keep your Yankee money to yourselves then,’ when they realised they were getting nowhere.
‘Let’s have one for the road,’ said John after they had disappeared. There was a small corner pub called the George, which was almost empty. Like the Pillars of Hercules it was dimly lit, with a coal fire burning in the corner, the flames glinting on the glass and mirrors of the bar.
They sat in the corner, nursing a couple more pints. Harry had never drunk so much in his life and was feeling in a wonderfully good mood. John showed him a picture of his girlfriend, Shirley, taken on the day John had asked her to marry him. She was a pretty girl with curly dark hair. There she was, sitting on a beach somewhere on Long Island, holding her hat as a brisk wind swept over, looking really happy.
John put the photo away, and smiled at Harry fondly and told him he was really glad they’d ended up in the same bomber crew and that he felt like his elder brother.
‘I had an elder brother once, but he died,’ said Harry, surprising himself. He had never talked about David to any of the guys.
John waited in the pause that followed, weighing up what to say. ‘No, kidding,’ he replied eventually. ‘I had a younger brother once, but he died in the 1937 polio outbreak.’
The coincidence made Harry feel braver and he told John about what had happened with David, and how they had been out in Manhattan when the symptoms first began to show, and he had insisted they stay out there and visit the museum.
John listened intently and when the story was over he put an arm round Harry.
‘My cousin’s a medic, Harry. He told me, once you’ve got polio there’s nothing medical science can do. They give yo
u medicine that might ease your pain, but no one knows why some people die and some people don’t. It wasn’t your fault he died.’
Harry had kept these feelings to himself for so long, it felt a relief to have finally shared them with someone. That night he slept better than he had done for years.
The following day they did all the things tourists in London were expected to do – Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral – and caught a train back to Norwich at three in the afternoon. When they returned to Kirkstead there was a note on Harry’s bunk: Come and see me when you get back in, Ernie.
‘Know what this is about?’ he asked John.
‘No, but I got the same note too. Let’s go.’
They sauntered over to the hardstand, bumping into Corrales. ‘Had a good time?’ asked John. Corrales laughed. ‘Better than Skaggs. He got taken into the cells for picking a fight with a black guy with an English girl on his arm.’
‘What, he’s still locked up?’ asked Harry.
‘Nah, he came back with me. Dumb redneck. He knows how to mess up a good time. I shoulda made him go with you guys.’
As they approached the Macey May’s hardstand John said, ‘Maybe we’ve got more time off? Maybe Ernie’s taking longer than he oughta?’
Benik and his crew were still all over the Macey May and scaffolding covered the right wing.
Ernie whooped when he saw him. ‘Are you boys lucky sons of bitches,’ he said. ‘Look what we found in the fuel tank!’
He clambered down from the wing and went over to the ground crew utility truck. ‘Look at this lot.’ Ernie held out three hefty projectiles that covered the entire palm of his left hand.
John whistled. ‘Some bullets,’ he said.
‘They’re cannon shells, Hill, not bullets,’ said Ernie. ‘These things explode on contact. You wouldn’t have stood a chance if they’d done what they were supposed to. If they did, your wing would have gone up like a dry hay barn.’
Bomber Page 10
