Flight or Fright

by Stephen King

  Joe Hill

  Exeter, New Hampshire

  December 3rd, 2017

  Author’s note: my thanks to retired airline pilot Bruce Black for talking me through proper procedure in the cockpit. Any technical errors are mine and mine alone.

  WARBIRDS

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  David Schow is perhaps best known for his work in the splatterpunk subgenre (he is said to have invented the word), but he has also written straight fiction, crime stories, and screenplays which include The Crow and the best of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboots (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, for those of you keeping score). “Warbirds” is a stunning and amazingly detailed re-creation of the bombing runs over Germany in World War II. It’s also a powerful portrait of the forces that are unleashed when men go to war. “I think we woke something up back then, with all that conflict,” old Jorgenson says. “All that hate. All those lives …” Which may (or may not) explain what the crew of the Shady Lady saw while the bullets were flying and the air was exploding all around them.

  “Warbirds was real,” said the old man sitting across the table from me. “I seen ’em. More real than gremlins, say; less real than the weight of a pistol in your hand.”

  I had traveled several hundred miles to listen to this man reminisce about my late father, and he was spinning me a tale of flying monsters, his spidery white eyebrows gauging how much hogwash I might buy. We’d never met before, and all the trust assumed implicit between us was mere courtesy, standing at ease until something more fundamental could replace it.

  I should have paid more attention to that part about the pistol.

  “Good man, your dad,” said Jorgensen, top turret gunner. That would be the Martin turret on the B-24D. Blame my homework. I knew each crew member by their position; I’d based a lot of my anticipation on a photo I found from 1943—one of the few times the entire core team held together long enough for a snapshot. I appended last names to each man, my roster denying them their full names or nicknames, and back then everybody had a nickname, usually a diminution of their given name: Bobby, Willy, Frankie, no different from kids in a neighborhood mob. And kids these guys were. As I sat there drinking coffee served by Jorgensen’s sister Katie, that defocused black and white photo was sixty-five years old and most of the fresh faces were barely out of their teens. At least two of the crew had lied about their age in order to join up. Jorgensen, today, was not pushing eighty; he was pulling it. One more burden. He suffered arthritis that had closed his hands to cramped claws. He wouldn’t admit that he was a bit deaf, even though his hearing aid was plain to see (one of the older, bigger ones, a behind-the-ear rig with a so-called “flesh-colored” braided wire that snaked to a box stationed in his shirt pocket). His eyes were blue, paled by a patina of yellowed sclera. Polished spectacles. He was bowed but unbent by time and expected me to believe what he told me, because, after all, he was my elder, and what do kids really know, anyway?

  Brett Jorgensen, like most men in bomber crews during World War II, had come out of training and landed in Europe as a sergeant. He joked that before the Normandy invasion, German prison camps were overcrowded with thousands of shot-down sergeants. He leaked items like this to suss me out; was I for real and did I know what I was talking about, or was I just another ground-pounder who had seen fit to drop the last Great War from history and memory?

  “Sergeants and lieutenants,” I said, dumping powdered chemicals into my lukewarm coffee. Jorgensen drank his straight, black. Naturally. If you repeat what a person tells you, usually they illuminate.

  He pushed back from our table, then moved forward. He had a tough time finding biz to do with his hands, since they had degenerated to basic grasping tools. I felt a sympathetic twinge, not for the first time.

  “Your dad was a sergeant, too, outta Chicago. He tried to train on AT-6s but wasn’t a very good pilot. He pulled back’a the bus—twin Fifties.” He snorted out a chuckle and searched for a napkin. “This one time, he got his butt cooked by a piece of flak that came through the fuselage and tore through his flight suit and wound up sizzling against his ass.”

  “Yeah, he told me about that one. Bernberg airport, part of Berlin’s outer ring of protective bases, mission number three, March of ’44.”

  “You have been paying attention,” Jorgensen said. “Well, then, maybe you won’t find this story so weird. You’ve seen war movies. Ever seen combat?”

  “No, sir.” I was in high school when the draft lottery was instigated. I drew a fairly high number on first cull.

  “Well, it ain’t like that, and aerial combat is a whole different gorilla. Mostly what it is is a lot of noise and panic, and somehow, if you live through it, you try to figure out later why you’re not dead. In the moment, it’s all adrenaline and the kind of fear that makes you shit yourself. Planes coming apart around you, bomb loads dropping, ten big Fifties all snackering away, enemy fighters throwing twenty-millimeter cannon shells at your snoot, and around you, all around you, you see other planes going down—guys you knew, trailing smoke, blowing up in midair, and you want to look for chutes but there’s no time. You ever listen to that heavy metal music?”

  He painted such a vivid thumbnail that I was momentarily lost in it, groundless. “What? Oh, yeah, some. You know.”

  “I never liked it,” said Jorgensen. Pause for me to construct a mental image of Jorgensen sitting down all cozy with a Black Sabbath greatest hits disc. A taste of Mudhoney thrash. Perhaps a jot of some Norwegian speed-metal band’s idea of meltdown.

  “Know why? It sounds like combat, that’s why.”

  THE B-24 Liberator called the Turk, according to its nose paint, chomped into the ground and belched flaming parts all over the runway shoulder while what was left of her crew scattered. Two crewmen still in thermal suits were flattened by the explosion. One did not get up to slap himself out. Fire crews hustled from one half-extinguished conflagration to this new one as other crippled heavies tried to dodge the debris and land. Liberators—nineteen tons each, empty—were packed and stacked on approach and literally dropping out of the sky. A tower spotter was busy counting returning planes and racking up a death toll.

  The weather, typical for England, was an oppressive haze of fog and overcast. Blazing planes seared painfully bright peepholes in the mist, hot spots that corkscrewed black contrails of smoke toward the sky.

  Wheatrow, a just-arrived belly gunner from Oklahoma City, as blond and corn-fed as his name, rushed up to Harry Mars, a lieutenant who was the Shady Lady’s co-pilot. Mars stood with his hands thrust into his back pockets, an attitude he affected when he had no idea of what to fix first.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” said Wheatrow. “What hit her?”

  “Came in with her nose wheel cocked and didn’t watch the crash film, I guess,” said Mars. “Welcome to Shipdham, laddie buck.”

  Shipdham was a parish in Norfolk, a jut of the Isles northeast of London, now home to the 44th Bomb Group and one of the Allies’ coastal rally points for European missions. This British postcard of pubs and cottages had been despoiled by Nissen huts and landing strips, engirded by anti-aircraft batteries, then overrun by brash American flyers demanding to know what was really going on. Usually loudly and with a pointed absence of tact—cultural shock, writ large.

  Watching a gut-shot B-24 slide home was almost operatic in its extravagant horror. Liberators were big-bellied birds that ceased to look ungainly only in flight. On water ditches they tended to “squash,” making survival ten times less likely than if you splashed a Flying Fort. The Turk’s skipper took the lousy hand he had been dealt and played it by the manual, feathering his two working engines, stomping flaps and keeping his snout off the tarmac as long as possible. His locked-down starboard wheel had snapped on impact, guttering him into the mud and shearing off the right wing between the huge Pratt-Whitney engines. Then something had caught fire. No bomb load, little ammo, and littler fuel, but something aboard had touched off and blew
the beast apart at the waist like a firecracker in a beer bottle.

  Practically everything aboard these planes was flammable, anyway, and the fire would not be extinguished by the United Kingdom’s omnipresent cold, gray mud and moisture-laden air.

  Everybody got more bad news from Madsen in the mess hall, which doubled as the briefing shack. Wheatrow checked the mission board for Shady Lady. Their space was still blank. Madsen was a stiff piece of Sam Browne-belted British business, with a swagger stick he employed as a pointer and map-whacking tool, addressing a full complement of fidgeting officers and noncoms in the too-small corrugated hut.

  “… a total of one hundred nine-point-two tons of five-hundred and 1000-pound bombs, fused at a one-tenth of a second nose and one-quarter-second tail, were successfully dropped from eighteen thousand to twenty thousand feet. Apart from the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg—”

  Madsen’s swagger stick whacked the map and a general cheer went up at this.

  “Yes, yes.” Madsen waited it out. “Two other targets in the vicinity were hit, successfully severing air, water, and electrical lines. A screw factory and a rubber plant. Of course, some machine parts were left salvageable, but not without major testing and repair.”

  Nearly nine hundred lit cigarettes formed an inversion layer of smoke in the dome of the hut. Wheatrow recognized a few faces fresh from his training in Casper, Wyoming, guys he’d shipped over with, guys with unmemorable names. But now he was socked in with his new crew, the fresh meat on their plate. He sat next to Sgt. Jorgensen, who was rocking in his folding chair.

  “All this Limey ever talks about,” said Jorgensen. “Screwing and rubbers.”

  Alvin Tewks, a cowboy from California, leaned in from Jorgensen’s far side to jerk a thumb toward the Shady Lady’s navigator. “Ol’ Lieutenant Max, he married a Limey almost as soon as he hit the beach. Ba-boom!”

  Tewks immediately cringed under the scrutiny of Lt. Keith Stackpole, bombardier and nose gunner. He was, after all, talking about an officer. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry, sir.”

  Stackpole, one of the grownups among them at age 22, held out a flat hand. Keep that blather stowed. Just as they were raiding the Axis, a similarly militant contingent of British ladies were raiding homesick Yanks, in a potent atmosphere of material privation and imminent death. Max Gentry, their green-eyed navigator, had claimed different. He had fallen in love. Of course. He had also bought himself a double truckload of ribbing and bullshit, which Stackpole admired him for bearing with a calm deference that suggested he was acclimating to the whole indigenous stiff-upper-lip posture. As long as Gentry did not start wearing a flight scarf or speaking with a nasal accent, Stackpole would be A-OK with the Lady’s map-man.

  Stackpole passed a cigarette to Sgt. Jones, the radioman, who broke it in half and passed it on to Sgt. Smith, his best buddy, engineer and right waist gunner. Smith and Jones. Sometimes you had to laugh to keep from crying.

  “To hell with all the scores,” Jones groused. “How many?”

  “Forty, fifty, something like that,” said Smith. Both men lit up off the same match.

  Wheatrow’s expression curdled. “Out of how many?”

  “Two hundred, something like that.” Jimmy Beck had appeared behind them, since there were no more seats. The tail gunner wore military-issue glasses and transferred his smoke from one hand to the other to permit Lt. Mars and their pilot, Lt. Coggins, to squeeze in. Every fact and statistic, no matter how clear, was something like that.

  Wheatrow lost his breath. “Two hundred …?!”

  “Out of a total of one hundred seventy-seven B-24s,” Madsen boomed from the paltry little stage upfront, “at least one hundred twenty-seven and possibly as many as one hundred thirty-three reached and bombed the target. Forty-two aircraft were shot down or crashed en route—”

  “N-root?” said Tewks, still with a newcomer’s fascination at the British penchant for not speaking English.

  “—of which fifteen, we estimate, were lost over the target.”

  “We’re not on the mission board, again,” Coggins said to Stackpole.

  “In addition,” said Madsen, “eight planes landed in neutral Turkey and were interned. One hundred and four returned to base, and twenty-three to other friendly bases, for a total loss of fifty. The casualty tallies at present are four hundred forty men killed or missing in action. We are informed the Axis holds twenty of the missing crews.”

  Wheatrow felt his stomach drop away. One mission, nearly four hundred fifty guys lost. The crews of forty-five lost planes. Something like that.

  “Goddamned Krauts,” Jorgensen muttered.

  Madsen delivered the cold comfort part of the briefing: “A total of fifty-one enemy fighters were downed.”

  “Great,” said Tewks. “Almost one fighter for every bomber fulla guys.”

  Some of the men applauded anyway.

  Lt. Mars was already past it, ribbing Beck. “Hey Jimmy—know what the life expectancy is for a tail gunner in combat?”

  It was an ancient joke for these youngsters. At least three of them chimed, “Nine seconds!”

  “Thanks, fellows,” said Beck, exhaling smoke. “I feel a whole lot better. Warm inside.”

  Coggins silently scoped reaction among his crew. Good. Big death numbers would make them all hate the Fuehrer a little more tomorrow, and maybe that hate could help him bring them all back alive, not barbecued in bomber wreckage like those poor sonsabitches aboard the Turk, whose skipper was currently logging bunk time in the hospital with his left arm deep-fried medium rare and his leg busted in four places.

  This was war. This was important. In 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, the US Army Air Corps had been renamed US Army Air Forces under General Hap Arnold, and this hut-full of belligerent Americans had a lot to stand up for. Tons to prove. Now, their pride was pricked every day. The warriors of the clouds were almost as legitimate and autonomous as the Navy or the tank jockeys. After the States entered the fray, the War Department reorganized the Army Ground Forces and Army Air Forces into co-equal commands, but the shuffle would not result in something called the United States Air Force until after the war. Many of the veteran fliers still wore their Air Corps insignia with understandable self-esteem even though they were all now part of the AAF.

  The pride did not count for much when you were rousted out of your rack at one o’clock in the morning. Half the guys in the hut were aware of the intruder even before he clicked on his flashlight. That would be Carlisle, the C.O., so that would be Carlisle’s beam bouncing off Coggins’ bald cueball skull in the chilly darkness.

  “Coggins,” Carlisle whispered. “J.J. Wakey-wakey.”

  “I’m awake,” Coggins husked, rolling over.

  Carlisle seated himself on the edge of the cot. “Listen, I hate to do this to you, but—”

  “What time is it?” Everybody except Tewks was awake now.

  “One-fifteen. Look … the mission. Can you make it?”

  “Sure,” said Coggins, as if he were sure of everything.

  “We’re leading the Eighth this morning, and we need the whole group to muster maximum effort.”

  “What’s he saying?” said Wheatrow, rubbing his face to consciousness.

  “Shh,” said Beck. “It’s a surprise.”

  “It’s a big deal,” said Carlisle, louder now, for the general benefit. “Heavy flak, then fighters. An oil refinery. I know your crew isn’t quite combat-ready, but we can’t co-pilot you out with a more experienced guy because—”

  “My crew is combat-ready, sir,” Coggins returned, and nobody contradicted him.

  There it was, then. The thing Coggins would later describe as a “massacre.”

  Coggins had gotten “Shady Lady” painted on his ship during his North African leg. This green crew was sleeping inside a hut that several days before had been occupied by a completely different crew, now MIA. Tomorrow, who knew? Technically, they had flown four of their 25-mission stint,
but had always been recalled or otherwise aborted. They had yet to make it all the way across the Channel. Their much-vaunted first mission had decayed into a complete embarrassment when they lost a supercharger at 12,000 feet and had to turn back and dump their bombs in the North Atlantic. Their right waist gunner, a Texan named MacCardle, had been seconded out to an active combat crew on their twelfth run, Hometown Gal, leaving a slot that had just been filled by Wheatrow.

  A belly gunner from a ship called the Double Diamond had related the mission to Coggins: “I saw the Ratpacker take an 88 shell right in the cockpit. It heeled over with a full load of bombs and cut Hometown Gal right in half. I didn’t see any chutes.” Was MacCardle alive or dead? Nobody knew, and past a certain minimal concern, it was a bad idea to care too much.

  So here they were: scalding hot coffee, joints cracking in the accursed British damp, struggling into their gear, sleep dirt blurring their vision, becoming roly-poly flyboys. Electrical suits, flak vests, backpack chutes for the pilots, chest chutes for the rest, Mae Wests, helmets, goggles, oxygen masks. They all smelled like wet sheepskin and leather.

  “Goddamned fog,” said Tewks on the truck to the field. “Too thin to eat and too thick to drink.”

  Visibility was zilch. “We’re going to have to follow a Jeep just to find the runway,” said Stackpole. “Where are we in the formation?”

  “Coffin corner,” said Coggins, trying to make it sound normal.

  “Oh, outstanding,” grumbled Beck, the Guy in Back.

  “What?” said Wheatrow, damp blond hair plastered to his head inside his flight cap.

  Lt. Mars recited the verdict: “Outside edge of the box, rear element.”

  “So the flak can kill us easier,” noted Beck.

  Jorgensen boffed Wheatrow on one thickly-padded arm. “Newcomer position. For virgins.”

  “We’re supposed to tag along until there’s an abort,” said Coggins. “So we can fill in.” At least they had graduated from the aborts. Coggins had pulled the wire from the brim of his garrison cap with pliers, to permit the proper “mission crush” when he donned his headphones.