The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  I felt safe. There were planes in every direction—the lead squadrons over France while the last ones were still over England. Groups were staggered everywhere between twenty-two thousand and twenty-eight thousand feet. We were the needle in the haystack, lost to any fighters that might want to attack us. Besides, there were our own fighters climbing up to join us and rushing to get out ahead of the first bombers. The antiaircraft guns started as soon as we reached the Belgian border. Our efforts at secrecy had fooled no one. It seemed that every cannon in the world was lined up along our route.

  At first it was a staccato of separate explosions dotting the sky with individual puffs of smoke. Then the tempo grew until there were explosions everywhere and the smoke became a seamless haze. Finally, the antiaircraft bursts became a dense cloud that dimmed the sun and made it hard to see the plane next to you. Within that cloud the air was alive with shards of steel that ripped through the planes like buckshot, cutting them to pieces and mowing down their crews. Planes fell aimlessly through the formations, exploding into one another. Engines burst into flames and fired out their pistons to join the lethal rain of hot metal. The carnage was everywhere. There was no safe center of the formation. The cannons found every corner of the sky, so the odds for all the planes were identically grim.

  My crew was hunkered down, away from the gun mounts and the glazed openings, cowering behind any piece of equipment that might deflect a spray of shrapnel. Ron Brown, my copilot, was hunched over the instruments, ducking his head out of the exposure of the windows. I was steering over a bumpy road, bounced from side to side by cannon bursts, and struggling to hold position, close to planes that would disappear and then reappear as they found streaks of sunlight. At one point a flame raced right into my face and roared by just inches outside the windscreen. An engine? A piece of a wing? It happened so quickly that I couldn’t tell.

  Seconds later there was a flash that pitched the plane straight up, twisting the wheel out of my grasp. A scream sounded over the intercom, and then a voice yelling, “Henry! Jesus, Henry! Oh, my God!” And then another voice pleading in pain. The flak had torn through our belly, ripping one of the waist gunners to pieces and sawing a foot off the other. The ball gunner, who was still up on the deck, had seen them both get hit, and he was screaming madly at the horror. The radioman went back with his first-aid kit, but all he could do was tie a belt around the live gunner’s leg.

  Still we pushed on, flying the tight defensive formation designed to save us from fighters, but that made us a perfect target for the gunners on the ground. We were like a flock of geese. All they had to do was fire into the air and a few birds would tumble.

  Our fighters reached the end of their fuel tethers, wished us luck, and turned back to England without ever firing a shot. On that cue the antiaircraft fire stopped, the sky opened, and we got our first glimpse of the swarm of German fighters that was waiting ahead. My remaining gunners took their positions, and then the fighters moved in.

  The center of the formation became a blessing. The German pilots started with the easier pickings on the edges of the formations and worked their way in, layer by layer. We had a momentary respite. It would take them a few minutes to get to us.

  What was obvious was the change in our attack force. The dense pattern of droning bombers had been thinned out. There were spaces everywhere that the raid commanders were trying to fill by moving planes. Colonel Mast, whose voice had been silent during the flak blitz, came back on the air. “Gordon, move up into Johnson’s spot. Minor, get onto Marron’s wing.” It was the first time I was aware that the plane to my left was no longer there.

  The cacophony of commands and responses, of fighter warnings and fighter pickups, of gunners rejoicing and gunners screaming became deafening, louder even than the drone of the engines. Through it all we kept plodding ahead, while the fighters danced around us like hornets: darting in, stinging, and then moving away. They kept thinning out the formations as fast as the commanders reassembled them. If we kept flying in a straight line, we would all be gone before we ran out of fuel. Then there was a voice announcing five minutes to target. We began our bombing countdown, moving toward a mill that rolled steel plate.

  It was at that moment that the fighters poured through into the center, appearing suddenly above and ahead, in a dive that aimed them right through my window. My flight engineer called their bearing, and then the turret gun behind my head began to chatter. In response, the attacking planes’ guns flashed. One of the Germans veered off, leaving a sudden trail of smoke, then the turret above exploded and the flight engineer’s dead body dropped down into the aisle beside me. I flinched as two of the German 190s whipped past. When I looked down at the body, I saw that most of its head was gone.

  Then, as if nothing else of any particular importance was happening, the bombardier began his monotonous sounding countdown. “Three minutes. Opening bomb-bay doors.” There should have been mechanical noises and the sudden rush of air as the bomb-bay doors swung out, but there was nothing.

  “Doors won’t open,” the bombardier yelled while he pounded the switch. “The fucking doors are stuck!”

  I turned to the copilot. “Ron, get back there and crank ’em open!” He didn’t move. He was staring down at the headless corpse in the aisle. “Ron, get the bomb-bay doors!” He looked up and blinked at me over the top of his oxygen mask.

  “I’ll get it!” It was the navigator over the intercom. He was crawling back under the flight deck, pushing between the dangling feet of the flight engineer, then he was on his knees, fitting a crank over a square nut.

  “Two minutes,” the bombardier said, his voice quivering in a hint of panic.

  I could hear the whistle of the first rush of air. The doors were opening slowly as the navigator strained against the crank. Two more German fighters rolled down toward us, through the tracers that were fired from the planes around us. A cannon round exploded halfway out on the left wing, shaking us as if we had hit a mountain and rolling us to the left. I twisted the yoke and the right, snapping us back to level.

  “One minute!”

  “No! The doors are still stuck. I can only get them halfway down!”

  “What’s stopping them?”

  “Something in the gear. Maybe shrapnel. I have to close them again to work it out.”

  “Forty seconds.”

  “Abort the drop! Abort the drop!”

  “Bomb switch off! The bomb switch is off!”

  “Okay, Rusty,” I told the navigator. “Close them and then try again.”

  “Bombs away!” The planes ahead were dropping, then the planes on our wings.

  “Now the damn doors won’t shut!” Rusty screamed.

  Ron had recovered his senses and was climbing to his feet and then stepping on the sprawled body that blocked his path. “I’ll help him,” he announced, and then climbed down next to the navigator to lend his shoulder to the crank. In a few seconds the wind sound stopped.

  “On my mark, flank turn left to zero, zero, zero,” Mast’s voice ordered. The bombing run was over. The squadron was turning back, and we still had a belly full of live five-hundred-pound bombs.

  “Stand by…mark!”

  I began our turn, adjusting in the formation so the plane on my left wing turned out ahead of me. My fingers moved precisely, but my mind was screaming in anguish. We had been through hell. I had a shot-up plane with two or three dead crewmen. With the fighters still attacking and the antiaircraft guns waiting for our return, the prospects of getting the rest of us back to base safely were dim. And all for nothing. Absolutely nothing. My plane hadn’t put a single bomb on target.

  “On my mark, five hundred per minute to thirty thousand.” Standard procedure. Mast was going to take us back at a higher altitude. We were lighter, so we could fly faster and higher and maybe get above some of the flak.

  “No can do, Colonel,” I radioed. “My doors are stuck. I’m still loaded.”

  “Okay, Marron. E
ase away and kick them out. Then climb back up and join us.”

  We dropped down, just above the next box in the stack, and then turned slowly out of formation. As soon as we were clear, Mast gave his mark, and the squadron climbed away from us.

  “Okay, try it again. Let’s see if we can crank the doors down.”

  The two men leaned on the crank and turned the doors halfway down, then they reversed their grips and pulled them back up. They took three cycles of opening and closing before the gear freed and they were able to swing the doors all the way down.

  “It’s clear,” Ron told me, then he dragged the engineer out of the way and left a bloody boot print as he climbed back into his seat. “Drop them whenever you’re ready.”

  I hesitated a second, wondering what was underneath us. A family of farmers sitting down to their dinner? A schoolhouse filled with kindergartners? It was another lottery of destruction, just like the random blasts of the antiaircraft guns. There was no reason why some lived and some died. “Get rid of them,” I ordered.

  “Bombs away,” the bombardier intoned, and the suddenly lightened plane bounded upward. I eased back on the yoke and we began climbing up toward the formation that was in the process of turning back to the west.

  We started letting down when we reached the Dutch coast and were at five thousand feet when we crossed the cliffs of England. I went down first, because I had a wounded gunner aboard, and dropped a flare to signal for an ambulance. The plane handled flawlessly, even though there was a gaping hole in the left wing, and touched down on the center line. As soon as we were off the runway, the ambulance was alongside, taking out the man who had lost his foot and two others who had been slaughtered and bled like cattle. The rest of the crew rode back to the parking area and then climbed down wordlessly. I stayed strapped into my seat, just as Colonel Mast had done on my first mission. I was drained of physical energy and my mind was too numb to take the next step.

  The mission, we were told in our review meeting, was a stunning success. There were photos of the vast factory complex we had hit, and indeed there were pockets of utter destruction and fires that were still burning. But the numbers told a different story.

  Six hundred and twenty planes had taken off, laden with two thousand tons of high explosives. Perhaps ten factories had been destroyed, but only 430 planes had returned, and a third of those needed extensive repair.

  To destroy ten production lines, we had expended half of our bombers, a month’s output from probably twenty American production lines. We had lost nearly two thousand men, who, in the game of grim statistics, represented about four thousand man-years of training. A few more stunning successes like this one and we would be out of business.

  The generals couldn’t, of course, admit defeat, but they must have been impressed by the high cost of their victory, because the entire American bomber force stood down. Plans for more raids deep into Germany were shelved. For the rest of the month, we were grounded.

  The Bridge was grimly quiet. There were upturned mattresses in nearly every room and barracks. The mess lines were short, and the officers’ club deserted. Without ever discussing it among ourselves, the survivors had declared a period of mourning, in which heads were bowed and eyes downcast. Each of us had lost family.

  Carberry and I spent a night hunched over our beers at the officers’ club. We weren’t saying much, just the smallest of small talk. Then he asked, “Know what I’m thinking about?” I shrugged. It probably wasn’t something worth bringing up. “I’m thinking about all the people back home.”

  I looked bewildered. “What about them?”

  “Just how many there are. Like each of our guys has a mother and father, maybe a grandmother, and probably some sisters and brothers. Maybe half a dozen people whose lives are never going to be the same because the guy they loved just bought it over Germany.”

  “Bought it?”

  “Bought the farm. He now owns a plot in Germany, just about his size lying down. And that’s where he’s staying. He ain’t never going home.”

  “Jesus, Michael! We’re down enough. Just drink your beer.”

  Another spell of gloom, and then he asked, “How many people do you have back home?”

  “Just my parents.”

  “No one else?”

  “A few friends, I guess. No one who would be devastated.”

  “What about the girl on your desk?”

  “Kay? Yeah, I guess she would miss me.”

  “What about Angela?”

  “She’s not at home. She’s here. And we’ve agreed not to care too much about each other. She’s afraid I’ll drop her once I get to know her, and I don’t want to make things tough for her if it’s my turn to…buy the farm in Germany.”

  I was just about convinced that Angela wasn’t a very good idea when I was summoned to Colonel Mast’s office. “Get that cop out of my face,” Mast warned me, with the legal officer standing behind him. “Remind him that we have a few problems of our own, and we’re not going to keep looking for an American who is probably dead already.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Detective Sergeant Browning said as he rose and came around his desk. He had tea waiting, and he poured and served both of us, mumbling all the while about how much he appreciated our cooperation. “With your terrible losses, you must have more pressing concerns,” he said with authentic sympathy. “What you young men are doing…” He shook his head in reverend disbelief.

  “I can’t talk about our losses,” I said, reminding him that base business fell into the classified information category.

  “I know,” he said, “but we do count.” I must have looked puzzled because he explained, “The planes. Everyone around here counts them when they take off and then again when they come back. We pray they’ll all come back, and we grieve for the ones who don’t. This most recent raid gave us much to grieve over.”

  I nodded. “We hit our target,” I told him.

  “You always do, don’t you? No matter how terrible the opposition.” Then he sat mournfully, stirring his tea.

  “There was some information you needed?” I asked, trying to hurry to the business at hand.

  “Yes. It concerns the men who were identified with the murdered girl. You gave me copies of their records and I wondered if you perhaps noticed a curious coincidence.”

  “No, but apparently you did.”

  “The military insurance,” he said, still concentrating on the texture of his tea. “Two of the men had Mary Brock as their beneficiaries.”

  I was startled. I’d figured her for an officers’ hooker, not an intended wife. Browning pushed the copies of the records toward me and then indicated the box where I could read the entry. “Both men had her as beneficiary at the same time. Do you Americans do a lot of that? I mean, is your military insurance something you like to give away—like your cigarettes? Or candy?”

  I pushed the copies back. “Of course not,” I snapped. “She just happened to get her hooks into two of them.”

  “That’s what I was wondering. Were there just two of them? Or was this some sort of cruel hoax that Miss Brock was perpetrating against you men? Because I have to say that if any of our policemen found someone taking advantage of you lads, they’d land very hard. Very hard indeed. And if some of the men around her knew, then there wouldn’t be any doubt about the motive for her murder.”

  “What makes you think there would be many more?”

  “Her bank account, actually. Much more than her job could have accumulated. It’s pretty obvious that she had another source of income. A very substantial source, it would appear.”

  “So you want me to find out how many others had, or have, Mary Brock as a beneficiary?”

  “It would certainly be most helpful,” he said.

  I finished the tea and stood, because I thought our meeting was over. “I don’t think you’ll have much trouble. Just put it in writing and send it to our legal officer. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.�
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  Browning didn’t get up. He didn’t even set down his cup. “I don’t think that will do me much good. I called him a few days ago and his response was dismissive. Polite! Civil! But definitely noncooperative. That’s why I left word for you to stop by.”

  I sat back down and gave him a detailed review of my morning meeting with Colonel Mast. I explained the terrible workload we all had in bringing in new planes and new crews, and the grueling training schedules we would be involved with. “It may seem like a minor clerical task,” I concluded, “but at this time, we are all out of clerks. And, as you might understand, with all the dead…well, the death of one woman…it can’t be a priority.”

  Browning was understanding. “It’s just that it will take so long to get this information from the insurance underwriters,” he said, letting me know that he was by no means at the end of his investigation.

  I told him I couldn’t promise him anything, but that I would try to take a look. Then I begged him not to call the base. “My assignment is to keep you out of their hair,” I admitted. “If you have to call, then I’m not doing my job.”

  I left his office and walked out into a summer rain, light but steady, made more soaking by the driving force of the wind. I walked directly to the old loft building that had been turned over to Angela’s firm because of their critical contribution to the war effort and found a sheltered doorway across the street.

  It was two hours before she appeared, clinging to her coat and trying to raise her umbrella into the wind. I started across, ducking around the left-handed cars with their headlamps painted over. She saw me when I reached the sidewalk, and her eyes widened as if she were suddenly frightened. The half-opened umbrella fell at her feet. I reached out to her and she rushed into my arms. I squeezed her tight up against me and buried my face against her cheek.

  “I thought you were dead,” Angela whispered. “I prayed you had made it back but…”