The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

“Oh, we’ll make it, that’s for sure. And I know exactly how I’m going to feel.”

  You could tell that he had no doubts. All you had to do was watch him as he glanced up from his letter, spent half a minute drinking in some remembrance of his Alice from her portrait, and then smiled as he got back to writing.

  Michael wrote to Alice every day. It was something he looked forward to almost as much as if he were picking her up for a date. I wrote when I felt guilty about not responding to Kay. His letters were probably filled with feeling. Mine were filled with news. And with the rain dampening everything down, there wasn’t even much of that.

  We fueled ourselves on rumors. Dark rumors that the Germans had built up their antiaircraft batteries and fighter fleets. That there was a new, long-nosed 190 fighter that flew higher and faster than anything we had. That they had moved their bombers forward and would hit our bases on the first clear day. That our army in Italy was being driven back by new German panzer divisions. That we had reached the air equivalent of trench warfare where both sides would be slaughtered without either gaining a foot of sky.

  And optimistic rumors: the Germans were shifting everything they had to the Russian front. That peace negotiations had already begun in Switzerland. That the Italian campaign had stripped the German air defense of its planes. That the new P-51 Mustangs were even more fantastic than previously reported. That there was a glut of new aircrews coming out of training and headed for England, and that we would all be rotated back to the States.

  I was nothing more than a bystander to the conversations. The war was still there. I was still in the grim lottery of life and death. I would escape on Friday, even for only a few minutes, into Angela’s arms. I would leave all this behind me and vanish into the love I had for another human being, and that moment would be more important than the planes, the bombs, and the guns. Death might be triumphant everywhere, but in that tiny borrowed apartment there would be unquenchable life.

  Thursday night the orders came down. Meteorologists had identified a high-pressure region moving down from the North Atlantic toward the Dutch coast. Bitter cold, but sparklingly clear air would move onto the Continent during the night. Sometime tomorrow the targets of the Ruhr would emerge from their winter shroud. We were going to be there to destroy them.

  With the abrupt change in plans came a total security blackout. The base switchboard was disconnected and the gates by the guardhouses were swung shut. There was no way I could reach Angela to tell her that our rendezvous would have to wait. No chance to exchange consoling words. She would find out tomorrow when the town of Whittingbridge shook under our engines and when all of our planes labored up into the sky. Then she would know what I already knew. We might never again feel one another’s breath as we touched our lips carefully together. Both our lives were at play in the lottery.

  The briefing room seemed strange when the officers assembled. It had been weeks since our last big mission, and fresh aircrews had arrived in the interim. The newer men didn’t know where to sit, and when they took the traditional seats of the experienced pilots, the old-timers began to wander about. There were two new staff officers that none of us had ever met. The usual aerial photographs of the targets were missing. In the pea-soup weather, no photos had been possible. Most noticeable was the mood of apprehension that filled the room. We had developed bravado to cover our fears when we were flying a regular schedule. Relief at having survived the last mission spilled over into the plans for the new one. But now the fear was naked. It was a first mission for some of us, and like a first mission for all of us. The dark rumors had endured to set the mood.

  The target was a railroad complex south of Essen that linked the North Sea ports to the German industrial belt. But we weren’t going over Belgium or the Ruhr defenses. Instead, we were flying out over the Dutch coast and then southeast to Essen. The fighters would take the shorter route, rendezvous with us as we moved inland, and stay with us over the target. It was Germany, but not as deep into Germany as we feared.

  Weather was the critical element. We had to arrive over the target at the same time as the front. We would man our planes before dawn, but wouldn’t start our engines until there was a confirmed clearing over Holland. Then we wouldn’t take off until British Mosquito reconnaissance planes confirmed the clearing over the target. If the front changed direction, we probably wouldn’t take off at all.

  It was still night when we staggered out to the storage pads and climbed into our planes. The bombs—twelve five-hundred-pounders with six stacked up each side of the catwalk—were already aboard, no danger to anyone because they had not yet been armed—unless, of course, the plane caught fire. Burning fuel could cook them well beyond their detonation temperature. Or unless they broke loose and came hurtling through the flight deck or rolled back and tore off the tail. Then there was the ammunition. Over a ton of fifty-caliber machine-gun rounds was laid out in troughs behind the guns. And the gasoline. There were two tons of aviation gas in the wings, poured into tanks that filled the spaces around and between the engines. Everything around us, under us, and over us was explosive. When we climbed aboard, we became part of the plane, and that made us part of a gigantic bomb. If anything went wrong, we could become a ghostly shape of scorched earth with roughly the dimensions of a B-17.

  The danger inspired reverence. Death was only inches, or perhaps seconds away. Each of us sensed it and was painfully aware of his insignificance. A blast, a fireball, and then a wing-shaped area of burned grass. There would be no wreckage to examine, no bodies to take away—just clear the area to hide the event from the other flight crews. Pack the personal effects in cardboard cartons. Enclose one of the form letters from the commanding officer in each box. None of the crew need ever be heard from again.

  We sat in silence, watching the light penetrate the leaden sky to the east. There was no sunrise to add color or cast shadows, but just a gray glow in the overcast. The mist off the sea built up on the windscreens and began to run in tiny rivulets. An occasional breeze stirred the trees that surrounded the hangar pads. Aboard the forty planes there were four hundred men, each of them frightened and alone. The time ticked past—seconds, then minutes, and finally an hour. Still no word from the Dutch coast. Was it clearing? For Christ’s sake, someone tell us something!

  I knew Angela would be awake, beginning the motions of another day—but just the motions. Her thoughts would be on the evening and the intimacy we would be sharing, where my thoughts would be if my brain wasn’t locked on the weather over Holland. Are we going, or are we canceled? Yes or no? Will tonight ever come? Yes or no?

  More rain sprinkled across the windscreen. We were socked in. How could we go anywhere?

  “Looks bad,” two gunners exchanged over the intercom.

  A long silence, and than another voice, “Yeahhh, real bad.”

  “Looks like we’ll be standing down,” someone added hopefully.

  “If only it would get worse.”

  “It’s awful right now. The English wouldn’t be flying…”

  “The English never fly in the daylight.”

  “This isn’t daylight. This is mud.”

  “They don’t fly in that either.”

  Laughter on the lines. As the mission became less likely, the gloom began to lift. In another minute we would all be singing.

  “Let’s keep it down,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “Keep the line clear.”

  “You don’t want to fly this thing, do ya, Skip?” the radioman asked.

  “Can’t wait, Jonesy. Keep it down so I can hear the colonel.”

  The laughter died. Colonel Mast was always ready to fly. The mention of his name caused a chemical reaction. We all went back to being quiet and alone.

  More seconds. And then more minutes. There had to be a cutoff point—some precise time when it was no longer possible to make the round trip. But it wasn’t yet 0900. Plenty of time left for the cloud cover to move away from the target.

>   “Pilots, start your engines!” It was Mast’s voice. And then, to punctuate the order, a white flare shot up from the control tower.

  I opened the side window. “Clear!” I shouted out, waking the ground crew and warning that I was about to start an engine.

  “Clear,” my new copilot, Glenn Randlett, yelled from his copilot’s window. Ron Brown was now commanding his own B-17. He was still only nineteen.

  Bruce Firkins was our new flight engineer and turret gunner. He knelt behind the center console and began flicking the engine switches, connecting battery power to the starting motors, turning on the fuel pumps. I watched electric power come up, and then I hit the number-two starter. The electric motor whined. The big Cyclone radial engine outside my window groaned as the pistons pushed through thick oil. A cylinder coughed. Then another. As the prop turned slowly, individual cylinders fired, belching out puffs of oily smoke. Then the engine caught with a roar, vibrating against the wing strut and setting the whole plane humming like a tuning fork. Number three whined, coughed up clouds of gas, and then exploded to life.

  We fired up one and four, even though we didn’t need them to taxi. The mission plan called for us to reach the runway with all engines at flight temperature so we would be ready to take off on a moment’s notice. I stood on one of the brakes to swing the plane in its parking circle and start it down to the taxiway. There we fell into line with other Fortresses emerging from the trees and camouflage nets. It was then that you could feel the sound of 160 engines.

  You heard it, of course. A deafening low-pitched roar, like thunder rolling across a summer lake. It came through the windscreens and the sides of the plane, even through the earphones, and pounded against your eardrums. But it was the body blows that you felt, the pounding of waves of air that hit like fists. All fifteen hundred horses of each of the engines seemed to stampede across the base and reverberate out over the countryside.

  We all knew that faces were turning in Whittingbridge. Clerks were suddenly looking up from their desks. Housewives opened their front doors and stepped out into the streets. Children turned from their games, looked in the direction of the base and smiled until they broke into laughter. They knew the routine. We’d be taking off in a few moments, plane after plane clawing at the sky as it climbed overhead, each giving image to the rumble that came across the treetops. Most had fallen into the habit of whispering a quick prayer as they counted the planes going off. They’d keep that count until evening, when the shot-up remnants began appearing in the east.

  Angela would know. She could separate the shape of the B-17 from the twin-tailed Liberator, the other four-engine bomber with American markings. She could even separate the pounding of the American radial engines from the buzz of the in-line engines on the RAF Lancasters. She would know even before we were in the air that I was headed out on another mission. She knew the unit number painted on our sides, not that it was often clear enough to read it, but Angela always knew when we were on our way across the channel. And, presumably, she had neighbors who made sure that the Germans knew as well. There must have been many of them, because the antiaircraft guns were always loaded and the fighters were always waiting. She would be afraid, as every one of us was afraid. She would feel the loneliness that she and I shared. The foreboding that the life we had just begun together was suddenly in danger of being torn in half.

  “Shut down engines,” Mast ordered over the radio. As if God was commanding the storm, the thundering stopped. Lines of planes that had been quivering in their anxiety to reach the runway were suddenly calm. I was gradually aware of the rain tapping on the glass, and I could hear the sound of the wind.

  “We’re on hold,” the colonel said. “Stay alert. It won’t be long.”

  Apparently the clearing had reached Holland, but the British Mosquito reconnaissance plane was still bumbling through clouds over our target. We weren’t going off until we had confirmation of visibility.

  “You think we’ve got a backup target, Skip?” the flight engineer asked.

  “Sure, there’s always a backup, but that’s only when we’re in the air.”

  “Then maybe we won’t go.”

  “We’ll go.”

  Except we didn’t. We sat quietly for another forty minutes, and that got orders to restart our engines. The lead planes moved out onto the runway and revved their engines to check magnetos. We were all watching the tower, looking for the takeoff flare. Minutes dragged by. And then Mast’s voice: “Sorry, men, but I’ve got to shut you down again. Stay sharp. Our target is looking better.”

  Again, quiet. And then another long wait, where seconds became minutes—and then hours. Our daylight raid was beginning to look more like a noon takeoff. I wondered what Angela was thinking. She had heard the engines, but hadn’t seen the planes. Was something wrong? Or was something wonderfully right? Did it mean the mission was off when she heard the engines quit? Then why did they start again? Was I going out? Or would I be rushing to join her?

  We scrubbed shortly after noon. The target had stayed safely under a thick overcast. We weren’t going to take off with the near certainty that we would be wasting our bombs on a secondary target. We swung our planes carefully and headed back to our parking pads. Then came another order.

  Plane captains were to stay on board for fueling. We had burned a lot of gas in our false starts and the tanks had to be topped. Bombardiers were to post armed guards on their planes because we weren’t going to disarm. The generals had decided to move the raid back one day. It was safer to leave the bombs aboard than to handle them twice more, unloading and reloading. “Get some sleep,” we told our crews. Reveille is at 0400. Man the planes at 0515. Takeoff scheduled for first light. If, of course, the damn weather ever cleared. In the meantime, the base was secured. No one leaves. No phone calls in or out. We had to protect the secrecy of our intentions and our destination.

  Angela went to her friend’s apartment, joined her in dinner, and then sat up waiting for me until an hour after her friend returned. It was nearly midnight when she returned to her family home.

  “Yanks didn’t visit Jerry today,” her father said factually.

  “No, they didn’t,” she said.

  “Thank God,” her mother added, as if tomorrow would be any safer than today.

  Now

  Arthur Lyons is waiting to pounce on me as soon as I enter the hotel dining room. He races to the end of the bar and has a scotch, neat, in front of me as I climb on the stool. “Heard you got back this morning,” he says in a tone that turns the statement into a proposition that needs confirmation.

  “Seven o’clock into Gatwick,” I tell him.

  “Back out to the old base?” he asks.

  “In my room, mostly. Trying to make up the night’s sleep.” But then there seems to be no need for evasion, so I plunge into the truth. “I was finishing up Sergeant Browning’s memoirs that I read a couple of times during the flight.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “Yes, but a lot that was disappointing. I found out that the young woman I remember was really a police agent. Browning was using her to get information out of me.”

  “Oh, dear” is all he can manage. There’s not much you can say to someone who has just found out that his best friend was using him.

  “And then there was an address I was trying to find, but no one had a clue. Not even the postman.”

  He tips his head to show his interest.

  “Callaway Road. Or Callaway Lane. There was a row of flats. Two-story walkups, really, with leaded-glass windows. If I remember, they were not too far from here.”

  Lyons looks puzzled, tests his stubble with his fingertips and then shakes his head. “Callaway…I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. You sure of the name?”

  I smile and nod. “I spent a whole day hoping to meet her at one of those flats. I’m damn sure of the name.”

  “It was her flat?”

  “Not hers. It belonged to a girl friend
, and I don’t remember her name. They weren’t going to be home that evening, so they offered their flat to…us. We were planning to cook dinner for ourselves and dine by candlelight.”

  He sees the disappointment in my eyes. “But…” he says, prompting me to tell him what went wrong.

  “But the weather was going to clear over Germany, so we were scheduled for a mission that morning. Then, when the weather didn’t cooperate, we were held overnight and scheduled for the next morning.”

  “And then it cleared,” Arthur laughs, rolling his eyes at the irony.

  “No, it snowed in Germany the next day. We never took off. Maybe someone else got to bomb the damn place, but we never completed the mission. We just sat on the ground the next day. I didn’t get into town until the couple reclaimed their apartment.”

  “So you and the young lady…”

  “That’s an even longer story, Arthur. Too long for tonight. Besides, now that I know what she was up to, I don’t know how the story ends.”

  Arthur is well experienced behind the bar. He knows enough to turn away and busy himself with the other guests and leave me with my straight-up scotch.

  I have just finished the driest, most tasteless steak of my life when Herbert Little slides into the chair across from me. Herbert giggles with delight. “How was Browning’s manuscript? Did you read it?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “All two hundred handwritten pages. Not very engaging prose, and as his son suspected, not much for Sherlock Holmes here in Whittingbridge. But there is a bit about the Mary Brock case.”

  Arthur is walking toward us with two drinks on a tray. “I took the liberty,” Little explains.

  “These are on the house,” Arthur announces. Then he advises his friend, “The Yank has already spent a couple of hundred here.”

  “Good show,” says Herbert, and he lifts his glass in a toast.

  As soon as we have sipped to each other, Arthur Lyons reminds me to ask about “that apartment you were looking for. On Carraway Street, was it?”