by Ed Ruggero
“What’s he gonna do?” Strickland said to his comrades. “Get Doolittle to change the war plan?”
Strickland turned to Harkins. “Who do you work for, anyway?”
Harkins thought—hoped—they were on the verge of giving him some information that might prove useful. Telling them he was the newest member of the OSS would probably not encourage an open conversation.
“I’m a cop,” Harkins said. “I’m investigating a murder.”
“Shit,” Larson said. “And you think that Gefner clown is trying to railroad Major Cushing?”
“That’s one theory,” Harkins said. “I’d like to know why Gefner might have an ax to grind with him. Also, Cushing is in bad shape. I’m trying to find out how he got that way.”
Larson, the captain, looked at his hands for a long moment.
“You two take a hike,” he said when he looked up. “If there’s blowback, it can land on me.”
The lieutenants got up and left the hut. Larson looked over at the sleeping forms on the bunks. No one had moved; he and Harkins were essentially alone.
“Cushing was totally dedicated to making his crew better, making the squadron better, to making himself a better pilot. But no matter how much he did, we kept losing planes. Lose enough guys and it’s going to take a toll.”
“I heard some raids had as many as twenty-five percent losses.”
“Last year, yeah,” Larson said. “And even into this year. We were losing hundreds, thousands of guys every goddamn month. And still the brass kept ordering bigger and bigger raids. Nobody expected the flak to be so heavy or so accurate. Hell, at the time I was shipping out of the states—this was January of ’43—the goddamned generals were telling us that the Krauts couldn’t touch the B-17. We were too high and too heavily armored. But once we started raids into Germany proper, shit, they were just slaughtering our guys. Then you’d come back here and get a day’s rest and have to go back up again.”
Larson leaned his elbows on his knees, took out a cigarette, offered one to Harkins, who declined.
When Larson flipped his Zippo lighter and held it to the end of the cigarette, his hand shook.
“Is it true that the Mustangs are making a difference?” Harkins asked. “You have fighter escorts all the way now?”
“Oh, they’re making a huge difference,” Larson said. “But we should have had them earlier.”
He leaned back, one elbow on the back of an adjacent chair, blew a smoke ring into the fetid air.
“The first models had American-made engines, not enough power, so they didn’t handle well is what I hear. The Brits got hold of a few and put in Rolls-Royce engines; they worked great. But fucking General Arnold, flying a fucking desk back in Washington, doesn’t want anything British. No engines, no tactics, no cross-training. The sonofabitch slowed down procurement. Meanwhile, dozens of planes are getting shot out of the sky every goddamned day.”
Larson took a breath, then pressed thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets.
“Sorry,” he said.
Harkins waited a moment, then said, “A while ago I asked if there were any targets left in Germany. That’s when you told the lieutenants to leave.”
“Yeah,” Larson said. “Because the answer is that Germany is the target. If the bombs hit the ground, the brass and the Eighth Air Force public relations weenies shovel some bullshit about precision bombing of vital war industries, especially aircraft factories. If we hit those targets it’s only because we drop so many goddamned bombs.”
“What about that fancy bombsight everyone is always talking about? I saw it in a newsreel.”
“The Norden bombsight,” Larson said. “Put a bomb in a pickle barrel, right?”
Harkins nodded.
“You know where they developed that? Tested it and trained the first bombardiers? Fucking Arizona. You know how much Arizona weather resembles the weather over Germany? Over northern Europe?”
Larson held up his hand, made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and looked through it at Harkins.
“Zero.”
“And Major Cushing knew about all these problems with the targets and casualties?” Harkins asked. “Did he complain about it or something?”
“That’s a good question,” Larson said. “Some people think he talked to reporters—to one reporter in particular—that he spilled the beans about this whole fucked-up show.”
“Who was the reporter?”
Larson sat still for a moment, watching Harkins through the smoke curling from his cigarette.
“Cushing has a cousin who writes for the Chicago Tribune.”
“Oh,” Harkins said.
The Tribune, owned by World War One veteran Robert McCormick, was a vocal—some would even say rabid—critic of everything that had to do with Franklin Roosevelt, starting in the 1930s with FDR’s New Deal and continuing through the administration’s wartime strategy.
“There’s been a couple of articles attacking bomber command, especially all the horseshit about how we can win the war with air power alone. By the time the brass found out about Cushing’s connection—he and his cousin have different last names—Fred had already been warned about shooting his mouth off, about being critical of the air campaign.”
“Wow,” Harkins said.
It was one thing for a dogface private to bitch to his congressman that he wasn’t getting his mail. It was quite another for a decorated officer like Cushing to tell a major newspaper that the air force generals were lying when they said they were winning the war. That would be enough for the bigwigs to send their lawyers after Cushing.
“Did he do it, do you think?” Harkins asked. “Did he feed information to the Tribune?”
Larson shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. They think he did, so they have it in for him.”
The pilot took another long pull on his cigarette, then dropped the butt into a can of dirty water beside the stove. He held out his hand, palm down, fingers spread. It shook, just as it did when he held his lighter.
“See that? That’s mild. Some guys get to where they can’t button their fly. Tough to fly a plane when you shake like that.”
“Cushing get to that stage?”
One of the men sleeping beneath a pile of blankets stirred, then shouted something unintelligible as he kicked the covers off. He sat up, looked at Larson and Harkins, mumbled, “Shit,” and fell back, pulling the blankets over his head again.
“Cushing was worse. The flight surgeon took him off status.”
Outside, a siren wailed. Then the door to the hut banged open and Lieutenant Holland stepped inside. “Got some shot-up aircraft coming in,” he said.
“On my way,” Larson answered. He stood and slipped into the sleeves of his leather flight coat.
“Can I come along?” Harkins asked.
“Yeah,” Larson said. “Sure. You might wind up carrying wounded.”
“Wouldn’t be my first time.”
10
21 April 1944
1400 hours
Lowell and Sergeant Curry watched from inside the staff car as a procession of tractors pulling wheeled racks of bombs rolled past them, headed for the flight line. The tractors moved slowly, ground crew walking along beside like shepherds.
“Just think,” Curry said. “In about twelve hours those bombs will be ruining some Kraut’s day.”
The siren saved Lowell from responding. A tractor stopped on the road next to the staff car, its rack of two fat bombs just a few feet from Lowell’s window.
“What’s happening?” Lowell asked.
“Planes coming in with wounded,” Curry said, checking the sky through the windshield. “They might be damaged, so we won’t haul any more bombs up near the flight line just yet, in case there’s a crash or something.”
Lowell and Curry got out of the staff car. The three GIs escorting the closest batch of bombs all noticed her at once.
“Hello, gorgeous!” the GI atop the tractor said when Lowell stepp
ed into view. “I see you brought your car for our date.”
He was chubby, with the stripes of a staff sergeant, wireless spectacles that made his eyes look oversized, like an owl in uniform. The two other men, both privates, chuckled.
“Is it okay if I look?” Lowell asked. She had never seen a bomb up close, though she had certainly seen the effects of their explosions.
“Sure,” the sergeant said, jumping down from his seat. “Sure, come right on up. They won’t bite. They’re not armed yet, so they can’t hurt you.”
He drew close to Lowell as she approached, then pulled a big wrench from his pocket and tapped one of the bombs on the nose. Lowell jumped at the sound of steel on steel.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “Ol’ Sergeant Rickover ain’t gonna let anything happen to you. Just wanted to show you they’re harmless is all.”
Lowell couldn’t take her eyes off the bomb. Each was about four feet long, the cylinder domed at one end; the other end sprouted large fins that stabilized the bomb as it fell. Up close, the weapons were enormous—it would take two people to wrap their arms around the body.
“How much does this weigh?”
“This is a five hundred pounder,” Sergeant Rickover said, standing too close beside her.
“Here you go, miss,” one of the other ground crewman said, holding his hand out to Lowell.
When she reached toward him, he laid a big piece of chalk in her palm.
“Good idea,” Rickover said. “Why don’t you write a message on one of them bombs?”
“What would I write?” Lowell said, caught off guard. She held the chalk between her thumb and forefinger, as if it might be a smaller bomb.
“Anything at all. Here, let me show you.”
Rickover took the chalk from her, squatted down and wrote in big block letters on the metal cylinder, “TO ADOLF FROM THE MIGHTY EIGHTH.”
He stood, smiled at Lowell, and offered her the chalk. Another one of the privates came close. “Let me,” he said.
In a sloppy script he wrote, “Kiss my ass, Krauts!”
Rickover took the chalk from the GI. “That’s no way to talk in front of a lady,” he scolded. He lifted Lowell’s right hand by the wrist and used his other hand to lay the chalk on her palm, then he folded her fingers over it.
“Go ahead,” Rickover said. “It’s fun. Harmless fun.”
Lowell took a step toward the bomb, reached out with the chalk, then drew back. She looked back at the fins, remembered a sequence from a newsreel that had been filmed through an empty bomb bay. The big canisters went out in a cluster, the bombs eventually sorting themselves out and pitching nose down. In that newsreel, she could just make out what looked like a river, then a geometric pattern that might have been a city. The short, which played in packed movie houses before the feature film, never named the target.
“I got something to write,” the third soldier said, stepping up.
Yet another American accent, Lowell thought. His “write” sounded like “rat.” He was very young, very handsome, with dark curly hair and a dimpled chin. When Lowell handed over the chalk, he squatted and wrote below Rickover’s inscription, “rember pearl harbor!!”
“What the hell is that supposed to say?” Rickover asked.
The handsome soldier looked at Rickover, then at the bomb, as if he’d forgotten what he wrote.
“The fucking Germans didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” Curry said, laughing.
“Watch your language,” Rickover said to Curry. Then, turning to the handsome soldier, he said, “And you spelled ‘remember’ wrong.” He shook his head, a disappointed schoolmaster.
Lowell took the chalk back, stepped up and wrote, very slowly, “Arthur” on top of a bomb. She looked at her work, then quickly wrote, “Betty, Thomas, Joan.”
She straightened up, tossed the chalk to Rickover, dusted off her hands and turned back toward the staff car, Curry following.
“Is that King Arthur?” Rickover asked her back.
“No,” she said. “My dad.”
* * *
There was a jeep, engine running, outside the Quonset hut, Strickland driving. Harkins squeezed under the canopy and into the back. Larson jumped into the front passenger seat just as Strickland pushed the accelerator and the vehicle lurched forward. They bounced along a muddy track and turned left through a gap in a tall hedge, an ambulance hard behind them. The control tower—three flimsy stories of white-painted wood—came into view after the turn, and in front of them a wide, muddy field, a long runway with steel matting and a windsock at either end. Trees around the edge were bare of leaves, like ink drawings on a gray canvas. The ambulance pulled even with the jeep and the two vehicles veered right until they were parallel to the runway. Harkins saw a white flare arc up from a deck atop the tower.
“What’s that mean?”
Larson turned and yelled over the noise of the engine.
“Damaged aircraft coming in, wounded on board. Planes that aren’t in distress will circle and wait.”
Harkins heard the plane before he saw it, not the steady buzz-saw drone of healthy engines, but a choppy sound that reminded him of a car on its last few miles. Then, to their left, a B-17 skimmed the tops of the trees and came into view.
“Holy shit,” Larson said.
The tail assembly looked as if it had been attacked by a machete-wielding giant, and Harkins could see pieces of the aircraft’s aluminum skin flapping in the prop wash. A propeller on the left wing was barely turning, the engine trailing gray smoke. None of the landing gear was down. The plexiglass nose was shattered, just a gaping hole.
“Belly flop,” Strickland said. “Jesus.”
The wounded bomber came down to a hundred feet or so, then held steady at that altitude as it headed for the trees on the far end of the field.
“Is he going to land like that?” Harkins asked. “No wheels?”
Larson and Strickland looked at each other, then Larson got out of the jeep and trotted over to the base of the control tower, where a knot of officers had their heads together in some sort of heated exchange.
The wounded airplane did not land and barely cleared the trees at the end of the runway. Harkins watched, fascinated, as the ship banked in a slow turn.
“What’s he doing?” Harkins asked Strickland.
“Coming around again,” Strickland said. “They’re probably trying to get the landing gear down using the hand controls.”
By the time the bomber made its racetrack turn and was headed back to the field for another attempt, Larson had returned to the jeep.
“Hydraulics are out,” he said to Strickland. “Landing gear mechanism shot up. Ball turret stuck.”
“Shit,” Strickland said as he turned to look through the windshield again.
“What does that mean?” Harkins asked.
“They can’t get the landing gear down, which means they have to do a belly landing,” Larson said. “But without hydraulics they can’t move the ball turret either, and its tracks are jammed, probably hit by flak.”
Harkins knew the ball turret was the plexiglass bubble that hung from the belly of the plane to engage enemy fighters attacking from below. A gunner, usually the smallest man in the crew, squeezed inside through a small hatch. The whole thing moved like a ball joint, the twin machine guns swinging toward targets.
“The gunner is still inside?” Harkins asked.
“He can only get out if the hatch is aligned, and they can’t move the ball, so he’s trapped.”
“What happens when they do a belly landing?” Harkins asked.
“What the fuck you think happens?” Strickland said without turning around.
The bomber was aligned with the runway again, two engines now trailing smoke, the right wing dipping lower than the left, but clear of the trees and lowering itself to the English soil. The ball turret would hit first, the weight of the plane crushing it. Harkins forced himself to breathe.
“They radioed i
n,” Larson said. “Said they had everybody in the crew back there at some point, trying to get the ball aligned.”
The plane hit tail first, then bounced as it appeared to stumble, the propellers throwing sparks when they hit the steel matting, the blade ends bending back like wilting flower petals. The ball turret simply disappeared.
The ambulance dashed forward, and a fire truck appeared on the other side of the runway. Harkins could see two men in white overalls, maybe flame suits.
Strickland pulled the jeep closer to the aircraft, and Harkins got out when Larson did. Up close, the fuselage looked like it had been used for target practice. Jagged holes from machine-gun rounds stitched lines across the wings. Shrapnel from antiaircraft fire had torn long gashes in the aircraft. The nose of the plane, where the bombardier sat, had been destroyed by cannon fire, as best Harkins could guess.
He did not ask any more questions.
There were fifteen or twenty people around the wreck now, helping wounded crew members climb free, passing stretchers inside. Harkins caught a glimpse of a mechanic standing inside the belly of the plane where the waist gunners would be, holding a plasma bottle above his shoulder while, below him, a medic worked in the dark space, trying to save a man’s life.
A few members of the ground crew had gathered around an opening in the fuselage where it had been sliced open, above where the ball turret had been.
“Get away from there!”
Harkins turned to see a captain in a thick jacket, his life vest still around his neck, hurrying from the front of the plane to where the little mob had gathered.
“Get away from there!” the pilot yelled again, tearing off his life vest and tossing it aside. His cap was gone, the sleeve of his coat torn open so that the lining hung out in clumps.
“What do you think you’re doing? Get away!”
The men had been straining to see what had happened to the ball turret and its doomed gunner.
“You fucking ghouls! I said get out of there!”
The men closest to the pilot couldn’t move fast enough, and the officer shoved one man, who stumbled into his comrades. Harkins heard someone say, “Sorry, sir.”
