The War Lover

by John Hersey

  The Group was ordered out again the very next day, to Villacoublay airfield, not far from Paris. The Body didn’t go. There was cloud cover, and the mission was recalled, and most bombs were carried home. This, too, was bad for the Group’s morale, as a follow-up on Hüls. We didn’t go because we hadn’t been scheduled. There was nothing wrong with the plane. We just weren’t on the list. Marrow raised the roof but was firmly told that he had the day off. We couldn’t figure out whether this was to punish us for our pass at Wing, or whether Doc Randall thought we needed a layoff, or what. It made us very edgy, the more so because everyone got sortie credit for a recall on which there’d been no fighters or flak at all. We hated to miss that one.

  Two days later Marrow became a hero.

  31/

  On June twenty-fifth we were wakened before we had begun to get into the chugging part of sleep, at one in the morning, and we were briefed for Hamburg. We took off in the first dilution of night with dawn, at four thirty, and everything seemed out of gear from the moment we left Pike Rilling. The sky was a gray structure of clouds in several storeys, and the rendezvous was like the Covent Garden dance hall on a Saturday night: everybody was waltzing cheek to cheek with total strangers in a dimly lit setting. We finally got formed and then found we couldn’t climb at the briefed speeds because of the clouds; out over the Channel the whole formation flew a twenty-mile circle in order to reach altitude before we crossed the German coast, and upon getting up there, we found that we were all swathed in dangerous contrails. We were very much aware that our big spiral had registered on the German radar and that it gave Jerry plenty of time to position his fighters to greet us.

  All through this unhappy climb Marrow kept cursing and complaining on our interphone.

  Over the Channel, I looked out once, I remember, and saw that we were in a great chamber of clear air between two layers of opacity, the one beneath us somber and greenish, the one above a sheet of hammered silver, while between the two strata, at some distance from us and all around, puffy, globular clouds with blackish centers and snow-white trim, like huge immobilized flak bursts, ringed us about, shut us in. We were passing through an empty room of one of the many houses of the sky.

  Our mission that morning was being led by Walter Silg, but he was not in control of the strike, because he was carrying in his second seat a command pilot from Wing, a certain Colonel Trummer, who was said to be bucking for Whelan’s job as our Group C.O., and who was famous for being bullheaded. This was his second mission; our fourteenth, so Marrow could be pardoned for thinking he knew more than the Colonel. For once Haverstraw was on the ball, and after we came out of our big loop Clint remarked insistently, five or six times, that we were as much as three degrees to the south of our course. Marrow flicked his selector switch to command and he had the nerve to tell Trummer that he was off course.

  I was monitoring the band, and I heard the Colonel say, “Get off the air. I know what I’m doing. Who is that?”

  And Buzz said, “It’s Captain Marrow, and you’re still off course.”

  It was crazy of Marrow to break code, and I told him so.

  As we approached the target the cloud cover was pretty bad, and some fighters jumped us, and listening on liaison we could just feel that Colonel Trummer was getting the jimjams. He began asking Wing Headquarters, back home, what he should do if this and if that. Then he reported that both primary and secondary were under ten tenths. This simply wasn’t true. The undercast was bad, but we could see the ground from time to time. Finally Wing gave a recall order—what Trummer obviously wanted, because he was on that radio verifying the order before the airwaves had stopped twanging from getting it to us. We weren’t more than ten minutes from the initial point, and we were under constant attack from fifty or sixty squareheads.

  The Body was leading the second element of the high squadron of our Group, with Gurvine up ahead of us in Black Cat as squadron commander—and incidentally as deputy commander of the Group in case anything went wrong with the Silg-Trummer ship. Just as Trummer came up on the radio to tell us all to follow him home, Black Cat suddenly stood up on one wing and flipped out to one side and, according to Handown on interphone, dived without smoke or sign of trouble.

  Marrow poured on the coal and pulled our element through under Gurvine’s wingmen and took over the high lead.

  He took over a lot more, too.

  Silg and the lead squadron had just begun to swing out for home when Marrow, still on his command set, said, sticking to code this time, “Padlock Green to all Padlocks. Deputy command taking over. Anybody wants to bomb, form on me.”

  Apparently Trummer was back on liaison talking to England and hadn’t heard Marrow, because, at any rate, he said nothing, and with no countermand from him, and considering that everyone knew how close to the target we were, the rest of the strike stayed with us. The low squadron dropped back and hitched onto us, and the other groups just hung on.

  Clint sang out that we had reached the i.p.

  I must say Marrow did a beautiful job of taking us through the briefed turns of the approach routine because he had certainly not expected (but then again, maybe he had; as a flier he seemed to have worked everything over and over in his mind) to be a leader.

  Max kept muttering. You could tell he wasn’t ready.

  We were about halfway down to the start of the run itself when Handown reported that a clutch of Forts, six or seven, that had apparently turned out to follow Trummer and then had changed their minds and decided to attack, were straggling and were under severe attack.

  “Tough s—,” Marrow said. He was having a big time. “Come on, Maxie,” he said. “Come on, Baby.”

  For weeks Max Brindt had been griping about having to toggle his bombs on signal from the lead bombardier—giving the impression that on the average he could do better setting his own sights and bombing independently. Now he was having his chance. “Wind, wind, wind,” he said, evidently trying to build the drift into his sight.

  We were in the run. Max had us on AFCE. Suddenly with forty seconds to go, he said, “S—! I’ve lost it.”

  “What’s the matter?” Marrow shouted.

  With amazing speed our rock, Handown, said, “If we went around again we could give those stragglers a chance to tack on.”

  “You stupid mother f—er!” Marrow shouted at Max.

  Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve…

  “Clouds,” Max said. “It’s covered with clouds.” But you couldn’t tell whether to believe him.

  Of what I did, I remember only that I pretended Neg was standing behind me, as on take-offs and landings, so I was sort of drinking in his casualness, and that I looked over at Marrow and saw him looking at me, and that suddenly I was rip-roaring mad, and that I grabbed the wheel and put my feet on the pedals and put a very decided amount of pressure on the controls in favor of a left turn.

  Then I heard Marrow say, “All right, Max, get yourself straightened out, we’re going around.” And he flicked his band-selector switch and told the other ships: “Three six oh turn. Repeat. Three six oh turn.”

  If there’s anything an outfit hated to do, it was to take a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn for a second run on the target, because one Fort going around alone takes time enough, but with a formation you almost had to multiply that time by the number of ships, and you had to multiply the agony by plenty, too, because you’d thought the worst was almost over, and the fighters were still there, and the flak was still coming up, and it took forever. Oh, it was a nasty thing to have to do.

  I don’t know, I’ll never know, whether Marrow would have done the same thing if it hadn’t been for Handown’s remark and my push. I never told anyone about that little hint of mine on the controls, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Marrow never told anyone—until he told Daphne.

  At any rate, it all turned out O.K. I’m afraid the formati
on lost three ships on that big turn, but the rest of us got around, and the stragglers hooked on, and this time Max had had time to get everything straight in his head, and apparently the clouds didn’t bother him, and he did a good job—the P.R.V. photos the next day showed that he did a creditable job, which is not to say that we schmoozled the whole German war effort, but there wasn’t any Gross Error, anyway.

  We hadn’t reached the rally point when the ships began to call in to congratulate Buzz. They called him a horse’s ass, and the f—ing mulberry bush was mentioned, but it all stacked up as grudging praise for having done a tough thing.

  As for me, after we got away I turned my electric suit off, but the perspiration still poured off me.

  When we landed it turned out that down in the ball turret Junior Sailen had been so busy tracking Jerries that he never had understood what had happened, and when I told him, just before interrogation, he leaned against the side of a door and began to blubber: “He’s a good egg, Captain Marrow is, he’s my friend, my friend,” he said. “He’s like a buddy, you wouldn’t think he was a captain. I got to get him out of my head. I don’t want to think about him. He has ahold of me, and he’ll never let go. Never, never, never.” Junior sobbed as if he’d just heard of Marrow’s death.

  That evening in the bar at the officers’ club, where there appeared to be extraordinary unanimity about the notion of tying one on, Whelan, who hadn’t gone along on this raid, came up to Marrow and told him he’d put in for a D.F.C. for him. I believe Marrow thereupon took a new look at the question of our commander’s sanity.

  A few minutes later Dunk Farmer, the bartender, sidled up and said, “I been tryin’ for three months to get shet of this job and get on a combat crew, and I was just wondrin’, Cap’n, if you might find a slot for me.”

  Yes, Buzz was on the top of the heap. “Sure, son,” he said, “just as soon as my boy Boman, here, drops dead, you can have his chair.”

  “I ain’t kiddin’,” Dunk said.

  “I know it, son,” Marrow said, serious now, benevolent, oozing noblesse oblige. “I got a tail gunner I may have to wash out. I’ll bear you in mind. You don’t get gas on your stomach, do you?”

  “No, sir,” Dunk said.

  “I’ll bear you in mind,” Marrow said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE RAID

  1404–1455 hours

  1/

  Marrow’s scream persisted until that first wave of four fighters had committed itself to go above us and comb through the high group.

  The relief then was twofold: of the end of Buzz’s terrible battle cry, and of the knowledge that the main force of the day’s first blow, at least, was to strike a formation other than ours.

  The Body trembled as Handown fired at the planes passing overhead.

  We were near Antwerp. Looking down through air as clean as a washed window I saw the city. A thin, steam-like smoke screen lay over it, eddying on a gentle southwest breeze that was moving down there.

  At our altitude the wind was west-by-north, two hundred eighty degrees, almost precisely a tail wind, at fifty miles per hour.

  Our squadron, at the apex of the huge slanting wedge of the task force, was about a thousand feet beneath the plate of cirrus which, so far, was thin and translucent, so the color of the sky came through it as the color of my grandmother’s grape jelly used to come through the film of candlewax she melted on its surface to seal it off from mold before she put it in the cellar.

  Ack-ack came up from Antwerp, meager, fairly accurate, evidently a predicted concentration. It was quickly ended.

  The second and third waves of the Hun had run in on the high group, and on the far side of it the enemy planes turned now to come in from every rearward direction. Our gunners began to call in individual planes that might attack our Group.

  Then Bragnani saw a formation coming in from above and behind.

  “Look out,” Marrow said. “They might be Spits.”

  “Christ Almighty,” Handown said, “they look like P-47s.” You could hear elation in Neg’s voice, a kind of pressure on the underside of his larynx, near where the beads of the throat mike lay against his neck.

  And yes, they were Thunderbolts, which we had least expected, but they did us no good.

  I tuned in on the “C” channel, which was reserved for communication with the fighters, and I could hear Colonel Ewing, up at the front of the first task force, seventeen minutes ahead of us, holler on it in an attempt to reach the 47s. “Croquet! Croquet! Do you hear me? This is Windbag One calling Croquet.” But the band was jammed, and that was all I could hear. It was enough to gather, however, just from the urgent sound of that call, that the forward task force was catching it bad.

  Our bombers were disposed to take advantage of the usual P-47 tactics of sweeping over us in a column of squadrons at two- or three-minute intervals, furnishing what was known as corridor support. In other words, we expected all three squadrons to keep weaving back and forth over us in turn, and to jump German formations that came up. But after two or three passes overhead both of the P-47 squadrons pulled away and flew on to the forward task force of bombers and did not return. I was sure from this that there must be heavy going ahead, and at the same time I became apprehensive about our own situation, because I knew the Germans’ habit of pouncing on unescorted formations.

  Junior Sailen saw two Forts going down from the high group. Farr reported a new flight of German fighters swinging up from below.

  2/

  I looked at my wrist watch. It was two twenty-one. We were supposed to reach Eupen, in the southeastern reaches of Belgium, a city once German which had been given to Belgium for her sufferings in the war that had made the world safe for democracy, at two twenty-six, and there we were to change course and go more southerly, so we would miss the dreaded flak areas of the Ruhr and fly over relatively open country. There was no promise that anything would change at Eupen except our direction of flight, but in my mind I clung to that turning point as the most important goal of our trip. It was only five minutes away. I had to get through those five minutes. After Eupen I would set another goal and strain to reach it—but that was not to be thought about yet. Eupen was everything. Five minutes.

  I had learned thus to break up danger, not only into its component individual hazards, but into temporal fragments as well. I could not have borne the thought of the entire three hundred and twenty-two minutes from this point until the moment when, if we were fortunate (as we were not in fact to be), we would recross the English coast in safety at Felixstowe, but I could face getting through the next five minutes—and that I set myself to do.

  I saw a stolid pack of barrage balloons off to the left, over Aachen, fat pigs of the upper air.

  3/

  The second attack of FW-190s came in and again, not surprisingly, concentrated on the high squadron. The German tactics of those days were highly co-ordinated, not only as between ships in a flight but also as between flights, and once they started bearing down on one of our formations they usually did their best, in consecutive swoops, to tear it to pieces before turning on another.

  The first German attack had not broken off but was still working on our high group of Forts, and the second attack simply joined in.

  But something new turned up in that second attack—and in those five minutes. Prien was the one who saw it and told the rest of us.

  He called out first a fighter coming in at our group from dead astern, then a few seconds later said that from the way its tracers were going it seemed to be after our low squadron, not us.

  “Mother of God!” he said next. “It blew up…. No, it didn’t…. Look, it’s got a big cannon or something…. It was a flash…. A very big flash on the fighter…It hid the whole plane.” Prien gave these garbled reports in his familiar cold, flat tone of voice, which made their staccato rhythm and startling content seem the
more eerie. “Wait till I tell you,” he went on. “I could see the damn thing, like a shell, it came out after the flash, only it went so slow I could see it. The burst was in our low squadron, black, like flak, only easy twice as big. The thing is, the plane split-assed up behind us and I could see this tube, this cannon thing, fastened under the fuselage. I could see it plain as anything.”