The War Lover

by John Hersey

  I do not say that I thought all this through, or consciously realized what was happening. All that I experienced at the time, I guess, was a momentary shudder and a sharpening of my perceptions.

  But this was, I believe, the point at which the curves of my destiny and Marrow’s might be said to have crossed.

  10/

  For what happened in the next few minutes, however, neither Marrow nor I—Marrow in his inner climb toward death, I in my settling down toward life—was quite prepared.

  Squadron after squadron of enemy fighters came after us. At two thirty-five, two new flights joined the attack.

  Handown said, “Oh, the bastards, they got bombs coming down on parachutes up ahead.”

  I think that a few minutes before I would have reacted to this by pretending it hadn’t been said, perhaps busying myself with a check of pressures and temperatures on the instrument panel, but now I ducked my head forward and looked up at the chain of small glistening hemispheres of synthetic fabric, which stood out clearly against the blue-black infinity beyond. They were quite far ahead; they were floating downward, and we were flying into their field. And German fighters were charging obliviously through them.

  “Come on, Handown,” Marrow shouted, and again there was that unfamiliar sound of appeal, of pleading, in his voice, “watch out for planes, will you?”

  For some reason I thought of Buzz’s claim—one of his most boastful stories, which he had repeated often, only to have it collapse on him in recent days, turn out, like so much else, to have been falsehood—of having left his car at the airfield with the key in it when he had left the States. It seemed to me pathetic that a man had to make up such a lie as that about his indifference to things.

  The parachute bombs had been dropped too low and exploded below us.

  Now I saw another way in which Marrow was off, way off. Customarily, on nose attacks, Max Brindt would call them out first to Clint Haverstraw, they’d divvy up the shots, and if the planes were coming in at an angle that wasn’t ideal for either, Max would tell Marrow to drop the nose, or turn a little, or skid us; on skidding turns our gunners would get some very good shots. On one attack a German came in from ahead who was so obviously green that his rawness showed in everything he did; he turned in too close and overshot and never brought his guns to bear, and he evidently tried to pull the nose through with the rudder, and it stuck and got up and just stalled and shuddered up there.

  Max shouted, “Give me some right. Oh, he’s just sitting there. Right! Right!”

  But Marrow didn’t seem to hear, or else he had completely run out of right turns—something very peculiar.

  “Buzz!” Max cried in dismay—but now it was too late. “What the hell! He was easy as pie.”

  There was another time when a plane was called at ten o’clock low—out Buzz’s window, and he got watching it, and Sailen quietly said, “I think that’s a decoy,” which (for Sailen’s understated warnings were like sirens to us) would ordinarily have been enough to make Marrow smartly swing us into the best spot in the defensive fire system to meet the main punch which was sure to follow. But this time, after Sailen said, “Six o’clock, low,” Buzz flew woodenly on, and we were awkwardly positioned with reference to our wingmen when the attack came, from the tail.

  Bragnani saw a German fighter hit as it flew forward through our group, and he shouted that the pilot was jumping. “Look! Look! Nine o’clock. He’s right out there.”

  I saw Buzz’s head turn, and I peered beyond him and saw a yellow chute filling. I felt a surge of apprehension, for I remembered having seen a yellow parachute break out once before, on the Nantes mission, in July, and something awful had happened that had been a kind of turning point for me—and now I knew from Daphne that it had been one for Marrow, too.

  “That f—ing bastard Silg!” Marrow now said, with a kind of groan. “Him and his big mouth.” It was Silg who, after having parachuted down, was rumored to have been captured and to have taunted Goering, so that Goering was supposed to be out personally to get our Group. What a strange response, coming from Marrow! It was as if he felt that the Germans were laying for us, for him.

  11/

  Handown called in a pack attack from twelve o’clock high. “Coo, blimey!” he said. “A whole blahsted squadron.”

  I saw them. Twelve? Fifteen? Flying abreast, wingtip to wingtip.

  Marrow saw them, too. I noticed out of the corner of my eye how he lowered his head and took them in.

  The next thing I knew—we were closing with the fighters at a terrific rate of speed, theirs plus ours—our element was tucked in tight under Angel Tread, Erector Set, and Gruesome Twosome, so snugly that it was almost as if we were in a hangar in order that rain and hail couldn’t fall on us. I couldn’t even see the fighters any more. We were simply hiding.

  Handown had time for two yelps to Marrow. “Clear me! Open up!”

  Then we were not covered any more. The three Forts that had been above us were gone. The first element was completely wiped out. The fighters had gone on through. I saw nothing of it. I don’t know what happened. They were shot down. Angel Tread, Erector Set, and Gruesome Twosome were shot down in one pass.

  Handown said, “My God, did you see that?”

  At this point Junior Sailen called in and said in a quiet, calm voice, “Guns are stuck. What’ll I do, Neg?”

  There ensued a perfectly logical conversation, only it seemed, at that minute, quite mad.

  “Burnt out?”

  “No, hell, it ain’t hardly hot.”

  “Try taking the back plate off. You can manipulate the trigger bar.”

  A few seconds later Sailen said, “Fires all right, but it mashes my thumb.”

  Handown said, “Use a screwdriver, you dope. Christ, they left the brains out of your chromosomes.”

  “Repeat, please.”

  “Use a screwdriver. Scarew-dariver!”

  “Roger.”

  The first thing that occurred to me was that Marrow wasn’t badgering the gunners any more, or he would have had something to say after those little formal touches of Junior’s. No, Marrow was silent.

  My second thought was that there was some meager, inaccurate flak bursting around us—from where? Koblenz? Wiesbaden? Mainz? Vividly my mind recalled Feather Merchant’s bronze lips naming those cities, to the left of our line of flight, shortly, he said, before our course change.

  Only then did a third thought burst in on my consciousness, like the beam of Sully’s flashlight blazing out of the darkness: We were the lead ship of the task force now.

  12/

  I guess Prien didn’t know what had happened. He kept calling in fighters.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was twenty-three minutes before three. “Clint,” I said, “do you think you better check—”

  I hadn’t even finished my question when he said, “Sixteen minutes to course change. We’re two minutes ahead of flight plan.”

  Old indefinite Haverstraw was ahead of me. People certainly gave you surprises.

  “Did you get that, Buzz?” Clint said.

  “I heard you, son,” Marrow said, but his voice was dull, passive.

  Just about then three separate clumps of German fighters dropped away from us. That helped, but there were still plenty around us.

  Our gunners were all chattering again now.

  We were plodding along all right, I guess, but the thing was, Major Holdreth, in Round Trip Ticket, the leader of the high squadron, jolly, big apple, he was supposed to take over in case anything happened to Bins, he was deputy lead of the task force; Round Trip Ticket surely should have come up and taken it away from The Body. Not if this had been on the bombing run, or just before it, because it would have been standard operating procedure for us to carry through under those circumstances. But we were half an hour from the target, and
Holdreth should have come up. He certainly should have.

  Any doubt I may have had whether Marrow was aware of our position was removed now, as he said to me on interphone, “Get on command, Boman. See if you hear anything.”

  I flicked my selector switch, thinking: The old Marrow would have got on the pipes himself and would have trimmed Holdreth, or would have been glad to assume the lead—felt it belonged to him, anyway. In fact, Holdreth’s reason for holding back was undoubtedly that he and everyone else remembered the way Marrow had taken over, that time when Trummer had chickened out on the way to Hamburg, when Buzz had earned his D.F.C. Here Buzz was asking me to carry water for him.

  And of course I didn’t hear a word from Holdreth.

  What I did hear was some other ship, which opened up and broke code. “Marrow. Marrow. Are you leader?”

  I didn’t check with Buzz. I just said, “I guess so. Close up. Tighten up.”

  I have to say that I did not feel elated. I think I must have had fantasies about this kind of situation, about saying words on the radio like that on my own hook, but it wasn’t any good. I felt rotten bad.

  At two forty-four another group of Germans broke off contact, and that left only about ten ships plaguing us.

  Clint was on the ball. He gave us a minute’s notice of the course change and reminded us of the new compass reading.

  Marrow, it must be admitted, made a fine easy turn which the whole task force had no trouble following.

  We now had fifteen minutes to the initial point.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE TOUR

  June 28 to July 30

  1/

  Here was a paradox: I was skeptical of Marrow’s heroism, yet I was proud of being his co-pilot.

  After the Hamburg show Buzz was the hot aviator of the Group, and I wanted to be near him, to bask in the light that reflected from him, and I suppose this is one of the reasons why June twenty-eighth was almost the worst day of my whole tour—a day on which I remained on the ground yet felt deeply endangered. The Group flew a mission in St. Nazaire that day, and I had to sweat it out. I was left behind. Operations wanted Marrow to carry Louis Maltitz along as co-pilot, in order to check Titty out on combat before letting him command a plane of his own.

  The mission was a comfortably late one. The briefing wasn’t until nine in the morning. I sat all the way through it under the impression that I was going along; suffered all the pangs, was satisfied at being given the old milk run to the sub bases, knew the flight, had been there on our third and ninth missions, this was to to be our fourteenth, all downhill now to the end of our tour. Familiar visceral sensations. Then, at the end, when the formation sheets were handed out, Curly Jonas announced that three co-pilots would give way to three men who were ready to be checked out as first pilots—a new routine that Mad Whelan, who was leading this mission himself, had obviously devised—and I was to be one.

  I watched the take-off, at two in the afternoon, from the balcony of the control tower, and I gripped the railing there, and clenched my teeth, as if my vitals were being torn out of me.

  It was strange. I had nothing, really, in common with any of the nine other crewmen in The Body, and toward some of them I was genuinely antipathetic. In civilian life I would never have willingly passed an hour of my life with a man like Jughead Farr, nor, indeed, would he have chosen my company, even for a minute. But now, hearing the head-splitting roar of the four props of my ship, our ship, beating the soft air of a cloudy afternoon to get away from the ground and me, my heart yearned for those nine.

  What if they got it on this mission?

  I would kill myself. Die with them. I would shoot myself out of remorse, guilt. Why hadn’t I fought for my right to fly with them? I had let them down. I should have jumped at Curly Jonas’ throat, torn him apart rather than let him separate me from my crew, my family.

  I can’t remember how I passed the hours that followed. I do remember walking out to the empty dispersal area, and on the way I had a passage of homicidal thoughts about Colonel Whelan, whose idea it must have been to leave me behind. I was burned up at him about the previous day, anyway. Whelan had posted a notice, some time before, announcing that combat officers would take their turns at desk duty, checking enlisted men in and out on passes and doing various kinds of paperwork, and I had caught mine the day before, on a Sunday, just when our Group ball team was going over to play at Kimbolton, with Haverstraw holding down third base. Everybody from The Body went but me. I sat at the lousy desk with nothing to do, reading Yank, seething at Screwy Whelan on account of this desk-duty invention I supposed to be his. (We later learned that it was actually the idea of a softhead up at Wing who, I suppose, felt so sick about having shirked combat that he wanted all combat officers to know how arduous desk duty was.) Whelan walked in while I was fuming there, and he made me sorer then ever by piling into Marrow. He said he’d put in for a D.F.C. for Marrow on account of the Hamburg show, but, “Personally,” he said, “I’ve got some doubts about your pilot’s great deed.”

  “He took ’em around, didn’t he, sir?” I said.

  “A better pilot would had had his crew and ship ready to drop accurately the first time.”

  “Christ, sir,” I said, “there were clouds. You can’t ask a mere captain to control weather conditions at the target.”

  “He’ll get his decoration,” the madman said.

  I wondered, walking out on the perimeter track, whether my half-sassing Whelan was the reason I’d been left behind today. That really didn’t make sense, though, I told myself, because two other co-pilots had been left at home. Still, there were a lot of co-pilots to choose from.

  At The Body‘s hardstand I found Red Black sitting on a tool chest, chewing a dead cigar, talking with one of his crew. Black was transformed; I scarcely recognized him as the irascible prima donna whom we handled with such care and respect around the ship. He had become fretful and fidgety, and he seemed to have shrunk, and though the mission had only been in the air two hours, he kept glancing at his watch and then at the sky, across which broken clouds were driving toward the southeast, as if pursuing our absent companions. Red was in a state of near-collapse over an oil line he wished he’d checked more carefully. “I did check it once, but I meant to get Captain Marrow to rev up the engine again while I watched it. Or you, sir.”

  Sir! Me, a second lieutenant? Had Red lost his mind, getting respectful to a second looey?

  And, by the way, why wasn’t I a first lieutenant? I was overdue by several weeks. Up to that moment I hadn’t ever worried about my rank; I’d supposed some dizzy WAC in the Pentagon had stuffed the wrong card in the IBM machine that controlled the destinies of officers overseas. It would get straightened out, and I’d get a suitcase full of back pay. I was at the front, I hadn’t cared about such things—until this moment, when, standing by Sergeant Black crouched on his tool box with that lick-spittled wad of a cigar butt in his pale pink lips, and conscious of a cloud-shade chasing the sunlight along the perimeter track, I suddenly had a terrible sinking feeling. I was no good. I had been passed over on purpose. They’d left me behind because I was a failure. I was never going to fly again with Marrow. He would see what it was like to have a real flier along in the second seat. He wouldn’t want me again. Clint! Max! Neg! Junior! My friends!

  2/

  A full hour ahead of the E.T.A., I was back on the rim of the tower, straining my eyes to see, in the rare breaks in the clouds that were still scurrying southeastward, the distant specks of a formation, and straining my ears, too, to hear the thunder that sometimes overran the sight of a flock of planes.

  While I was waiting I managed to get in some worrying about Kid Lynch. In one way Lynch had an Asian look—that is, in the strangely shifting impression his face gave of his age. In some lights and in some moods he looked sixteen, seventeen; naïve, unused, a fellow aptly nicknamed the Kid. At
other times you saw the pits in his skin and the drawn lids of his eyes, and there appeared a fated look of the kind one associated with old men, because it spoke of a close approach to the end, of acquaintance with, and acceptance of, death; the expression I remembered having seen, and having been deeply moved by, on the young faces of the soldiers in Brady’s photographs of the Civil War.

  What if both The Body and The House of Usher were shot down? Perhaps they were already lost. I was alone. My friends were gone.

  The E.T.A. had come and passed. Maybe the headwind was fierce up above. The weather was foul and getting worse. I kept ducking downstairs into the control room, where the disciplined silence itself seemed a kind of excitement, and where the slightest crackle of a radio made heads turn, and there was nothing new, except some talk of a weather front in the south, and finally they told me to stay the hell out; I was a nuisance.

  This intensified my feeling of uselessness, and of failure. I was a nervous Nelly they couldn’t stand having around.

  I returned to the balcony. The long, lingering dusk of England was settling down, with a mean-looking sky—scudding clouds and gaps of wind-filled purple. The station disregarded all blackout precautions and kept the field ablaze; the flare-path lights were a soft hyacinth blue, and the enormous red eye of a mobile beacon on a trailer at the east end of the runway winked a welcome in code. You could feel the worry in the men who came out into the cold breeze from time to time. The vigil seemed endless. I kept thinking I heard a roar, but it was only my own blood cascading in my ears, or the wind eddying in them. Twice we thought we saw flares dropped at a distance from the field. An enlisted man ran excitedly up to the control-tower balcony, where five or six of us were standing, to shout that he had seen a strange orange glow in the eastern sky—“like it was a ship on fire,” he said, his teeth chattering. We all pushed toward the east rail, and there was a faint something, and then the clouds parted and we saw the round disk of the rising moon just above the horizon. We went back to our watch toward the south. Fifteen minutes more were swallowed by the night.