by Jeff Shaara
The wingtips drew closer, the formations tightening, and he could see other crews, some of the faces staring out through the small, grimy windows. There were no waves, no smiles, every man tensely aware that they had passed through the worst of those first deadly moments. In the early dawn, with this kind of cloud cover, with so many aircraft rising up through so much blindness, a disaster could have hit any one of them, the deadly collisions, horrific accidents. Buckley had seen two collisions firsthand, one during training, what he had to believe was someone’s grotesque stupidity. The voice had come on the radio, a command to “bank to the left.” Buckley’s plane had been in formation just behind a pair of others when one plane suddenly veered right, a hard collision that erupted into a massive explosion, blasting two planes and their crews right out of the sky. It was an image he would never forget. Two crews had died, he thought, because someone didn’t know left from right. Well, I don’t know if that’s what happened, but it sure looked like it.
The second collision had come on a combat mission, soon after takeoff, the planes not yet in formation. It had been only his third combat flight, and as they climbed up into the overcast, two B-17s impacted right above him, debris crashing against the nose of his plane, flames washing past. Two more crews gone, just like that. It was cloudy, like today, he thought, and someone just ran over his own formation. Guess that happens a lot. Hell of a thing to write home to those families. Your son died because his pilot screwed up. So, what’s better? Blown to hell by the enemy? Buckley had seen that as well, on nearly every mission. He had almost become used to it. Almost.
The plane shook and shimmied again. He was used to that as well, endured it, hoped it would pass, that the air would smooth out. The plane closest in front was slightly to the right, and he saw the ball turret rotate, the gunner testing his hydraulics. There was a voice in his ear, the pilot.
“Navigator, we’re at altitude, three zero thousand. We’re straightening out. The colonel has given us a heading, zero eight five degrees. Airspeed two two zero. Reports say we’re looking at a tailwind about four zero. I’ve heard the old buzzard gets lost once in a while. We’re tail-end Charlie on this one, I don’t want to lose the crowd.”
Buckley glanced back to his left, the navigator staring hard at a chart, pencil in hand.
“Roger, Captain. Zero eight five degrees. Airspeed confirmed. I’ll watch him, sir.”
Tail-end Charlie. Buckley had heard that before. Of their twelve small formations, they would be that most dreaded last place in line. So, he thought, we get to watch the whole damn show in front of us.
The pilot’s voice came again. “We lost one bird. Blue Beauty fell out with a bad engine.”
It was inevitable that with this many planes in the air, some would suffer mechanical problems. One out of thirty-six, Buckley thought. Not too bad. Blue Beauty … who’s that? Yeah, Hobart’s the bombardier. Not sure who else. So, they can go back home and read our mail.
The pilot’s voice returned. “Gunners, test your weapons. Fire at will, but keep it short. And dammit, watch your aim. No accidents today, right, Granger?”
“No, sir.”
The response was meek, an unspoken apology for one very dumb mistake. The week before, Granger, the left waist gunner, had accidentally shot holes in the tail section of a neighboring plane. Buckley nodded toward the navigator, loosened his safety belt, reached for the fifty-caliber beside him. The newer B-17s had been fitted with guns up front, poking out each side of the plane’s nose, so that the navigator and bombardier could supposedly contribute to the plane’s defense. Buckley pulled back the bolt on the machine gun, watched the brass shell sliding in, the belt of ammo hanging down into a large green box. Before he could grip the trigger the entire plane seemed to erupt in shivering blasts, the gunners behind him touching off a few rounds. He never had gotten used to the shock of that, but he felt for the trigger, aimed at empty air, fired a brief burst, the gun shaking, empty cartridges chattering to the deck. He enjoyed firing the gun, though unlike the trained gunners he never expected to actually hit anything. The skilled specialists on the planes were given a minimum of training with the fifties, and so they caught a fair amount of teasing from the men at the waist, tail, and ball turret, who at least pretended they were marksmen. The engineer worked the turret on top, above, just behind the cockpit, and Buckley knew that no one would tease that crazy lieutenant about anything.
He eased back from the gun, looked at Goodman, saw a thumbs-up. Yeah, sure. You can’t hit a damn thing either. Just pay attention to your charts.
Davy Goodman was barely twenty, had come out of some New York City neighborhood that Buckley could never imagine. Buckley was from Kansas, the low hill country southwest of Kansas City, where the tallest thing he walked through were cornfields. But Buckley respected that the navigator took his job as seriously as Buckley took his own, and that both men were critical to every mission they flew. Though they had become friends, Buckley knew there was one enormous difference between them. Goodman carried a different kind of fear, something that went beyond the usual shivering anticipation that accompanied the crew on every flight. They had spoken of it when the beer had flowed, Goodman telling him that if they were shot down, if they survived one of those horrors that had already taken away so many of the crews, Goodman would never surrender, would never allow himself to be taken to a German POW camp. He had shown Buckley a small pistol he carried in his boot. If the .45 at his waist was lost in a parachute jump, Goodman had been very clear what the smaller pistol was for. Buckley tried to dismiss the drama of that, had teased Goodman that he couldn’t handle a pistol any better than he could the fifty-caliber. But the navigator would only point to his dog tags. It was there, plainly, for any captor to see. Goodman was Jewish.
Buckley pushed that from his mind, stared out into the sharp light coming above the horizon. In one vast sweep, the bombers had completed their turns, leveling out, heading east. As they moved away from the English coast, the cloud banks had disappeared, and six miles below them the English Channel spread out like an icy pond. He focused downward, saw scattered ships, another distant part of the war, but to the men in the bombers, they might as well have been fishermen.
The sunlight was blinding now, glare on the Plexiglas, and he kept his eyes downward, the formation moving toward a solid strip of land. It was the coast of Belgium. He felt the chill again, and not from the cold. He had been briefed about the target, what they only referred to as Big B, a destination that inspired deep dread in every member of the crew. Once again, they were going to Berlin.
The clouds began to come again, spotty puffs of white, well below them. All around the plane, the sky was streaked with white trails, beautiful, the frosty exhausts from the planes in front of him.
The pilot’s voice startled him. “Here come the birdies. Right on time. Three o’clock level. The colonel says more are coming up from behind. We’ll have a couple hundred, anyway. Praise Jimmy Doolittle.”
Buckley leaned forward, staring out to the right, saw them now, specks against the blue, growing larger. It was their fighter escorts, rising up from the myriad fighter bases across occupied Belgium and northern France. Thank God, he thought. Or Jimmy Doolittle. Might as well thank the man in charge. Maybe, out here, General Doolittle outranks God.
Through the first years of the war, the B-17s had been horrifyingly vulnerable, mainly because the American command insisted on only daylight missions. The British had different technology and different training, and their pilots flew mostly at night. Strategically, the bomber chiefs were pleased by this arrangement, since the bombing missions could destroy enemy targets in a continuous stream around the clock. Since they flew at night, the British rarely equipped their bombers with offensive weapons at all, few of them carrying the fifty-caliber machine guns so prized by the American crews. At night, there was simply nothing for them to shoot at. But the B-17s’ machine guns, twelve per plane, had proven to be more of a morale bo
ost than an effective weapon against enemy fighters. The Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs seemed untouchable, darting through the vast formations of lumbering bombers like mosquitoes evading the slow swing of a baseball bat. No matter how much practice a gunner had, there was no way to prepare for live attacks by a fighter plane that you could rarely see until he had already shot at you.
As the number of bombing missions increased, the losses to B-17 crews had exceeded the most dismal expectations. Every crew had understood that once you were more than a couple of hundred miles from Allied airspace, there was no one to protect you. The fighter planes early in the war had limited range. But then something new and magnificent had come to the Allied airbases. It was designated the P-51, the American fighter that someone had named the Mustang. The P-51 had supplementary external fuel tanks that could be jettisoned in flight, and so it could accompany the vast flocks of big birds throughout their missions. Even better, the Mustang was agile and fast and could outmaneuver and outfight their enemy. Almost immediately, the Messerschmitts had become less of a problem. The attacks would come still, but the German fighters would find themselves engulfed by swarms of this superior enemy. The losses to the Luftwaffe’s fighters had become immense, and so, by late 1944, many of them simply stayed away.
As effective as the P-51s were, they could not protect the B-17s from an even greater danger. As the bombers drew closer to their targets, they ran a gauntlet of anti-aircraft fire, the deadly eighty-eight-millimeter, as well as great networks of German flak batteries, firing thick clouds of metal, steel scraps. Every crew in every B-17 knew what to watch for, the first black puffs, that peculiar inverted-Y shape, and very soon the skies around them would be pockmarked with black smoke. Within each cloud, the metal bits swirled and ripped through the air, hanging, falling, a forest of scrap metal the B-17 could not avoid. In tight formations, there was little room for the pilots to maneuver, though many of them tried. All any crew could do was stare out and hope that, once again, the prayers and tricks of fate might let them slide through the curtain of metal with only minor wounds to their bird.
Pilot to bombardier. You awake down there?”
“Always, Captain.”
“If that guy next to you is doing his job, we’ll be at the IP in ten minutes. We’ll slow to one five oh, and I’ll hand it over to you. You’re only togglier on this one, though. Watch the guys in front of us. Hell, you know the drill.”
“Roger, Captain.”
Buckley nodded. Yep, I know the drill. IP. The initial point. That’s where all hell breaks loose.
He had heard the same commands over the past couple of weeks, thought, Captain Babyface sounds like he’s reading me the manual. Togglier. I know what it means, sir. It means I don’t do a damn thing but watch the lead plane in the group. When he opens the bomb bay doors, so do we. When he drops his load, so do we. All I do is keep this bird straight and level and flip the damn toggle switch, and hope like hell that guy in front of us knows how to use that Norden.
He leaned forward, put his hand on the bombsight. The Norden was a marvelous piece of technology, a secret the army had tried to protect as much as any piece of equipment of the war. The Norden bombsight was connected by cables to the pilot’s flight controls, so that when it came time to make the final run to the target, the bombardier could actually control the plane. There had been talk in training that the Norden was the one instrument that would allow the Allies to win the war, though Buckley seemed to miss as many targets with it as without. But the commanders had stifled any talk that the Norden wasn’t living up to its reputation in actual combat conditions. Buckley knew only that it was a machine armed with gyroscopes and electrical motors that somehow gave the bombardier the precise moment the bombs should be dropped, by computing the plane’s speed against the altitude and location of the target. Pretty neat stuff, he thought. This guy Norden had to be some kind of wizard. Buckley reached down alongside the sight itself, felt for the small pistol. Every bombardier was under the strictest orders that if the plane was going down, or if he had to bail out for any reason, he was to shoot the Norden with this pistol, which was loaded with a thermite bullet. The bullet would melt the Norden into a mass of useless metal, thus keeping it out of German hands. All right, he thought, I’m set. He looked toward Goodman, who was scribbling furiously on his pad of paper. Get it right, Davy. My job is the easy one. Any idiot can sit here and watch someone else drop his bombs. At least if we miss, it’s not my fault. That’s something to be thankful for.
“Flak dead ahead.”
Buckley could see the puffs of black himself, far out in front of the squadrons. He had absorbed the briefing, the specific target they were after, some kind of rail yards just outside the Big B. Makes little damn difference, he thought. We either hit them or we don’t and if we don’t, we blow hell out of some Berlin neighborhood. Nothing wrong with that.
The cold came again, the pounding in his chest, and he could feel the plane slowing. He focused on the planes close by, ignored the other squadrons banking, sliding away to their own targets. Good luck, fellas. He glanced up, the fighter planes in scattered spreads all across the skies above, out of range of the flak. Smart. Get the hell out of the way. Any Krauts show up, you can drop on ’em quick. He put both hands on the Norden, could see that the plane was on automatic pilot, no maneuvers needed, not yet. But there was no target to focus on, and his eyes were up, sharp stares at the puffs of black, a blanket of smoke closer still.
“IP. We’re at one five oh. Ten minutes to target. The bombardier has the controls. Use the autopilot unless you need to do something else.”
“Roger, Captain.”
There was no need for any other response, the pilot’s order idiotic. Don’t do anything unless you need to do something else. Babyfaced moron. The nervousness was complete, and Buckley flexed his gloved fingers, the plane flying slow and level. He caught a glimpse of the lead plane, thought, only one job left to do. I’m just a passenger except for these next few minutes. He looked down into the Norden, the ground, roads, not much else. He looked up again, frantic motion, found the lead plane again, more smoke, closer, one brief flash of light, smoke swallowing the plane in front, a blast of flak very close.
“Get ready, boys!”
The pilot’s voice was cracking, the man as nervous as Buckley himself. Shut the hell up, Captain. Nothing to do now but … hope.
The smoke was all around, some of it well below, and he nodded in quick jerks, good, that’s lucky. The Germans are undershooting, miscalculating the squadron’s altitude. But that’ll change. In a few short seconds, it did. There was a burst straight in front of the left wing, and he flinched, reflex, a chatter of metal hitting the plane to that side. He banked the plane slightly to the right, more reflex, a mistake few could avoid. No, keep it level! More smoke came, below again, then two more to the right. Buckley’s brain was beginning to scream at him. Pay attention! Watch the leader. He searched the smoke, saw him now, the B-17 not more than two hundreds yards in front. Too close, what the hell? His own plane was catching up quickly, words in his brain, we’re gonna run right over the bastard! He grabbed the Norden, pulled back, the nose rising. Buckley held his grip on the bombsight, steadied himself, and fought for control, another blast of flak on the right, the plane bouncing sideways, the right wing rocking upward.
“How you doing down there—”
“Not now, Captain. I’ve got her.”
The plane leveled out again, and Buckley searched for the leader. Where the hell is he? Behind us? He saw the shape now, right above them, the lead plane rolling off to the right, pieces, another burst of fire, thunder in his ears. He held the Norden, fought against the impact of the blast, and the pilot’s voice came now, panic, high pitch, “Oh God! She’s hit … going down! They got the colonel! Not sure we can do this one!”
Another voice now, the engineer. “Knock that off! We’re still here. Bombardier, fly the damn plane!”
More voices
cluttered the intercom, and the pilot seemed to gain control. “I see parachutes! They’re getting out. All right! Shut up! No one talks! Keep the intercom clear! Do your jobs! Radio, can you reach the bird to the right? That’s Dragon’s Breath, right?”
After a few seconds, the radioman answered, “Yes, sir. Captain Murphy says he’ll take the lead, if it’s okay with you. He’s pulling ahead.”
“Yes, yes. Good. Bombardier, fall in behind Dragon’s Breath.”
Buckley saw the other plane moving out from the right, taking position in front of several others. He knew the radioman was good, but my God, he thought, there must be hell all over the radio. Keep cool, Freddie. He responded to the pilot now, “Roger, sir. I’ve got her. We’re fine. Just a little bumpy.”
“Okay, okay. Five minutes, probably.”
The plane bucked again, a hard shock in Buckley’s ears, the blast from the flak burst close by, his hands coming up, protecting his face.
Behind him, Goodman shouted, “They hit the nose. A big hole in the glass!”
The Plexiglas had a six-inch-wide gash, down close to his feet, and Buckley saw another crack, one jagged hole right in front of him, the wind blowing into his face.
The pilot’s voice came again. “Engine number four is done. Feathering the prop. We’re close now.”
Buckley fought the wind in his face, thought, shut up, shut up, shut up. The air was driving into him, a low whistling through the Plexiglas, and he blinked away wetness, saw the new lead plane moving ahead, leaving them behind. Watch him, dammit. Three engines. We can’t keep up. Okay, fly the plane, jackass. Let’s get rid of these bombs.
The bomb bay doors opened on the plane in front of him, and he followed suit, pulled the switch beside the Norden. He heard the doors opening up behind him, the hard hollow rush of air, the plane slowing even more. The flak was still coming in a solid spray of scattered bursts, and he tried to ignore the smoke, kept his eye on the lead plane, his hand on the bomb release. A new burst blocked his view, close, the plane heading straight into it, and Buckley flinched again, jerked the Norden to one side, the plane banking steeply, but the blast had been too close. The plane blew straight through the smoke, the debris from the flak ripping and cracking into the nose. He felt a hard punch in his chest, heard Goodman scream, the rush of wind worse now, blinding him. There were voices on the intercom, a jumble of noise, the earphones ripped away from his head, and he felt his chest, a slice in the flak jacket, but the jacket had worked, breathless amazement, a piece of twisted steel on the deck beside him. He fought the Norden with one hand, his other securing the earphones, and behind him Goodman screamed again. Buckley saw him lean down, grabbing his foot, blood on the deck.