by Michael Oren
Live in Fame,
Dive in Flames
In the first three years of World War II, the United States produced more than 200,000 combat aircraft. Thousands crashed in training accidents or vanished flying overseas. And those that did make it into action were frequently shot down on their first missions. On a single raid in 1943, sixty bombers were lost and six hundred airmen killed.
Civilian deaths were massively higher. Not only Germans and Japanese, but hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen, Italians, Austrians, and Czechs were killed—collaterally or intentionally—by allied bombing.
None of this slaughter slowed down the enemy’s war effort. On the contrary, it only accelerated.
* * * * *
Chester blew on his balled hands. Though only September, the chill came early to Kansas this year and, pre-dawn, made it feel like late autumn. He blew and rubbed and looked over his shoulder at the headlights sweeping up the runway. Then, he went back to his contraption—tightening a rivet here, there securing a wire—minimizing the chances of failure.
“They’re coming, Pop,” Scotty informed him.
“I know, son.”
“Maybe you can put in a word for me,” the young man added as his father, crouched on one knee with a flashlight between his teeth, fidgeted. “My number’s coming up next year, you know.”
“Pass me that ratchet wrench, will you.”
Socking his palm, rocking eagerly on his heels, Scotty addressed the approaching beams. “There’s a thousand guys for every pilot spot, I heard. But they could get me in, betcha.”
“Betcha,” Chester grunted, giving a hex bolt a final torque. Only then did he stand up and slap his hands on his thighs. He stood next to his son who, though lanky like him and tawny-haired, was hatless and at seventeen, taller by a head. They stood just off the end of the runway, the two of them in their pleated pants and waist-length canvas jackets, as a U.S. Army Packard pulled up. Four men stepped out.
Three were in civilian clothes—double-breasted suits and somber ties, wingtips, and fedoras—but the fourth wore the peaked cap and uniform of a full-bird colonel. He was the one who spoke.
“Twenty minutes, that’s what you got, McGarry.” Armed with a mass-produced military face, his only distinction was the paunch straining his tunic. “These gentlemen are busy.”
Chester removed his workman’s cap and held it before his chest. Clearing his throat, he said, “Thank you all for coming.” Then he turned to his son. “Okay, Arthur.”
But the young man did not react. He remained, rather, fixated on the three men on whose lapels he pinned his dreams. Chester frowned at him. This was his only son, named for a grandfather he never met, but who supposedly died broken-hearted and drunk on these plains. The son whose late mother hated that name and so called him just what she wanted and what he, growing up without her, preferred.
“Scotty,” his father conceded and finally the boy snapped to.
“Sure, Pop.” He bent into the grass and retrieved a kettle-shaped object, transparent with an elongated grip.
“This, gentlemen, is a Super-Emitron,” Chester began. “It’s an advanced iconoscope with an improved photocathode that captures light and turns it into electron images. It then projects those images onto metallic granules that can be scanned and made to emit the images on a…”
“McGarry,” the colonel barked, “cut the voodoo and get on.”
Chester clutched his hat to his throat. “Television. The Germans have been experimenting with it for decades. They used it to broadcast the 1936 Olympics.”
The colonel scowled. “War’s no game, McGarry, and no damned teelee whatever-the-hell-you-call-it.” He consulted his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”
Rising, the sun regarded itself in the pale, glassy sky. The first rays illuminated the prairie, accentuating each blade. By the Packard, three bright dots, like morning stars, glimmered as the civilians lit up.
“A Super-Emitron can transmit a picture of, say, us, standing off this runway, to anywhere in the world. To Washington, D.C. To England!” Congenitally quiet, Chester nevertheless let himself go. Even his face, so spare it barely contained his sorrows, gleamed. “But here, here!” He snapped his fingers at Scotty, signaling him to lug over the camera.
And lug he had to, despite his youthful strength. Together with its tripod, the camera was an unwieldy monstrosity weighing more than he did.
“It’s so big because the Super-Emitron’s inside,” Chester narrated. “But we can reduce it all, the iconoscope and the camera to something like this.” He held his wan hands the width of his sternum. “And put it in the nose of a rocket.”
The four men might have reacted to this information but, just at that moment, the air rippled with a deep, droning sound. It seemed to emanate from far down the runway, beyond eyeshot. As if to catch a whiff of wild indigo, the civilians lifted their noses, exposing slight smiles. Chester, somewhat louder, kept talking:
“And once we implant the camera, we can see where the rocket’s going.” He practically leapt. “We can guide it!”
The colonel glowered at him but the others, if only for a moment, leaned forward. “Guide it?” one of them asked.
“Exactly, Mr…”
“Never mind their names,” the colonel cut in. “He’s Mister Ford to you. The others, Mister Grumman, Mister Douglas.”
“Okay. Yes, guide it, Mister Ford, the way you’d guide a radio signal. Except in this case, your target audience is just that, a target. Your audience is the enemy.”
The three civilians appeared dumbfounded. Only the colonel snorted and was again lifting his watch when Chester pre-empted him. “I’ll show you.”
He limped ten yards to a spot where the sun now revealed a table and a ziggurat of gadgets—dials, buttons, meters, and a dull, bible-sized screen. Chester laid his hat beside the set and started adjusting. His back was to the runway now, but still he talked.
“Each B-17 and B-24 costs you—well, maybe not you but the taxpayer—about $200,000. That’s more than most folks around here earn in a lifetime.”
The colonel stepped forward, stiff-armed. “Where’d you get those numbers?”
“The Army’s Statistic Bureau. It’s where I serve,” Chester replied and explained how a childhood harvester accident left him 4-F and fit only for desk jobs. “So I see a lot of numbers. For instance, statistically speaking, American airmen cannot survive their required twenty-five missions.”
“And what about this”—the colonel gestured dismissively at the table—“crap?”
Chester considered telling him about teaching science before the war, his fascination with optics, the nights tinkering alone in his shed. He wanted to describe his desperate struggle with time, but instead he answered, “This crap is my hobby.”
The droning sound, meanwhile, intensified. It reverberated through the ground and up into their soles. The tips of the prairie grass quivered. The minutes, Chester realized, were dwindling. He turned and began “Arth…” but checked himself. “Scotty. If you don’t mind.”
A second passed before the young man managed to detach himself from the buzz and take up a small cardboard box. He presented it to the colonel and his civilian guests, treating them each to binoculars.
“May I direct your attention to the rise about two hundred feet to our east?” He pointed at a mowed circle surrounding a rocket-like device. Rocket-like because, rather than conical, the head was bulky and roughly rectangular, with swept-back wings at its neck. “And then, a football field away, to the south.” Chester again pointed and four pairs of binoculars trained on the rusted tractor hull that he and Scotty had hauled with a pick-up.
He nodded at Scotty who produced a matchbox from his pocket and lit the fuse that ran from under the table and burrowed into the grass. “What you’re about to see, gentlemen, could change the course of the war.” Chester’s body stiffened but his eyes lingered on his son. “What you’ll see could save uncountable lives.”
/> * * * * *
The water, split by the prow, reminds me of the part in her hair. Everything reminds me of her. The sea smell—salt, sand, hemp—surrounding her. The sweep of her heron-like neck, her skin the white of gull feathers. Marie-Madelène. Her name is whispered by the tide.
Pepe—my father—opens the throttle as our skiff rounds the promontory. He is singing to himself, I see, the words drowned out by the motor, but the tempo kept by the cigarette bouncing in his toothless mouth. He takes no notice of the big guns and barbed wire lining the beaches of Le Portel. He cares nothing about the Germans—le boche—nothing even about the war, only about his mussels and how many he can market today. The world can wreck itself—“Va au diable,” he spits. He seems to me an old man already, indifferent to the same soiled sweater and overalls he wears every day, his stubble, caring only for his nightly dram of calvados and the mussels. Toujours les moules. They have fed us since time began, he once told me, and they, alone, matter. Germans, wars, they come and disappear, but mussels always remain.
And Marie-Madelène. We have always been together, she was born two months after me in a house down the street, and together we will always live. There is the lighthouse whose corkscrew ladder we used to climb as children. I blush now remembering how I used to let her go first so that I could peek up her skirt. And there, jutting out in the ocean, the great stone slab of Fort de l’Heurt, home to endless bouts of hide ‘n seek and duels with driftwood sticks. She never failed to win, and not because I let her.
The lighthouse, the fort, all have been taken over by the Germans. But I no longer care. We do not play, Marie-Madelène and me, at least not those kind of games. Since turning fifteen, our rollicking has become something else. Where once I could not get her out of my life, today she possesses it. Now everything—the waves, the foam—recalls some part of her. The air itself wafts her brine.
The promontory is behind us, and the Équihen Plage comes into view. Pepe steers the skiff landward, the wind lifting his tattered collars. I, though, stay perched in the prow. The ripples breaking against the gunwales recall my moods the night before when the two of us, Marie-Madelène and I, snuck into a warehouse near the port and there, hidden by the cages, buoys, and nets, embraced and kissed and more. She never removed her plaid skirt with the shoulder braces or even her ankle socks. Nor did my trousers come off. And yet, somehow, thrashing, we fused.
Later, exhilarated, frightened by this power and mystery, I lay, listening to her tell me how we’ll have to wait two more years to get married. “Je t’oime,” I confessed to her in our Norman dialect, but she only shushed me and explained that her parents would never allow it.
Two years! Could have been two centuries. Who knew where I might be at seventeen—September, 1945!—conscripted into one of the boche’s work gangs, probably, half-way to being an old man like Pepe. Or caught in a squall, I might be mussel food.
Death, in truth, was easier to contemplate than those endless two years. How much suffering could I endure, this anguish of seeing her in everything around me? The thump of the hull against the ebbing surf, like the sounds we made in the warehouse, as Pepe guns the outboard toward shore.
They stand like sentries—not soldiers but our bouchots. Rope-spiraled stakes are set in the sand and seeded with baby mussels. There, shielded by mesh, they grow and fatten until ready to be pried off, fried, and eaten. This my job, mostly, to select the ripe ones and dislodge them with a three-pronged hand-rake and drop them into big tin buckets half-filled with seawater. Pepe meanwhile lights one butt with the tip of the other, curses, spits, and watches me.
This is the part I hate most. Not because the mussels do not detach easily, even with the rake, and have to be clawed by hand. No, I hate the resemblance between the mussels and her eyes, black-blue and tear-shaped. I hate that the spiral stakes recall the dark braid that falls to the small of her back and which I wrap around my face lying next to her. I hate that from here, on Équihen Plage, I can see across the grassy bluffs to Le Portel and the sloped, coral-colored roof of her house.
Marie-Madelène. I repeat her name to myself with every plop of mussel into the bucket. I sing it to the sea and the sky. I would shout it up and down the Norman coast if the Germans would let me, and even if they wouldn’t. Instead I sigh while hauling the harvest to the skiff where my father, hounded by gulls, waits smoking. Her eyes, her braid. The billowing clouds that recall the softness of her body. Her breath in my ear as we lay in the warehouse becomes the buzz of airplanes approaching.
* * * * *
When Negroponte said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back,” he meant it literally, his buttocks knocking against Tully’s throughout the flight. They bumped again, hard, bruising both their coccyges just as the bombardier announced ten minutes to target. Not that anybody needed updating. A pair of 109s had already probed the squadron’s perimeter, picking off stragglers. With three of its four engines sputtering, the first of the Fortresses fell.
Tully watched it drop from his waist gunner’s window and waited to count the chutes. Four bloomed. It was the Apache Squaw, and he knew all ten men aboard. But he had no time to mourn. “Nine o’clock! Nine o’clock!” The tail gunner cried into the radio and shook the plane with his twin .50 calibers.
Tully bolted his own Browning, crouched as low as he could in his steel helmet and 24-pound flak jacket, peering through the ball and ring sights at the slipstream hissing outside. His face was frozen—frostbitten, again, probably—and his fingers numb, even the thumbs on the trigger. What did they expect at forty below, he wondered? What did they expect with the sweat of lower altitudes freezing behind his knees and his oxygen mask rank with the spam and powdered eggs he wolfed down after briefing? The smell, almost aromatic but still acrid, of airplane fuel. Tully needed to pee, he wanted to puke. He longed to be back in Chelveston.
Not the town, which resembled any other in central England, with its mossy churches and overpriced pubs, cold and fog-girded, but for the girl, Beryl Nicholls. Supple body cloaked in flannel, a woolen beret battening her hair, back home she would have passed for a child. Yet though three years younger than Tully, at sixteen she knew far more. Maybe it came from living near the RAF base, but she knew how to kiss him, nibbling his lips and tongue, and where to guide his hand. And she promised far more than that—everything—after his twenty-first mission.
He ached to be back at the Enlisted Men’s Club. There the gunners, sergeants all, drank, and the pilots and other officers sometimes stopped by to bullshit. Beer bottles clinking. Laughter like ack-ack piercing the smoke. Anything to conceal their terror from one another but above all from themselves.
Here was his crew of the Wildcat Wendy, as they dubbed it, a scantily-clad pinup wooing on its nose. Simpson and Wazowski, Rice, Cunnigham and Sokolov, Torentelli and Smith—natives of places Tully mostly never heard of, from scarcely imaginable lives, bonded by a war utterly inconceivable to them as kids. Still, he loved them all—more, he often felt, than he did his own family back in Edison, New Jersey.
And most of all he loved Negroponte. “Blackbridge,” he sometimes called him, or simply “the Greek.” A hulk of a man, destined like his father for the docks of Stockton. Tully’s age, but somehow, he, too, seemed older. Wiser. Able to listen to his friend when he confessed his fear of being trapped in a cigar tube 22,000 feet over the earth while hundreds of strangers shot at it. Only to him could Tully admit that he had never known a woman and dreaded dying before he could.
Negroponte who, as the other waist gunner, worked directly opposite him on an aluminum walkway barely wide enough for one man, much less two in thick winter overalls, hunched with their butts sticking out and swerving as they fired. And each time they smacked, Tully, a bantam, got the worst of it. Which was why at the end of each mission, the Greek would turn with a big-toothed smile that lifted his earphones and swiveled his chin like a ball turret. “I got your back, Tully boy,” Negroponte winked. “All over mine.”
&
nbsp; But Negroponte wasn’t winking anymore, not smiling either, but jolting hard into Tully’s spine as the plane lurched side to side, struggling to stay in formation. More screams on the radio, more bursts from the tail, and the bombardier cursing, “Fuck this cloud cover, I can’t see shit.”
Someone suggested, “Then just drop our sticks and get out of here,” or rather begged. But the cockpit urged steadiness. Six more minutes to target.
Wildcat Wendy bounced and pitched, and Tully barely kept hold of his gun, much less fired it. Yet somehow Negroponte managed. He got a bead on something and peppered the air. Empty cartridges rattled across the walkway, further tripping Tully. He only gained his balance once, long enough to blast at a shadow zipping past his window—a Messerschmitt, he hoped, and not a fellow bomber.
Another B-17 disintegrated but slowly. Sliced in half by a nosediving 109, the bomber broke midway through its fuselage. Its wings folded and snapped. Through the clouds it drilled, flaming. No chutes.
“Three minutes to target.”
“Fuck the target!” someone shrieked, but the cockpit ordered everyone to shut up.
Negroponte, meanwhile, was firing and then wasn’t. The plane, blind-sided, jerked horizontally before righting itself and allowing Tully to stand. His vision cleared and discerned just to the right of his window a yard-long gash spurting light. Viscous liquid dripped from the frame in front of him and he thought, “Shit, the hydraulic line’s broke.” With landing gear stuck, they might have to bail or worse, belly-land. “Beryl Nicholls,” he said to himself and pictured her skirt and beret.
“One minute. Bomb bay open.”
“Hold on, everybody. Hold on.”
“Just drop the fucking bombs.”
And then, all at once, quiet. The 109s vanished, the firing stopped, and only the engines thrummed. Tully watched as the liquid froze but not before he dabbed it with a finger and saw a color not hydraulic brown.
“Here it comes, boys, get…” a voice began warning but was cut off by a deafening smack. The first of the flak bursts snapped not far from his window and reeled him backward. The formation had entered “the box,” the section of sky nearest the target and studded with anti-aircraft batteries, their shells set to burst at 22,000 feet. Ragged black nimbuses with angry red cores, they dotted the sky, missing most of the planes, but then, one after another, igniting three of them.