by Adam Makos
Charlie felt like a mess. His hair was stringy and his body felt sticky from sweat. A debriefing was the last thing he wanted. He also knew that now was the time to see his crew’s bravery recognized. Like a testimony under oath, the story he gave Harper would become the official record.
Harper unlocked a drawer in his desk and removed a bottle of Vat 69 whiskey and two shot glasses. He uncorked the bottle while explaining that policy permitted him to give each crewman a shot to loosen his tongue before reviewing a tough mission. He poured Charlie a glass. That morning Charlie had turned down a drink from Walt, but now that moment seemed like another lifetime. Charlie slugged the whiskey in a stinging gulp. Harper kept holding the bottle at an angle. “No one’s counting here,” he said. Charlie accepted another shot.
Charlie walked Harper through the mission. He explained how Frenchy and Doc had downed enemy fighters, how Ecky and Blackie had remained at their useless guns to call out fighter attacks, how Pechout had refused to leave his radio, and how Jennings and Andy had saved Russian from bleeding to death. Harper scribbled notes, hanging on every word.
Charlie told him of the spin, of pulling out over Oldenburg, and of racing for the coast. “Then the last 109 parked on our wingtip,” Charlie said, “and I thought it was all for nothing.”
Harper stopped Charlie. “The last 109?”
Charlie clarified, “Yeah, the one who flew with us.”
Charlie described their bizarre encounter with the German pilot who had escorted them out to sea and said good-bye with a salute.
Harper cocked his head and stared at Charlie as if he was joking. “He flew with you?” Harper said, leaning across his desk, incredulous.
“He was probably out of ammo,” Charlie said. “But he took us out of Germany.”
Harper slapped his desk. “I thought I had heard it all,” he said. Harper closed his notes. Charlie interrupted him to ask how he could nominate his crew for awards. He wanted a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for each man as well as a Bronze Star for Ecky. Harper told Charlie he might want to think bigger.
“They’ll take one look at that plane of yours and every one of you will be wearing the Bronze Star,” Harper said. Charlie knew his request for DFCs for his crew was not asking much. The DFC was a modest medal given routinely to bomber pilots who flew twenty-five missions or to fighter pilots after fifty missions.
Harper promised Charlie he would forward his report to his counterpart at Kimbolton.
It was around 5:30 P.M. when Harper walked Charlie to the base officer’s club. Harper and Charlie found Pinky, Doc, and Andy sitting in plush chairs and eating sandwiches. A painted mural decorated the wall above a nearby fireplace. When Harper saw Charlie admiring it, he admitted he had painted it. The mural featured a creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle jumping through the center of a massive blue American star. It was supposed to be a patriotic mural representing the bomb group on attack. Harper said painting was his hobby. Someday he hoped to be an artist. Doc and Andy covered their mouths with their arms and coughed, fighting not to break out in laughter. They found Harper’s artistic rendition to be hilarious.
Harper excused himself to call his superiors at 8th Air Force headquarters. He had told Charlie on their walk to the club that he saw tremendous PR value in the story of a miracle plane and the crew that stayed together to stay in the war. He departed with a wave. Charlie told his officers about Harper’s reaction. They grinned at the thought of how Harper would paint them as heroes.
CHARLIE AND HIS officers heard the B-17 land at 6:30 P.M., even before the orderly stuck his head into the club. The orderly informed them of a hitch. The B-17 had developed an engine problem and would need to be grounded for a while before its flight back to Kimbolton. The mechanics were working on it. Doc grumbled something about missing the dance.
Three hours and many Cokes and sandwiches later, the orderly returned. The bomber was ready to fly again. As Charlie and his men donned their jackets, Harper entered the club with a wild look of concern. He was glad to have caught them before they left. Harper pulled Charlie to a nearby table and asked him to sit down.
Charlie told his men to board the plane and that he’d catch up.
“I told them your story, just as you told me,” Harper said. “But when I mentioned the part about the German they went berserk!”
Charlie sighed with relief. He thought Harper had come to deliver bad news about Russian.
Harper explained that 8th Air Force headquarters had given him orders to pass along. “When you see your crew, you are to instruct them not to discuss the mission with anyone.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow.
“Here’s the worst part,” Harper said. “Forget about any medals for your crew.”
“That’s bullshit!” Charlie said, standing.
Harper rose to Charlie’s level. “I tried as hard as I could. I know what headquarters is thinking. If your men get medals, people will ask how they got them. Then if your men tell the story, they’ll mention the Kraut pilot.”
Charlie shook his head in disbelief.
“The brass wants you to forget this day ever happened,” Harper said. “Those are the orders.”
Three words crossed Charlie’s mind: Go to hell. But he held his tongue, tossed on his jacket, and started for the door.
Harper caught Charlie by an arm and leaned in with a sudden whisper. “Listen—suppose another of our planes gets in a similar fix. And suppose our gunners hold their fire just as a 109 swoops in because they heard some story about how he’s going to ‘fly with them.’ Now suppose this Kraut isn’t as nice as yours and blows our boys out of the sky?”
Charlie thrust his hands in his pockets. Harper had a point.
“What am I supposed to tell my men?” Charlie asked.
“You tell them they did what they came here to do,” Harper said. “Bomb Germany, fly home, and go back to do it again.”
Charlie gave a terse nod. He and his crew weren’t in it for the medals. Surviving a horrendous attack was just doing what they had volunteered to do. He looked straight at Harper. “What about Ecky? Would you at least help me nominate my tail gunner for a commendation? For his family’s sake.”
“Write it up, and I’ll grease the wheels,” Harper said.
IN THE DIM light of a quarter moon, Charlie jogged toward the tower. His ride to Kimbolton lay idling behind the tower. Peering across the field, Charlie looked for The Pub but couldn’t see her. He passed the tower and approached his ride to Kimbolton from the tail. Blue exhaust flames spit from beneath the bomber’s engines. Charlie removed his crush cap and tucked it under his arm as he crossed through the prop wash. A crew chief waited with a flashlight near the bomber’s rear door. For a moment, Charlie hesitated before he entered the plane.
The crew chief had barely shut the door when the pilots gunned the engines, hurrying to make the thirty-minute hop to Kimbolton, seventy-seven miles west. Charlie found Pinky, Doc, Andy, Frenchy, and Jennings in the radio room. Charlie apologized for not wanting to sit with them and explained that he was curious to see what England looked like at night, from the plane’s nose.
The pilots swung the bomber around onto the main runway as Charlie took his seat in the nose. The pilots gunned the throttles. The bomber barreled along the runway and had just lifted off when Charlie heard a popping sound from the left wing followed by sputtering. The bomber had an engine problem again, this time a blown supercharger. The pilots lowered the plane back toward the earth and touched down. They slammed on the brakes and Charlie thought he heard an unusual squeal. The bomber veered left and ran off the concrete, just before the end of the runway.
As the bomber’s wheels dug into the mud, the sudden stop threw Charlie forward, into the Plexigas nose cone. Ammo cans, clipboards, and pencils from the navigator’s desk cascaded around him. Lying with his head in the tip of the cone, Charlie trembled. The bomber, somehow, managed to stay on its gear.*
Charlie followed the pilots out the nose hatch and found his men behind the plane. The bomber had crashed just across the runway from The Pub. The bomber’s pilots examined the blown engine with flashlights. Frenchy looked at his luminescent watch. It was 9:47 P.M. “I think we’re gonna miss the dance,” he joked.
“I should have bailed out over Germany,” Doc said.
Charlie knew he still had to break the news to Doc and the others that their heroism was being swept under the rug. He was dreading the letter he had to write to Ecky’s parents and the question he knew they would ask him, “How did he die?” Looking at the wrecked bomber that should have been their ride home and The Pub sitting proudly, as if ready for another trip to Germany, Charlie said what each man in his crew was thinking: “Why did I volunteer for this?”
* * *
* “The lower we dropped,” Charlie would remember, “the more ominous the North Sea appeared with its dull gray mantle, interspersed with large whitecaps indicating strong wind and high waves.”
* Author’s note: Decades later, when I talked with American bomber crewmen who had been taken prisoner, almost to a man they would admit, “I was never so glad to see the Luftwaffe” when a German pilot showed up to take them prisoner, as opposed to the alternative, who often wanted their heads.
* “When I saw the condition of the airplane, it frightened me more than anything in the air did,” Charlie would remember. “It seemed as if a hand had been holding us up in the air, and it wasn’t mine.”
† Some three months later Colonel James McKenzie Thompson led his group over Germany on April 1, 1944. Of the twenty-one planes dispatched, five did not return, including Thompson’s. His B-24 hit heavy headwinds on the flight home and ran out of fuel over France. Only he and one other man from his crew bailed out. Thompson’s parachute failed to open.
* “As I sat there in the darkness, I reflected that it had been a very long and rather tiring day for a thoroughly frightened, confused, and totally misplaced West Virginia farm boy,” Charlie would remember. The Pub would sit at Seething until March, when the men of the 2nd Strategic Air Depot would repair her over twenty-three days. The Pub was then flown back to America and later scrapped.
17
PRIDE
TWO DAYS LATER, DECEMBER 22, 1943, KIMBOLTON AIRFIELD
CHARLIE SLOWLY SULKED up to the door of his Nissen hut dragging his canvas kit bag. Forty-eight hours after his traumatic flight over Germany, Charlie still wore his same heavy flying uniform. The 379th had sent a hapless truck driver to Seething to retrieve Charlie and his crew. The driver took all of December 21 just to reach them. He arrived at Seething wearing a ball cap too big for his head and said he had been lost because the English had taken down their road signs to confuse a German invasion. On the drive back to Kimbolton, he had crisscrossed the back roads of eastern England all night while Charlie and his crew bounced around in the rear of the truck. Only a flap of canvas separated them from the freezing cold. Following a twenty-hour-drive, they fell from the truck’s lift gate at Kimbolton, sick from diesel exhaust.
His eyes half-shut, Charlie slowly opened the door to his hut. He had not bothered to check in at the squadron headquarters like Pinky and the others had. He only wanted to drop to his bunk to sleep. Charlie saw that fellow officers were straightening their ties and slicking back their hair for dinner dates. They stared at Charlie in the doorway then ran to him, slapping him on the back.
“Back from the grave!” someone yelled. Charlie grinned wearily. His good friend, Second Lieutenant Dale Killion, broke through the crowd beaming a wide grin. Dale was a rookie pilot, too, and a simple farm kid from Iowa who resembled film star Ronald Reagan. Dale was twenty-two years old, so Charlie looked up to him, although Dale’s “gee whiz” mannerisms made him seem younger.
“We were told you went missing over Germany!” Dale said. Charlie told Dale and the others he had phoned from Seething. “Somebody didn’t get the message,” another pilot said. One by one the men hurried to their footlockers and returned, piling Charlie’s arms with his cologne, his comics, his socks, and his broken watch. Dale handed Charlie a stack of perfumed letters from Marjorie. “Glad I held off on burning these,” he said. Charlie shook his head in disbelief. He knew the Air Force’s standard practice was to remove the possessions of a downed crewman as soon as possible for morale purposes. They would always give the missing man’s buddies the chance to sort through his belongings and remove anything embarrassing before the man’s effects were sent home to his family. By tradition, the missing man’s buddies were allowed to keep useful items, like books or toothpaste or hair pomade. Dale advised Charlie to hurry over to the Operations Office before they mailed the rest of his belongings home to West Virginia.
Glancing toward the corner of the hut, Charlie saw a man sprawled out in the bunk Charlie had claimed. The man’s feet were crossed and his nose was in a book. “What the hell?” Charlie muttered. Charlie approached the man and stood at the foot of the bunk, his shadow blocking the man’s light. “I think you have the wrong bunk,” Charlie said.
The man looked up from his book. Charlie knew the man was a replacement. The wings on his shirt revealed that he was a navigator. The navigator had already hung pinup girls on the wall above his head and sat his shoes on the footlocker that had been Charlie’s. “They assigned this to me,” he said flatly.
“They wrongfully assigned it to you because they thought I was dead,” Charlie explained.
“It was empty,” the navigator said. “Just grab another one.” The other officers in the hut looked up from their grooming. Dale lingered silently a few paces behind Charlie.
Charlie looked around. The hut was full. Charlie saw with relief that no one had disturbed Pinky’s bunk—yet. “That’s not going to work,” Charlie said.
“Then move to another hut,” the navigator said.
Charlie’s face turned red. He had lived in that hut for two months and had grown used to his friends’ snoring and nightmares. That cold, lousy hut was “home.”
Charlie set his kit bag on the concrete floor and dumped his belongings from his arms into the bag. He thrust a hand into the bag, fished around, and pulled out his .45 pistol. “You’re going to leave one way or another,” Charlie told the navigator.
“You’re goddamn crazy!” the navigator said sitting up in bed.
“I’m going to fire one round through the ceiling,” Charlie said. “The next round will be through your leg.” The man scowled but did not move. Charlie leaned in close and whispered something inaudible. The navigator saw the pistol wobbling in Charlie’s shaking hand. He got up, grabbed his shoes, and left the hut without his coat.*
As Charlie’s adrenaline dissipated, he sat down on Pinky’s bunk. No one had raided Pinky’s goods, because the replacement navigator had chosen Charlie’s corner bunk instead. Dale called the other officers to help him gather the navigator’s belongings. In a minute, they cleaned out the man’s footlocker and departed, carrying his uniforms and effects in sloppy bundles to the squadron headquarters. Charlie flopped onto his cot and fell fast asleep.
TWO NIGHTS LATER, WIESBADEN, GERMANY
The smoky pub was filled with pilots on Christmas Eve. The party was rowdy and coarse because the married men were away with their wives. Franz was in the center of it with Bobbi. Normally, Franz liked to be in the middle of the party but not the center of attention. With Bobbi at his side, this was impossible. Willi was drunk and telling jokes, his Knight’s Cross dangling proudly.
When Franz had returned from Jever, he told Willi he had found the B-17 he downed in the farmer’s field but had no witnesses to confirm the victory. He never mentioned the bomber he let escape over the sea. “You won’t get anywhere by not claiming victories—I’ll confirm it for you,” Willi had said. “Your word is good enough.”
Franz had never been closer to the Knight’s Cross. But to him, the Cross had taken on new meaning. He had seen the eyes of the wounded bomber crew
, young men no different than the ones he had been killing for two years. He knew the Cross stood for bravery. But Franz now realized it also represented a man’s success at his most corrupted service to the world—his prowess at killing other men. Franz knew he could not stop fighting. The war would not let him. But never again would he celebrate his job as a fighter pilot, the role he had volunteered for. On December 20, 1943, he had given up on the Knight’s Cross for good. “Don’t bother,” he had told Willi. “Let’s go get drunk.”
Because Christmas Eve was a special occasion, the pilots bought Bobbi a beer. The bear loved the taste. So the men found him a bowl and filled it high with beer, then refilled it again and again, each pilot pouring the beer from his tall mug. The men got drunk with their mascot. Franz finally stopped his comrades from giving Bobbi any more beer by insisting that they would need to help carry Bobbi home if he became too inebriated to walk.
The pilots sang obscene songs to one another but changed their tunes when the local girls trickled in after midnight Mass. At some point, they began singing Christmas carols, including a sad rendition of “Silent Night,” a German song by tradition.* Franz stumbled out into the cobblestone street with Bobbi. Drunkenly, man and mascot plodded to their apartment. With the voices of his comrades still singing in the background, Franz smiled, unaware that their time together was coming to an end.
ELEVEN DAYS LATER, JANUARY 4, 1944, KIMBOLTON AIRFIELD
Charlie and his officers ate their lunches in silence in the nearly deserted mess hall. Dark circles sagged beneath their eyes. Instead of talking with one another, they looked around at other crews, at the swinging doors, at every sound outside the windows. They picked at their food and dropped their silverware, jittery.