“We’ve been getting the shittiest planes,” Bachmann announced one day, “because Bomber Command wants all the long-range ones for pounding Germany. Churchill likes pounding Germany because he’s angry about the Blitz. He also wants to make a show to the Russians that we’re doing something valuable on the western front. As we don’t have a foothold on the Continent anymore, dropping bombs is about all we can do. That means that Coastal Command and the Atlantic battle are being largely ignored, which is why the U-boats are going to continue to sink all the merchant ships because we have no air wing that can stop them. However”—Bachmann paused to collect his winnings, which everyone had assumed would make him stop talking because that’s how extortion worked—“you’re getting a B-24 Liberator. The only one in Iceland. And it’s equipped,” he said to Abe, “with the Norden.”
As Alvin had earlier insisted, this particular plane had been headed for RAF Nutts Corner but was later meant to be flown back to Reykjavík in the autumn. So, one particularly annoyed administrator figured they might as well just leave it here when it stopped for refueling and he’d fudge the paperwork.
“Want to see it?” Bachmann asked them when the card game was over.
They did. They really did.
It was past midnight, and because they were stationed at sixty-four degrees north latitude, the sun was barely below the horizon and the world was cast in a treeless twilight of pinks, purples, and indigos. The plane was alone on the airstrip and its fuselage was awash in a beatific lavender glow.
The nose art (straight from San Diego) read, The Shrew.
“It’s a reference,” Bachmann explained, “to a headstrong woman with a sharp wit from a Shakespeare play.” This fact made the crew happy because they liked sharp-witted and classy women, especially when they were pictorially represented by stunning brunettes in black swimsuits, which was exactly what was painted above the name of the plane.
“She looks like my aunt Lucy,” Abe whispered to Louis.
“I think that’s Hedy Lamarr as a Vargas Girl.”
“Whoever she is, she looks like my aunt.”
“Your aunt must be a looker,” Louis said.
“She was. She died in a fire with my mother in ’37.”
Louis frowned. It was a sad story, and it explained some of Abe’s personality, but it also sounded like a bad omen.
“I’d keep that to yourself,” Louis said.
* * *
They flew the B-24 on three missions over the next week that resulted in still more nothing. It was the night before their fourth scheduled flight, which everyone knew was canceled because of the oncoming storm, that Bachmann burst in on them two hours before mission time. “Up! You all have to go up now. Take the B-24. Up you go. Now, now, now, boys.”
They all looked at him like he was crazy. It was very late, there was a storm coming, and it was American Independence Day. To the crew, these reasons overruled anything the Germans might be up to.
Abe was writing a letter to Sheldon, who was at some hotel in the Catskills where he and his buddy Lenny were working over the summer. Abe was trying to describe what July Fourth felt like in Iceland among a bunch of Canadians. He didn’t have time to finish, though; Bachmann was quite animated.
“Get in the air!” Bachmann yelled.
“OK,” Louis said, not moving.
“The Americans are coming!”
They all laughed. It was a joke. Bachmann had made a joke. Not even a bad one. They hadn’t known it was possible. They ribbed Abe and congratulated Bachmann on his fine show.
“No, no,” he said, standing with his hands on his hips. “The Americans are coming to take over the defense of Iceland, and all of us are going to Britain for the air war over Germany. That part you knew. Here’s the new part. The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade is coming over from Newfoundland now. Right now. And they have a problem. A German problem. And you need to help them. Now.”
“Argentia?” Louis asked, referring to the base there.
“Yeah. Right,” Bachmann said more calmly, perhaps because he realized that no one would listen to him while he was hysterical. “Task Force 19. They’re coming. An Avro of ours spotted a U-boat on an intercept with their convoy. But they’re out in the Pit, and the Newfoundland planes can’t reach that far. The Shrew is the only plane with the range to engage the U-boat. You’re going west and you’re going hunting and you’re going now because you might not make it even if you fly flat-out. There are more than a thousand marines on those ships, and if you don’t bomb the U-boat, they’re going to die. Any questions?”
Louis had one. “What about the storm?”
“Yeah. It’s going to be windy.”
“How windy?” Abe asked.
Bachmann said nothing, which told Abe how windy it was going to be.
Abe thought about this: When you drop depth charges or bombs at altitude, the Norden’s supposed to compensate for the cross trail in a wind, but a storm was more than wind. A storm is made of high- and low-pressure fronts colliding. They push the wind all over the place. You don’t compensate for something like that. You avoid it. Especially in a plane.
Abe remembered throwing a ball with Sheldon in the hurricane of ’38. Only twenty feet away from each other, they never caught a single one. Depth charges were no different from baseballs. Wind over the ocean was unobstructed and terrifying. Abe wouldn’t be able to pattern the drops. They weren’t going to hit a goddamned thing and he knew it.
A storm also meant terrible turbulence, and the B-24 was well-known to be a bitch at altitude; it would shake them all around like they were dice in a cup.
Abe checked to see how much everyone had been drinking. They were all going to be barfing it up. So, there was going to be that smell too.
Morris Campbell, the waist gunner, knew something about storms too, having grown up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan north of Regina. Morris didn’t need to know more about bombs than he already did to state the obvious. “U-boats are twenty feet wide. We won’t hit a wheat field from altitude in a storm.”
No one replied.
“We will miss. We will not hit the target.”
“We’ll hit something,” Abe said.
Morris didn’t laugh. No one laughed. A thousand marines were coming this way, a U-boat was going in the other direction, and a storm was wrapping the whole affair in a withering embrace.
“You don’t need to hit them,” Bachmann said. “You just need to be there. The Americans need to see that we’re trying, and the Germans need to know they’re at risk.”
“We’re going to die for show?” Abe asked.
“No,” said Bachmann. “Show matters, but the sortie is real. The Germans run on diesel on the surface. Up top, the boats are fast enough to catch the convoy—assuming the intelligence from the Avro is right. But submerged, they have to run on batteries and they are very slow and the Yanks will be able to outrun them. And the Germans can’t stay down forever; they have to surface to run those engines again and recharge the batteries. If The Shrew is up above, the U-boat will be forced to dive and slow down unless the captain is nuts. Also, if there’s a wolfpack, they won’t be able to coordinate an attack while submerged whether you’re dropping charges or not. So, the charges don’t need to be that accurate. You know all this!”
“Why not?” Morris asked.
“Why not what?” Bachmann said.
“Why won’t they be able to coordinate an attack while submerged?”
“The only way they can coordinate is by radio,” said Bachmann, checking his watch and wanting to hurry this along. “They can only use the radios on the surface because the cables from the aerial have to run down through the hatch. Their engineers couldn’t think of any other way to design the things. Once they close the hatch, each U-boat is on its own.”
Morris said nothing. Everyone looked at Bachmann, who said, “The plane. Get on the fucking plane!”
They rushed through the preflight check, and after
that, they were up.
* * *
THE HIGHER THEY FLEW, the less fuel they used, so they flew higher. The higher they flew, the colder it was, and they wished they weren’t flying so high. At 20,000 feet, it was extremely cold.
After two hours in the air, Alvin called roll to see who hated their new airplane and everyone raised a hand. Despite its being much larger than the Wellington, the heaters were weaker. Moving around inside the fuselage was also awkward. Both waist gunners had to sit on the floor and wrap themselves in wool blankets.
Louis called down to Abe, who was scrunched up in the nose cone below. “You planning to see that girl when you get back?”
“Yeah, I think so. I hope so.”
“What’s her name again?”
“Ingunn.”
“Jewish?” Louis asked, deadpan.
The entire crew laughed.
Louis looked out into the dark. Normally, U-boats surfaced and recharged their batteries at night, especially during the first four moonless hours. That was also when they hunted. With the sun already in the sky at two in the morning, they were easier to spot.
The Atlantic, though, was very big.
Louis checked the airspeed. This was as fast as they could go. Even in the long-range Liberator, they were facing a range problem if getting back was part of the plan. If they had to linger over the convoy, that would also cost fuel.
Louis steered them southwest into the face of the Gulf Stream. They were above the clouds. When they occasionally glimpsed the water, it was a pallid iron gray. The prospect of seeing a submarine seemed bleak.
It wasn’t impossible, though, if they used geometry.
They knew the U-boat was on an intercept course with the convoy, so even if they didn’t know exactly where it was—which they didn’t—they knew where it had been spotted, they knew where it was going, and they knew that the paths of the convoy and U-boat would eventually converge. The closer those lines became, the greater likelihood that the U-boat could use its torpedoes against the Americans.
The navigator called in the time to Louis. “Seven minutes to convoy intercept.”
“I’ll take us down.”
The four propeller engines slowed. The Shrew descended into the gray floor of clouds below.
The airplane shook more violently the lower they flew, and the visibility was terrible.
It was cold and dull in the nose cone. Abe looked down at the vastness of the ocean through breaks in the low storm clouds. The men were too cold for banter and the clock was ticking down to intercept. It was during that time that Abe came up with an idea. “Let’s circle the convoy and make wider and wider circles while periodically dropping charges until we either force the Germans under or destroy them.”
“You mean get shot at,” Morris said.
“No, it’ll be fun,” Abe replied.
* * *
Louis could see his own breath when he exhaled. He was thinking about what Abe had suggested. The wind was now rattling them, and the windshield wipers were outclassed by the intensity of the rain pelting them.
“What do you think?” Morris asked.
“I think I see them.”
“Who?” asked everyone at the same time.
“The Americans.”
The only straight lines at sea are those made by men—or women, in the case of ship hulls, because it was the women back home who had built them. Even while looking for those lines, it had been hard to make out the ships. There were more of them out there out of sight; they were not distinct objects but part of the ocean.
Like the U-boat.
Aircraft can be tough to spot against darkened skies, and the clouds help to mask them. But the sound they made always gave them away. Louis didn’t love Abe’s idea. The problem with circling the convoy was that it showed the enemy where the convoy was; it was like drawing a giant circle in the sky.
Shots from a German antiaircraft gun punctured their fuselage.
None of the aircrew knew what had happened at first. They had never engaged the Germans before, and the sound of bullets puncturing the skin of the plane didn’t seem as loud or dramatic as the crew might have expected. It had been loud in the plane to start with, but after the bullets passed through, it instantly became much louder. An annoying whistle came through the fuselage that sounded like a kid blowing across the top of a Coke bottle. It was Morris, the waist gunner, who noticed that the holes were round and plentiful.
“We’ve been hit!” he yelled. “And we’re gonna get hit again!” he added.
“Do you see anything?” Louis yelled. Morris had opened the door. His harness kept him from flying out. He was looking for something to shoot at.
It was Alvin, though, who spotted the target first and announced it with his deafening .50-caliber machine gun. The tracer bullets fell slowly like flares to the far ocean below, each one directing Alvin’s aim toward the surfaced U-boat that he was now locked in mutual combat with. The spent shells clanked to the floor all over the aircraft, rattling around and bunching up in the corners as puddles of brass.
Morris—whose own gun was pointing at the clouds as Louis banked the plane—had nothing to do other than freeze as the wind and rain soaked his leather jacket so he removed a shovel from the wall and started hauling out the hundreds of spent shells on the floor.
Louis called down to Abe. “Low and slow?”
It was what they had both been thinking about back in the hanger when they heard about the storm. Drop altitude from a long way off. Come in over the surface of the ocean nice and low, line up with the U-boat, and then unload the bombs and blast it to hell. Assuming, that is, that the U-boat’s 20mm flak gun didn’t shoot Louis through the windscreen first.
“There’s a second one!” Alvin yelled. Louis pulled up on the stick, gaining them some distance and shaking off the oncoming fire.
Abe was trying to reason his way through their predicament too. The Norden was utterly useless in these conditions. He’d trained as though he were in a plane 20,000 feet in the air over a German forest with a building in the middle during a calm day with a moderate breeze. What the plane was doing now was banking at thirty degrees in the middle of a hurricane over a sheet of gray paper with a doodle of a U-boat on it.
“Can you do it?” Louis yelled to Abe.
With a tailwind and only a few hundred feet of drop, there wouldn’t be much trail on the antisubmarine bombs and Abe already knew the terminal velocity of those. If Louis could fix airspeed and altitude, Abe could do the math. Sort of. Or at least he could eyeball it with a certain level of expertise. But, realistically . . .
“I’ll miss,” Abe yelled.
“It’ll force them under.”
“Yeah, but it’s dangerous. I mean . . . if the point is to make them submerge rather than sink them, why go lower when we can go higher?” Abe tried to explain himself, but the incessant explosions of the .50-caliber gun were driving him nuts and his own nose was starting to run, which was an irritant in his mask.
Louis seemed to understand, though. He started to spiral upward in the general area of the U-boats so Abe could drop the depth charges as if they were land mines falling from the sky. Maybe they hit, maybe they were close enough, and maybe they didn’t, but the U-boat captains would have to be nuts not to submerge and ride it out.
More antiaircraft rounds hit The Shrew. Louis took them up. Something near Alvin had caught fire inside the plane. Smoke was everywhere, and Morris dropped his shovel and reached for the fire extinguisher. As he worked on the fire, he called out, “You’ll never hit anything if you don’t aim.”
“We’re going to let the randomness of it all scare the shit out of them,” Abe yelled.
Morris was strangely quiet while Alvin continued to pepper the Atlantic with lead.
“I thought you wanted to kill Germans.”
Abe—staring down at the Atlantic—took Morris’s question seriously. He had wanted to kill Germans. In this moment, though, and in sig
ht of the convoy less than a nautical mile away, Abe wanted something else even more. It was an extraordinary feeling; a burden was lifted from him when he realized there was more to all this than his own anger.
“I think I’d rather win the war,” Abe said.
“Now!” Louis yelled, as he banked the plane.
Abe started the stopwatch.
If the U-boats did submerge, Abe and Louis would need the watch to time their turns and match them to the compass to know that they were bombing in the right spot despite where the wind took them next.
The harder they banked, the more Alvin was able to fire straight down into the water and the more the rain came in through Morris’s side of the plane and smacked him in the face.
The rain smothered the remains of the fire, and the smell of smoke shook Abe for a moment, making him think of his mother. He shook it off. He didn’t want to think about his mother, or Aunt Lila, or Mirabelle, or Sheldon, or even his father. He wanted to save the convoy.
When the second hand reached the twelve o’clock position on his black-faced Elgin watch, Abe shouted the words he’d been waiting to yell for almost a year.
“Bombs away!”
* * *
THE SHREW RETURNED to the airfield to a hero’s welcome. They had no casualties and less than an hour’s worth of fuel in reserve when the wheels touched down in Iceland. The gambit had paid off and the U-boats had submerged, giving the convoy the time it needed to outpace the wolfpack. There was no evidence that they’d hit anything, but that wasn’t why they’d been airborne. By the time Alvin called it and said they had to return to base, the convoys were safe.
Everyone was freezing cold, starving, and tired. They were all ordered to take hot baths, and Bachmann told them they had three days off for excellent work “starting now.”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 29