The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Navigator Smith proved an exception to this rule.

  I wondered aloud if there hadn’t been some concern among our crew that we would be dropping bombs not just on selected targets in Hamburg, but that we would be bombing the city as a whole.

  “What of it,” Smith said.

  “We would be killing civilians,” I said. “We might be knowingly killing civilians.”

  “What do you know of killing civilians?”

  I told him that before arriving in London I’d lived for a year in Rotterdam, and the people there I knew had most likely been killed by Luftwaffe bombs.

  Now Smith just looked at me.

  “So that’s your girl you were talking about?”

  I tried to explain that I’d been meaning to speak of a Briton named Glynnis, to whom I’d briefly been engaged and who’d died in central London. Instead, though I’d not meant it, I’d referred to a woman I’d known in a Dutch brothel.

  “I don’t need your whole damn family tree. I’ll just tell you the same thing I told you last time,” Smith said. “We’re here to drop bombs on the heads of some Nazi bastards. This is total war. Look—you’re going to have to adopt a press-on attitude, Pilsudski. That’s your mantra from here on out: Press. On. Regardless. Isn’t it what you’re here for?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Let me pose a question, then,” Smith said. “You think your pain for this Glynnis or Françoise or whatever is so unique. What makes you think all the boys in our squadron haven’t lost girls of their own? Aren’t thinking about their girls back in London?”

  Navigator Smith wiped his face of shaving cream. He studied himself in the mirror. I thought to say something more, but there was nothing more to say. I’d lost Glynnis to the Luftwaffe attack. I’d left Rotterdam. I’d left Niny and Johana, and Johana had lost her paramour and most likely her husband, and my parents had been taken from their home. And I’d lost Françoise, left her thinking only of what it meant to me—never what it meant to her. I could still hardly conceive of what she’d thought I’d done.

  In those moments with Navigator Smith, there wasn’t anything to explain, nothing to talk about. He left the latrine.

  I donned my RAF deep blues and dressed in layer after layer now that I knew intimately the cold of thirty thousand feet. My crew convened on the airstrip near S-Sugar at 1800 hours to await the call for takeoff. Gallsworthy had conferred upon himself a kill for one of the Messerschmitts that went down over Cuxhaven. He was only now painting a swastika on the side of our Lancaster by way of commemoration. I asked after the secret weapon the wing commander had mentioned at the briefing.

  Gallsworthy showed me a dozen large paper-covered packages sitting below the waist of the plane. Rowlandson had left them there to be loaded. He would drop these packages as we entered German airspace. Neither he nor any of us knew then how it was to work, but the effect of the dropping of these packages was meant to clear our flight path. Gallsworthy paused in his painting and picked up a package. He turned it over in his hand, as skeptical as I was that a paper-covered package would effect much of anything in the midst of that “total war.”

  The aerodrome was a din of engines starting, flight engineers checking bombers. The sun was moving ever closer to a dense stand of trees in the western sky that brought to mind my first trip to the cave with Glynnis. Water had been lying still in the fields then. Though we hadn’t seen much damage, the first time a huge brown crater revealed itself out there, Glynnis had gasped. I hadn’t realized I was clenching my fists until I heard her. We’d both grown so accustomed to the ruin of buildings all across London. But seeing earth torn up like that—no human harmed, no building destroyed; no real danger, only the ability of a two-ton bomb to move solid grass-covered earth—had some new effect on us.

  I just said, “Navigator Smith was after me again.”

  Gallsworthy suggested I begin keeping clear of Smith—I was providing him too much ammunition with which to antagonize me.

  “These are nineteen- and twenty-year-old men you’re talking to,” Gallsworthy said. “Boys like you, but who haven’t been through what you have.”

  Just then word came from Wing Commander Pennington: Cloud cover over Germany was too dense. We were a scrub yet again.

  That night there was an NAAFI dance downriver at Grimsby. While the rest of the crew went out I hoped to give the night over to a long letter to Niny. But Iago that he was, Navigator Smith knew the business of roiling emotions well. I stayed in our Nissen hut and spent the night instead writing a posthumous letter to my mother. I wrote her of the Tiger Moths and the vacuous chill of the air at thirty thousand feet, where nightly now we flew to drop huge bombs on the very villains who had sent her to her death, and to move ourselves ever closer to the heaven where she now resided.

  I wrote and wrote and wrote.

  I wrote her things I couldn’t quite admit aloud to anyone but her: I’d never made it back to see Glynnis, and I’d never told Glynnis about my mother’s death. The weight of that guilt, knowing she was now dead. Even when she and I were quietly making love I would sometimes close my eyes and think of Françoise. That anger had sent me fleeing from Rotterdam when I honestly still to this very day didn’t know that I’d wanted to leave Françoise—but I had, and now I didn’t know her fate. And now I’d begun to picture myself there, to imagine what half-bombed Rotterdam looked like and what I, Poxl, as a villain looked like to the woman I’d left without a word of my leaving. Somehow I felt that if anyone would understand this unnamable emotion it was my mother. I told her how many times I’d wished I hadn’t walked out of our house without saying good-bye to her, too, the first of my flights beginning that moment I left her home, the one that imbued my muscles with the memory of leaving that allowed me to depart Rotterdam, and that I never truly thought I wouldn’t get another chance, how I wished I could see her. How I wished I could see her. How I would always for the rest of my life have wished I could see her again.

  When I’d finished I sealed the envelope and placed it in my footlocker, where over the days to come, as this letter writing would become something of a habit, I would accrue quite a collection of undeliverables.

  7.

  Saturday night we were briefed again, this time by Wing Commander Pennington himself. We arrived at the airfield at 2100 hours. At 2315 we took off. Clear skies, a rarefied night absent moon or cloud. Three hundred miles from the English coast we joined our wing in formation over the North Sea. We were in rear right. This was the most dreaded position, most exposed to flanking attacks. Still I was grateful to have to worry only about the bomber to my left. Maintaining formation could be the difference between living and dying.

  As I moved in, Navigator Smith came on the interphone.

  “Press on regardless, Captain West.” I said certainly, but suggested that perhaps we should keep quiet, as we had for our former captain, Flight Officer Ford. This didn’t keep Smith from bugging Gallsworthy and McSorely about the WAAFs he was sure they’d been with the night before. He ran on until we reached the German border. Contrails of Stirlings strung out thousands of feet below. At that height I was reminded of Goethe’s description of blindness: “Everything near becomes distant.” Though I knew intellectually those fighters were a thousand, two thousand feet away, that distance might have been all distances, or none, in the enormous Prussian sky.

  Our rendezvous point, position A, was less than an hour from Hamburg. Now Gallsworthy was to begin dropping his mysterious packages. Over the interphone the only sound was of his timing the drops: “One Lancaster, two Lancaster, three Lancaster,” all the way to sixty, then another drop. Frigid air filled the cockpit each time he opened the window. When he reset his count we looked behind to where thousands of silver swimming minnows filled dark air, reflecting the lights of bombers. Yellow flares marked the path before us. As we approached the Kiel Canal the previously cloudless sky filled with brown clouds of flak smoke.

  Gallsworthy called out
that he’d seen a Lancaster far off to our starboard. All seven men of its crew bailed out.

  Then we were through it without incident.

  Another half hour and Navigator Smith came over the interphone: We had achieved our final turning point at Kellinghausen. What we saw before us then made procedure unnecessary.

  Hamburg was already glowing, an earthbound star. Lancaster squadrons all across the midnight horizon were lit by individual auras against the dark summer sky. By the time we made our approach, no green or yellow flare was discernible. They’d mixed together with the blockbusters each squadron had already dropped, four-thousand-pound bombs and four-pound incendiaries landing again and again as our bombers dropped their loads, blooming like enormous sunflowers thousands of feet down.

  Gallsworthy came on the interphone: What was there to drop on? Bombs atop bombs? I thought of my mother. I thought of my father, and of Françoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, “Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb.”

  Navigator Smith came after: “Press on,” he said.

  I felt the lightening of our plane as our bombload went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke.

  I banked left.

  Already we were on our return path. We encountered not a single Luftwaffe fighter. Those silvery minnows Gallsworthy had dropped had fooled German radar into thinking there were thousands of bombers all across the vector on which the minnows flew. Bombers before and after us had dropped the packages, too, and the Luftwaffe fighters hadn’t had enough fuel to stay skyward long enough to engage us. We’d approached Hamburg on the driest night of the summer and hardly faced any resistance.

  Hamburg was given over to flame.

  With the city burning behind us the night was no longer dark. Western suburbs of Hamburg burned phosphorescent, glowing out to their fuzzy lighted edges. There, glinting amid the dark earth below us on the path back to base, was the Elbe. The river flowed northward from below my father’s tannery, through Hamburg and on to the North Sea on the other side of which I was now stationed. For the first time since arriving at RAF Grimsby I caught a whiff of days swimming with Johana and Niny, gnats buzzing in the low Bohemian evening. Below us the shrapnel of a bomb found its way into the Elbe, floating upstream and out to the North Sea. River water carrying it had flowed from Leitmeritz and from Schalholstice, where it cooled in vats of tanning leather at my father’s business. Through Poland. Through the city I had just set ablaze during the dimming July night.

  Hamburg’s flames lit our backs for miles, dimming in our wake until the ruined city ebbed to a match tip on the far horizon.

  Soon we were clear of Hamburg. And in those moments after I’d exacted revenge on German soil, a face arose in mind so lucidly I couldn’t imagine shaking it, perhaps ever—a face I’d hoped to forget since I left her but which clearly I couldn’t shake: Françoise’s.

  8.

  Debriefing back at base at almost 0500 hours was joyous. The first moment of true happiness I’d felt since discovering I would be accepted into flight training. It allowed for a true forgetfulness of all else: This bombing was our whole world in the moments after we returned. Morale soared after our unqualified success. Navigator Smith recounted perfect turns his pilot—the Eastern European Jew now called Poxl West—had executed at each turning point. A low black course of stubble had cropped up on his jutting chin, and the deep furrow of his dark Etonian brow brought a feckless look to his flat face. McSorely described the night sky and the Catherine wheels raised by each blockbuster bomb as it landed on central Hamburg, one after the next, stoking flames so high we couldn’t see the city itself.

  Even taciturn Flight Engineer Smith disregarded unspoken protocol and told the WAAFs who questioned us about our perfect run. There was such good cheer in the Nissen hut, I wondered if rest would come that night for the crew of the S-Sugar. But we all fell immediately to sleep, and then, late that morning, I was awakened by Navigator Smith’s cries. They were half-human, a macaw’s squawk, which stirred no man among us but me, all the rest wholly overtaken by exhaustion. I dropped from my bed. I held his thrashing arms. He woke only long enough to dart upright. He looked me in the eyes. He steeled his body. He had long, sinewy arms and a thicket of dark, dark hair along them to match his brown brow. I could feel the sisal sharpness of his arm hair in my palms as he thrashed. Sweat covered his face and his eyes flashed.

  Then he grew still. He recognized me and returned to himself.

  “Wizard flying, young Yid,” he said. “Now let me sleep.”

  The evening following our run, there was revelry. We went to the Rooster’s Peck, where Gallsworthy and I played a game of darts. Our crew congratulated me on a perfectly executed run. Any reservations I’d had before dissolved in the warmth of drink. Even McSorely stood me a pint, and from behind his acne-covered face—he was only nineteen, after all, and looked like a schoolboy—I could see a softening of his features. After darts Gallsworthy returned to our table, where he hoisted a warm Harp and said, “To our pilot, Poxl West—a hebe who does some fine flying!” Laughter erupted among the men of S-Sugar. Reconnaissance reported severe damage to the Hamburg Krupps factory. We’d hit our targets. We’d done in Hamburg.

  On our meander back to our hut, Gallsworthy held me back until we were a good thousand feet behind the rest of S-Squadron.

  “Poxl,” he said. “Poxl, I know you know all about women.” He was slurring his words, and while I should have been thinking of Glynnis, I was thinking about Françoise. “You had Glynnis back in London and you have your cousins. But me…” His weight shifted all the way to his right foot, then to his left, almost tipping him each time. “Me, I’ve never even kissed a girl, if you can believe it.” Gallsworthy was a squat five feet tall, maybe a few inches more, and, even despite his training, nearly two hundred pounds.

  I could believe it.

  He continued.

  “If I could meet a WAAF or some girl in town,” he said.

  My kind slovenly friend Gallsworthy needed my help finding love. Even for him a taste of death over Hamburg had touched off a longing for love. I told him that when we were back in London he would come with me and meet my cousin Niny.

  “Let’s have the picture of her,” Gallsworthy said. We were back to our Nissen hut by now and though he’d seen the photograph a thousand times, I went to my footlocker and picked out the photo of Niny, Johana, and me along the Elbe in Schalholstice, just outside Brüder Weisberg. We stood beside one another, not touching, and behind us the very vats were sunk into the ground, inside of which my father’s men submerged the hides in need of tanning.

  Gallsworthy was the drunkest I’d ever seen him. Now he was lying back on his bed. I took him the photo and he held it very close to his face and said, “Niny, Niny, Niny,” an incantation, until his arms bent back and the picture sat against his chest. He passed out dreaming of my cousin and of the image of my Elbe, which he knew only from that photograph, and which no amount of killing or distance could ever rob from my memory.

  9.

  Next few days we awoke to fog so thick it was as if we were back up among the clouds. By Wednesday there was an even heavier cover, morning announced only by a subtle glowing change in hue. The Americans were grounded during the day, just as we were at night. It was Thursday before another run could be attempted. Some kind of electricity ran through the crewmen in the briefing room—our turning points were changed, but the destination remained:

  We were to make a second run on Hamburg.

  All the other bombers in our squadron had flown a second run on the city Tuesday, but we’d been grounded. Upon takeoff we had lost oil pressure and were forced to return to base. They reported what we had: a clear, safe run to the city. There was an edge to their stories. They’d experienced a parallel success to ours, but now they described flying into a column of smoke so thick they could taste soot from the city in their oxygen masks. We had fuzzy heads the days after our
victorious run. We had time on our hands from the failed takeoff and the fog. Idle, we began to consider what we’d done.

  “How many you suspect we killed on that run?” Gallsworthy said at breakfast. “Thousand? Two?”

  “More, I’d think,” McSorely said.

  “More than two thousand,” Gallsworthy said. “That’s a lot of civilians.” He paused and took a bite of his sausage. “That’s a lot of anything.”

  “Well, sure,” McSorely said. “But it’s a huge city. There’re plenty more who survived.”

  Again from the edges of my memory came that image: cobblestones rising to mind; Glynnis’s pale skin. Françoise’s broad nose.

  Wing Commander Pennington arrived and briefed us on our run. Flight Officer Rowlandson was to fly with S-Sugar on one more run before taking over his own commission.

  Soon we lifted off again into a light mist. We weren’t far from base before it grew apparent this was to be a more challenging run. S-Sugar was among the lead bombers. No matter how high we rose through the clouds it felt we would never overcome them. Over the North Sea we finally broke from cloud cover to witness a blanket of undulating gray below. A bomber’s moon provided some light. It wasn’t a help for long. Navigator Smith called out coordinates for our upcoming turning point. We were miles out over the sea, passing above Heligoland, when before us was a billowing column of black pumice. My first thought was that this was what we’d wrought in Hamburg.

  We’d ignited Germany. Here, rising nearly 35,000 feet above the ground, was the evidence. Then the swelling and dying of dozens of white explosions ran through the great black mass. It was hard to know how so much flak could be thrown into the air. Perhaps we were witnessing some unprecedented new Nazi weapon, some horrible counterpunch to the silver strips we’d dropped to disrupt Nazi radar and which had allowed us to light such a monumental conflagration.