by Jim Shepard
“Maybe it should,” Snowberry said.
“Maybe. I myself think the RAF have got it knocked, going at night. Everyone bombs a field and comes home happy.”
“It’s a helluva way to run a war, this daytime stuff,” Piacenti said. “Shoot your way in, shoot your way out.”
“That’s the idea of the Fort to begin with.” Lewis tapped his head ironically. “All it is is a fat-assed bird with a lot of guns all over it. Put all the guns together. That’s the idea. Who needs fighter help?”
“Yeah,” Snowberry said. “Who needs fighter help?”
“It’s a shitty idea,” Lewis said. “But they want to make it work. Someone wants to make it work. You telling me they wouldn’t have come up with a long-range fighter by now if they had wanted to?”
They thought glumly about the Air Corps’ neglect on that score. Snowberry was wearing his World’s Fair button.
“This is Charge of the Light Brigade stuff, is what this is,” Lewis added.
“Bean’s doing German up there,” Snowberry said. “I can hear him.”
Lewis snorted. “At this point I just want to hit the ground alive. Let’s start from there, and worry about sprechen sie later.”
Tuliese had a panel off and was fiddling. They listened to the click-click-click of his spanner wrench. “They should cancel,” Lewis said. “They have to cancel. The Regensburg people have to be running out of time. They have to get to Africa in daylight. I can’t see how they can send us up in this. We haven’t exactly lived and breathed instrument flying.”
Bryant reflected on the relative laxity of the base and Lewis’s anger at their free time and the base CO, the car salesman from Pocatello. He understood this was what Lewis’s anger had meant. They were not ready for this. He hoped the car salesman from Pocatello understood that and passed the information along. They sat, and waited. Ball finished the rest of his candy. Bean lay on his back under the nose like someone wishing to be run over. The darkness was completely gone now, and from moment to moment the clouds inched a little higher in an irritating meteorological tease.
There was another delay, to 0715. And then, while Bryant was urinating off behind some oil drums, Piacenti tapped his arm and told him of another delay, of nearly three and a half hours.
Lewis was aghast when he got back to the plane, and tried to get Gabriel to listen to him. “Three and a half hours?” he was saying. “What about the Regensburg force? They couldn’t be waiting that long.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel finally snapped. “Who are you, Bomber Command? Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they’re scrubbed and we’re not.”
“Sir, isn’t there someone we could ask?” Lewis pleaded. “Sir, do you understand? If they went off, then the Germans can catch them and rearm and refuel for us. Sir, they can go after us both with everything they’ve got.”
“Peeters, shut up,” Gabriel said. “You’re gonna have everybody shitting their pants before we even take off.”
Lewis stepped back and looked at him. “Yes sir, thank you sir,” he said. He sat down and put his hand in Bean’s old vomit. “I’ll have more faith in the Army, sir.”
Gabriel shook his head and walked away from him, standing with arms folded where Bean was lying. Bryant said to Lewis, “That’s the worst possible case you’re talking about. Things aren’t that bad.”
“I’m beginning to catch on,” Lewis said. His eyes were glittering. “I’m the one who gets to figure this all out, and then no one gets to listen.”
They remained where they were. It was hot. Everything was ready and there was nothing to do. They hated the Army, hated the mission, hated the wait. At eleven o’clock Lewis announced they had now been up nearly ten fucking hours and they hadn’t started the mission yet. They had been at the planes for almost six hours. No one around Bryant had spoken for two hours. Bryant was talking to himself in discrete little snippets of conversation. He had no idea how long he could wait like this, but he did know he was approaching some sort of limit.
The sky had cleared a good deal. They were perhaps waiting now for the more western bases to clear. No one mentioned the Regensburg force, and there were no official announcements on the subject. Most of their gear was strewn around them. A jeep arrived, and an officer climbed out and conferred off to the side with Gabriel. When they parted Gabriel, with a look of regret, waved them into the plane, and they stood and wrenched on their outer layers while the jeep tooled off. They climbed in in small groups, officers near the nose, gunners and radio operator through the waist. Bryant was the last aboard.
He sat on his sling and swayed like the boy on Snowberry’s swing. The air was cooler. His neck prickled. The turret retained its factory smell of gasoline and leather and steel. It was too recently off the assembly line to have lost it, he understood, and it struck him how little time had been involved in all of this—sign up, show up, train, arrive in England, end up here, doing this. He shook himself, frightened all over again. While the first B-17’s of the flight line ran up their engines, turning over the huge Wright Cyclones with a roar, he ran through his training manual’s profile of the perfect gunner, reciting silently from memory: the perfect aerial gunner, when he was six, his father gave him a .22 and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, he was ranging the hills and woods near his home potting squirrels until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, he got his first shotgun and went quail hunting, duck hunting, grouse hunting, and learned the principle of leading a moving target. He learned instinctively that you do not fire at a moving target, since it will no longer be where it was, but ahead of it, and learned too that his gun is a deadly weapon, to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Corps, he has a whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of the new weapon, and the principles of shooting down the enemy airplanes are exactly the same as those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner.
He closed his eyes. His throat seemed constricted and he wondered if he was getting the mumps. He visualized Messerschmitts as tow targets, Focke Wulfs as fragile and static ducks.
A bird stood on the canopy of the dorsal gunner in No Way, to his right, feathering wingtip feathers slightly in the gathering slipstream from the plane’s engines. Bryant thought, This must be the way it is before a stupid attack, when you know it’s going to fail and it can’t help but fail but you can’t change it or run away; you can only be a part of it, and help it to fail.
Over on No Way the dorsal gunner was rotating his turret and elevating his guns to dislodge the bird, which turned slowly and imperturbably with the rotating canopy, the black fifty-caliber barrels flanking it in a paradox of power and impotence.
No Way went off ahead of them, the huge tail swinging around like a monstrous and slow weathervane. Bryant could see on the small blurred face of the tail gunner his irritation at the danger and probable stupidity of all this. He swiveled his guns at Paper Doll angrily, like the butt of a joke, a man in a tiny car fitted with towering and foolish fins.
Bryant watched them go off tail-heavy and wallowing, only slowly achieving any sort of grace, and then looked on blankly as his own ship began the rush forward. The end of the paved strip was happily vague in the fog but he could feel when they had been on earth too long, and started counting, and it seemed far too late when he felt the bump and lift and sway of Paper Doll finally letting go and straining upward. The wings tilted and wobbled under the weight and the trees marking the end of the base appeared and rolled by beneath, and that gave way to undifferentiated gray, and then they were climbing and banking to the right, although he couldn’t be sure. No one spoke. All four engines sounded good. He watched for lights, for the black shapes of other Forts, though by then it would be too late. The engines’ pitch seemed changed and enclosed, a roar in a bathtub. The gray began to thin and strand and suddenly they were out and into a bril
liant blue, the sun flooding across his canopy and the ship’s upper surfaces, and all around him was the awesome boys’ war spectacle of the entire group’s B-17’s rising from the cloud blanket, like a horizon of magically appearing good guys, all sweeping into the clear and cold sunlight.
They were to form up as a squadron seven miles north of the field. The earliest planes to arrive began circling at an agreed-upon altitude and subsequent arrivals formed into their three-plane vees and slipped into place to join the slow wait. With the twelve-plane squadron finally assembled, they began climbing to the south to find the larger group. Hirsch announced they were eleven minutes late.
The larger group was not where it was supposed to be. Bryant circled his glass dome, scanning the blue and finding nothing. Gabriel asked Hirsch peevishly if they were where they were supposed to be, and Hirsch, though he wasn’t lead navigator, confirmed it testily. After the pre-takeoff wait the delay was particularly irritating.
They crisscrossed a good bit of England searching. With every change of direction there were groans over the interphone. Willis Eddy every so often asked Hirsch to identify various towns. Hirsch pointed out Peterborough and Oxford, and then stopped answering. A pond or lake below was a luminous light blue. Bryant imagined Robin seeing these colors, and missed her. Eddy speculated on the interphone as to the identities of subsequent villages until Gabriel told him to pickle it, and Cooper asked for some semblance of interphone discipline.
With the rest of their squadron they circled, scanning the horizon for the larger group.
“What’s a silage?” Willis Eddy asked. His voice in Bryant’s ear suggested a casual curiosity that made Bryant wish Eddy would lose consciousness until the bomb run. He lifted his earpiece away and cleaned an ear with his little finger, his glove under his arm, and resettled the earpiece.
“A what?” Gabriel was saying.
“A silage,” Eddy said. The formation banked and they banked with it. The horizon lifted and swung and their starboard wing rose to the light. “S-I-L-A-G-E. Like on a farm.”
“Jesus Christ,” Gabriel said.
It’s where they keep the animals at night,” Lewis called in. “What’s going on up there?”
“I thought that was a barn,” Eddy murmured.
“Eddy, the next thing I hear out of you better have to do with the bomb run,” Gabriel said. “You keep interphone discipline like Gracie Allen.”
“Jeez Louise,” Eddy said. The interphone was silent.
No Way was not far off their port wingtip. Their dorsal gunner rotated slowly, as if satisfying himself the bird was gone. Bryant remembered the potato farms in Barrington he’d been taken to see, a Fourth of July he’d spent in Tiverton, hot and dusty and enjoying a sticky strawberry soda while a parade went by. Small parade by Providence standards, with dogs sprinting along the route barking at the bands. A barnstormer had been promised in a local field and had indeed shown up, but had spent all of Bryant’s visit tinkering with an engine that seemed disappointingly small and ill-kept. Mother of Jesus, the barnstormer kept saying in exasperation. Afterwards Bryant’s father had sardonically commented on the miracle of the airplane, although his uncle Tom had been more enthusiastic later when Bryant had reported on the trip. The barnstormer’s machine had resembled the biplane he’d seen disintegrate as a small child and he’d come away impressed with the flying machine as an amazingly complex assemblage of interdependent elements, all capable of failure. That any of them flew and returned their pilots to earth safely he found a notion to marvel at. He’d started studying engines not long after that. He hadn’t been very good—“Just watch,” he remembered his father saying more than once, like Favale, like Tuliese—but he had been dogged.
Despite the radio silence imposed on him, Eddy was the first to call in the larger formation of Fortresses, turning like slow birds off to the north at an unexpectedly high altitude. They climbed to rendezvous, and in a group slipped into their position as lead low squadron.
There was something matter-of-fact about the spectacle, having to do with the bland impossibility of the sheer numbers of planes. Above and behind him B-17’s extended into the sky with the dazzling and fraudulent abundance of replicating images in facing mirrors.
He could see Bean amidships peering upward out of the radio operator’s oval window. Bean saw him and waved and pointed. He realized with awe that the bomber stream extended farther back than they could see.
“I guess the theory is, the Germans just don’t have this many cannon shells,” Lewis said finally, from the tail.
Bryant adjusted his mask and thought again, unhappily, about the brevity of his training—who was to replace who as formations of this size got thinned out or broke down? Did anybody really know?—and swiveled his turret to face forward. His mask was wet. His toes were ominously cold. It was August. In September of the previous year he had first set foot in an airplane of any kind.
He swayed on his sling, squeezing his oxygen hose every so often as a hedge against ice buildup. He felt the cold through the sheepskin and felt the hollowness and fragility of the airplane carrying them. He thought of Lewis, whispering to Snowberry during the night in an effort to calm him, the words frightening Bryant, at least, still more. All we have is that thin metal can. We can’t run and we can’t hide. We just do our job and do right by our buddies and tighten up our ass and pull our knees in and hope for the best.
The leading aircraft of the 231-plane formation left the English coast at a little promontory of Suffolk that Hirsch identified in passing as Orford Ness. Snowberry repeated the name with distaste from the ball turret below and then was silent. They were over water at 1:17, just about two hours after takeoff. Hirsch called it in. Bryant thought of Stormy with all those watches. They left landfall at 14,000 feet and climbing, in a bomber stream sixty miles long and drawing closer together. The sea crossing was scheduled to take thirty-five minutes.
“Where’s Der Bingle?” Lewis asked about halfway across. “Don’t we get Der Bingle anymore?”
There was no answer from the ball.
“Oxygen check,” Cooper said. “Ball turret?”
“Ball turret,” Snowberry said. “Okay.”
Cooper reeled through the others, Bryant included. They rode on grimly. Bryant switched off his interphone and sang to himself. Around him the force was closing up. He could see the smoke and the shuddering from the planes to his right as they tested their guns. The racketing started on their ship and he shook in his sling when the ball and waist guns let go. He charged and cleared his own, aimed off into space, and squeezed the triggers, the roar shaking him and the tracer lines corkscrewing down and away. The waist and tail were firing, he could feel. Eddy and Hirsch up front on their single fifties. He smelled the cordite through the mask, the pungency tainting the cool oxygen. Fireworks. He flashed back on cans blowing into the air, cats shocked by porch to porch lobs. The smaller smoke bursts from the other planes’ guns trailed backward as lesser echoes of the enlarging contrail streams, all of the lines unfurling behind, striating the sky. The sight gave him the proud and uneasy sense that the whole attack, the whole formation, was indifferent to stealth or surprise, and was serenely intended to overwhelm the air defenses that lay ahead.
In their shallow elements of three the wingmen floated slightly above and behind their element leaders, trying to keep wingtips level with the leader’s waist gun positions. Paper Doll was an element leader, flanked by No Way and Archangel. Above them in a vee were Geezil II, Leave Me Home, and Dog Star. Immediately behind them were Quarterback, Lucky Me!, and Boom Town. Plum Seed flew between them as a loose egg, a spare. Element leaders maintained formation by keeping watch on squadron leaders, squadron leaders on group leaders, group leaders on combat wing leaders. There was, Bryant assumed, an extensive chain of succession worked out, in the event of what the CO called unexpected visits with the Glass Mountain.
Gabriel was correcting their course with the most discreet calibrations,
the adjustments rippling through the following planes. He was flying well, and Bryant appreciated it. If the lead planes flew erratically, they forced a constant seesawing of position, with the ships sliding and sideslipping to hold their distances, which exhausted pilots and gave everyone else shortened breath, as well as shaking out the formation into a pattern too loose for adequate defense.
They did their share of weaving, but Bryant imagined the strain on Cooper and Gabriel, hauling their heavy plane around for hours with their hands and feet, and marveled at their endurance and ability. No Way and Archangel stuck right to them. Everyone was good. They were going to get through this.
They began the serious looking, for their escorts, for interceptors. Bryant divided the sky into eighths and searched each with something he hoped was methodical precision from horizon to azimuth. A scratch on the Plexiglas between the guns kept him occupied for minutes. His eyes hurt and rebelled at focusing and refocusing on nothing and his concentration waned and returned.
They turned a few degrees and he permitted himself a look down, at blue waves, the threads of whitecaps, a tiny boat. Eddy called out the Dutch coast landfall ahead and through the haze of the distance the edged pale green emerged, resolving itself as they drummed nearer into three large islands near wide river estuaries gleaming in the sun. He saw drifting motes which had to be shipping. One of the islands reminded him of Florida.
“Fighters, fighters, fighters,” someone shouted. It was Piacenti.
“Escort,” Lewis said. “Escort, sir. Three o’clock low.”
“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Piacenti, you know?”
“Sorry, sir,” Piacenti said.
A group of them swept by in two diamond formations, green and brown Spitfires with their red, white, and blue rondelles flashing underwing. The crew cheered. They waggled their wings as they passed and climbed up and away from them, seeking altitude and a station well ahead of the bomber stream. The American P-47’s remained closer when escorting. The Brits believed it more useful to break up attacking German formations at a greater distance. The crews liked to see fighters nearby, and preferred the American strategy.