Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Buzz’s first burst, short and deadly as always, set the other German on fire. He spun away, gushing smoke and flames. But Frank’s German methodically blasted a stream of lead into the American’s cockpit. Frank saw the pilot, a boyish Iowan named Waller on his first mission, shudder in agony. He shoved his Spad into a dive. The German, smelling blood, followed him. A thousand feet down Waller pulled out and tried to roll to the right. The German anticipated the move and caught him with another burst, riddling the cockpit. Waller spun in, exploded and burned.

  A second later the Fokker pulled up into a twisting loop called an immelman, after the German pilot who invented it. He came down on Frank’s tail. It was a maneuver the lightweight triplane was designed to perform. But Buzz McCall was waiting for him down below. He rolled over and fired a burst into the Fokker’s belly while flying upside down. The German, probably wounded, banked away and fled for home.

  Frank flew in a daze, not quite sure he was alive. Six American planes were still in the sky. They had lost two of their green pilots. At least half the replacements failed to survive their first mission. Hardly surprising, when the average life of all the pilots on the western front was six weeks. Below them were four, five, burning wrecks. His stomach churning, Frank dove with the survivors to waggle his wings above the fallen. In his head he heard his mother’s voice hissing: death machine.

  On the ground, Buzz threw his arm around him. “Good shootin’ up there, Wingman,” he said. “Too bad your lousy limey guns jammed and we couldn’t save Waller.”

  “We’re sending those kids up without enough training. It’s murder, Buzz!”

  “What’s this, what happened?”

  It was their squadron commander, a lean West Pointer named Kinkaid. With him was a handsome soldier in gleaming black riding boots and a broad-brimmed campaign hat tipped at a cocky angle. He had a brigadier general’s star on his collar. Behind him trailed a photographer and several reporters.

  “We ran into the flying circus and whipped their asses, Colonel,” Buzz said. “I got two of them, Frank here got one. We lost two of the new guys—Waller and Kane.”

  “Two more kills,” said the brigadier. “That means you’re only three behind Rickenbacker. I’m Billy Mitchell. I came down to pin a medal on you, Captain.”

  Buzz remembered he was in the army and saluted the most popular general in the American Air Service. “Pleased to meet you, sir. This is Lieutenant Frank Buchanan. He got his fifth today. A real beauty.”

  Buzz described the way they had attacked the Germans as they came out of their dive. “That’s the kind of aggressive tactics I want up there. That’s the American style,” Mitchell said.

  They adjourned to the officers’ mess, where champagne bottles popped and glasses were raised in a silent toast to the dead, then flung into the fireplace. Outside, the ground crews and pilots lined up in a semblance of military formation and Mitchell pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Buzz McCall.

  He added to the commendation a speech full of fiery prophecy. Fliers like Buzz McCall were demonstrating what Americans could do in the air against German veterans. “If this war lasts another six months, we’ll wipe the Germans out of the sky. Then we’ll show General Pershing and that circle of dunderheads he’s got around him what air power can do for their infantry.”

  Flashbulbs popped, the reporters took notes. General Mitchell was already semi-famous for his running battle with Pershing’s staff, who scoffed at the importance of air power. Mitchell told them he was assembling a force of de Havilland bombers that would demolish enemy airfields and supply dumps and arms factories if the Germans rejected the Allies’ armistice terms and kept fighting.

  Two hours later, led by General Mitchell driving a black sedan at ninety miles an hour, the squadron headed for the nearby city of Toul to celebrate Buzz’s medal. They started with dinner at the Three Hussars, the best restaurant in town. Fueled by more champagne, Mitchell talked about air power in future wars with visionary fervor. The plane would soon make the infantry and the warship superfluous.

  “The bombers of tomorrow will make this war’s attacks on London and Paris look like acts of tender mercy,” roared the general. “They’ll be no need to send millions of men to die in the trenches. The war will be over the moment one side achieves air superiority.”

  “Let’s drink to that!” Buzz shouted. “Air superiority!”

  Frank Buchanan lurched to his feet with the rest of his by now ossified squadron mates. “General,” he said. “I hope you’re not saying Americans—would bomb cities—kill women and children—the way the Germans—”

  “The British are doing it right now in the Rhineland,” Mitchell roared. “They dropped some bombs in a fucking schoolyard last week and killed about sixty kinder. Those things’ll happen till we get better bombsights. Then—plunk—we’ll be able to put a thousand-pounder down a goddamn factory chimney!”

  After dinner, the squadron and General Mitchell adjourned next door to Madame Undine’s, the best brothel in the city. It was stocked with enough champagne to drown an infantry division and enough mademoiselles from Armentieres and elsewhere to make Valhalla look like a Methodist camp meeting.

  At midnight Frank found himself in bed with two dimpled whores named Cheri and Marguerite. They were sisters. Marguerite was going around the world, licking him from the back of his neck to the soles of his feet, while Cheri was rolling her tongue around and around his aching joystick. He was Craig again, happy, proud, indifferent to death. He passed out as he came in Cheri’s mouth.

  The party raged around him and in the blank darkness Frank dreamt of a plane with a fuselage as round and smooth as a gun barrel, a plane that swallowed its wheels after takeoff and had only one wing, unsupported by struts. He leaped out of bed and stumbled over male and female bodies in various stages of undress to find a pen and paper and sketch it.

  His mother hissed death machine but he defied her. This was a creature of speed and beauty, as vibrant with life as the Elgin marbles he had seen in the British Museum. It would make American pilots supreme in the air. That meant peace, not war.

  “What the hell is that?”

  It was Buzz McCall, glowering over his shoulder at the sketch.

  “A plane we ought to build.”

  “You’d never get me to fly a fucking monoplane.”

  Louis Bleriot had flown the English Channel in a monoplane. But he soon gave the design a bad name because his wings frequently fell off. Frank began explaining that the problem was not the single wing but its shape and its position on Bleriot’s monoplanes.

  “Let’s go,” Buzz said. “We’ve got the dawn patrol.”

  In a flash, as if the champagne fumes in his head had exploded, Frank was back in the dogfight. The motors roared, the machine guns chattered, the planes blazed and spun down to doom.

  He could not go up again. He was not Craig, he was Frank, the younger brother with these beautiful creatures of the sky in his head. He had no confidence in either his luck or his skill as a pursuit pilot.

  “I can’t do it, Buzz. I don’t want to die until I see this plane—other planes—in the air—”

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Buzz stepped back as if he wanted to get a better look at his contemptible wingman. “Why should I die?” he mocked. “Do you think you’re better than the rest of us, because you can draw pretty paper airplanes?”

  Yes, Frank wanted to shout. He wanted to denounce everything, the war, the drunken parties at Madame Undine’s, the dying. The endless dying. Before he could speak, Buzz hit him with a right cross that sent him hurtling across the room to crash into the opposite wall.

  The next thing Frank knew he was on the floor and Buzz was shoving a foot his chest. “Are you comin’?”

  Frank lurched to his feet. He was a head taller than Buzz but there was no thought of hitting him back. Buzz was Craig, curing another outbreak of momma’s boyitis. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  �
�Nobody’s gonna shoot you down as long as I’m up there with you,” Buzz said. “We went into this fuckin’ war together and we’re comin’ out together.”

  Buzz rounded up the rest of the patrol and they wobbled into the semi-dark street. Toward them panted Madame Undine, the fat blond-ringleted mistress of their revels. Her eyes bulged, tears streaked the layer of powder on her dumpling face. “C’est fini!” she cried. “La guerre, c’est fini!”

  Frank threw his arms around Madame Undine and gave her a kiss. He was going to live. He was going to build the beautiful planes that flew in his head.

  “Son of a bitch!” Buzz said. Peace meant he would never pass Eddie Rickenbacker and become the top American ace.

  Behind him, General Mitchell looked even more disappointed. “What the hell am I going to do with all those beautiful bombers?” he said.

  LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE

  The Negro jazz band in the SS Berengaria’s main salon was playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” In his mind’s eye twenty-year-old Adrian Van Ness could see the dancers gyrating across the polished teak dance floor, the men in bright sports coats, the women in beaded dresses, their bobbed hair bouncing, their skirts revealing legs all the way to the knees and occasionally a silk-stockinged thigh.

  Adrian wanted to be out there with the dancers. Instead he was standing on the main deck, holding his wife Amanda’s hand while she fretted over the future health of a child they had yet to conceive. For a moment Adrian felt bewildered by the way life had catapulted him from carefree youth to husband and prospective father.

  “Darling, I assure you England isn’t an unhealthy country.”

  “Adrian, I can bear it for your sake. But what if the baby has weak lungs? All that dreadful fog and rain—”

  “If the slightest problem develops, I’ll quit my job in an instant and we’ll take the first ship to California.”

  “I dread the thought of asking you that. I love you, Adrian. I’m terrified I’ll make you unhappy.”

  The jazz band fell silent. It was past midnight. “Why don’t you say good night to your mother?” Amanda said.

  Adrian threaded his way through the tables to a corner of the salon, where Clarissa Van Ness was chatting with a sleek, gray-haired Italian nobleman. She wore a single strand of pearls around her swan-like neck, long white gloves, and a low-cut beaded black dress by Paul Poiret, the latest rage among Paris couturiers.

  “Where’s Amanda?” Clarissa said in her silkiest voice. “I was hoping you’d both join me for a nightcap.”

  “She’s not feeling very well.”

  “Poor dear. I hope she gets her sea legs soon.”

  Everyone was being marvelously polite. Adrian’s excuse avoided saying Amanda wanted to have as little to do with Clarissa Van Ness as possible, a sentiment that Adrian endorsed—and Clarissa ignored. She had blithely insisted on sailing with them to help Adrian launch his career as a merchant banker in London.

  Her presence made Adrian uneasy. He wondered if she thought he carried his father’s failure with him, like a virus. Did she plan to supervise his office conduct, his business decisions, to make sure he did not repeat Robert Van Ness’s blunder?

  Adrian had married Amanda in spite of Clarissa’s desperate attempts to dissuade him. In fact, he had used her disapproval to wangle this opportunity to make himself a man of substance as rapidly as possible. He let Clarissa lure him to England last summer to renew their ties with Geoffrey Tillotson and other friends.

  Tillotson’s son Peter had been shot down and killed on the last day of the war. He seemed especially touched by Adrian’s sympathy. Before long he was urging him to consider the possibility of coming to work for his family’s merchant banking firm, Tillotson Brothers, Ltd., after his graduation from Harvard.

  In the next year, Clarissa had mustered all her finesse to make this invitation as attractive as possible. She talked about the power and prestige of London’s merchant bankers. She bombarded Adrian with stories from their glory days, when Byron celebrated them as men whose “every loan … seats a Nation or upsets a throne.”

  After a deliciously sadistic show of reluctance, Adrian accepted Tillotson’s offer—and announced his plans to marry Amanda within a week of his graduation. A stunned Clarissa could only accept it with muted murmurs of regret. The wedding took place in Boston. Amanda’s mother’s mental condition had worsened, making Casa Felicidad, the family’s Orange County home, unsuitable.

  The newlyweds honeymooned for a week in Bar Harbor. It did not take Adrian long to realize Amanda had changed. Her father’s death, her mother’s nervous collapse, had damaged her ebullient trust in the future, which had been one of the most appealing aspects of her innocence. She felt guilty about leaving her mother to the not very tender care of her half-brother. She had no enthusiasm for further clashes with Clarissa.

  A northeast storm engulfed the Maine coast with freezing rain and wind for their entire honeymoon. Although a shivering Amanda offered herself wholeheartedly, even frantically, to Adrian, she kept apologizing for her failure to “let go,” to make him truly happy. She blamed the awful weather and herself for not overruling her penny-pinching brother and insisting on a California wedding. Adrian, for whom self-control was basic, saw no virtue in letting go and could not understand her distress.

  Amanda’s dislike of Maine in June soon extended to worries about England’s fog and rain. Adrian gradually realized she saw this sojourn in London as little more than an extended honeymoon before they moved to California. Adrian soothed her with vague promises and hoped she would like England in spite of her doubts.

  Geoffrey Tillotson met the Berengaria at Southampton and they drove to London in his yellow Hispano-Suiza Cabriolet. Listening to him talk, Adrian had the heady sense of being at the vital center of the civilized world. Having just won the most stupendous war in history, England was the most powerful nation on the globe. India, South Africa, Iraq, Palestine, Persia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece—their condition, their fate, rested on decisions made in Parliament and 10 Downing Street—and in the banks where the financial resources of the empire were mustered.

  There were some parts of the world that were not under English control. Adrian was surprised by a note of uneasiness in Tillotson’s voice as he discussed Russia, where the Bolsheviks were on their way to winning a civil war and taking charge of the country. He was almost as disturbed by the emergence of an Italian socialist, Benito Mussolini, as a power in Italy.

  “Communism—socialism—they’re both demagogic rot—,” Tillotson growled.

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Amanda said as the chauffeur eased the Hispano-Suiza to a stop in front of the Ritz Hotel. “In California we’ve seen the evil results of unrestrained capitalism. My father was one of the leaders in the fight against the railroad barons.”

  Clarissa’s eyes asked Adrian what he thought of his California bride. In their room, Adrian told Amanda to keep her opinions to herself from now on. They went to bed angry, not the best beginning for an extended honeymoon.

  The next day Adrian reported for work at Tillotson Brothers, Ltd. His American eyes were dismayed by the company’s offices. The redbrick Queen Anne building was two hundred years old and looked it. A barely legible rusty sign next to the entrance was the only evidence of ownership. Inside there was a rabbit warren of extra floors and rooms and cubicles where aging clerks clipped stock coupons or entered mysterious figures in thick red ledgers. Cage-like elevators creaked and clattered.

  In the oak-paneled partners’ room, cravatted Tillotsons of earlier generations stared with aplomb from the walls. A half-dozen partners sat at polished mahogany tables, conferring with clients in low tones or reading the London Times. The stationery had the firm’s address, 16 Old Jewry Lane, and the telephone number on it but not its name. Unobtrusive was the watchword of British merchant banking.

  Geoffrey Tillotson helped the newlyweds find a comfortable flat in Mayfair on a tiny s
treet called Islington Mews and proposed Adrian for the Garrick and the Athenaeum clubs. He arranged invitations to weekend parties at a half-dozen country houses. Usually Tillotson and Clarissa came to the same party and Geoffrey introduced Adrian to prospective clients. It was all so low-keyed, so casual, Adrian had no sense of being under examination.

  His fear that Clarissa would breathe down his neck soon vanished. But his hope that Amanda would like England evaporated almost as fast. Deprived of her native sunshine, she got one cold after another. She sat around their flat shivering in two sweaters, gulping cough medicine, inserting nose drops. This did not do much for their sex life. The ardor Amanda had promised him in his Harvard days vanished in tearful laments for California.

  At work, Adrian filed routine letters from the African loans department. Occasionally, familiar names from Anson days relieved the tedium. Many of his former schoolmates were in the army or the civil service in Nigeria, East Africa, and other outposts. A letter from Kenya was especially welcome—it was from his Italian friend Ponty, who was running a vast coffee plantation purchased by his family with some help from Tillotson Brothers. He was still in love with flying. He had a French-made Caudron R11 three-seater that he flew all over East Africa.

  Adrian lunched with Tillotson several times a month in the partners’ top-floor dining room and was told he was doing splendidly. Tillotson talked offhandedly about the firm’s recent investments in Chilean copper mines, South African railroads, Canadian lumbering, explaining why each one seemed a good idea. Invariably it came down to knowing that up the road certain events or changes in government policy would make the investment very profitable.