Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  People with mathematical ability soon estimated that only 34 percent of them would make it through the required tour of twenty-five missions. Colonel Atwood addressed this chilling computation with his usual candor. “I’ll give you a little clue on how to fight this war. Make believe you’re dead already. The rest will come easy.”

  On the B—17s plowed in two huge box formations. Below them, Europe was invisible as usual beneath its semi-permanent clouds. The weathermen said the skies would be clear but they had been wrong so often, no one even bothered to curse them anymore.

  Dick Stone found himself thinking about Sarah Chapman again. Amazing how poetry could connect people. He still felt linked to his grandfather by certain poems by Goethe and other German writers that the old man had read to him. He identified with that poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins because he too felt trapped in a spiritual cage. In an odd way he also identified with the word Catholic, spelled with a small c. He could hear his grandfather saying: catholic, that’s what we all must become. That’s what America is about, catholicity, diversity yet brotherhood.

  “Any fucking cultural monuments you don’t want to hit on this run, Stone?” Cliff asked.

  On a recent raid the primary target, Dusseldorf, had been invisible under heavy clouds and they had scattered to bomb secondary targets. Breaking through the overcast to get some idea where they were, the Rainbow Express saw a city full of church spires and eighteenth—century houses, with some factories on the outskirts. Dick Stone flipped his maps, did some rapid calculations of their airspeed and course and concluded it was Weimar, where Goethe spent most of his life. He urged Cliff not to bomb it. The place was a living museum. Cliff had bombed it anyway and was still needling him about it.

  “Nothing to worry about but women and children,” Dick said.

  They droned on in subzero boredom for another two hours. Finally, navigator Stone informed Captain Morris they were less than fifteen minutes from Schweinfurt. Below them was a growing number of fleecy cumulus clouds. In ten minutes they began to darken into a gray cumulonimbus blanket. The weathermen were wrong again.

  “Bandits at two o’clock!” screamed the top turret gunner, Smithfield. He was coming apart. He started firing his guns when the Germans were at least a mile away, hysterically holding the triggers down, instead of squeezing off three— second bursts. The planes were thick-bodied Focke—Wulfs. They did a barrel roll and came down ready to work on the outer edge of the American formation where the Rainbow Express was flying. It was known as the Purple Heart corner.

  Smithfield was not the only member of the crew Dick Stone worried about. Cliff Morris was also showing signs of strain. He was getting drunk much too often at the Rackreath officers’ club. Already a licensed pilot when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Cliff had a personal motive for seeing action. His stepfather had told him a good war record guaranteed him a job at Buchanan Aircraft. Cliff had converted this promise into guaranteed jobs for all of them. But Cliff had never imagined that winning this pot of gold involved sitting behind a half inch of glass watching Focke—Wulfs closing on him at a combined airspeed of five hundred miles an hour, their wings aflame with machine guns and cannon.

  Cliff shoved the Rainbow Express’s nose down, putting her into a shallow dive to give top turret gunner Smithfield a better shot at the oncoming Focke-Wulfs. The Germans’ wings flickered fire. A slamming tearing sound, then a scream of anguish over the intercom. “Smitty’s hit!” shouted the radioman.

  “Get up there and man his gun,” Cliff said.

  The Focke—Wulfs rolled into a dive that brought them beneath the formation for another blast of cannon fire. A new cry of anguish. Dick Stone turned to find bombardier Beck slumped over his bombsight, blood gushing from his mouth. Dick dragged him aside and told Cliff he was going to bomb.

  Cliff held the Rainbow Express on course while Dick flicked on the rack switches and the intervalvometer switch that controlled the spacing between bomb drops. He peered through the sight at the target area. The clouds were now shrouding Schweinfurt. But the bombers were all too visible on German radar. Up through the clouds hurtled a firestorm of .88 millimeter shells. The blue sky looked as if a madman was flicking gobs of intensely black indigo paint on it.

  “Marvelous Mabel’s hit,” shouted Mike Shannon from the tail. She had been flying directly behind them. A shell had blown off Mabel’s wing. As she spun down the leggy blonde on the fuselage below the name seemed to smile up at them. “Not one goddamn parachute,” Mike said.

  Baby killers and women killers, Dick Stone thought, waiting for a break in the clouds to give him at least a glimpse of their target, ballbearing factories on the outskirts of Schweinfurt.

  “Open bomb bay doors,” Cliff said. A blast of freezing air swept through the plane. Dick could feel the motors straining against the extra drag.

  A tremendous crash. Stone saw flames gushing from the number-two engine. “We’re in trouble,” Cliff shouted as the Rainbow Express lost airspeed. “Get rid of those goddamn bombs. Now.”

  “I can’t see a thing,” Dick said.

  “I said bomb!” Cliff said, pulling the CO2 switch to douse the fire in the burning engine.

  Dick Stone’s grandfather—or was it Colonel Atwood—began reciting a poem in Stone’s head. It was by the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, asking his mistress to listen to his breaking heart. He said the hammering sound was a carpenter fashioning a coffin for him. Now the coffin maker was in the sky and Stone’s heart was hammering not from love but a berserk mixture of fear and revulsion. What if he refused to press the bomb release?

  “Stone, I said bomb!” Cliff Morris roared.

  Dick pressed the button and the four five-hundred-pound bombs fell from their racks. He pressed a second button that fired a white flare, a signal for the rest of the group to bomb at the same time. God only knew what they were hitting in Schweinfurt.

  The B—17 soared up at least a hundred feet without the bomb load. “Let’s go home,” Cliff said, banking the Rainbow Express like a pursuit plane to make the tightest possible turn.

  “Bandits at two—three—four—five—six o’clock,” screamed the radioman. There were at least two hundred of them and they all seemed to be heading toward the Purple Heart corner. A wave of bullets and shells hurtled into the 103rd Bombardment Group. Tail gunner Mike Shannon shouted reports of B—17s burning and exploding all around them. The Rainbow Express shuddered and groaned as she took her share of the bullets and shells.

  Shouts from the waist. The radioman was dead, the second top turret gunner to go down. “Shannon, take over those guns,” Cliff said. “You’re having a goddamn vacation back there.”

  “Fire in the radio room,” shouted one of the waist gunners.

  “Number three engine’s on fire,” cried the copilot who was on his first mission. The regular copilot had been decapitated by a twenty-millimeter shell on their previous outing.

  Smoke swirled through the plane. Dick Stone and the waist gunners used handheld extinguishers to snuff out the radio room flames, standing back as far as they could, praying they did not inhale any of the fumes, which were a deadly poison gas, phosgene.

  Cliff used the automatic CO2 in the wing to douse the number-three engine. That left them with only two engines. Their airspeed dropped below two hundred miles an hour. The surviving members of the formation soon passed them. They were alone in the sky with at least a dozen Focke—Wulfs barreling around them.

  There were more slamming, tearing, clanking sounds as shells and bullets struck the plane. On the intercom Stone could hear Mike Shannon whooping: “I got one. I got one of the bastards.”

  A scream of pain erupted from one of the waist gunners. Stone realized it was only a matter of minutes before they went down. The rest of the bombardment group was on the way back to England, leaving the crippled Rainbow Express behind. The other planes were only obeying orders. There was no way to help a cripple. It was survival of the fittest up h
ere in the enemy skies. Stone felt the detachment he had struggled to achieve under Colonel Atwood’s tutelage slipping from his mind’s grasp. Bombardier Beck’s blood oozed from his dead body in a half dozen dark rivulets.

  Death. He was going to die like Beck. He was going to turn into inert flotsam in history’s stream. Garbage. Dust. Nothingness. Before he understood what life, history, America, Jewishness really meant. A terrible cry of rage, of pain, almost burst from his lips.

  Did Cliff Morris, in the cockpit of the Rainbow Express, know this? Or was it only Cliff’s hand that knew what Stone was thinking and feeling, what everyone was thinking and feeling in the belly of the Rainbow Express? Was the hand protesting that mutual terror, that common dread as it reached for the switch that released the landing gear? Then and for years to come Dick preferred to think of it as an involuntary thing, as impersonal as one of the motor’s throbbing pistons. Somehow that made it easier to accept.

  Thunk. The wheels came down and the Rainbow Express almost fell out of the sky as her airspeed faltered with the sudden increase in drag. Did Cliff know what his hand was doing? Dick wondered. Lowering your wheels in enemy skies meant you were surrendering. You were agreeing to fly your plane to the nearest German airfield.

  No one in the 103rd Bombardment Group had done this. But planes in other groups had done it. The Germans had captured enough B—17s to fly some into formations and cause chaos by opening fire just as the Americans were starting to bomb.

  “What the hell’s happening?” the copilot said.

  “Shut up,” Cliff Morris said.

  “Like hell I’ll shut up,” the copilot said. “We’ve still got two engines and plenty of ammunition. Why the hell are we surrendering?”

  “Yeah, Cliff. Why?” Mike Shannon said over the intercom.

  Dick Stone did not say a word. He was paralyzed there in the navigator’s compartment face to face with death and the realization that Colonel Atwood’s solution was balderdash.

  The Focke—Wulfs had stopped shooting at them. One of them pulled alongside the Rainbow Express’s right wing tip. A second one appeared off to the left. The first pilot hand-signaled Cliff to head northeast. He banked in that direction and Cliff followed him. The other Focke—Wulf stayed on their left wing-tip.

  “Listen to me,” Cliff said. “I’m trying to save our goddamn asses. When I say go, I want you to blast these two bastards out of the sky. Shannon, you take the guy on the right. Byrd, the guy on the left.” Byrd was the ball turret gunner, curled in his glass sphere underneath the belly of the plane.

  The other Focke—Wulfs were specks in the distance, pursuing the rest of the B—17s. Did fighting Germans justify this dirty double-cross? Dick Stone wondered. Were these two pilots who had accepted their surrender Jew-baiters and Nazis, out to rule the world? Or had they been in their second year of college like Dick Stone, more interested in literature than politics when the war exploded in their faces?

  Still, Dick did not protest. No one protested. No one wanted to sit out the war in a German prison camp. Dick did not want to put his fate in the hands of something as murky as the Geneva Convention, which supposedly protected everyone, even a Jew, as a prisoner of the Nazis. Dick waited in silence, barely breathing.

  “Now!” Cliff shouted.

  The Browning machine guns clattered above and below the navigator’s compartment. Dick saw the Focke—Wulf pilot on the right clutch his throat. The plane dropped into a spin, gushing smoke. Dick whirled in time to see the plane on the left spin in the opposite direction, afire. The pilot bailed out and hung there in his harness as Cliff retracted the Rainbow Express’s landing gear and dove for the cloud cover. The German shook his fist in rage as they roared past him.

  The clouds remained thick all the way to the North Sea, a remarkable piece of luck. But when they emerged over the water, they found a half-dozen Messerschmitt 109s waiting for them. Cliff ordered the engineer to man the tail guns and they fought off a furious ten-minute attack, living up to their flying fortress nickname for once. Mike Shannon shot down another plane and Dick Stone, manning the nose gun in his compartment, amazed everyone, including himself, by getting a second as he pulled up after a head-on attack.

  Cliff dove to less than 100 feet and let the Germans decide whether another attack was worth the possible cost. They tried one more pass and Mike Shannon got his third plane of the day. The 109s cut for home, probably reporting the Rainbow Express would never make it to England.

  The plane was practically scrap metal. Mike Shannon counted over 200 holes in the fuselage. The horizontal stabilizer was hanging in shreds, giving them no elevator control. The ailerons were equally shredded. When Cliff tried to climb to a safer altitude, they almost stalled out. “Get rid of everything you can tear loose,” he ordered.

  They jettisoned the ammunition, the machine guns, their bulky flying gear, their boots, the fire extinguishers. Finally, at Dick Stone’s suggestion, they dumped the dead bodies of Bombardier Beck, the radio man, and the top turret gunner out the bomb-bay doors. Coaxing maximum rpm’s out of their two engines, one of which was making ominous noises, Cliff reached the Norfolk coast at treetop level.

  There, almost under their wings, was RAF Bedlington. “Let’s hope Sarah’s saying her prayers,” Cliff said. There was another, more realistic reason for landing at Bedlington. If that gasping engine quit now, it would not be a water landing, it would be on top of apple orchards, thatched roof cottages, it would be fire and explosions frying and rending their flesh.

  “Hello Bedlington, this is Rainbow, do you read me? We’ve got a Mayday here. Request permission to land. Over,” Cliff said.

  “Hello Rainbow, this is Bedlington,” said a liquid feminine voice. “Receiving you poorly. Strength two, over.”

  “Need wind direction. Airspeed down to one hundred and ten,” Cliff shouted into the microphone. “Designate runway immediately!”

  “Wind from the west at ten. All runways open. Fire trucks spraying foam. Good luck!”

  “We’re going to make it, guys. We’re going to make it!” Cliff shouted over the intercom.

  In ten minutes they were over the field. The fire trucks had just finished spreading foam on the runway that ran southwest. The wings wobbled. Cliff fought them back to horizontal as they turned into the approach. Dick Stone saw a slim WAAF standing outside the Watch Office, her hands clasped together before her lips.

  It was Sarah Chapman, praying them in. For a fleeting moment he felt a strange, wild gratitude—and a regret for his unbelief, which prevented him from sharing her plea to the faceless baffling God who held them in the palm of his omnipotent hand.

  The runway rushed up at them. “Full flaps!” Cliff yelled and they pancaked in, skidding down the foam-covered runway to a shuddering, smoking stop. Fire trucks clanged toward them. The smell of scorched metal filled the plane. “Didn’t I tell you guys this was one hell of a plane?” Cliff said.

  As Cliff and Dick helped the vomiting copilot off the plane, Sarah ran toward them. “Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. Tears were streaming down her face. She flung her arms around Cliff and kissed him wildly. Standing to one side, watching the romantic spectacle, Dick Stone felt an odd, painful regret. Did he simply want those no-longer-innocent lips on his mouth? Or was he deploring the probability that she and Cliff would be inseparable now?

  The surviving members of the crew were pounding Cliff on the back. Only the copilot, still green, and Dick Stone declined to join the celebration. Cliff’s eyes explored the circle of faces with an almost preternatural wariness. For the first time Dick sensed something or someone trapped inside Cliff that he was trying to conceal.

  For the moment they had a more immediate problem to conceal. What they had done over Schweinfurt was a violation of the rules of war, not to mention morality. In the circle of faces Dick Stone saw mutual guilt, heightened, somehow, by the adulation in Sarah Chapman’s innocent blue eyes.

  AMERICAN KAMIKAZES

  Bless
’em all! Bless ’em all!

  Bless the needle, the airspeed, the ball;

  Bless all those instructors who taught me to fly—

  Sent me up solo and left me to die.

  If ever your plane starts to stall,

  You’re in for one hell of a fall.

  No lilies or violets for dead strafer pilots,

  So cheer up, my lads, bless ’em all!

  The young American voices were bellowing these words off—key when Frank Buchanan emerged from Major General George C. Kenney’s tent into the humid twilight of the New Guinea jungle a few miles from Port Moresby. “Thanks for dragging your ass out here to the end of the earth on such short notice, Frank. I wish I could give you something more concrete, like money. Or at least a medal,” Kenney said.

  “There’s one thing you could do, George,” Frank Buchanan said. They were old friends from World War I days. “Let me fly with the kids tomorrow. I always like to see how my planes perform under stress.”

  “You know as well as I do those bombers can’t handle passengers. They’ve got enough weight problems.”

  “My nephew’s copilot is down with malaria. They’re going to give him some green kid who flew in yesterday.”

  “My ass will be in a sling with Richard K. Sutherland stamped on it if you get shot down.”

  Sutherland was General Douglas MacArthur’s overbearing chief of staff. When he tried to browbeat Kenney the way he had intimidated other generals, Kenney had taken a blank piece of paper and drawn a tiny black dot in the corner. “The blank area represents what I know about airplanes. The dot represents what you know,” Kenney said. Sutherland had not bothered him since that exchange.

  Tomorrow the whole world would find out if Kenney knew as much as he claimed. He had taken over the Fifth Air Force with its reputation at zero and its morale at zero minus. Bombing from twenty thousand feet, their planes had hit almost nothing. Occasionally they attacked American ships by mistake. Kenney had fired five generals and a dozen colonels and totally revamped their strategy.