Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  John spotted three ground-crew members standing by his plane when the truck stopped at the circular hardstand. While the other men piled out to perform their own individual pre-flight chores, he went through a sequence of instrument and control checks with the crew chief. That done, he walked around the plane with the mechanic he’d talked to the day before. First, they examined the steel patches that had been soldered over the holes sustained during their last mission to Bucharest. Then they checked to be sure the main fuel tanks and the auxiliary tanks were full, and that ten 500-pound bombs hung in the bay.

  “Looks good,” John told him.

  “Give Hans hell for me, sir.”

  The flight crew climbed into the plane, where they spent the final few minutes before engine starting time getting into their takeoff positions.

  “Anybody need their sinuses unplugged?” Bill opened the first-aid kid and held up a bottle of nose drops. Hearing no takers, he treated himself to a snort before putting the bottle back.

  “Everybody wearing their dog tags?” Bob asked as he slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to John’s.

  “The rosary my mother gave me, too.” Tommy Murphy reached down the front of his flight suit and pulled it out. He wore it around his neck on every mission, believing it brought him luck.

  Ever the clown, Ed Harrigan grabbed the blue beads from behind and pretended to twist them around Tommy’s neck, saying in a bad German accent, “Start praying, Ami.”

  Tommy crossed his eyes and made a gagging sound. Everyone laughed, releasing some of the pre-flight tension. Then the assembly officer gave the signal to start the engines.

  John checked his watch as Bob reached for the starter engines. The base exploded with sound as thirty-six olive drab B-24 Liberators roared into life and the noise echoed off the mountain ridge. From the tower, a white signal light arced upward, with two stars falling from it.

  It was time to go.

  The ground crew gave them thumbs-up, the brakes were released, and the “Kansas City Kitty” moved off its hardstand to join the other planes in a single-file counterclockwise path around the perimeter taxi strip.

  Fifteen minutes after the squadron’s engines started, the lead plane lifted off the single metal strip. John waited thirty seconds so he wouldn’t get caught in its prop wash before following. The knot of tension in his stomach tightened as the plane surged forward and the crew checked off.

  “Gear up.”

  “Wing flaps up.”

  “Climb configuration.”

  John tasted rubber, cold and bitter, through his oxygen mask as they lifted off. He’d seen so many aborted takeoffs, with at least two resulting in aircraft and bombs exploding at the end of the runway, that he couldn’t relax until they’d passed the first danger point in the mission. When they were finally airborne, he sighed with relief.

  “Bombs activated,” Pat notified the pilots after they’d begun their hour-long assembly into box formation.

  John’s stomach tightened on hearing the statement. He couldn’t count the number of hours he’d spent in the States practicing precision bombing until he could hit a “pickle barrel” from twenty-five thousand feet. But where he’d grown up believing that war involved only military men and military targets, he sometimes found himself bombing industrial towns that were largely populated with working people much like the members of his own family. So whenever the bombs dropped away and his aircraft leaped forward, free of its burden, he had ambivalent feelings. While he was glad to have a more maneuverable plane to fly, he felt guilty at the thought that he’d probably just killed a lot of innocent women and children.

  On the lighter side, the sky was clear in all directions. People on the ground looked up. Some had their hands shading their eyes against the rising sun as they watched the growing air armada assemble. Others waved to them for luck.

  John wished he could wave back. A war-weary Italy had surrendered last September, allowing the Allies to set up their air bases in the south, but the Germans were still fighting in the north. Bridges had been blown, villages destroyed and railroad ties demolished in an attempt to slow the Allied advance. It was that devastation, coupled with the abject poverty of the Italian people, which helped to remind him that he was on the right side of this cursed conflict.

  “Oxygen check,” Bob called fifteen minutes into the flight.

  “Pilot OK,” John replied as he relinquished the controls.

  Disembodied voices crackled over the intercom—tail gunner OK, nose OK, right waist OK, left waist OK, radio OK, top turret OK, bombardier OK, navigator OK.

  The squadron flew in tight formation over the Adriatic Sea and into Yugoslavian airspace. It was the best protection they had because it maximized their firepower against the emplaced German gunners on the ground. But with the good came the bad. When a plane in close formation was hit by flak, there was a chance of it taking another one down with it. To minimize the risk, they usually relaxed the formation over target and then reformed for the trip home.

  “How are we doing?” Bob asked.

  John checked his watch against the clock on the instrument panel. “Exactly on time.”

  The outside air temperature showed minus forty-eight degrees Centigrade, warmer than the minus sixty degrees that they’d recorded last week over Knin. The only clouds in the sky were the white contrails streaming from every wing tip.

  “Oxygen check,” John called when it was his turn to resume control of the plane.

  “Co-pilot OK,” Bob confirmed.

  A few miles ahead, John spotted several cushiony puffs of flak below the formation. He didn’t worry about the flak he could see, though. It was the flak he couldn’t see that was the killer.

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra,” Pat warbled.

  “Bing Crosby, you’re not,” Norm cracked.

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-li . . . ”

  “Hush, I’m going to cry.”

  Because time passed so slowly over enemy territory, some of the guys sang or told jokes or talked about the wives and sweethearts they’d left back home.

  John just tried to think about the mission. When that didn’t work, he talked to the Man Upstairs. He prayed that he would do the right thing in an emergency. That he wouldn’t let his crew down. And, if worse came to worse, that he would meet death like a man.

  So far, with the exception of a few bad flak attacks, his prayers had been answered.

  “Got any names picked out for the baby?” Bob asked him now.

  “John, Jr., if it’s a boy.”

  “And if it’s a girl?”

  “We can’t decide between Mary and Margaret.”

  “How about Mary Margaret?”

  “Mary Margaret.” John mulled that over for a moment, then smiled. “I like it.”

  As they crossed the Romanian border, thick puffs of black smoke filled the sky, blotting out the sun. From dead reckoning, John placed the antiaircraft guns about a hundred miles from target. The shells exploded well to the right of the formation. But like ants at a picnic, he knew, there were plenty more where those had come from.

  “Oxygen check,” Bob clipped out.

  “Pilot OK,” John said tersely.

  They were nearing Bucharest now and everyone was on full alert. Going in on a bombing run, they were bound to attract heavier flak than when they were coming out. After all, an empty bomber couldn’t hurt anyone. The cloudless sky was no comfort, either, because it gave the German gunners a clear shot at them.

  John had just taken over the controls again when he heard it . . . a faint sound, like gravel being thrown on a tin roof.

  “Did you hear that?” Narrow-eyed, he scanned the instrument panel but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Bob frowned. “Hear what?”

  There was no mistaking the second hit. It tore through the ship with a thunderous roar, shattering the windows and buckling the floor. A hunk of hot metal caught Pat in the throat, killing him instantly.

  “Oh, my God!�
� Bill screamed as he stared at the mittened hand with which he’d just wiped his face. “I’m bleeding!”

  “Everybody into their flak suits,” Bob ordered as the sky suddenly erupted into a sickening mass of smoke and flame and spheres of exploding steel.

  B-24s began going down all around them. The lead plane went into a steep dive with both wings trailing bright orange flames. Another one barrel-rolled onto its back and plummeted toward the ground. Yet a third plane took a direct hit in the bomb bay and disappeared in a cloud of oily black smoke.

  “Two o’clock low, sir,” Norm directed.

  John had already moved up to the lead position when he looked to his right and saw those ugly black spots climbing ever closer to their altitude. They missed completely. But seconds later the plane lurched again, as if swatted by some giant hand in the sky, and red-hot shrapnel ripped through the ship.

  “Mary, Mother of God.” Norm sounded surprised as he slumped forward in the rear of the nose—blown back there by the flak blast.

  “I smell smoke!” the tail gunner cried.

  “Right waist gunner to pilot, we’re on fire.”

  Smoke from the battery of antiaircraft guns protecting the marshalling yard boiled up before John’s eyes. He tried to blot it and everything else out of his mind and concentrate on flying. The controls had gone soft on him but the railroad tracks he was following told him he was right on target.

  “Hit the bailout bell,” he snapped as he started losing altitude.

  Bob did as he was ordered.

  “Get out, you guys.” John feathered the prop to cut down on drag and air resistance, then pulled up so that his remaining crewmen could jump. “I’m going in.”

  Fumbling with his parachute straps, Bob looked at him like he had oatmeal for brains. “You’re coming, too.”

  “I can’t.” An icy calm descended on him as he glanced down and noted that his right leg had been severed and was hanging by just a few shreds of skin. His life’s blood gushed from the torn tissue but, oddly, there was no pain—only a merciful numbness. “I’m hit. Bad.”

  “I’ll help you hook up your pack,” his co-pilot insisted.

  “Get the hell out of here,” John shot back.

  “You gutsy sonuvabitch, you.” Bob’s voice shook with emotion as he squeezed John’s shoulder hard in farewell. Then he dropped to his knees and began crawling behind the other crewmen through the choking smoke toward the escape door.

  John thought of his beautiful wife, Kitty. And of the baby he would never see. It was enough to make a grown man cry. But just before his bomber hit the railyards and exploded in a ball of fire, he smiled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ste. Genviève, France

  “Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone,” the announcer intoned.

  Kneeling beside her radio set in the attic, Anne-Marie Gérard was stunned by the impact of the words she’d just heard. “Wound my heart with a monotonous languor” was the second line of one of her favorite poems—“Song of Autumn” by Paul Verlaine. The first line had been broadcast two nights ago, putting French partisan groups on alert. Now this was the last half of the message telling them that the Allied invasion of Europe would begin within the next forty-eight hours.

  Which meant she had work to do.

  Before she got started, though, she had two other coded messages to listen for. Sitting back on her heels and clenching her hands together in her lap, she strained to hear the BBC broadcaster’s voice over the static created by the early June storm that was sweeping through the village. The messages she was waiting for would confirm that the underground’s prearranged sabotage plans against the Germans were to go into effect tonight.

  “It is hot in Suez . . . It is hot in Suez.” The announcer’s solemn voice triggered off the “Green Plan”—the sabotaging of railroad tracks and equipment.

  Time seemed to drag out interminably in the crackling silence following that first message. Anne-Marie bit her lip to keep herself from screaming at the broadcaster to hurry up. Then she heard it, the second message.

  “The dice are on the table . . . The dice are on the table,” he said, calling for the “Red Plan”—the cutting of telephone lines and cables—to begin.

  Overcome by emotion, Anne-Marie bowed her head and allowed herself a moment to collect her thoughts. It wasn’t quite seven o’clock in the evening, and the attacks couldn’t begin before dark. But the freedom for which so many of her countrymen had been fighting and dying these last four years was finally close at hand.

  Fear prickled across the nape of her neck as she prayed for courage for everyone involved. It was going to be a long and dangerous night for French resisters. An even longer and more dangerous day lay ahead for the Allied soldiers who would soon be confronting the Germans.

  The announcer droned on, delivering messages to various other resistance units. Having already heard the ones that concerned her, Anne-Marie concentrated on her next move. She needed to contact Guy Compain, who’d been receiving airdrops of explosives and stockpiling them in a cave near the village, and tell him that the signal had been given. In turn, he would inform the demolition experts within their group that it was time to blow the main trunk line leading out of the village and into lower Normandy. Yet other subagents would go to work smashing the steam injectors on the railway cars sitting unguarded behind the depot.

  Then the Maquis, perhaps the noblest saboteurs of all, would step in to engage as many German patrols as possible before the Allies began disembarking on the beaches.

  Anne-Marie smiled—a small, bittersweet smile. While she still didn’t know exactly where or when the invasion would take place, she was elated to hear that it was imminent. At the same time, she was heartsick that it was coming too late to save Henriette’s brother, Maurice.

  Last month, a German company had attacked the forest camp where he and his comrades were training new recruits to the Maquis. By all accounts, the fighting had been bitter and brutal. Maurice had escaped with minor wounds, only to be discovered the next day hiding out in a farmer’s barn.

  Now, remembering how his lifeless body—tortured and beaten almost beyond recognition—had been dumped on her aunt and uncle’s doorstep, she was more determined than ever to see the Germans defeated.

  Thunder boomed, loud as a cannon shot, as she switched off the radio and got to her feet.

  Downstairs, her grandfather was dozing in his chair. His neck was bent at an odd angle and the medical journal he’d sat down to read after dinner had fallen to the floor. Something inside of him seemed to have died with Maurice. He could barely drag himself out of bed in the morning and he just picked at his food. When he wasn’t working, he slept.

  Anne-Marie hated to disturb him, but she didn’t want him to wake up later and be alarmed by the fact that she was gone. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to turn his head tomorrow if he didn’t change positions pretty soon. She finished buttoning her raincoat, then leaned down and gently kissed his brow. He opened his eyes and looked up, staring at her in confusion.

  “I have to go out,” she told him.

  “Is it still raining?”

  Her face softened. “Yes.”

  “You should wear a scarf.”

  “I will.”

  Once he might have grilled her. Demanded to know where she was going and why, and when she would return. Now he simply nodded and began drifting back to sleep.

  The rain was coming down straight as a measuring stick when she went out the back door of the house and into the garage. She would have to ride her bicycle because there was no gasoline in her grandfather’s car, and she only hoped that the new patch on her front tire would hold. If it didn’t, she could always hide it in a ditch and complete her errand on foot. That would add almost an hour to her journey, though, and time was of the essence.

  Anne-Marie was fairly certain that no patrol cars would be out on such a foul night. Still, she kept a weather eye out for them as she pedaled along th
e street. Rain soaked her scarf and cold droplets ran down the back of her neck, but she took comfort from the thought that, even if the Germans caught and killed the messenger, they couldn’t kill her message.

  The Allies were coming!

  * * * *

  Omaha Beach, France; June 6, 1944

  One minute Mike Scanlon was stationed behind the Landing Craft, Tanks’ lowering ramp with his rifle in his hand, ready to hit the beach; the next, he was hurtling through the air sans rifle.

  They’d hit an underwater mine; it had blown the ramp off and sent him flying.

  He felt weightless—like an eagle soaring. Which seemed impossible given the gas-impregnated coveralls, heavy boots and steel helmet with the white officer’s stripe up the back that he was wearing. Only when he came splashing down in front of the crippled craft did it occur to him that he could easily become hamburger if the current pulled him under and the propellers caught him up.

  To his relief, his lifebelt inflated, keeping him afloat. But his heart sank like a stone when he opened his eyes and saw the carnage before him.

  The body of the first lieutenant who’d been standing to his right was now bobbing facedown in the water. The scarlet stains on his back told Mike that machine-gun fire from the German pillboxes on the bluffs had gotten him. Another body, that of the staff sergeant who’d been standing behind him, drifted face-up—dead from a bullet to the throat.

  A spray of water exploded in front of him, and he realized with a start that he was the target now.

  “Need a hand?” a loud voice called above the spanging of shells on steel.

  Mike glanced up and saw a Navy crewman, hunchbacked in a bulky life vest, looking down at him over the side of the beached craft he’d just been blown off of. Without waiting for an answer, the sailor threw him a line. Geysers of water from machine-gun fire erupted around him as Mike grabbed hold of it and let himself be pulled aboard.