by Lee Trimble
It was all off the record, and the only recognition was indirect and muted. In May, in a letter to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of USSTAF, General Hill had requested promotion for Captain Trimble to the rank of major, exempting him from the normal requirement of twelve months in current rank. Hill came as close as he could to acknowledging Robert’s extraordinary service in Poland: ‘I consider that the exceptional nature of Captain Trimble’s duties during the past three months warrant waiver of the current requirement.’4 Robert’s performance, both as a flight commander with the 493rd Bomb Group and as CO of Eastern Command, had been rated Superior, but his service as assistant operations officer – the cover for his secret work in Poland which could never be openly spoken about – was rated Excellent.
In all his endeavors he had done better than anyone could have expected, not least himself. ‘This has been one of the most difficult periods since the organization of the command,’ wrote General Hill. ‘Captain Trimble has displayed outstanding diplomacy, energy and devotion to duty under the most trying conditions.’
Later that same month, General Deane joined his voice to General Hill’s, also calling for promotion and also referring obliquely to ‘the exceptional nature of Captain Trimble’s duties and performance’.5
Captain Trimble himself was never told exactly what his generals had said about him. As far as he knew, he’d done all right, but no better. Oh well, it was all by and done with now. He ducked inside the plane and slammed the door.
THE WHEELS OF the last C-47 came unstuck from Poltava’s runway. The last contact was broken. America had been here, and now it was gone. The tiny, fragile island of Western liberty was inundated by the Red waters that had encircled it.
Captain Trimble paid a high price for what he’d achieved. He’d seen and experienced things that were beyond the ken of an aircombat veteran. The dead haunted him. But worse than that was the feeling of betrayal – the way, in his eyes, America had bowed the knee to Stalin and sold out Poland in a fool’s bargain.
With Poltava receding, Robert believed he was leaving it all behind – the fear, the frustration, the sickening truths about the conduct of war – but he wasn’t. He took it all with him, locked up inside. The war had exacted a price, and he wasn’t done paying yet.
THE C-47 CALLED at Moscow, where there was bureaucratic business to deal with and General Ritchie resumed his post at the embassy. Robert’s promotion to major had never materialized, and Ritchie – who’d become a friend during their brief acquaintance – promised to look into it and back him up. But nothing came of it. Robert, who was hardly thinking straight at all these days, was left to wonder if he’d made some kind of misstep during his time as CO. The memory of ‘Lydia’ and that awful drunken night came back to him, turning his skin cold; but he wasn’t aware that anyone had ever known about it. He’d certainly not been reprimanded for it.
Most likely, the promotion never came simply because there was no longer any role for him. With the war ending, Eastern Command dissolved, and demobilization on the horizon, there was no call for dynamic new majors. There was another possible reason too, which suggested itself during another stopover on the way home.
From Moscow, the C-47 flew to Berlin and Frankfurt. For the first time, Robert stood within the homeland of the enemy, the soil upon which he’d dropped so many tons of bombs. The place was utterly devastated – as bad as anything he’d seen in Russia or Poland – and the proud, bellicose people of the Reich were reduced to beggary. It wasn’t something he wanted to contemplate, and he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
He took the controls at Frankfurt and flew the next leg himself. In Paris, for the first time in months, it felt like he was re-entering the free world. Here was a city barely touched by battle or bombs, where the West was in force. Having been part of a tiny minority in a semi-hostile country, he found it strange to see British and American GIs everywhere, lounging in sidewalk cafés, strolling openly arm in arm with local girls. At long last, home started to seem like a real thing – a place that had an actual, solid existence.
In Paris Robert received a surprise invitation. A farewell party was being held for General Carl A. Spaatz, who was stepping down as commander of USSTAF and heading off to the Pacific to take command of the air forces there.6 Robert took a ride out to the headquarters at St Germain-en-Laye, a former royal retreat to the west of Paris. The place was dominated by the vast château which until a year ago had been the headquarters of the German Army. Once more Robert found himself in elevated company; on this occasion he was the only captain in an exclusive party of generals. They were the commanding officers of the constituent arms of USSTAF, a club in which Captain Robert Trimble was still notionally a member. He was even more out of his depth than he had been at the Moscow party.
Toward the end of the evening, General Spaatz approached Robert and shook his hand. Like many of the generals Robert had known, he was a surprisingly kindly-looking fellow in his mid-fifties, with the impression that there was steel underneath the soft features. Spaatz had heard good reports of the young captain’s work in Russia. In the course of small talk they discovered that they were both south-east Pennsylvania boys. Spaatz had grown up in Boyertown, a small community about 60 miles from Camp Hill, son of a local newspaper-man and politician who’d had a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly at Harrisburg.7
‘We used to play ball against Boyertown in the American Legion,’8 Robert said, caught up in memories of boyhood and not thinking what he was saying. ‘We always beat the dickens out of ’em!’
The general spluttered indignantly: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Robert reddened and started to backtrack, but Spaatz laughed and brushed the insult to his home town aside. ‘Join me for a cigar, Captain?’ he suggested. ‘I’d like a quiet talk with you.’
They stepped out onto a balcony with a view over St Germain in the summer evening twilight. Spaatz, done with small talk, got straight to business. ‘I’m heading out to the Pacific in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘I just lost one of my aides, and I need a good man to replace him.’ He looked at Robert through a wreath of cigar smoke. ‘That man could be you. I’ve heard good things about you.’ It was a stunning offer. Robert didn’t know what to say or think. ‘If you accept,’ Spaatz added, ‘you’ll certainly get that promotion your superiors have been pestering me for.’
The Pacific, as aide to a general – that could be quite a racket. On the other hand, Robert had learned the hard way to be wary of handsome-sounding offers. Going by past experience, he’d be tempted into accepting this appointment and in a month’s time find himself sneaking through a Burmese jungle with a money vest stuffed with yen and his guts churning.
Seeing Robert’s hesitation, Spaatz told him more. There was a covert operation on the table, but like nothing Robert could have imagined. They were planning a new phase in the air campaign against the Japanese, like nothing the world had ever seen. A top secret project was in train that would deliver a knockout blow. A special B-29 bombardment group had been formed, and there was a chance that Captain – sorry, Major Robert M. Trimble could be one of its pilots.
Robert had no idea what that meant, and no idea how to react. More air combat? Wasn’t that what he’d gone to Russia to avoid? And more secrecy, and being around generals, with all the politics that involved. And who knew where it could lead – maybe another act that would tarnish the image of the United States in his eyes. He’d had enough destruction, enough war, and was heartsick of politics.
General Spaatz gazed at him with his mournful eyes glittering – a sort of somnolent keenness. ‘What do you say?’
There was a tiny part of Robert – the remains of the urge that had made him want to go to war in the first place, the boy adventurer who still hadn’t been entirely erased – that was tempted. He thought it over for a good half minute before shaking his head.
‘Thank you, sir, but no. I’ve got a wife back home I haven’t seen
in over a year, and an eight-month-old baby girl I haven’t even met. I’ve given all the service I can, sir. I’ve had enough war. I just want to go home.’
Spaatz looked hard at him. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, Captain, I guess we’ll just have to find somebody else.’ He gave Robert his hand and shook firmly. ‘Take care,’ he said. And with that, he walked away. It would be some time before Robert learned that he’d turned down the chance of being one of the pilots that dropped the A-bomb on Japan.9
For now, he was heading home, and nothing was going to get in his way.
SITTING FORWARD IN his seat, Robert stared with an eerie intensity at the Pennsylvania landscape flitting past the glass. The train’s bogies clattered under him in the old familiar way, every flickering tie, every bridge, every crossing bringing him closer to home.
Five days had passed since leaving Paris, five days that couldn’t go by quickly enough. London – the place where the strange adventure had begun – was his first familiar stopping point. Then another circuitous route – Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and eventually his own native soil. Washington. Baltimore. And now he was back in the land that had made him, the place he knew like no other. It had that disturbing alienness of a known place when you come back to it after years away. It was fitting that it was the Pennsylvania Railroad that was bringing him home. He’d worked and traveled these rails for three years before going into the Army, and every junction and landmark was an old acquaintance.
But there were new memories overlying it all now. He’d looked at the tracks leading out of Baltimore and seen those boxcars pulling sluggishly out of Lwów, filled with haggard, hopeful men and women; heard the hurrying footsteps in the station halls and remembered the NKVD officer and his men waiting for Isabelle and her friends to arrive; and always in his mind he saw the rails running in under the archway at Birkenau, and the mutilated bodies laid like cordwood by the tracks north-west of Lublin.
He’d left something of himself in all those places, something he would never get back. Where were all those people now, the ones who’d survived the horrors? Had they found their way home? Did they carry the same baggage with them as he did? The same damage sealed up inside? And if they had come home, did the landscape look as strange to them as his home country did to him?
Robert leaned forward as the train pulled out of York; tapped his fingernails on the window ledge as it sped up the Susquehanna Valley. His breathing became short and his heart started to thump as the locomotive slowed into the outskirts of his home town. It was hard to believe that that was Lemoyne going by the window this moment; if he stood up he ought to be able to see Hummel Avenue. By the time the train thundered out onto the Susquehanna Bridge, he was on his feet and his hands were trembling. Before he knew it, he was glimpsing the red brick and the barn roof of Harrisburg station, and the train was sliding in under the arch and jolting to a halt.
Hauling his kit bag, he squeezed out the door, joining the exodus of GIs, sailors and civilians crowding onto the platform. Scanning the sea of people, he saw a familiar face, and walked that way. It was her. He hurried his steps; his feet seemed to vanish from under him, as if he were floating through the crowd; then his kit bag fell to the floor and she was in his arms. ‘Robert! Oh, Robert!’ Eleanor squealed. ‘Robert!’ He felt her tears soaking his face, and inhaled the scent of her – the scent he’d all but forgotten, that carried him back to that evening beside the lake at Fort Worth, the homes they’d shared along the way, and to the times before that, when they were both just innocent kids, before there was a war.
He clung to Eleanor, for how long he didn’t know, like a drowning man holding on to a lifeboat. Then he held her at arm’s length and looked into her face, the beautiful features pinched and pink with tears, but smiling, telling him breathlessly over and over how much she had missed him. (Only later, looking back, did he realize that his own eyes had remained dry.)
There was another presence there, sitting patiently on a bench beside them, watching curiously as her mommy embraced the strange man.
‘Carol Ann,’ Eleanor said, lifting her up, ‘this is your daddy.’
Robert stared dumbly at the tiny face. Another infant face swam up in his memory – pallid, chilled in the forest snow. He shook away the image and reached out toward his daughter. She reared back, lashing out with her tiny hand, and bopped him on the nose, then screwed up her face and screamed. ‘Sweetheart!’ said Eleanor, mortified. ‘This is your daddy! Daddy’s come home!’
Robert smiled, but his heart ached, wounded by the rebuff. Coming home wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped.
HE WAS ON home soil, but Robert wasn’t out of the Army yet. He might still be hauled back into the machine, and there was even the remote possibility that he could be thrown into the fight again. The war in the Pacific looked like dragging on a long while yet. He could end up flying a combat tour against Japan after all, with or without General Spaatz’s special mission.
And it now occurred to him that he wouldn’t mind that at all.
He hadn’t left the war behind – he’d brought it all with him, every last piece of it, and it infested his home. He’d been back a couple of weeks, and he just couldn’t settle. He was nervous, agitated, and under the surface, like a land mine, was a latent anger that could be triggered by the lightest touch.
Home wasn’t home at all. It was as much an alien place as the Ukraine had been. Carol Ann no longer screamed at the sight of him, but she reached for Eleanor, not for him. And ashamed as he was to think it, Eleanor herself irritated him. He didn’t like to be around her. She didn’t understand; she didn’t know what he’d seen, never could know or even imagine, and he couldn’t communicate it to her. Robert spent as much time as he could alone, fishing in the timeless peace of the Susquehanna.
While he waited for the military to decide what to do with him, he gave thought to civilian life. Eleanor wanted him to settle back to work on the railroad, but he longed to keep flying. He began secretly scanning the ads for civilian piloting jobs. In his idle moments he developed an obsessive bond with his Army Colt; the same one he’d used to fend off the Russian colonel at Staszów. He kept it in a dresser drawer in the bedroom, but was constantly taking it out and cleaning it.
Every day he strove to keep the memories at bay. But they came back to him in his nightmares, and even in his waking life. The sudden burst of a flak shell close by, the zip of splinters through metal, the stomach-knotting tension of riding through a storm of explosions, steadily bearing down on the target, Forts either side falling apart and dropping to earth. The stacked bodies, frozen rigid, bursting out of the shed and lying in the slushy snow. The infant, starved and chilled to death, huddled inside his coat. The gunshot in the street below his window, and the woman’s struggle suddenly ceasing. And then there were the things that made the anger begin to boil. The cold, bland smugness of the Soviet officers, and the humbled compliance of the American generals and diplomats, sipping champagne and playing tennis while Poland was turned into Stalin’s front yard, infested with secret police and murderers.
Eleanor was frightened and confused. She could see the change in Robert, but couldn’t understand it. He was detached and moody all the time. The prospect of his homecoming had been a light in the darkness, sustaining her through all those lonely months while she struggled to keep a home together for him to come back to. But all he had brought was disillusion and fear. There was no rekindling of their romance – just sullen silence, irritability, and long absences. He shut her out, turned away from her, and she didn’t know why. And he kept handling that awful pistol.
One Friday evening he returned home after a week away on a military exercise. Eleanor gathered her courage to confront him. Looking at his face, she hardly dared speak. She asked him what was the matter. He denied that anything was the matter. In that case, she asked, why was he behaving like this all the time?
It was like sticking a finger in a raw wound. He exploded
with anger, and swore at her. ‘You wouldn’t understand it, not any damn part of it. Or anybody that stayed home and never saw the things we saw over there. How can you expect me to come home and pretend none of it ever happened?’
His eyes blazed, and she quailed; but she kept her courage. ‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t know. So how can you blame me for it? Pretend what never happened?’
‘You really want to know? All right, I’ll tell you. Nobody here has any idea what war is like. It’s bloody and senseless and inhuman. They tell you it’s the Germans, but it’s everyone – the Russians, and even us. People starve to death and nobody does a damn thing; they torture, they murder, they rape. I’ve seen people put to death, cut in half, I … I held a – a little baby in my arms and she – she died.’ His voice started breaking up. ‘And those damned politicians in Moscow, they sold everyone out – the Poles, even their own people. They crawled to Stalin, that murdering, lying son of a bitch – they fired good officers just because they … just for trying to help our men … for telling the truth about … about …’
Speechless with emotion, he put his hands over his face and sobbed. Eleanor, horrified, her heart breaking, reached out to comfort him, but he threw her off.
‘We haven’t got the right!’ he yelled at her. ‘We haven’t got the right to be all happy and loving and pretend the world’s all wonderful.’
He pushed past her, and before she could call his name he had slammed out the door, run down the steps and out to the street. She heard the car start and pull away.
Eleanor sat down, stunned and shaking, and burst into tears, crying her heart out. It felt like everything was falling to pieces around her, and she didn’t know what to do. She was absolutely bewildered. She’d known that war must be awful, but … but how could Robert have seen those things he described? He’d been in Russia as a pilot, hadn’t he?