Soldier Spies

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  Ester shut down all but one engine—to conserve fuel, Bitter reasoned— and there was then a five-minute wait until a flare rose into the early morning from the control tower. Then Ester started a second engine and began to taxi. By the time he reached the end of the line of aircraft waiting to take off, all four engines were turning.

  He stopped behind another B-17 and checked the engine magnetos. When it was finally their turn to move onto the runway, Ester didn’t even slow at the threshold, but turned onto the runway as he pushed the throttles to TAKEOFF power. The plane immediately began to accelerate. There was not the feeling of being pushed hard against the seat that came in a fighter plane, but the available power was still impressive.

  Bitter remembered from his study of the Dash-One that at TAKEOFF power the B-17’s four Wright Cyclone engines each produced 1,200 horsepower, 150 horses more than the 1040 Allison in a P-40.

  On the ground, the B-17 seemed lumbering and ungainly, but once Ester lifted it into the air, it immediately became surprisingly graceful. Ester climbed steeply to the right, and Bitter could see the triangle-marked yellow B-17 above them. Ester took up a position just behind it, then spent some time working with the flight engineer. They were synchronizing the engines and setting the fuel-air mixture at the leanest workable mixture.

  They circled the field as they climbed to mission altitude, passed through the cloud cover at about 9,000 feet, and emerged into the light of early morning. When Bitter looked out the window and saw the aluminum armada that filled the sky, he was far less impressed than he had thought he would be. There was none of the elation he’d felt in Burma and China when he’d climbed out of the cloud cover and scanned the sky for the Japanese. He felt, in fact, very uneasy.

  Uneasy, because he was helpless. This was more like being carted off to an operating room than flying a plane.

  Just before they reached the Thames Estuary, their fighter escort appeared. Shining little dots that climbed out of the cloud cover became identifiable P-38s and P-51s as they climbed past the bomber formation, and then became little dots again as they took up protective positions above the formation, some to the front of the bombers and some to the rear.

  “Maybe you better go back and get on oxygen, Commander,” Ester said. “We just passed through 11,000.”

  Bitter returned to his gun position and put on an oxygen mask, and then a set of headphones.

  A five-plane V of P-51s appeared on their left, apparently throttled back to keep pace with the much slower B-17s. The flight leader of the P-51s raised his hand and waved.

  That’s where I belong, in the cockpit of a fighter plane, not as supercargo on a B-17.

  There was nothing to be seen below them but clouds. He wondered where they were. From what he understood of the briefing, and from the quick glance he’d had at the map before D’Angelo took him out to the flight line, they were to fly a northeast course that crossed the Thames Estuary twenty miles southeast of Southend-on-Sea, then took them seventy-five miles on a more easterly course to a point in the North Sea where a Royal Navy destroyer was stationed. From there the route turned right, nearly due east, to Dortmund.

  They were likely to be attacked by German fighters from two bases in Holland (Zwijndrecht and Hertogenbosch) and three in Germany (Duisburg, Essen, and Recklinghausen). The big map had shown known and suspected antiaircraft emplacements and German fighter bases; and it was marked with arrows indicating where Intelligence believed they would be first attacked, where they would be attacked later when the Germans computed their target, and later still en route home.

  After dropping their bombs on Dortmund, they were to turn right and fly a straight course back to England, a course south of the attack course that passed nearly over Eindhoven and north of Antwerp and left the European coast at Knokke on the Dutch-Belgian border.

  Ester’s voice came over the earphones, answering his question: “We’re approaching the coast, test your guns.”

  Bitter worked the action of the Browning, chambering a cartridge, then put his hands on the handles, aimed above the B-17 to their left, and pressed the trigger. The noise and recoil were startling.

  Ester and his crew seemed to be taking the whole thing very calmly. Bitter wondered if this was a reflection of their courage, or whether they had grown used to what he was doing. Or whether it was a carefully nurtured facade.

  Five minutes later, holes appeared in the cloud cover. He was trying to peer through one of these when he became aware of puffs of black smoke in the sky. That was antiaircraft. As he looked around the sky to see how much of it there was, an antiaircraft shell struck the port wing of a B-17 flying behind and below “Danny’s Darling.”

  It exploded between the engine nacelles, taking off the outer portion of wing and the outboard engine and detonating the fuel tanks. The B-17, in flames, fell off to the right, went into a spin, and then disappeared from sight.

  Bitter felt sick to his stomach.

  Five minutes later, German fighters appeared; long before Air Corps Intelligence thought they would. There was a running air battle, first between the P-51s and the Messerschmidts, and then between the B-17s and the Messerschmidts that, inevitably, made it through the P-51s.

  Bitter began to fire at a German fighter as it approached, and then he watched a double line of tracers from an aircraft behind him trace the path of the P-51 chasing the Messerschmidt through the bomber formation.

  The P-51 seemed to stagger, and then blew up.

  Bitter turned his attention to another Messerschmidt making a diving pass from the rear. He saw his tracers going where he wanted them to, but the enemy plane was out of sight before he could see any signs of having hit it.

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, the skirmish was over. “Danny’s Darling” droned on and on in straight and level flight, waiting for something else—antiaircraft or fighter—to try to knock it from the sky. The feeling of helpless terror returned. And despite the cold of their altitude, he was sweating.

  As they approached the outskirts of Dortmund, where their target was the Krupp steel mills, the antiaircraft fire resumed. It seemed to be much heavier than it had been the first time. There were far too many black bursts to count.

  The three-minute bombing run was the longest period in Ed Bitter’s life. He was desperately afraid that he was going to lose control of his stomach, if not his bowels. He had been afraid, and often, flying against the Japanese, but nothing like this. Here, it was like being tied to a stake before a bull’s-eye target on a rifle range. You could neither dodge nor fight back.

  His sense of relief was enormous when he felt the B-17 shudder as it was freed of the weight of the bomb load, a moment before the bombardier’s voice came over the earphones: “Bombs away!”

  “Close bomb-bay doors,” Ester ordered as he moved the B-17 into a climbing turn to the right.

  In the middle of the turn, Bitter looked back at the still-oncoming bomber stream. They seemed to be suspended on the black puffs of smoke the exploding antiaircraft shells made. As he watched, two planes fell out of formation: One exploded violently a second after he noticed it. The second fell into a shallow spin.

  Five minutes later, Ester’s composure left him. There was not just excitement but unmistakable fear in his voice as he cried on the intercom, “Bandits, dead ahead. Christ, there’s four of them.”

  Bitter watched in terror as one after another, four Messerschmidt fighters flashed past the B-17, their unbelievable closing speed moving them much too fast for him to get a shot at them.

  He could hear the belly gunner’s and the tail gunner’s twin fifties firing as they went away, but somehow he knew that was futile.

  Then there was a strange whistling noise, a wave of icy air, and the B-17 made a steep diving turn to the right. Bitter thought it was high time Ester made an evasive maneuver, then he remembered that bombers were trained not to make evasive maneuvers but to hold their formation, to preserve their “box of fire” at wha
tever cost.

  And then the flight engineer, his voice hollow with horror, came on the intercom:

  “Navy guy,” he said,“can you come to the cockpit?”

  Supporting himself against the centrifugal force of the steep turn, Bitter made his way forward.

  Ester was leaning forward, against the wheel. The top of his head was gone, but his earphones, incredibly, remained pinned to what was left of his head. Bitter could see the gray soupy mash of his brain.

  The copilot, blood streaming down his face, was taut against his shoulder harness as he tried to pull the wheel back against the weight of Ester’s body and the aerodynamic forces of the dive itself.

  Bitter pulled Ester’s body back in the seat and started to unfasten the blood-slippery harness latches. When he turned to the flight engineer to get him to help move Ester’s body out of the seat, he saw that the copilot, who had just barely managed to force the airplane into a nearly level attitude, was looking at him with glazed, terrified eyes. His yellow rubber “Mae West” inflatable life jacket was streaming blood.

  The flight engineer was looking at Ester’s open skull, then he threw up.

  “Help me get him out of there! ” Bitter ordered.

  When there was no response, Bitter decided to move the body himself. Ester was a lot heavier than he looked. And once his head tilted backward, a thick, glutinous mess spilled out of it onto Bitter.

  But he dragged him into the aisle between the seats and slipped into the pilot’s seat. The copilot was now slumped unconscious.

  And the B-17 was entering a spin.

  If he couldn’t bring it out of that, they would all die. Centrifugal force would pin them where they were; they couldn’t even bail out.

  [TWO]

  Lieutenant Commander John B. Dolan, USNR, wearing a fur-collared horsehide naval aviator’s jacket, stood on the observation platform of the control tower of Fersfield Army Air Base. He was holding a china mug of Old Overholt rye whisky-sweetened coffee in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. From time to time, he would put the binoculars to his eyes with the practiced skill of an old sailor and examine the cloudy sky to the east.

  Both the aviator’s jacket and the binoculars were prewar. The leather patch sewn to the breast of the jacket was stamped with a representation of naval aviator’s wings and the legend CAP DOLAN J.B. “Cap” stood for chief aviation pilot. Dolan had decided that it would fuck up the patch if he corrected the rank to reflect his current status, and besides, he suspected there were few people around who had any idea what “Cap” stood for. He had guessed correctly. Many of the Air Corps guys mistakenly interpreted it as the abbreviation for “captain,” and so addressed him.

  The binoculars bore two identification labels. One read “Carl Zeiss GmbH Jena” and the other “Property Aviation Section USS Arizona.” Chief Aviation Pilot John B. Dolan had once flown Vought OS-2U “Kingfishers” off the catapults on the battleship Arizona.

  The planes of the two squadrons based at Fersfield were thirty minutes late, but Dolan was not yet worried. His opinion of the skill of the Army Air Corps pilots was not high. It was not a chauvinist opinion, Navy vs. Army, but a professional judgment. Dolan was not surprised that they flew so badly, but that with so little training and experience they flew as well as they did.

  It was a magnificent accomplishment on their part that they could fly seven hundred-odd miles into Europe, find and bomb a target, and then find their way home again. Without considering any trouble they ran into en route, he expected them to be an hour or so off their estimated time of arrival.

  Forty minutes after they were expected, a sloppy formation of B-17s appeared to the southeast. When Dolan saw through the binoculars that the lead plane had begun a course correction toward Fersfield, he felt sure it was their squadron. He stepped to the window, tapped on it with his mug to get the Aerodrome Officer’s attention, and raised the mug in the direction of the formation.

  Three of the twenty-odd aircraft detached themselves from the formation and began to drop toward the base. Flares erupted from the first and last planes of the trio, the signal for wounded aboard.

  Dolan heard the peculiar sound of the English-built fire and crash trucks starting, and then the more familiar sound of Dodge ambulances.

  The planes with wounded aboard turned on final and came in for a landing. Dolan studied their numbers through his binoculars. Commander Bitter was in K5,"Danny’s Darling.”“Danny’s Darling” was not among the three planes with wounded aboard.

  The first two ships made it in all right, but the right landing gear of the third ship collapsed on touchdown. The B-17 skidded sideward but did not leave the runway as it screeched to a stop. It blocked the runway, however, and there was a ten-minute delay—during which the remaining B-17s circled slowly and noisily above—until a tractor could push the crash-landed B-17 off the runway.

  Then the landings resumed, at roughly one-minute intervals. Dolan was not impressed with the pilots’ skill in bringing their ships in. In what he judged to be a fifteen-mile crosswind, several of them had to make frantic last-minute maneuvers to line the planes up with the runway.

  He looked for “Danny’s Darling” among the circling and landing B-17s but could not find it. In the belief that the squadron commander was likely to stay up until the last of his chickens had gone to roost, Dolan was not particularly concerned about it. So he didn’t expect it when he felt a tug at his sleeve and turned to find Major Dumbrowski, the junior of the two squadron commanders, standing there with pain in his eyes.

  “‘Danny’s Darling,’” Major Dumbrowski said, “didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Commander.”

  Dolan nodded his head. “What happened?” he asked. Neither his face nor his voice showed any emotion.

  “Four Messerschmidts got through the fighters and hit us head-on. ‘Danny’s Darling’ was flying lead. I guess it was cannon fire. One moment they were straight and level, and the next they were in a spin.”

  “You see any parachutes?” Dolan asked.

  “No,” Dumbrowski said. He held up his left hand and demonstrated the attitude of the stricken plane. “When it gets in a spin like that, you almost never see anybody get out.”

  “Yeah,” Dolan said. “No chance he could have recovered?”

  “One of two things happened, maybe both,” Dumbrowski said. “A cannon round took out the controls, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone into that spin. Or it took out the pilots. That’s what they’ve learned to do, make a frontal assault and take out the pilots or the controls. Both, if they can.”

  “How far could you follow them down?” Dolan asked.

  “There were scattered clouds at three thousand feet,” Major Dumbrowski said. “My belly and tail gunners reported they lost them when they went into a cloud bank.”

  Dolan nodded, but said nothing. That was it. If they had dropped to 3,000 feet in a spin, they were through. It was surprising the wings hadn’t come off long before they went into the clouds. And taking a plane as big as a B-17 out of a spin was beyond the capability of Ed Bitter, even if he had made it to the cockpit, and even if the controls hadn’t been shot away. He was a goddamned good pilot, but he was not a bomber driver. And he had never flown a B-17.

  “Commander,” Major Dumbrowski said. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. About notifying the right people, I mean. I mean about Commander Bitter being aboard.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Dolan said evenly.

  Major Dumbrowski patted Dolan’s arm in a gesture of sympathy.

  When Dolan came down from the tower, Ed Bitter’s Limey woman sergeant driver pushed herself off the fender of Canidy’s Packard.

  “Is there word?” she asked.

  “Sergeant,” Dolan said, “you might as well put your gear together, and Commander Bitter’s. He’s not coming back.”

  Her face went white.

  “What happened?” she asked faintly.

  “They was hit, is what happene
d,” Dolan said, angrily. “The last time they was seen, they was in a spin.”

  “Oh, God!” she said.

  “He never should have let that little shit talk him into going,” Dolan said, still angry.

  “No parachutes?” Sergeant Draper asked.

  “What happens is that when a plane like that goes into a spin,” Dolan explained gently, “is that it pins you inside, like water in a bucket when you swing it around your head. You can’t get out.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Did it explode when it hit?”

  "Probably,” Dolan said, and then, when he saw the question in her eyes, added,“Nobody actually saw it hit.”

  She considered that for a moment.

  “Then we don’t know, do we, that it did crash?”

  “That’s what happens,” he said.

  “How much fuel did they have? I mean to ask, when is the latest they could possibly return?”

  He looked at his watch and made the computation.

  “Another two hours and thirty minutes,” he said. “Maybe two forty-five.”

  “Then I will wait, if you don’t mind, Commander,” Sergeant Draper said, “for another two hours and forty-five minutes. I seem to have more faith in Commander Bitter’s ability than you do. And if I were gone when he returns, he would be furious.”

  Hard-headed Limey is the first thing he thought. But then, Jesus Christ, she’s in love with him.

  What the hell, I’m the senior officer. It’s up to me to decide when I start making casualty reports.

  [THREE]

  Ed Bitter knew the technique for getting a fighter plane out of a spin, but he doubted that a bomber was stressed for the forces it required. You put the nose down and give it all the power available in the hope that velocity will overcome the aerodynamic forces of the spin.

  But there was nothing to do but try. After what seemed like a very long time with the needle well past the NEVER EXCEED red line on the airspeed indicator, he felt a lessening of the centrifugal force pressing him into his seat, and then saw that the world had stopped spinning. They were in a steep dive.