by Herman Wouk
Faces turned to Pug, who cleared his throat. “Sir, maybe I’ll be entitled to the field promotion when I get back, but I’m only Captain Henry.”
“The promotion stands for this mission,” said the wing commander with a laugh. “You deserve it!”
He went out. After a silence a boy’s voice behind Pug piped, “Anybody who’d go on a ruddy mission like this when he ruddy well doesn’t have to, should be in a ruddy loony bin.”
A short skinny flier with heavy, crinkling black hair and bloodshot little eyes approached him, holding out a paper box crudely tied with red ribbon. “Admiral, a little token of welcome from the squadron.”
Pug opened the box and took out a roll of toilet paper. He glanced around at the expectant white amused faces.
“I’m touched. But I don’t think I’ll be needing this, inasmuch as I’m already scared shitless.”
He got a good laugh. The little flier offered his hand. “Come along with me, Admiral. I’m Peters, the sergeant navigator of F for Freddie.” He took him to a row of lockers and gave the American his parachute, showing him how to clip it to his chest. He also handed him a paper sack with his ration.
“Now you don’t wear your chute. That’s a good chute. You just stow it where it’ll be handy in a hurry. It’s hard enough moving around inside the Wimpy, you’ll find, without that thing on. Now you’ll want to meet the pilots. They’re Flight Lieutenant Killian and Sergeant Pilot Johnson. Tiny, we call the sergeant.”
He conducted Victor Henry to a small room where the two pilots were studying and marking up maps of Berlin. The lieutenant, who had the furrowed brow and neat little moustache of an assistant bank manager, was using a magnifying glass. Sergeant Tiny Johnson, booted feet on the desk, was holding the map up and glaring at it. “Hullo! Brassed off, I am, Admiral,” he said, when Peters introduced Victor Henry. “Ruddy well brassed off.” He was a large fellow with a ham face and thick lips.
“Pack it up, Tiny,” said the first pilot.
“Brassed off, I say. A nine-hour sweat just for us. While those twerps in all the other squadrons go for a quick one on the Channel coast to hit the invasion barges, and then home for tea, mother. I’ve been over Berlin. I don’t like it.”
“You’ve never stopped boasting about being over Berlin,” said the skipper, drawing lines on the map.
“Rottenest moment of my life,” said the sergeant, with a rolling side glance at Victor Henry. “Ruddiest thickest flak you ever saw. Masses of searchlights turning the night into day.” He got up yawning. “Brassed off, that’s what I am, mates. Brassed off. You’re a brave man, Admiral.”
He went out.
“Tiny’s a good pilot,” said the first pilot in upper-class tones, tucking the map into a canvas pouch. “He does talk a lot.”
The six men of the F for Freddie crew gathered under a naked light in a hallway for a last word from Flight Lieutenant Killian, reading notes on a clipboard. Aside from the theatrical-looking flying suits and life vests, they seemed like any half-dozen young men off any London street. The wireless operator was thin and somewhat ratty; the rear gunner was a fresh-faced boy—almost a child, Pug thought—on his first operational flight; the pimply front gunner vulgarly worked chewing gum in long jaws. Only their nervy, apprehensive, adventurous, and cheerful look was unusual.
The warm night was studded with summer stars: Vega, Deneb, Altair, Arcturus—the old navigation aids reliably twinkling away. The senior pilot went aboard the plane. The crew lounged on the grass nearby.
“F for Freddie,” said the sergeant pilot, giving the fuselage a loud affectionate slap. “Been through many a long sweat, Admiral.”
This was how Pug found out that a Wellington bomber had a skin of fabric. The slapped cloth sounded just like what it was. He was used to his Navy’s metal aircraft. It had never occurred to him that the British could use fabric planes as attack bombers, and this piece of intelligence had not come his way, for he was not an aviator. Victor Henry could still have walked away from the flight, but he felt as compelled to enter this cloth plane and fly over Berlin as a murderer is to climb a gallows to be hanged. In the sweet-smelling quiet night, plaintive birdsongs rose here and there, richly warbling and rolling.
“Ever heard nightingales before?” said Tiny Johnson.
“No, I never have.”
“Well, Admiral, you’re hearing nightingales.”
Far down the field, one plane after another coughed and began to roar, shooting out flames in the darkness. A truck rolled up to F for Freddie. A mechanic plugged a cable into its fuselage. The motors caught and turned over, spitting smoke and fire, as other planes trundled to a dimly lit runway and thundered up and away into gauzy blue moonlight. Soon only F for Freddie was left, its crew still lying on the grass, its spinning motors cherry red. All at once the engines shut off.
Pug heard nightingales again.
“Eh? What now?” said Tiny. “Don’t tell me we’ve been scrubbed, due to some splendid, lovely engine trouble?”
Mechanics came trotting out and worked rapidly on one engine, with many a vile cheerful curse, their tools clanking musically in the open air. Twenty minutes after the other planes left, F for Freddie took off and flew out over the North Sea.
After what seemed a half hour of bumping through cold air in a dark shaking machine, Pug glanced at his watch. Only seven minutes had gone by. The crew did not talk. The intercom crackled and buzzed—the helmet, unlike the rest of his clothing, was too tight and hurt his ears—but once the plane left the coast on course, the pilots and navigator shut up. Victor Henry’s perspiration from the heavy suit cooled and dried, chilling him. His watch crawled through twenty more minutes as he sat there. The lieutenant gestured to him to look through the plexiglass blister where the navigator had been taking star sights, and then to stretch out prone in the nose bubble, the bombardier position. Pug did these things, but there was nothing to see but black water, bright moon, and jewelled stars.
“Keep that light down, navigator,” the lieutenant croaked.
The sergeant who had given Pug the toilet paper was marking a chart on a tiny fold-down wooden slat, and trying to squelch the dim beam of an amber flashlight with his fingers. Crouching beside him, watching him struggle with star tables, star sight forms, dividers, ruler, and flashlight, Pug wondered what kind of navigational fix he could possibly come up with. The youngster gave him a harried grin. Pug took the flashlight from his hands and shielded the beam to strike just the chart. Peters gestured his gratitude and Pug squatted there, cramped in the space behind the two pilots, until the navigator had finished his work. The American had imagined that the long-range British bomber would be as big as an airliner, with a control cabin offering ample elbow room. In fact five men sat crowded within inches of each other—the two pilots, the front gunner, the navigator, and the wireless operator. Pug could just see the gunner in the forward bubble, in faint moonlight. The others were faces floating in the glow of dials.
Stumbling, crouching, grasping at guy wires, Pug dragged his parachute down the black fuselage to the bubble where the rear gunner sat. The hatless boy, his bushy hair falling in his face, gave him a thumbs-up and a pathetic smile. This was a hell of a lonely, shaky, frigid place to be riding, Pug thought. The bomber’s tail was whipping and bouncing badly. He tried to yell over the wind noise and motor roars, then made a hopeless gesture. The boy nodded, and proudly operated his power turret for him. Pug groped to a clear space in the fuselage, and squatted on his parachute, hugging his knees. There was nothing to do. It was getting colder and colder. He took something from his ration bag—when he put it in his mouth he tasted chocolate—and sucked it. He dozed.
Garbled voices in his ear woke him. His nose was numb, his cheeks felt frostbitten, and he was shivering. A hand in the dark tugged him forward. He stumbled after the vague figure toward the cockpit glow. Suddenly it was bright as day in the plane. The plane slanted and dived, and Pug Henry fell, bruising his forehead on
a metal box. Rearing up on his hands and knees, he saw the bright light go out, come on and go out again as though snapped off. The plane made sickening turns one way and another while he crawled forward.
Tiny Johnson, gripping the controls, turned around, and Pug saw his lips move against the microphone. “Okay, Admiral?” The voice gargled in the intercom. “Just passing the coast searchlight belt.”
“Okay,” Henry said.
The helmeted lieutenant threw a tight grim glance over his shoulder at Henry, then stared ahead into the night.
Tiny waved a gloved hand at a fixture labelled OXYGEN. “Plug in, and come and have a look.”
Sucking on rubber-tasting enriched air, Pug crawled into the bombardier position.
Instead of sparkling sea he saw land grayed over by moonlight. The searchlight beams waved behind them. Straight below, tiny yellow lights winked. Red and orange balls came floating slowly and gently up from these lights, speeding and getting bigger as they rose. A few burst and showered red streaks and sparks. Several balls passed ahead of the plane and on either side of it, flashing upward in blurry streaks of color.
The voice of Tiny said, “Coast flak was heavier last time.”
Just as he said this something purple-white and painfully brilliant exploded in Victor Henry’s face. Blackness ensued, then a dance of green circles. Pug Henry lay with his face pressed to cold plexiglass, sucking on the oxygen tube, stunned and blind.
A hand grasped his. The voice of Peters, the navigator, rattled in his ear. “That was a magnesium flash shell. Ruddy close, Admiral. Are you all right?”
“I can’t see.”
“It’ll take a while. Sit up, sir.”
The plane ground ahead, the blindness persisted and persisted, then the green circles jerked in a brightening red mist. A picture gradually faded in like a movie scene: faces lit by dials and the gunner in moonlight. Until his vision returned, Victor Henry spent nasty minutes wondering whether it would. Ahead he saw clouds, the first of this trip, billowing up under the moon.
The navigator spoke. “Should be seeing beams and flak now.”
“Nothing,” said Lieutenant Killian. “Black night.”
“I’ve got Berlin bearing dead ahead at thirty miles, sir.”
“Something’s wrong. Probably your wind drift again.”
“D.F. bearings check out, sir.”
“Well, damn it, Peters, that doesn’t put Berlin up ahead.” The skipper sounded annoyed but unworried. “It looks like solid forest down there, clear across the horizon. Featureless and black.”
Tiny Johnson observed bitterly that on his last raid almost half of the planes had failed altogether to find Berlin, and that none of Bomber Command’s official navigational procedures were worth a shit. He added that he was brassed off.
The piping voice of the rear gunner broke in to report searchlights far astern, off to the right. At almost the same moment, the pilots saw, and pointed out to Victor Henry, a large fire on the horizon ahead: a yellow blotch flickering on the moonlit plain. After some crisp talk on the intercom, Lieutenant Killian swung the plane around and headed for the searchlights; as for the fire, his guess was that another bomber had overshot the mark and then gone ahead and bombed the wrong target. “That’s Berlin,” he soon said, pointing a mittened hand at the lights. “All kinds of fireworks shooting off. Well done, Reynolds. How goes it back there?”
The high strained voice of the rear gunner replied, “Oh, I’m fine, sir. This operational stuff’s the real thing, isn’t it?”
As they neared Berlin, the nose gunner was silhouetted black by exploding balls and streaks of color, and fanning rays of blue light. Tiny’s voice in the intercom rasped, “Those poor bastards who got there first are catching the heat blisters.”
The lieutenant’s voice came, easy and slow: “It looks worse than it is, Admiral. The stuff spreads apart once you’re in it. The sky’s a roomy place, actually.”
F for Freddie went sailing into the beautiful, terrible display, and as the captain had said, it thinned out. The searchlight beams scattered and ran down to the left and right. The streaks and balls of flak left great holes of darkness through which the plane bored smoothly ahead. The captain and the navigator talked rapidly in fliers’ jargon.
“See that fire off there, Admiral? Some other chaps have pretty well clobbered the primary target,” said Killian.
“Or at least dropped a lot of bombs in the vicinity,” Tiny said. “I can’t make out a damned thing for the smoke.”
The view below was half moonlit clouds, half black city flickering with anti-aircraft flashes. Pug Henry saw a peculiar high column of flickers—the Flakturm, that must be—and, in another direction, an irregular blob of fire and smoke enveloping buildings and smokestacks, near the river curling silver through Berlin. The black puffs and fiery streaks of the flak slid past F for Freddie, but the plane plowed ahead as though protected by a charm. The captain said, “Well, I’m going for secondary. Course, navigator.”
Shortly thereafter the motor noise ceased. The nose of the plane dipped way down. The sudden quiet was a big surprise.
“Gliding approach, Admiral,” the captain’s voice gargled. “They control their lights and flak with listening devices. Navigator’s got to take your place now.”
The plane whiffled earthward. Pug made his way to the rear gunner, who was looking down with saucer eyes in a pallid baby face at the moonlit German capital, and at the anti-aircraft winking like fireflies. A rush of icy air and a roar followed the captain’s order, “Open bomb bay.” Into the plane a strong acrid smell poured, and Pug had a mental flash of gunnery exercises on a sunny blue sea near green islands. Off Manila or over Berlin, cordite smelled the same. The navigator kept talking in a drilled cheerful tone: “Left, left… too much… right… dead on… no, left, left… smack on. Smack on. Smack on. There!”
The plane jumped. Pug saw the bombs raggedly fall away behind them, a string of black tumbling sticks. The airplane slanted up, the motors came bellowing on, and they climbed.
Below, a string of small red explosions appeared alongside the buildings and the huge fat gas-storage tower. Pug thought the bombs had missed. Then, in the blink of an eye, yellow-white flame with a green core came blasting and billowing up from the ground, almost to the height of the climbing plane, but well behind. In the gigantic flare, the city of Berlin was suddenly starkly visible, spread out below like a picture postcard printed with too much yellow ink—the Kurfürstendamm, Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, the river, the bridges, the Flakturm, the chancellery, the Opera—clear, sharp, close, undamaged, peculiarly yellow.
The cheers in the intercom hurt his ears. He seized his microphone and gave a rebel yell.
As he did so, F for Freddie was transfixed by half a dozen searchlights that swung and stopped. In the gunner’s bubble all was blue radiance. The boy looked horror-stricken at Pug and suddenly started to scream in fright, his eyes tight shut, his mouth wide open. There was so much noise that Pug could hardly hear him. It looked like a painted scream, and in the blue light the boy’s tongue and gums were black. The plane seemed to have landed on a shining blue pyramid. The motors howled, the machine lurched, dived, sideslipped, but the pyramid stayed locked under it. Pug seized the gun mount with both arms to steady himself. The gunner fell against the mount, knocking the microphone away from his open mouth. His clamor ceased in the intercom, and Pug heard Lieutenant Killian and Tiny talking in brisk controlled voices. A mass of orange and red balls lazily left the ground and floated up directly at F for Freddie. They came faster. They burst all around, a shower of fire, a barrage of explosions. Pug felt a hard thump, heard the motor change sound, heard a fearful whistling. Icy air blasted at him. Fragments rattled all over the plane, and F for Freddie heeled over in a curving dive. Victor Henry believed that he was going to die. The plane shrieked and horribly shuddered, diving steeply. Both pilots were shouting now, not in panic but to make themselves h
eard, and through the frail plexiglass bubble Henry stared at the fabric wings, waiting for them to break off, flutter away, and signal the end of his life.
All at once the screeching, whistling blue pyramid turned black. The dizzying swoops and slips stopped, the plane flew straight. Pug caught a whiff of vomit. The gunner had fainted, and the puke was dribbling from his mouth in the moonlight and rolling down his chest: chocolate, coffee, bits of orange. The boy had eaten his whole ration. Out of the left leg of his flying suit black blood welled.
Pug tried the intercom, but the crackling in his ears had stopped. The system was dead. The stricken plane lurched on in a tumult of wind roars and howls. He went forward, clutching the guy ropes, and ran head-on into a figure who shouted that he was Peters. Pug screamed in his ear that Reynolds was wounded, and moved on to the cockpit, passing a ragged flapping hole in the starboard fuselage through which he could see the stars. Mechanically he noted the form of the Dipper. They were heading west, back to England.
In the cockpit the pilots sat as before, busy at their controls. Tiny shouted, “Ah, Admiral. We’re going home to tea. To hell with ruddy pictures. You’ll tell them you saw that gas plant go up, won’t you?”
“Damn right I will. How’s the airplane?”
“The port engine was hit, but it’s still pulling. Heading back over land, in case we have to come down. Looks like we can make it, unless that engine completely packs up.”
“Your rear gunner’s got a leg wound. Navigator’s back there with him.”
The swinging searchlights of the outer belt loomed ahead, probing the clouds, but F for Freddie climbed into the overcast undetected. Tiny bellowed at Victor Henry, his big blue eyes rolling, both hands on the wheel, “Ruddy asinine way to make a living, isn’t it, Admiral? Brassed off, I am. Should have joined the ruddy navy!”
Pulling off his helmet, Lieutenant Killian turned over control to Tiny, and wiped his face with a big white handkerchief no whiter than his skin. He gave the American a tired smile, his forehead a mass of wrinkled lines.