The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  That should have been challenge enough for a pair of soda jerks or fraternity brothers. But that was the easy part of the test. All the way there we would be flying wing tip-to-wing tip with other very young men. Anyone’s mistake could bring down two or three of our planes. The likelihood of errors was increased by the fact that people would be shooting cannons at us and squadrons of enemy planes would be trying to shoot us down.

  With every reason to scream in terror and run for our lives, we calmly strapped ourselves into our seats. I tried to hide the shaking in my hands as I advanced the throttles and moved the plane into position at the end of the runway. Ron Brown stood on the brakes while I brought the four engines to full power. The plane trembled, threatening to shake itself apart before it ever got off the ground.

  My signal to start rolling! Ron came off the brakes and the plane began to move, gathering speed more quickly than I had realized when I was in the right seat. Just as soon as I had air over the wings, I eased the yoke forward. The tail responded leisurely, slowly lifting off the ground, and the speed picked up noticeably.

  Ron began calling off the ground speed. “Twenty…forty…fifty…sixty…” The distance markers were blurs firing past the corner of my eyes. My focus was on the trees, which were moving toward me with ever-increasing speed, and the feel of the plane’s weight on its wheels. Our tires were still pressed onto the concrete. The B-17 didn’t yet know that it was supposed to fly.

  “Eighty…ninety…” Ron was trying to sound nonchalant, but I had been in his seat, and I knew his breath was catching in his throat. He was wondering if I really knew what I was doing and beginning to suspect that I was waiting too long before coaxing the plane into the air.

  “One hundred…one ten…” The wings were flexing upward. The wheels were suddenly rolling lightly.

  I couldn’t wait as long as Brombeck used to. I eased the yoke back into my lap. The nose picked up and the Fortress spent a second trying to decide whether it belonged on the ground or in the air. Ron Brown’s hand was already on the landing-gear lever, ready to lift the wheels out from under us. I still wasn’t sure that we were off.

  In an instant all the sounds changed. The bearing noises from the undercarriage were replaced by the hiss of rushing air. The pounding vibrations merged into a melodious hum.

  “Gear up!” Brown threw the lever, and there was the instant squeak of hydraulics. The trees disappeared under the nose. We were off—heroic warriors on our way to do battle with the enemy.

  Carberry must have had the same experience, because he was a changed man when he strode into the recreation room. “Milk run,” he said by way of greeting. He waved a finger to the mess sergeant to order his ration of beer. We both had moved into the ranks of the elite, and we knew that our demeanor had to be different from what it had been before.

  “Piece of cake,” I agreed, tipping my stein in his direction, then we widened our circle to allow another veteran combat officer to join us. Within minutes we were suggesting new tactics for our next raid.

  It was the following day that we bought the car, poured our stolen gasoline into the tank, and filled the crankcase with a one-time ration of commandeered motor oil. We waited impatiently while the shopkeeper explained the intricacies of an Austin sedan that had a separate starter button on the dash. It turned over roughly and stalled a few times, but just as we were beginning to worry about the battery, the engine fired, oscillated a bit, and then settled at a noisy twelve hundred rpm. Carberry and I let the sound sink in like the notes of a big-band melody.

  We had nowhere to go, but we had to drive our ugly little automobile. Mike got behind the wheel, backed out of the garage, and promptly turned head-on into the stream of traffic. We mounted the sidewalk to avoid a small lorry and then cut across the center line, in front of a British military sedan. We found a deserted side street, pulled over and laughed until we cried. What, we thought, could be more ridiculous than to be killed for driving on the American right in front of a truck driving on the English left?

  We found a road out into the countryside and pulled up at a picturesque turn that overlooked a field of grazing sheep. I took out my box camera, posed Carberry leaning on a fender, and took his picture, then he took a shot of me with my foot on the running board. We noticed a bearded Englishman, with a dog on a leash, watching us from a distance and enjoying our antics. I showed him how to aim the camera and how to push the shutter release, and then he took several minutes posing the two of us shaking hands across the hood. He must have had his thumb over the lens, because that photo never came out.

  I drove us back to town, acting very English as I kept the Austin in its proper lane. We pulled back into the garage, paid the shopkeeper his first month’s rent for the garage, and hitched a ride back to the Bridge. All the way, Michael and I laughed at the details of our journey, as if we were remembering the rides in an amusement park. “If you don’t mind my asking, sirs, exactly where have you two been?” the driver asked, suspecting that we must have found a distillery or a house of ill repute.

  “We’ve been at peace,” Carberry said. “A place where they don’t know there’s a war going on.”

  The ugly little sedan became the bond of our friendship—a shared secret, or maybe even a blood oath. All the other young men might have been condemned to eternal war, but Carberry and I had our escape. The car was our secret hideaway, as wonderful as the tree house that each of us had owned in our childhood. No matter how bad it got, we could smile at one another and know that our car was waiting like a magic carpet to carry us away from the horror.

  Now

  Arthur Lyons is waiting in the lobby when I come down the next morning, jaunty in a camel jacket and his tweed cap.

  “Ah, Mr. Marron. Good morning!”

  “Good morning, Mr. Lyons.”

  In America we’d be Arthur and Jim, but it’s quite possible for the English to live side by side their entire adult lives and never use first names. In England, it takes more than proximity to create intimacy.

  I down the day’s first coffee while Arthur fusses with the menu and decides on a cup of tea. “Really not much more to see,” he tells me. “It’s all been gone for years.”

  “I’d just like to walk around a bit more,” I answer. “There’s still a great deal to see if you’re looking with your imagination. But really, I can find it myself.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Marron. I’ll be happy to take you back. Just wanted to be sure that you wouldn’t be disappointed or hurt because it’s all gone over to houses, and not very nice houses at that.”

  “I won’t be disappointed, Mr. Lyons, and I certainly won’t be offended. I’m sure Whittingbridge needs homes much more than an airport.”

  The people living here have no concept of the airfield that lies beneath their houses and stretches across their backyards. Actuarially, they have no concept of World War II. I’m sure when they see old black-and-white documentaries of our bombers over Germany, they have to wonder at the folly of it all. All these men firing at each other from the open windows of planes. Bombs wobbling uncertainly as they drop four miles to targets shrouded in clouds. Why didn’t they use guided missiles and smart bombs? Why did it take so many planes and so many men to damage so few industrial plants and so little of the essential infrastructure?

  But I see the airfield, and not the houses. And I see the planes as the ultimate weapons of war. I guess I have never truly grasped the capabilities of supersonic jets, guided by satellites, launching missiles that read maps in order to find their target. Today the flyer can put his bomb through the window of a building. He can even pick the window. It seems like something from science fiction.

  Arthur and I shuffle through the field, find a small section of broken concrete, and use it as an arrow to point down the length of a runway. Then we follow the runway back to the headquarters cluster and, using those two guides as our start, find the locations of the various huts and sheds. We then trudge across an open field th
at is in the process of being surveyed for a new subsection of homes. A billboard proclaims the area “Lief’s Landing,” which I suppose is more commercial than “Bomber Alley” or “Fortress Fairway.” The British have incorporated the Vikings into their history. The American occupation, perhaps because it lasted only a few years, has been pretty much forgotten.

  Arthur is excited as he stands on a large circular platform, its shape unmistakable, even though the concrete is pitted and pulverized. “Some sort of switching roundhouse?” he guesses.

  “No, it was just a parking space,” I tell him. Arthur walks the perimeter, puzzled at the need for such a large parking space.

  The planes were parked away from the runways. Narrow concrete taxiways led back into the woods, and where there were no trees, under fields of camouflage netting. Ground crews would taxi the Fortresses on two of their four engines, bring them to their assigned circles, and then spin them into position around one locked wheel. The planes would sit there, awaiting their next assignment, pampered by the mechanics and the maintenance crews. The idea was to spread them out so a single German bomb couldn’t cost the base its entire inventory. In truth, there were no more German air raids, but the concept seemed brilliant when the buzz bombs and rockets began falling at random.

  The Fortress stood, with its nose high and its tail resting on the ground, a seventy-foot long tube of circular frames, covered with shaped strips of paper-thin metal. From the outside, its lines seemed streamlined and graceful. Inside, it was crude and unfinished, like a framed-out house before the wallboard is installed. You could see every structural component, right down to the ends of the thousands of rivets that held the whole thing together. Electrical wires protruded in bunches from the back of every control panel and cables ran the plane’s length, transferring the tug of the controls to the moving surfaces on the wings, stabilizer, and rudder. The chairs were bare metal, secured to frames with large bolts.

  The pilots, navigator, and bombardier pulled themselves up through a hatch under the nose into a flat space underneath the flight deck. The bombardier and navigator crawled forward into the nose that was jammed with the mechanical bombsight, the breaches of machine guns, and the navigator’s desk and chair. The two pilots climbed up to the flight deck into seats that were fitted between and under clusters of knobs, levers, buttons, and gauges. The engine controls, with four of everything, were grouped into a center console.

  Last up through the nose hatch was the flight engineer. The engineer knew the guts of the plane better than anyone on board, kept the engines fed with fuel and running smoothly, and stepped into the top turret gun when we reached enemy territory.

  The rest of the crew got aboard through a hinged door in the rear fuselage, much in the manner that you would step up into the cab of a truck. The radioman walked forward, around the tripod that supported the belly turret, to a bank of radios mounted on a bulkhead. He tuned the high-frequency radios that carried voice traffic among the planes and sat over a low frequency telegraph key that kept contact with the home base. In combat, he stood at a generally useless machine gun that stuck through a skylight in the roof above his station. It was useless because it pointed in one direction, up and aft, and its range of fire was pretty much blocked by the vertical tail. The gunners huddled near the door until well after takeoff, then the tail gunner crawled back and straddled a bicycle seat that positioned his head in a small glass box under the rudder. The two waist gunners helped the belly gunner into his contortionist’s ball, lowered the ball out into the airstream, then took their positions at the open windows in the plane’s sides and swung their machine guns out.

  The idea of open windows in a high altitude bomber may seem ridiculous, but in fact the entire plane was open. Besides the unglazed gun ports on the sides, there were vents of one kind or another in every compartment. When the bomb-bay doors were open, there was a gaping hole in the center of the belly. Heat piped from the engines gave some relief to the crew, but with the outside temperature well below zero, we were working in a subfreezing environment.

  We wore heavy jackets, gloves, and boots over our thermal underwear. The gunners had suits that were connected directly to heat lines. As if all that wasn’t bulky and cumbersome enough, we were wrapped in flak jackets that were the ancestors of today’s bulletproof vests. The clothes added forty pounds to a man’s weight, and the mittens robbed him of his dexterity. Then there was the oxygen mask, essential above twelve thousand feet, which interfered with vision and kept each crewmember tethered to a rubber hose.

  Ten men hobbled about in these outfits, trying to work the intricate controls while the plane pitched and rolled through turbulence, while shards of flak tore through the plane’s skin as if it were made of paper, and while enemy fighters fired cannon rounds into the engines. What gave purpose to this lunacy was a small section between the wings that could hold three or four tons of explosives in six to eight iron-skinned bombs to be dropped on a vital enemy resource. The Flying Fortress, for all its size and its ten-man crew, carried less destructive power than a single-seat fighter launched from a modern carrier, and it dropped its bombs with much less accuracy. Each lost bomber was a terrible price to pay for the pitiful amount of destruction it might cause. At the time, the Army Air Force generals believed that the bomber could easily penetrate enemy airspace and knock out factories, power plants, oil refineries, whatever, with pinpoint accuracy. Each B-17 was treated as a fleet in being. Why else have a navigator on every plane when all the planes were going to the same place? Each was expected to strike a telling blow that could turn the tide of the war. It cost over a thousand bombers and their crews to prove to the generals that they were wrong.

  The proof came hard. The answer to more and more losses was more and more planes. More airfields were built and more and more circular concrete pads reached out into the countryside until the whole of East Anglia was an airfield. The Americans turned their bases into cities with residences, offices, streets, hospitals, fire departments, police departments, playgrounds, bus stops, warehouses, and just about anything else you would find in a fair-sized American town. The only thing obvious in its absence was the cemetery. The cemeteries were out of sight, far beyond the English Channel.

  Arthur Lyons, thankfully, invades my solitude. He has questions about every phase of our operations, and we spend the morning walking and talking together. “We should have preserved one of them,” he finally decides. “One base, exactly as it was the day the Jerries surrendered. Something you lads could come back to look at.”

  But many of the lads had no desire to come back. And what would we do with an old bomber base, now that most of the flyers are dead?

  It’s while I’m dropping him off at The Traveler that he mentions his friend Herbert Little. “Has a few years on me, and a much better memory. He’d likely know what happened to your detective sergeant and his papers. Might even remember what became of the Priest family you were asking about.” It’s obvious that I’m interested in meeting Herbert Little, and Arthur promises to invite him in for a drink that evening, so I have something to look forward to as we drive to the police station and descend into the tomb that holds the dead records.

  Browning recorded the results of my next official meeting with Angela. “Miss Priest,” he wrote, “was able to identify the officers she knew as Howie and Dan.” Unfortunately, Howard Coonts and Daniel Moore are both dead—killed in the line of duty. She could not identify the officer called Rog. Lieutenant Marron came up with a Roger Wilson who has enjoyed the company of a number of English women. He has vague memories of a Mary Brock and says “that might be her” when he sees her photo. He doesn’t recall ever being with her and several other Americans, and he’s sure that he never picked her up in an automobile.

  The official report seems to indicate that the investigation had reached a dead end, but Sergeant Browning’s handwritten notes continue to probe. “Must interrogate Lieutenant Wilson. He must remember something of the Br
ock woman. Did he assign his insurance money to her?”

  Another of his notes reads, “Is Lieutenant Marron withholding incriminating information?”

  I suppose I was, but at that point in time not about the insurance assignments. I had no idea that was where he was headed. I had gone through the past rooming assignments to find out whom Coonts and More had roomed with, then I had interviewed the former roommates. What I learned was that Howie and Dan had both thought they were engaged to Mary Brock. Each of them had met her when she was on the rebound from another American pilot who had been killed in action, but I had no reason to check their records and find out who had gotten their insurance benefits.

  Browning’s notes recall his impressions of the meeting when he had taken me to task. “Explained the seriousness of the case to Lieutenant Marron, and I think enlisted his cooperation.”

  Explained was an understatement. What he did was threaten me that withholding evidence was a violation of English law, for which I could be turned over to the civil authorities. I doubted that our command would give me up without a fight. We were leaving planes on the ground for lack of pilots, but a fight was the last thing Colonel Mast wanted with the English. He had assured me that he wanted to be kept totally uninformed, so I certainly didn’t want to be at the center of a jurisdictional dispute.

  The real threat was that I might never have an excuse to meet with Angela again. Browning reminded me that if Whittingbridge turned out to be a dry hole, there were other bases where he would have to drill. He implied that Angela was the property of his investigation, and not of my loneliness. Rumors wouldn’t do. He wanted factual information from their service records.

  I promised to look harder, and at our next meeting I handed over handwritten copies of service records. His notes of that meeting indicated exactly what he was looking for—something that he chose not to share with me at the time. In the official transcript, he wrote, “Miss Brock’s frequent and simultaneous affairs with American military personnel seem inevitably to result in her becoming the beneficiary of their military insurance. Her death could well be the result of an American learning that his affections had been misplaced and that insurance proceeds were the basis of the relationship.”