The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  The two formations passed through one another, and instantly our guys turned into a climb. The Germans should have done the same, getting themselves in position for a second crack at the Mustangs, but they held their formation and headed straight toward us. The second Mustang group was now diving down on top of the Messerschmitts. The German pilots must have seen them, but they took no evasive action. Instead, they kept boring in on us.

  Our nose guns opened up and I could hear the turret above my head firing ahead. Our front line was putting up an enormous barrage, and the tracers seemed to be finding their targets. One German exploded, then two more. Others seemed to be shedding pieces of their wings, while still others began flying erratically. The interceptor force kept closing, and suddenly their guns were blazing.

  I knew we were hit. I could hear the rounds smash into our wings. A machine-gun slug hit the windscreen high in the center and knocked out a fist-size chunk of bulletproof glass. The gyro repeater flew back between Glenn and me and shattered on the base of the top turret, but I didn’t react. I was mesmerized by the fighter that was headed straight at my face, its pilot looking at me through the flash of his propeller. With only a second to spare, he suddenly dove and disappeared under our nose.

  “Christ!” I looked at Glenn. He had his eyes squeezed shut.

  “Fire! Fire in number two!” It was Firkins calling down from the turret. I looked left. The inboard engine was trailing smoke and oil. Pieces were flying from inside, punching holes in the cowling. Glenn was back in the action, shutting down fuel to the engine and feathering the propeller. I hit the switch for the fire extinguisher. The smoke lightened and became a transparent trace.

  Both of us eased our hands across the steering yokes, feeling for the pitch and vibrations that would tell us we were about to lose control. There was nothing.

  We were still in trim with just the slightest bit of yaw toward the dead engine, easily balanced with a touch on the rudder pedal. Add a bit of power to the outboard engine on the left and cut back a bit on the right. We could still hold formation and keep up our speed.

  Others weren’t so lucky. Three of the B-17s were falling into dives with flames visible on the wings and inside the fuselages. Others were shedding parts as they struggled to stay in line. A bomber to our left had lost its entire nose—not just the Plexiglas, but everything forward of the pilot’s windscreen. The plane beyond was missing its top turret and a piece of its tail.

  Behind us, the second group of Mustangs was diving into the German formation. It was a shooting gallery, with each P-51 pulling up behind a Me-109 and shooting it to pieces. The German pilots should have been scattering. Instead, they were holding formation in a tight turn that was bringing them around to our right, setting up for another pass. Suicide! They couldn’t outrun the Mustangs trailing them, and they were headed back toward the Mustangs they had already encountered. These guys were madmen!

  Then I understood. They were risking everything to keep the bombers from getting through. Surviving our fighters was secondary. All that mattered to them was saving the aircraft factories at Regensburg.

  “Five minutes to target,” someone announced over the command frequency.

  “I can see it,” Bob Meyers reported through his bombsight.

  Over the nose, I could see the patterns of a good-sized city. I couldn’t yet make out the Messerschmitt manufacturing campus, but based on our briefings I knew exactly where it would be.

  Our guns were firing again. Half the German interceptors had survived their encounters with our escorts and were closing from high on the right. Firkins, who had balanced our three engines, was back up in his turret. I heard his machine gun firing. Again, the formation was putting up a wall of defensive fire and the Germans were still taking hits from the pursuing Mustangs. One by one they were coming apart, tossing burning engines and wings into the air, but the surviving dregs started firing on us. They closed quickly and flashed by. Right behind them came the tumbling carnage of their mounts. A burning piece of a fuselage blazed past us like a meteor. Something…an engine part or maybe a landing-gear assembly…bounced off our right wing, punching a hole near the tip. A B-17, hit by cannon fire, fell in a flat spin. Two others in our group were trailing flames. We pressed ahead, our bomb-bay doors now open.

  “We’ve got the line,” Meyers said from the nose. He had the target sighted and could have put our bomb load right into the factory compound, but it wasn’t his call. The lead bombardier would give us a mark when he dropped, then we would drop fifteen seconds later.

  The plane pitched on a burst of flak. Before I could level it, antiaircraft rounds were exploding everywhere. The German gunners knew we were on our bombing run and that we wouldn’t be taking any evasive action. They were zeroed in on us and were putting up a wall of steel. It was the most concentrated flak I had ever seen.

  Shells were exploding all around us, and shards were hitting the plane like raindrops on a tin roof. Ding, dah-ding, dah-ding, pieces of metal were tearing into us like birdshot. The radioman screamed. One of the waist gunners had been mowed down. Flak exploded under the plane ahead and the ball-turret gunner fell past our wing. We were bouncing crazily along the tops of shell bursts, being thrown from side to side. The flight deck was alive with flying pencils, clipboards, and other debris. Outside, pieces of airplanes were cartwheeling by. There were more fighters, this time four pair of the super Focke-Wulf 190s we had encountered earlier. They were shooting down on us from a higher altitude, adding a rain of cannon rounds to the hell that was being thrown up from below.

  “Thirty seconds,” the command radio announced.

  The last thirty seconds goes quickly, but not this time. The air was sizzling with lethal shards. Bombers were exploding in giant fireballs. Propeller blades, engine cowlings, tail assemblies were whizzing through the formation. A body went by, its knees tucked up to its chin. Below there were puffs of white, like buds in a cotton field—parachutes flicking open over men who had somehow made it through the carnage.

  “Bombs away! Mark.” The lead plane had dropped its bombs. Bob Meyers began his count. In fifteen seconds he would drop ours.

  Our left wing exploded. The glass next to my face shattered into a dozen spiderwebs. Something cut through the side of the cabin and sliced into my leg. I screamed with pain and let go of the wheel to grab for my foot, but a tongue of flame flicked over my left shoulder and stopped me.

  “Fire in the cockpit!” Glenn Randlett screamed into the intercom. He was locked onto the controls, determined to hold us steady for at least the next fifteen seconds. Firkins dropped from the turret and fell in between us.

  “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled. He pulled the fire extinguisher off the bulkhead.

  The oxygen line and one of the hydraulic lines had been severed right at my shoulder. The burning oil was like a cutting-torch flame, aimed by the pressure of the escaping oxygen. I tried to pull myself up out of my seat to get away from the intense heat, but the pain in my leg was crippling and my foot was trapped where the explosion had buckled in the wall. I was trapped.

  “Put it out!” It was a senseless command. I had given away to blind panic. “Put it out, dammit!” I could smell my flight jacket burning. “Jesus, get the fire!”

  Firkins fired a blast from the foam extinguisher, first at me, and then at the thin, white-hot flame.

  “It’s the oxygen line. It won’t go out.”

  “Get him on bottled oxy!” Randlett ordered.

  “Get the fire!” I screamed. “Put out the fire!”

  The flame would cook me, and the lack of oxygen would cook my brain. Firkins made the right choice: pulled my oxygen connection from the severed feeder line and connected it to a green cylinder.

  “Jesus, I’m burning!”

  He twisted open the cylinder valve.

  “Bombs away!” The Fortress jumped upward as two tons of bombs dropped out of its belly.

  I dragged at my foot, fighting desp
erately to get away from the flames, but the pain in my leg was even more intense than the fire, and my foot was locked tightly.

  Firkins was firing the foam point-blank into the flame. The fire jet began to flicker and oily smoke belched out from the hydraulic line. There was a sizzling sound, like beads of water on a hot skillet. Foam sprayed across the back of my head and rolled down into my collar.

  “Turn right to one eight zero on my mark.” It was Colonel Mast.

  “Doors closed,” the bombardier reported.

  “Mark!”

  Randlett rolled the wheel. We went into a bank and turned away from the plane ahead of us, and under the tail of the plane that had been to our right. He kept us in position throughout the maneuver. A good pilot, I thought, ready for his own command.

  “You’re okay, Skipper. Fire is out. I just gotta pinch off the hydraulic line, and the oxygen line. Only take a second.”

  I looked down. There was a crimson stain spreading up my pants leg.

  “My foot’s caught. It’s bleeding.”

  Glenn ignored me, concentrating on the formation. We were heading south, halfway through our 180-degree turn. We had pulled out of the line of the antiaircraft guns and away from the debris field that was just as lethal as the flak. To our north the Mustangs and the German fighters were engaged in a classic dogfight, with planes flipping and rolling to shake one another or gain attack position. The P-51s couldn’t hang around much longer. In the maneuvers they were burning fuel at a faster rate. They needed at least a third of a tank to make it back to England. The German interceptors had suffered staggering losses, but there were still enough of them up there to take a few more runs at us.

  “Turn right to two seventy-five at my mark,” Mast’s voice ordered. And then, “Mark!”

  Randlett eased the wheel. We banked and turned until the plane that had been ahead of us was now above and to the left.

  “She’s heavy as hell,” Glenn said. “The left wing doesn’t want to fly.”

  I pressed my forehead against the scorched window. The explosion that had blown in the side of the flight deck had also peeled back the metal skin inboard of the damaged engine. We weren’t just short of power on the left side, we were also carrying a lot of extra drag.

  “Firkins, see if you can get the engines into balance,” I said.

  He gestured with a crowbar from the emergency tool kit. “I’m going to free your leg.”

  “Get the fucking engines, dammit! I’m not going anywhere.”

  Glenn was struggling with the controls. “Get his foot out!” he snapped at the flight engineer. “We may be jumping.”

  Firkins looked from me to Glenn, and then back. I was still the plane commander. He set down the crowbar and began jockeying with the engine settings. It took him only a few seconds to understand that we were in trouble. “I’m going to have to shut down three and let it windmill.” When he shut down the right inboard engine, we’d be flying on the two outboards, not enough power to keep up with the group. By leaving the idle propeller pitched instead of feathered, he would cause it to turn like a windmill in the airstream. That would add drag to balance the peeled metal on the left wing. We would be in control, but maybe thirty knots slower than the formation. Stragglers didn’t generally make it back out of Germany.

  “Okay,” I told Firkins and then asked Glenn, “All right with you?”

  “It’s your call.”

  “You’re the one who has to fly it. I don’t have rudder pedals.”

  Randlett nodded. I keyed the group frequency, reported our condition, and told Colonel Mast that we would be falling back.

  “Take it down low,” he told me. “If you can get under their radar, you won’t have to worry about fighters.”

  Smart! At low altitude they wouldn’t have enough warning to scramble interceptors.

  The dark side of the equation was that if we got low enough, a German soldier could bring us down with his rifle.

  Firkins lifted his hands and backed away from the engine console.

  “That’s good,” Glenn Randlett commented. We were already a couple hundred yards behind our group. He eased the nose down, gaining us a little speed in the process. The Fortress seemed to be flying well. All we had to do was keep it flying until we reached the Channel.

  Firkins reached across me with the crowbar and tried to find some leverage in the twisted metal.

  “I can do that. You get back in the turret. As soon as the Mustangs pull out, those Germans will be coming down on us.”

  I tried to lift my foot, but the pain was sickening. I was still caught under the rudder pedal, and when I applied pressure it was pretty obvious that I had broken something. There was also blood puddling on the floor plate. It looked like I might bleed to death before we made it home.

  Carefully, I inserted the crowbar behind my boot and leveraged some of the metal away. I could see the side of my boot and the jagged edge of bent metal that was sticking through it. I swallowed hard. It looked as if my foot had been cut off just below the ankle.

  I pried near my toe and carefully tried to twist the foot. Another flash of pain, but I could see the boot swing slightly. Something was still connected to my leg.

  We were down under twenty thousand feet. Glenn was using the shallow dive to keep up our air speed. He had to be wondering what would happen when he leveled off. Was there too much drag for just two engines? Would we fall into a stall? He would want to pick some point to try flying level, leaving himself enough height to push the nose down if he had to recover from a stall. The last place he wanted to find out that the plane wouldn’t fly was at treetop level. While I was prying around my shoe, we discussed our options.

  Ten thousand feet, we decided. We would stay in our shallow dive to open up as much distance as possible between us and the German fighters, then we’d try flying level. If we couldn’t, we’d look for a place to crash-land. If we could fly, we would keep going down to get under German radar, leaving ourselves just enough altitude to run for the Channel.

  My foot seemed to be free inside my boot. I reached down and opened the laces, then I lifted carefully and watched a bloody sock pull free. Glenn saw the leg as I tried to stretch it out. “Jesus!” He keyed his intercom and called Rusty Jorgenson, the navigator, to the flight deck. The navigator manned two machine guns pointing out the sides of his compartment, but the bombardier was responsible for the nose gun that fired ahead. That was the mount that we couldn’t afford to abandon.

  “Jesus Christ!” Rusty said as soon as he raised his head over the deckplate. He came into the cockpit and helped pull me out of the pilot’s seat. I stretched out on the floor and he began cutting through my pants leg and then through the long johns.

  “Just a couple of holes, Marron,” he told me, “and a broken bone or two.” He was tying a tourniquet below my knee.

  “What have you got, X-ray equipment? How do you know the bone is broken?” I demanded.

  “I can see it. Unless it was sticking through your skin when you got up this morning.” I laughed, and then winced as he tightened gauze pads over the gashes.

  “Our little guys are leaving,” Firkins told us from the turret. The Mustangs had broken off the dogfight. They had just enough fuel to make it back across the Continent. Looking up through the Plexi, I could see the fighters moving past the bombers.

  “Hurry up, Rusty. I want to be in my seat when the Jerries get here.”

  “Don’t rush me. I’m charging by the hour.” He had sprinkled the powdered sulfur into the foot wound and was pressing down with another bandage.

  “Fighters coming down, one o’clock high,” Firkins called. His turret whirred around to face them.

  “Where? I don’t see them,” Meyers called from the nose.

  “You better get down there, Rusty. We’ll need the gun.”

  “Not till I get your boot back on.”

  “What for? Where am I walking to?”

  “Maybe to Poland, if we ha
ve to jump.”

  “Get on the damn gun. Then I won’t have to jump.”

  Jorgenson slid down under the flight deck and crawled forward. I used the back of my seat to drag myself up onto my good leg. Then I slid around the yoke and back into the pilot’s station. Rusty was already panning the sky with his right machine gun.

  “Hey, they’re ours. Those are our Mustangs.” Firkins was delirious with joy. I leaned forward. Sure enough. Four P-51s had pulled out of their formation and were spiraling down to join us. One of their pilots came in on our group frequency.

  “Can’t take you all the way, guys, but we can stay with you for a couple hundred miles.”

  “Much appreciated,” I answered back. “I hear the French are more neighborly than the Germans.”

  The three Mustangs set up just about over our right wing tip. They were so close I could see the rivets and read the warnings that were red-lettered on the side. No Step warned the plane crew not to step on the flaps when climbing up to the cockpit. Lube Oil Only reminded novices not to pump aviation gas into the oil tank.

  “I should have been a fighter pilot,” Randlett said, looking out at the Mustang pilots with envy.

  “Yeah!” We were driving a bus. Those guys were in sports cars.

  They left us over Belgium, at a point where we could see the Channel ahead. I jotted down the plane numbers. Those guys were going on my Christmas-card list forever.

  Glenn handled the landing, setting her down like a feather at the very end of the runway and stopping her by the first turnoff. I had never made a better landing. Our waist gunner went out in a body bag. The other waist gunner, with a piece of shrapnel in his buttocks, shared the ambulance with me. I was packed into the back of an ambulance and rushed into surgery. I woke up the next day in striped pajamas that weren’t mine and with an anesthetic headache that felt worse than my foot. The bone had been set, the tendon put back together, and three wounds were being allowed to drain.