Authors: Paul Lally
We lived on opposite sides of the tracks - literally, because my father was an engineer on the Florida East Coast Railroad, running passenger trains back and forth from Miami to Key West. By contrast, Orlando’s father lay in an unmarked grave somewhere down in Cuba, killed as a freedom fighter for
Partido Independiente de Color
.
Two years earlier, with a ‘dead or alive’ price on his head, his father had sent Orlando and his mom packing across the Florida Straits to Key West, where we fell in together and became thick as little thieves. When word of his father’s death arrived, we became angry little thieves as well.
‘Try it now!’ Orlando boomed.
I grabbed the gear crank and started turning.
‘Stop! Now go the other way!’
‘Going the other way.’
‘Stop!’
Orlando wedged his head and shoulders into the cockpit, huffing and puffing, his breath hot on my face, his fist the size of a small ham opened up to reveal a broken piece of metal.
‘Hinge-pin snapped.’
‘Can you fix it?’
He snorted like a bull. ‘We’ll figure out something.’
‘You and the Lord?’
He gave me a long hard look, and then stomped off.
Most of the ‘Conchs’ - what we call Key West natives - frowned on this skinny little white boy playing with that chunky little black boy. Slavery was long gone in the south but not long forgotten. Even so, folks knew better than to cross swords with my mother, Rosie Carter, and dare tell her how to raise her boy. They wisely looked the other way while Orlando and I continued being black-and-white friends.
To boost my father’s meager paycheck - he was just an engine hostler back when O and I first met - Rosie went to work in a cigar factory. If you remember Prohibition, you might remember that in the 1920s Key West had hundreds of them. Bad booze mixes with good cigars.
Anyhow, Rosie worked shoulder to shoulder with O’s mom, Carlita, rolling cigar after cigar, hour after hour, day after day, and became fast friends. By the way, you become friends with my mother whether you like it or not. She has a way of making you feel like there’s nobody in the world as interesting as you, while she looks at you with those cornflower-blue eyes of hers and smiles at what you’re saying.
My late wife Estelle used to claim that I looked at her the same way Rosie did. I would always disagree, arguing that I was cantankerous, opinionated, bull-headed and cocky. But she’d wait me out, smiling, knowing that sooner or later I’d come to a sputtering stop and shrug my shoulders and surrender.
That’s because my wife was one of the only people - aside from my mother - who saw the real Sam Carter gliding along beneath the hard-polished skin of ‘Samuel J. Carter, Pan American Airlines;’ a stiff, by-the-book, professional airman doing the job he’d trained a lifetime to do; bravely piloting flying boats in and out of harbors from Miami to Buenos Aires, and landplanes from Mexico City to Panama, day after day, week after week without a murmur of complaint; rarely seeing his wife and kids, and utterly determined to make captain even if it killed him, which in hindsight maybe would have been better, all things considered.
But it didn’t happen that way. I’m here writing this down as living proof that what you think is going to happen in your life is just that, a thought. What really happens is what really happens.
And what happened to me is that the night the Nazis dropped their atomic bombs, my life basically vanished, including my job with Pan Am - courtesy of my own actions, let me state for the record. And now I was just a small time charter pilot flying a beat-up hangar queen, scrambling to make ends meet in between trying to pick up the pieces of my dream.
It sure as hell wasn’t easy. Still isn’t.
But that’s not the story I’m telling now, with O and me in mid-air, trying to make a living in a new world not of our choosing – or any American’s, for that matter.
Ever since the Neutrality Act, the Nazis had restricted civilian flights along the Atlantic coastline - only one of their many conditions. They had officials on the ground to enforce them, too. Not soldiers, of course. Helmets and hobnail boots would not have gone down well with the American public.
No, sir, these swastika-wearing bastards knew how to do things right by using ‘Compliance Officers;’ smooth-talking, diplomatic types in civilian clothes who just ‘happened’ to be stationed at key industrial sites across the United States to make sure our factories were turning out cars not tanks; washing machines not fighter airplanes. Nothing to aid the global war effort. No arms. No weapons. Just stuff and more stuff.
They even shipped over their own military aircraft to make sure we toed the line in the restricted airspace, using squadrons of top-of-the-line Messerschmitt Me-109’s, the same plane that had helped win the Battle of Britain in 1940. But for their enforcement role in America, they painted the planes white. And the menacing, black iron crosses on their wings? A friendly green, instead, to make everything seem nice and innocent and diplomatic-like. But make no mistake, the planes carried twenty millimeter cannons and their pilots were more than happy to shoot you down if you flew into ‘temporarily restricted airspace.’
Temporary, my ass.
Berlin calmly insisted these restrictions were ‘dictated by current events and not to be considered permanent.’ which was a nice way of saying, ‘until you get your country up and running again, we’re going to make damn sure you don’t do anything stupid, like start a war. Because if you do we will hammer you flat the same way we’re hammering Russia flat.’
And they were doing that in spades. At last report, Stalin was still alive and well, but like D.C. and New York, the city of Moscow was nothing more than a smoking nuclear crater. What was left of the Soviet government had retreated east behind the Ural Mountains, claiming they were merely re-grouping. But from what radio reports were saying - propaganda or not - Hitler was about to pull off what Napoleon had only dreamed about and God help the Soviet peasants who stood in the way of the SS Troopers goose-stepping eastward, where sooner or later they would shake hands with Imperial Japan.
Final score? Fascists: 1 -- World: 0.
In the middle of all this crap, here’s what caught my attention. For some odd reason, Pan American Airlines was still flying airplanes, which surprised many people, but not me. I figured its president Juan Trippe had cut some kind of secret deal with the Germans that allowed his big silver birds to keep making money for his airline. That’s how Trippe was.
‘War? What war? Let’s get down to business, boys.’
By contrast, American Airlines and United Airlines had had their wings clipped on all their coastal operations. Me? I had my wings taken away literally. But don’t blame Pan Am. They prefer sober pilots in the cockpit and I had turned up drunk. Twice, actually. If I had been Trippe, I’d have pulled my wings too. But in my case, I handed them over before they lowered the boom. Regardless of what had happened to me to create this situation, no matter how justifiable my behavior, company rules were company rules and I had broken them.
On purpose.
‘New York’s coming up to starboard,’ I shouted back to Orlando.
‘Keep clear of it, you hear? It’s still glowing.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing there now but a big hole in the ground.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’
He had a point. It had cost me five hundred dollars to bribe Air Compliance Control for our extended flight plan to Key West. I wasn’t about to lose it by violating their precious airspace. I patted the polished oak control yoke. How many times in the past had my sweaty hands gripped this very wheel under very different circumstances?
This particular S-38, NC-6000, had a previous life before becoming a hangar queen for the Providence charter outfit, where I had bought her and changed her call sign to ‘Carter Air 45.’ She had once been the star performer of Pan American’s fledgling airline service from Miami to Havana in the early 1930s. In her heyday, she had flown fun-seeking passengers, pockets full of gambling money, from Pan Am’s Key West seaplane base down to swinging and swaying Havana for a fun-and-sex-filled weekend.
I know, because I was flying in the right hand seat and Captain Fatt, my mentor, the left.
Together we’d skim across the smooth waters, lift off and begun that familiar, slow, lazy climb to twenty-five hundred feet where we would weave in and out of the puffy cumulous clouds and make our way south across the Florida Straits. Weather permitting we could cover the ninety miles separating our two nations in less than an hour and deliver our passengers safe and sound to the Havana’s Prohibition-free, bar-filled streets.
I glanced over at the empty co-pilot’s seat and remembered a younger, happier Sam Carter sitting in that very same spot ten years earlier, hands in his lap, patiently waiting for Fatt to swing the wheel over to his side and say in his gravelly voice, ‘You have the aircraft, kid.’
‘I have the aircraft, sir.’
‘Maintain your heading, I’m going back to mingle.’
And with that, he would heave up his bulk from the left-seat and ease back into the passenger compartment. Already snug quarters with seating for twelve, Fatt’s presence made it burst at the seams. But happily so.
As I flew along, I would do my best to eavesdrop on his smooth banter, trying to learn his secret of mixing drinks for the passengers using the small bar built into the back of the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the paying customers. The plane’s original plans had called for isolating these two areas. But Juan Trippe understood the value of a captain mingling with his customers and modified it. Captain Fatt’s dominating physical presence not only reassured them to the safety of aviation, it also guaranteed future flights would be booked on our small airline, not some rival.
Pan Am was tiny back in 1929 when I first started working there. Trippe had opened service out of Key West using under-powered Fokker Tri-planes, lots of prayer, and miles of baling wire. I joined them a few months later as an eager nineteen year-old radio operator, after lying that I knew all about it. But after studying my head off the night before my final interview, I managed to bluff my way through the tests the next day, and kept at it until I actually did learn Morse code and communicated with the Pan Am planes flying back and forth across the Straits carrying passengers and mail.
But I didn’t want to pound a Morse Key the rest of my life. I wanted to fly. I already had my license. Against my father and mother’s wishes, I had run away from Key West at seventeen to help build runways for the airmail routes. Along the way I got flying lessons here and there from airmail pilots who took my hard-earned money, stuffed me in the front seat of a beat-up Jenny J-4 biplane and showed me the difference between a slip and a crab, a bank and a turn until I finally got the idea and soloed.
Don’t get me wrong. Saying you’ve soloed an airplane is like saying ‘I took my first step.’ There’s a lot more to walking than that. And don’t forget running, leaping, jumping and twisting. Flying’s the same way; everything’s new and different and scary, then you do it over and over again until it becomes second nature, and then disappears completely and your hands and feet and head and heart become one with the stick and rudder pedals and ailerons and elevator and you’re no longer flying an airplane, you’re just flying.
A big BANG from the back.
‘Try it now,’ Orlando shouted,
I cranked the landing gear handle. Something clicked, and the drawbars on both wings rose, lifting the wheel struts in turn, and the tires pivoted smoothly into the ‘up’ position.
‘Perfect!’
‘Now the other way.’
‘You sure?’
‘Trust in the Lord.’
I did as I ordered. They worked perfectly.
Orlando dropped down into the right seat. He stroked the chipped and battered instrument panel.
‘Poor girl’s been through a lot.’
I pointed down. ‘So has New York.’
We were still well outside the ‘No-Fly’ zone, but even so, any minute I imagined Me-109’s swooping down on us like greyhounds toying with a groundhog. I leveled off at two thousand feet. From here difficult to see much of the atomic bomb damage. The summer ground haze didn’t make it any easier. But what I could see matched up with the devastating photographs and newsreels that had flashed across the nation during that terrible week. That had been in black-and-white. This was full color.
Right around 82nd street, you could see a radical change in the skyline. From the beginning of the Manhattan Island down to that spot, the shapes of various apartments and office buildings and skyscrapers reached upwards like so many different fingers and thumbs. But from 82nd street down to the Battery, like a giant foot had crushed everything flat. In a white-hot, shattering instant, the nuclear blast formed a crater a half-mile across and destroyed a full third of the island. Final casualty counts were over eight-five thousand dead and wounded. New Yorkers never saw it coming. Neither did Washingtonians. How could they?
Afterward the Nazis bragged how their two-stage A9-10 intercontinental rockets had performed flawlessly on their four-thousand mile, pre-emptive strikes. Newsreels showed simulated animation footage of the two-stage beasts lifting off their launch pads at Peenemünde. At sixty-thousand feet, the first stage burnt out and fell to the ground by parachute, while the second stage accelerated to over three thousand miles-an-hour and became a silent, nuclear-tipped poison dart.
‘Time to be good citizens,’ I said, and turned on the radio. For a moment I forgot the assigned frequency. Then it came to me, and with it a flash of anger at what I had to do. I let it pass before I keyed the microphone.
‘New York Control, Carter Air four-five is with you at two thousand feet, heading two-ten degrees.’
Hiss, crackle; lousy radios. Then a German-accented voice, clipped and precise: ‘Carter Air four-five, why are you not at your assigned altitude of three thousand meters?’
‘In-flight emergency.’
A long hissing wait. ‘You are declaring an emergency?’