Bomber (3 page)

Gifford was sitting next to Harry. ‘This the posting you wanted?’ he asked.

Harry shook his head. ‘I was hoping to get some place out in the Pacific. See something different. Somewhere I’d never get the chance to see in civilian life.’

But Gifford scoffed. ‘England’s much better than some flyblow island in the Pacific, fighting the Japs.’

‘Japs execute Allied pilots if they capture them,’ chipped in another of the
Carolina Peach
boys.

Harry had heard about that too. A photo had been passed around in the mess hall at the training camp in Nebraska. There was a blindfolded Allied fighter pilot, kneeling down about to have his head chopped off by an officer with a samurai sword, while a crowd of Japanese soldiers looked on. Harry had felt a wave of nausea when he’d seen that. He couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be that young pilot, waiting for the fatal blow. Maybe England was better after all.

‘Hey, Charlie, you see that doll on the
Yankee Doodle
?’ called out another guy in his crew. ‘She’s buck naked, man!’

The
Macey May
had parked next to it when they had arrived. Their own nose illustration was more restrained. Corrales made the whole table laugh, telling the story of the
Macey May
’s nose art. Holberg had named his Fortress after his wife, and had been shocked to see the painting Stearley and Hill had done – a blonde girl with a Betty Grable hairdo, wearing nothing but a pair of red stilettos.

John Hill laughed. ‘Captain made us put her in a red bathing suit when he saw it.’

After they’d eaten, the non-coms from the
Macey May
said a friendly farewell to the
Carolina Peach
boys and went for another stroll around their new home and watched the last of the sunset. It was magical, but it reminded Harry how fragile his link was to this beautiful world. He noticed Ralph Dalinsky cross himself and mouth a silent prayer and envied him. Harry didn’t know what to think, but he found it hard to believe in a God looking over his creation if even half of what he’d heard about the Nazis was true.

It was almost dark when they returned to their hut. Jim Corrales turned on the light switch and they were shocked to see that half the room had been cleared out. All the cases and pin-ups and drying clothes that had been there this afternoon had gone. And the bunks had been stripped of their linen. The hut had been given a clean too and smelt of bleach.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Corrales. ‘Those guys were standing here this morning, just like we are now. Then they flew to Schweinfurt and they’re gone.’

‘Maybe they moved to another hut?’ said John. Everyone else just shook their heads.

It reminded Harry of the time he had spent in the Beth-El Hospital in Brooklyn with his elder brother, David, during the 1941 polio outbreak. His brother had been far sicker than him and was sent to another ward. When Harry went to see him the next morning, he found an empty bed laid out fresh and ready for the next patient. A sharp smell of bleach had hung in the air. Knowing at once that David was dead, Harry had fled in helpless tears. Every time he smelt it now it sent a shiver through his body.

They prepared for bed in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts. Harry stared at the bottom of the bunk above, wondering if he was ever going to get to sleep. He was too tired. And, he had worked it out, it was still only six o’clock in the evening over there in Brooklyn. He thought of his mom and dad. He had promised to write to them the minute he arrived in England, but he just wasn’t in the mood. The day’s events played out in his mind. It had been a real roller coaster. The joy of flying above the clouds. Relief when they had landed safely after such a long flight. The thrill of being in a strange new land. Horror at witnessing such a gruesome crash.

When Harry finally fell into a restless sleep his dreams were troubling. As a child he had read about the gods of ancient Greece and how they could cut the silver thread of life according to their whim and fancy. In his mind’s eye he saw himself gliding like a bird through sunset clouds,
suspended from that silver thread. At once he felt in terrible danger and woke with a start. His chest felt heavy; his mouth was dry. Outside, dim light peeped through the flimsy curtains. It felt cold and damp in the hut and he shut his eyes tight, dreading what the next few days would bring.

Three days after they arrived, Harry’s crew had still not been allowed to leave the airbase. ‘They think we’ll run away!’ said Jim Corrales. ‘Go off to London and join a Limey circus! Beats this gig, that’s for sure!’

On the second day at Kirkstead they had all attended escape classes as a crew. A crusty British officer, on loan from the RAF, introduced himself as Flight Lieutenant Bowman.

‘It is extremely important that you bury your parachute as soon as you land,’ he said, in clipped upper-class tones, just like a Hollywood Brit.

Dalinsky put up his hand. ‘When do we get to try out the parachutes, sir?’

The flight lieutenant gave him a hard stare. ‘When your aeroplane is on fire and you need to get out of it.’

A murmur of discontent went round the room. Holberg stood up, announcing his name and rank to let this guy know he wasn’t going to be talked down to, and asked if he was serious. ‘Do you mean to say we aren’t trained on how to bail out from a plane?’ he asked.

‘You train on the ground,’ said the flight lieutenant. ‘You go through the bailing-out drill until you can do it blindfolded. All you have to remember is to pull that ripcord on your chute after you count to five. That way you’ll be clear of the aircraft. Take it from me, you don’t need training for that.

‘And you need to ditch your uniform as soon as you make contact with friendly French or Dutch civilians,’ continued Bowman. ‘I think we can safely say there will be no friendly German civilians.’

He smiled at his little joke. Harry was still reeling from the news that there would be no proper parachute training. Surely it couldn’t be that simple. How did you steer the thing or land?

‘You must find civilian clothes as quickly as possible,’ said Bowman. ‘But it is essential you keep your identity discs.’ He stopped and for a brief moment a look of distaste flashed across his face. ‘I believe you call them “dog tags”. If you’re caught without “dog tags”, the Germans might think you are a spy and that will prove fatal.’

To underline his point he said, ‘Spies are shot if they are lucky, and tortured then shot if they are not so lucky.’

At first Harry had found it difficult to take this stuffed-shirt Brit seriously, but as the lecture progressed a cold chill settled in his guts. This was definitely not a game. It had never yet occurred to him that if they survived being shot down, they would face another terrifying ordeal on the ground.

‘I urge you all to take the latest issue of a British newspaper with you when you go into combat. If you have a copy of
The Times
or the
Eastern Daily Press
, then you can prove to Fritz that you have just arrived.’

That, at least, seemed a pretty simple thing to do to stop you being shot.

After the lecture, they went off to have their photos taken. This, explained Bowman, was so they could carry passport-sized prints for fake identity cards. The photographer had a small selection of weather-beaten jumpers and jackets. ‘You’re supposed to be a French civilian. You can wear a beret too, if you really want to get into the role.’

The next day, the little passport-sized photographs arrived. ‘Hey, Friedman, look at you.’ Corrales ruffled his hair. ‘You look like a little cherub.’

Harry batted away his hand. ‘And you look like an axe murderer.’

He didn’t like the guys teasing him about his age. He hadn’t told any of them he was really seventeen, but he thought they probably knew. He told himself to forget about it. He was here now, and if anyone was going to stop him from flying, they would have done so by now.

They had another lecture later that morning, this time from the colonel. Kittering told them it had cost many thousands of dollars to train them, so it was their duty as loyal Americans to try to escape if they were shot down. Harry wanted to ask about parachute training, and how they were supposed to land, but he lost his nerve.
Sometimes you were made to feel like there were questions you just didn’t ask.

After breakfast the following day, Holberg gathered them together in front of the
Macey May
and announced they would be making a high-altitude flight that morning. Most bombing raids were flown at twenty-five thousand feet, even thirty thousand. It was thought this great height would offer protection from German flak and fighters. That was higher than most of them had ever flown before, even in training. They were to report to the equipment store immediately to draw out oxygen masks and heated suits.

‘You need to shave every morning you have a high-altitude flight,’ said the instructor, after they’d collected their masks. ‘If these masks leak, you won’t get enough oxygen. You can easily pass out without even realising. And if no one else on the flight notices, they’ll find you stone cold dead by the time they find out something’s wrong.’

Harry felt a twinge in his gut and recalled mess-time conversations with other B-17 crews, warning them of the perils of high-altitude flying.

The masks were strange things – leather and canvas muzzles that attached to their leather flying caps, with a snaking tube that connected to their individual oxygen supplies. They took away your individuality, making you an anonymous sinister figure – like something out of a science-fiction movie, Harry thought.

Harry’s high-altitude suit was a curious affair too. Over his vest and underpants he pulled on a heavy one-piece suit made of blue woollen fabric lined with heated wires. On top of that came heavy canvas trousers and shirt and a sheepskin-lined leather flying jacket.

He didn’t like the idea of having that electricity right next to his underwear.

‘You’ll be grateful for it,’ said Curtis Stearley, the co-pilot, who was standing by Harry in the equipment store. ‘I had to do one or two high-altitude flights in training and it’s pretty unpleasant that high up. Nothing like the trip we did over the Atlantic. And you’ll be in that little ball, barely able to move to keep yourself from freezing. Look after that suit, Harry. It’ll be a lifesaver.’

Not for the first time, Harry regretted the duty he had been assigned. He was the
Macey May
’s ball turret gunner. His own physiognomy had decided his fate. There was no volunteering. At five foot six, he was the shortest in the crew, and the ball turret needed a small man to squeeze in and operate it.

To begin with, Harry had been fascinated by his revolving Sperry turret with two powerful Browning machine guns, slung under the belly of the B-17, just behind the wings. But then he got his hands on the instruction manual and realised what a nightmare it was. Just climbing into the turret could kill him. If he didn’t do it right, the turret might turn on its finely balanced rocker and snap him in half against the side of the aircraft. What made it even
more difficult was that you only got into the turret once the plane had taken off, and you had to get out of it before you landed. He didn’t like the idea of lowering himself in with ten thousand feet between him and the ground, and the aircraft shaking and jolting about.

The turret was as cramped as expected, especially in a heavy flying suit. But once you were in it, and had mastered the complex controls, there was no denying it was an amazing piece of machinery. You could swivel round 360 degrees at the push of a lever, and the whole thing rocked from 0 degrees level with the belly to 90 degrees straight down with equal ease. Early on in training, back in Nebraska, some of the gunners had dropped out, claiming being in the turret made them so nauseous they could not cope. But Harry had discovered he was unaffected by all that swivelling and dipping throughout the whole field of fire. Operating the gun excited him, despite its danger and discomfort.

What he couldn’t shake off though was the thought of how awkward it would be to get out of that little ball if the B-17 was going down. There was no space for a parachute in there. And he could imagine how difficult it would be to get out when everyone else was abandoning the plane.

By ten o’ clock that morning the crew had all clambered into their heavy flying gear and were ready to go. Holberg gathered them round, underneath the nose.

‘You need to be on full alert throughout this flight,’ he told them sternly. ‘Sometimes German fighters pounce on bombers on training missions. They think we’ll be easy
meat. Combat rookies. So let’s prove ‘em wrong. You’ve all done your drills; you’re all good shots.’

Then he softened. ‘And I definitely don’t want your folks getting a telegram telling them we were shot down over Cheshire or the Irish Sea.’

Like a football team before a game, before embarking they gathered together in a group hug.

‘OK,’ said Holberg, ‘let’s go,’ and the crew dispersed to their various entry hatches.

‘You could go hunting at the North Pole in this,’ said John, as the rear gunners clambered into the narrow door just in front of the tail.

Dalinsky smiled. ‘I’d feel a lot safer with a Browning than a harpoon.’

It was cumbersome moving around, but once the
Macey May
had taken off and Harry had clambered into his turret and plugged in his heated suit, he began to feel quite snug. It was a cloudless late summer day, and the blue sky and green land with its patchwork of fields and farms made for a stunning vista.

They climbed steadily, heading north-west towards the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. That was to be their turning point and would provide them with a flight time similar to the bombing runs they would be expected to make over enemy territory.

After half an hour Holberg’s voice came over the interphone. ‘Ten thousand feet. Oxygen masks on. Keep watching the skies.’

Holberg never wasted a word when they were flying, although he was friendly enough on the ground. He instilled in them all the importance of saying only what needed to be said when they were airborne.