Back to Yesterday (2 page)

1943

~ Breaking Benjamin

Dark

S
even square miles of total devastation.

That’s what I saw when I flew over Hamburg, a prominent seaport city in Nazi Germany.

I had been awakened at four a.m. by a Squadron Intelligence Officer, and I wondered, as I often did, why wars couldn’t be fought at reasonable hours. Then again, war wasn’t reasonable, was it? I guess I could take solace in the fact that I wasn’t being pulled from slumber to fight, rather, I was being lured from my cot to take photographs. Although, there was nothing safe about my job, no matter the assignment.

During my early morning briefing, I learned that this particular mission was to take aerial photographs of the results of “Operation Gomorrah,” one of the most severe bombing raids on a city to date. Hamburg had been leveled to nothing more than piles of twisted metal, bricks, and splinters of wood. Docks and military installations were flattened. Water mains, gas and electric plants…all destroyed. As I sailed across the sky snapping photographs, smoke still billowed in dark, ominous puffs around the rubble. Hamburg had been a Nazi war center, and it had been obliterated. This was what happened when nine thousand tons of bombs were dropped in a span of eight days and seven nights. I couldn’t help feeling satisfied, yet also horrified, at the sight below.

Flying low, I made about four passes, making sure I had taken enough pictures, then I headed back to base in England. The weather was nice as I whisked across the German landscape. And it was eerily quiet, although that was not uncommon. Reconnaissance pilots like me flew alone. I didn’t have a wingman or a fighter escort, and my Spitfire didn’t come equipped with guns or even a radio. It was equipped with cameras. It did have leading edge gas tanks though, which enabled me to travel greater distances, so I did have that advantage over enemy fighter planes with inferior distance capabilities. Other than the advantage of fuel, however, the only protection I had when under attack was speed and skill. I had the skill, and that was why I was picked to do these dangerous missions.

During long distance reconnaissance missions such as this one, with no one to talk to, it was easy to allow my mind to drift to happier times, and sometimes I found myself thinking about things I wish I could forget.

Like the night I walked away from Sophie.

I had never walked away from anything or anyone in my life, so walking away from her had taken every ounce of strength in me. I still don’t know how I managed it. I’d lost countless nights of sleep, retracing every step that had led to that point, wondering what I could have done differently. Wondering what things I could have said that would have changed the outcome.

And there was nothing–
nothing—
that I could have done differently.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I could have been more honest with her from the start, or with myself. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I had been lying to us both. If I had–

A line of bullet tracers streaked past my canopy, instantly getting my attention. I cursed a string of expletives because I knew better than to get distracted. You never take your eye off the ball. I looked up and around trying to find the source while simultaneously pulling back on the controls and forward on the throttle in an attempt to climb. I knew the enemy was somewhere above me, judging by the downward trajectory of the bullet tracers, and I knew my only chance at surviving was to close the distance between me and whomever had his own mission to blast me out of the sky.

It was then my attacker came into view, a German ME109.

I needed to pull harder, climb faster. I had to outmaneuver him if I wanted to survive. Speed and skill were my only hope.

He flew past me in a blur and I lost sight of him. Determined not to let him get the drop on me again, I searched all around and caught sight of him once more, off to the east at about two thousand feet below. He was streaking back for another run at me. My only option was to get into the clouds and play hide and seek, hoping his fuel would force him to return back to his base.

Then out of nowhere bullets ripped through the side of my plane. I rolled right, going into a dive, keeping my head on a swivel while I looked for the second 109. They were playing cat and mouse, and I was the mouse. They were forcing me to maneuver where I didn’t want to go. I rolled left, up and over, and then right, still trying to get in the clouds. And then another burst of bullet tracers impaled my aircraft and I knew instantly a bullet had hit my engine cowling. Fire erupted immediately. I was forced to shut off the fuel to the engine, roll over, and point my nose down in attempt to put out the fire. Keeping track of the 109s became secondary; not getting burned alive was my concern now.

Faster, I have to go faster to blow out the flames.

The ground was rushing towards me, but I knew I couldn’t pull up until the fire was out, otherwise I was dead anyway.

It’s funny the things that go through your mind when death is staring you in the face. Being in the war as long as I had I’d heard the stories. Some of the guys who thought they were going to die recalled seeing their whole lives flash in front of them. Me, I only saw colors.

Blue, yellow, and red.

I pinched my eyes closed because I wanted the colors to be the last thing I saw, not the ground rushing towards me. Holding a firm grip onto the flight control, I prayed. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I prayed for it to not hurt, for it to be over in a second. And just when I had accepted my fate, I thought I heard her voice.

Come back to me…

I opened my eyes, hoping that I had already died, that my prayers had been answered and I had been granted my final prayer to see Sophie one last time.

I wasn’t dead but the flames were out. Immediately I pulled back on the flight controls, desperate to climb.

Climb, damn you…CLIMB!

The nose lifted up…up…up. I was beginning to level out, although I wasn’t out of the woods yet. For fear of reigniting the fire, I couldn’t restart the engine, and I needed a place to land. Up ahead, north a few miles at twelve o’clock, looked to be a freshly plowed field. A farm.

Coming in and lining up, I prepared for a belly landing. If I had a solid surface I could pull the emergency lever to drop the landing gear, but the soft soil would rip my wheels right out from under me. So no engine and no landing gear, however, I knew my plane, and I knew she could take it.

Easy, Charlie…easy, easy…

Realizing that I was still looking death in the eye, the colors from before came back to me. They swirled around in my head, mixing and blending together. I blinked and tried to refocus on the task at hand, but the colors kept swirling before me. The blue became the color of Sophie’s eyes, the yellow became the color of the bow in her hair, and the red became the color of her lips.

I actually smiled, because I didn’t know which color I liked the most.

Then I saw tops of trees with their dark green foliage, then the dark, rich brown earth.

When I blinked again, the last color I saw was black.

I
opened my canopy and stood. Not knowing how long I was unconscious, my intentions were to have a look around, find out if my attackers were gonna finish me off. Then I needed to survey the damage and my surroundings. I needed to devise a plan that would get me safely back to base. However, the ringing in my ears and the dizziness in my head forced me to plop back in my seat. I held my head in my hands, trying to regain my equilibrium. Forcing myself back up on my legs, I lowered myself from the plane slowly. When I felt the ground beneath my feet, I allowed myself a minute to swallow back the nausea.

“You okay, boy?”

I spun around and reached for my 45-caliber and aimed it at the man standing five feet away. The earth spun around me, but I planted my boots in the dirt, not letting on that I saw three heads instead of one. “I will blow your head off! Arms in the air! Now!”

The man did as he was told. With arms raised, he said, “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not the enemy.” His eyes, although hesitant, gradually looked off to the side and back to me. “This is my farm.”

I watched him closely, analyzing and scrutinizing, trying to dissect his every flinch and twitch. “You speak English.”

He nodded, holding eye contact. “You’re bleeding.”

His clothes were common, plain, and dirty, consistent with someone who worked the land. His hands were callused, his skin dark and aged from the sun, leathery. “Where am I?”

“Hardenburg, Netherlands. We can keep you safe.”

“Who else is here with you?”

“My son. No one else.”

I glanced over my right shoulder at my plane and nudged my chin towards the man. “My plane, can you help me with it? I need to fix it, or hide it. She can’t sit out in the open like this.”

With hands still raised he said, “We can hide it.”

I lowered my weapon and stumbled backwards. “Thank you.” And then I succumbed to unconsciousness once again.