Bomber (12 page)

Kittering cast a flinty eye at the tall figure of Corrales at the back of the group with his peaked cap perched right at the back of his head. ‘I expect you all to behave in an exemplary fashion for the benefit of your passenger.’ Then he dismissed them too. ‘OK, on your way, and Godspeed.’

The
Macey May
’s non-coms shuffled out of the door. The sun had come out and the sky was now almost cloudless.

‘Looking good. Blue sky’s no place to hide a Messerschmitt,’ said John.

‘So what about Burnet?’ said Ralph Dalinsky.

‘I bet Stearley’s wetting his pants with excitement,’ said Skaggs. ‘I seen him buttering Burnet up. He’s probably thinking he’ll get even more ladies chasing after him if he had his picture in
Life
magazine.’

‘Hey, maybe that’ll work for us all!’ Corrales said. ‘Maybe we will be all over
Life
magazine. My mama reads that. She’ll be showing it to all the neighbours.’

They all took a final trip to the latrine, then suited up. ‘Hey, Harry, we’re going to be fine,’ said John as he zipped up his heavy fur-lined boots. ‘The news guy, he’s famous. I read him since I was a kid. He was in the Spanish Civil War, and he was at Dunkirk, and then the Blitz. Guy must be invincible!’

Ralph said, ‘Last thing he did I saw was interview Clark Gable.’

‘I like Gable,’ said Coralles. ‘He’s a gunner, ain’t he, over in Polebrook? Hah. Just like us. Anyone that famous who volunteers for this must be crazy!’

‘Gable’s just doing his duty,’ Skaggs said, ‘like we all are. I don’t give a damn if he’s a film star. They ain’t special, least no more than anyone else who volunteers to fly combat missions.’

Dalinsky changed the subject. ‘I read the news guy too. He interviewed FDR last year.’

‘What!’ said Harry. ‘This guy’s interviewed the president! And now he’s come to talk to us!’

This was extraordinary. Harry forgot about what they were going to do. He was rubbing shoulders with a man
who had met Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His parents were lifelong Democrats. They had a picture of FDR up in the kitchen. They would be over the moon when they heard about this.

The non-coms collected their guns at the armoury, then clambered aboard a jeep that took them across the base to the
Macey May
’s hardstand. The officers were already there, gathered under the nose of the B-17, chatting and smoking with another figure.

‘Yup, that’s him,’ said Skaggs. ‘Let’s hope he’s not a jerk.’

‘Hey, boys, come and meet our passenger,’ said Holberg.

‘Hi, fellas.’ Eddie Burnet shook their hands. ‘Colonel Kittering told me you’d all take a good photo. That’s why he put me in with you.’

The crew scoffed and sniggered in disbelief. The colonel hadn’t told them that part.

‘It’s a great honour to fly with you all. I haven’t flown a combat mission before so I have to tell you I’m scared shitless.’

They all chuckled and Harry liked the man at once. He was older than them, maybe in his thirties.

‘You do know this is only our second combat mission, right?’ said Corrales.

For a second Burnet eye’s flickered in surprise. He hid it well enough. ‘Great! What a story that’ll make.’

*    *    *

Inside the Fortress Harry was struck by the familiar odour of aviation fuel, sweat, lubricating oil, copper wires, a hint of urine. Before, the smell had always been comforting, and a little exciting, but now, going into combat for the second time, he found it unsettling, sinister even.

Once they were off the ground he waited as long as he could before he squeezed into his turret. He wanted Eddie to interview him. Sure enough, as they climbed above the Norfolk landscape, the journalist made his way down the fuselage.

‘Christ, it’s noisy in here!’

‘Better talk to Harry first,’ shouted John. ‘He’s gotta get into his turret any minute.’

Harry grinned. John had read his mind.

‘So what’s it like in there, Sergeant?’

Harry thought for a while. Should he be honest and tell him it was claustrophobic and he often had nightmares about being trapped, or crushed to death if he couldn’t get out and the Fortress had to do a belly landing? Or should he lie?

He lied.

‘Great piece of machinery, sir,’ said Harry. ‘You slide in and then everything moves around smooth as you like. None of them Messerschmitts are gonna get past me!’

‘That’s the spirit, son,’ said Burnet. ‘Now, where you from?’

‘Brooklyn, sir.’

‘No kidding. I’m just across the water.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Lexington Avenue. Chrysler Building.’

It was the most exclusive address in New York.

‘You can probably see into our apartment windows!’ Harry joked.

‘No kidding,’ said Burnet again. ‘You on the river front?’

‘Almost.’

Harry had watched that skyscraper go up when he was a kid. ‘Hey, here we are,’ he said. ‘You living in the most beautiful building in the world, me in the most beautiful plane in the world.’

He hoped the journalist would write that down, but he didn’t.

Harry meant it. He loved the B-17. It was the most elegant, magnificent machine he had ever seen.

‘Let’s have a shot of you getting in your turret,’ said Burnet. ‘I wanna get as many shots off as I can before we get too high. I’ve been warned things might freeze up above fifteen thousand feet.’

Harry felt pleased with himself. Burnet had spoken to him, and now he wanted a pic. That was something his mom and dad would be proud to show to all their friends.

Harry anchored the turret in its straight-down position and opened the hatch. For a moment he even forgot that pit of the stomach fear he usually felt, levering himself into that little bubble thousands of feet above the surface of the earth.

‘No parachute, huh?’ said Burnet.

‘No space,’ said Harry.

‘You worry about that?’ asked Burnet.

‘No, sir,’ he lied. ‘My buddies will help me out if we get into trouble.’

Harry squeezed down, stopping to give a thumbs-up and a grin when he was halfway in. Then he snapped the lid down, taking extra care to ensure the latches were locked tight. He pressed the control buttons and felt the mechanism respond with a reassuring swiftness. That was it. He was alone now, until Holberg told him he could get out.

Harry smiled. For a moment this strange turn of events had taken their minds off an awful truth. But then it hit him hard. Today was another day when there might not be an afternoon. There might not even be a midday, if they were unlucky.

Hauptmann Heinz Frey peered down from the cockpit of his Messerschmitt 109. He had never got used to that mixture of fear and excitement he felt before an attack. How could you? There you were, ten thousand metres up in the stratosphere, one or two thousand metres higher than the bombers, ready to scream down out of the sun. His airspeed indicator touched 640 kilometres an hour when he did that. It was a phenomenal feeling. Like being one of the gods of ancient times. And then in a matter of seconds the bombers would change from tiny specks streaming white trails to great lumbering machines spitting tracer.

If you were lucky, they crumbled under your cannon fire. You could see sparks and flashes dancing along the wings and fuselage. Sometimes they blew up in front of you, if you hit a bomb or a fuel tank. That was alarming. You could get caught up in that.

Then you would streak past and in a split second you might see the frightened faces of the boys inside. Frey didn’t like that. Once he caught a glimpse inside the
cockpit of a Fortress he had hit and there was a pilot sitting there in his brown leather jacket, his head missing. The co-pilot staring straight ahead. At that moment Frey had felt an overwhelming desire to throw up into his oxygen mask. But he managed to hold it down. You had to be careful as you dived through the formations – ‘combat boxes’, he had heard they called them. A split second’s bad timing, a momentary twitch of the joystick in the wrong direction, and you could collide and both of you would be engulfed in a great fireball. He had seen that happen a couple of times.

Like many of his comrades he was a veteran from the Russian front. They didn’t usually make those kinds of mistakes. But the older pilots like him, the ones who had reached their mid-twenties, were slowly disappearing and being replaced by fresh-faced young boys. The new ones were full of Nazi zeal, but that didn’t make up for experience.

Something else you noticed too, when you dived through the formations, were the pictures the Americans painted on the noses of their bombers. Nudes, or at least the scantiest clad girls imaginable. Frey sometimes wondered if these pictures were a deliberate ploy by the Americans to put the fighter pilots off their aim. The Propaganda and Enlightenment officials of the Luftwaffe had given them a talk recently and one political officer had told them these ‘obscene paintings’ were an obvious sign of the decadence of that ‘cesspit of a mongrel nation’.

But Frey had a sneaking regard for these Yankee pilots. Theirs was a terrifying job, and, like him, they were doing their duty. He was glad it wasn’t him stuck in one of those lumbering machines, although even he could admit that the Fortresses were beautiful-looking aircraft. He even went to talk to them sometimes, if they crashed near his airbase. They were OK. Decent men in the main. A few had come from German stock and had even spoken to him like natives. They were careful not to talk politics on those occasions.

Now here he was ready to dive, almost wing to wing with his
Schwarm
of three other fighters, the sun warm on the back of his flying helmet. They were seconds away from it. Frey’s mouth was desperately dry but he resisted the temptation to reach for his water bottle and have a final swig. He might miss the formation leader’s signal to go.

The lead Messerschmitt tilted its wings and dived. The rest of the
Jagdgeschwader
followed behind with well-trained precision. There were fifty of them in that fighter group, up in the sky that morning. They had missed the bomber stream on the way in. That had been a great pity and deprived them of the opportunity to down these beasts before they dropped their bombs, but they would make sure plenty of the huge machines didn’t get home.

Frey was set to squeeze off his first volley and waited until the Fortress was bang in the middle of his sight. He felt the fuselage of his tiny Messerschmitt tremble as his machine guns and cannon poured fire into the looming silver bomber. He was too busy concentrating to really
notice whether his shots hit home, too concerned to make sure he flew between the gaps in the tight combat box formation.

Frey came out of his dive, the G-forces pinning him hard to his seat and making even the simple action of pulling back the control stick a matter of sheer strength. He realised he was soaked in cold sweat and waited a few seconds for his head to clear. A B-17 near his target had exploded dangerously close as he made his pass.

As he prepared to climb again for another go at the bombers he noticed his controls were sluggish. The engine was misfiring and something was clearly not right. Heinz Frey was not a coward, but he knew when it was time to leave the field of battle. He radioed his commander to tell him what had happened. Then he turned his Messerschmitt away from the bomber stream and headed for the nearest airbase. He was not going to throw his life away in a failing machine, and if he was lucky his fighter would be easily repaired and ready for the next assault. It was a shame, he reflected, that he had not caused any significant damage.

In the nose, Bortz had followed the diving Messerschmitt all the way in, realising at least seven seconds before he fired that this one had the
Macey May
in its sites. But Bortz had never really mastered the intricacies of the remote-controlled Bendix chin turret. Even in training, his aim had been barely acceptable. Bortz was a highly skilled bombardier so they had turned a blind eye to his poor shooting. Cain was there too in the nose, firing one of the single side-guns just beside him.

Burnet stood behind them, just by the passageway up to the cockpit, peering with undisguised fear through the great Plexiglas nose cone, and realising all at once that all that lay between them and Luftwaffe cannon shells and bullets was a transparent plastic shell.

To their right there was a huge explosion. A Fortress next to them had disintegrated and was falling out of the sky. Bortz turned round to Burnet and shouted, ‘Did you see that?’ but even as the words left his mouth he realised he was talking to a dead man. Burnet lay sprawled across the narrow passage with the top of his head blown off and
a look of wide-eyed astonishment on his face. You could see the grey mass of his brain among the bone and hair.

The Messerschmitt swept past the
Macey May
’s right side. Ralph Dalinsky rattled off a volley. The tiny Messerschmitt was too close and going too fast to have any real chance. If he hit anything, it would be a lucky shot. And Dalinsky was sure he hadn’t been lucky.

Harry, under the wing, saw the Messerschmitt as it flew away and had more time to get a bead on it. He fired a long burst at the limit of his range and thought he saw something fly off the fighter.

Another Messerschmitt buzzed past almost as fast as the eye could register. Then Harry felt the ship shake and could see fragments flying off the wing close to his turret. The shots had landed right on the fuel tanks and his heart froze as he waited for the wing to catch fire and the Fortress to start to plummet.

‘Captain, that last pass caught us on the right wing,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I saw it too.’ The voice was Dalinsky. He sounded as frightened as Harry was feeling. ‘Bits were flying everywhere. Could ignite any second.’

‘OK, understood.’ Holberg’s voice was calm and collected. ‘Keep looking for fighters. Engines are still running OK. Those tanks are self-sealing. If there was going to be a fire, it would have caught by now.’

Harry didn’t know how Holberg managed to keep calm like that.

‘Two Fockes, three o’ clock low,’ cut in Dalinsky again.