Israel (75 page)

Danny would never forget his first time. The instructor took in the rear cockpit and the cadet sat up front. The plane had no electrical system; it started up by hand cranking—the cadet's job. As soon as the engine caught, Danny stowed the crank and climbed aboard.

He plugged in to the communication system and heard his instructor say, “Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

The PT-19 began to taxi, and then speedballed down the runway, wheels rumbling, engine screaming, and took off.

The wind tore at his goggles and pulled back the corners of his mouth into a mad dog's grin. Danny was mewling with fearful exhilaration as they banked and rolled through thin air. He found himself hanging from his seat straps. Earth was the sky, and the clouds were at his feet. He found himself pressed down into the cockpit as the plane clawed its way toward the sun, and suddenly the laws of physics and aeronautics made sense to him in a way they never had as equations on a blackboard.

After they landed Danny didn't want to leave the plane. How could he endure being earthbound after that?

“Well, what do you think?” his instructor asked slyly.

Danny's goggles were tear-streaked and his lips were dry, stretched, cracked. “I love it.”

“Tomorrow you fly,” the instructor drawled, and strode away.

“By the numbers. Brakes?”

“Set.”

“Control?”

“Free.”

“Gas on fuller tank and pressure up. Crank her up until that prop begins to roll.

“Taxi by making s-turns, and don't hit those brakes
too hard or you'll put her right on her nose. Check the sky and then take her up.

“By the numbers. Fly straight and level. Make those turns without slipping and sliding. Watch your turn and bank indicator, cadet. The little black ball in the glass tube stays right in the middle if you do it right.

By the numbers. Stalls, both with power on and power off. The instructor would throttle back until the engine was idling and haul the control stick right into his crotch to get the nose up. Meanwhile, he'd be tap-dancing on his rudder pedals to keep her from swinging right to left. As the aircraft slows and its nose rises, there is no longer sufficient lift to keep it airborne. The control stick and rudders begin to float, and the aircraft trembles as if in anticipation—and then the stall. Push the stick forward into a nose dive, and once air speed is reattained, level off.

And then the instructor drawled, “It's your turn.”

Every man got eight to twelve hours of dual instruction, and after that if you didn't wash out the day would come when you demonstrated everything you'd learned to your instructor. Then he'd mutter something like, “I could use a cup of joe, so if you want to take a little spin around on your own, you might as well.”

And then you did, and most made it, though somebody always didn't. If that unfortunate managed to parachute out, if he managed to walk away from it, if he didn't crash and burn, he'd be a washout. Everyone would shrug and pretend they weren't all pale and stricken and thankful it wasn't them and echo what the instructors always said. “He wasn't flying the plane; the plane was flying him . . .”

Following that solo was training in flying by instruments and the aerobatic maneuvers that are a fighter pilot's stock in trade. A lot of cadets decided to be bomber and transport pilots at that point, and there were more crashes and burns.

By then it was November and the sky was grey
cotton-wool, the cold awesome. Danny liked it that way. Nobody wanted to go up in weather like that, which meant there was always a plane available for anyone who wanted to rack up double flight hours—guys like him, the crazy ones, the would-be fighter pilots.

In November, after seventy hours in PT-19s, Danny and his class moved on to Independence, Kansas, and basic flying school. Here they would log more hours in the air, this time in North American BT-14s, bigger than the PT-19 and twice as powerful. There was more aerobatics, far more satisfying in the heavier, more powerful BT-14. There were long cross-country solos and more classes in protocol.

At the end of basic came the final cut. There were hundreds more volunteers for single-engine advanced training than the army needed, and most cadets would be assigned to multi-engine training. Danny crossed his fingers, he prayed and he triumphed.

His orders read Eagle Pass, Texas, single-engine training. When he left there it would be in a box, as a washed-out former cadet—a new buck private in the Army—or as a fighter pilot with gold bars on his shoulders and silver wings pinned to his chest.

Danny wandered on down the airstrip, looking for his instructor and the plane he'd be taking up. As usual it was an AT-6, but with one vital difference. Today Danny drew one with a forward-firing machine gun in its nose. He was going to get his first opportunity to practice aerial gunnery.

There would be five other cadets taking turns blasting away at the banner target towed by airplane above an empty field. Scores could be sorted out because the bullet tips of each cadet's belt of ammo were painted an individual color. The paint ring on a bullet hole would later identify the shooter.

“How's your eye doing?” Danny's instructor said by way of greeting.

“It's just a shiner.” Danny shrugged. “I can see okay.” He got it in a fight last week with some Georgia cracker who cornered him in the latrine and demanded to see his Jew's horns. The guy got in his lucky punch to Danny's eye and Danny managed to land a right jab on the cracker's nose before they went into a clinch. The guy lost his footing, slipped on the wet floor and knocked himself out against the rim of a sink. That ended the fight and Danny's most recent experience of anti-Semitism. There'd not been as much of it as he'd feared, but then, he was coming into the military at a relatively late date.

Since the fight he and the cracker had stayed out of each other's way. Danny guessed all that noble stuff about guys having it out with their fists and then becoming the best of friends only happened in the movies.

“Well, you just remember to keep that shiner of yours on the turn and bank indicator. I don't want you forgetting everything you've learned just because you've got yourself a gunsight to look through.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don't forget that you've only got a few seconds to make your approach, squeeze off a volley and get under the target.”

“Yes, sir,” Danny repeated a bit more impatiently.

The instructor scowled. “It's just that this here airplane cost Uncle Sam a pretty penny and I don't want some damn cadet cracking her up.”

Danny grinned. His instructor was a real tiger in the air and a good teacher, even if he was something of a mother hen at times. The two men shook hands, and then Danny climbed into the cockpit and took off.

He had done as much ground training as possible in preparation for this day. They all became expert skeet-shooters, the theory being that shooting clay pigeons would hone their ability to hit fast-moving enemy fighters.

Danny took his position in the spread rectangular
flight formation a thousand feet above the target and waited for it to be his turn to attack, thinking back on what his father had written.

It seemed ironic that his father was praying for the war to end before his son got a taste of it. Danny was praying for exactly the opposite.

He was following the news and worrying himself sick over the possibility that he would never get to see action. The papers were full of stories about the thousand bomber armadas escorted by long-range fighters that had pounded Germany. General Eisenhower proclaimed to his ground forces, “If you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours.” A GI might cheer such words, but they were not the sort of thing a fledging pilot with dreams of being an ace wanted to hear.

The Luftwaffe was far from being broken, Danny knew; on New Year's Day hundreds of German fighter-bombers had hurled themselves at the Allied airfields of Holland, Belgium and northern France in an attempt to shore up the crumbling German ground forces battling in the Ardennes. Since last summer they'd been sending up a new kind of plane, a jet, which flew without a propeller.

Nevertheless, Danny was in a race against time and time was winning out. If the war in Europe ended, he'd be out of it for good. There was no chance of his going to the Pacific. The Navy had retaken the Philippines and the sky was clear of Jap Zeros. There were still kamikazes to worry the aircraft carriers closing in on Japan, but with a British carrier force expected to lend a hand, there'd be no call for green pilots.

He peeled out of the flight formation and began his firing pass, steepening his bank to move his gunsight ahead of the target. He squeezed the trigger, felt the recoil tremor as the gun chattered, and then he was slipping beneath the towline before climbing back up to the formation.

He made ten passes that afternoon, and each time he wondered if this was as close to aerial combat as he was going to get.

They had a lot more gunnery practice and night flying and flying blind. The instructor would ride in the front cockpit to line up the craft on the strip's center line. The cadet would be in the rear under a hood. The lesson to be learned was how to take off using only your instruments.

On Sunday, January fourteenth, the Eighth Air Force resumed large-scale operations after a month-long interval during the Battle of the Bulge. Oil targets in Germany were attacked and heavy enemy fighter forces were encountered.

Solo cross-country night flights with nothing but the radium dials of the instruments and the dragon roar of the engine to keep you company against the endless velvety darkness lorded over by a leering sliver of moon. Then more ground school, more classes in protocol.

On January twenty-sixth the Russians isolated German forces in Prussia only a hundred sixty-one kilometers from Berlin.

On January thirty-first elements of the United States First Army crossed the German border.

Six-turn spins, slow rolls and flying upside down; more gunnery practice and at last graduation time drew near.

On February fourth Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea. Germany, it was decided, would be divided into four zones of occupation.

It was traditional for instructors to take a final ride with their students just before graduation. As Danny expertly flew through the crisp February sky, his instructor spoke to him over the intercom.

“You're one hell of a flier, Dan.”

“Thanks.”

“You might have been one hell of an ace—”

Might have been? No! Oh, no! Danny pressed the button on his mike. “I'm gonna graduate, aren't I?”

“Of course you are, kid. You're gonna get your gold bars and your wings, and we'll even give you guys some P-40 training for old time's sake. But none of you are going to war, kid. We just got the word. Chances are you'll be mustered out before those wings even get tarnished.”

On graduation day Danny and the rest exchanged their cadet's uniforms for officer's garb. They pinned their new second-lieutenant's bars onto their epaulets and stood at attention as they were presented with their silver wings.

Daniel Herodetzky, not yet nineteen years old, was a rated pilot and an officer in the Army Air Corps. He was saluted by enlisted men. He moved from the cadets' barracks to bachelor officers' quarters. He ate in the officers' mess and drank in the officers' club. As his instructor had promised, he received some flight time with a P-40, the shark-nosed fighter made famous by the exploits of Chennault's Flying Tigers, a volunteer group in China.

And it was ashes to Danny because now it was just play. He could continue to read about the winding down of the war in the newspapers; they didn't need him. Thanks anyway, kid.

He would not be going home like Smilin' Jack, or good old Scorchy, but untested, untried, a cherry.

He'd never know if he could have been a hero, if he had what it took. He'd missed his chance to find out and there wasn't a damned thing he could do to get that chance back again.

After his arrest Herschel Kol found himself in a shuttered room with a mattress on the floor and a guard always at the locked door. Different guards brought him his meals and escorted him to the outhouse in the back yard of the house he was held in. He couldn't be sure of his whereabouts, but from the glimpse of an open field beyond the yard's fence and the scent of citrus in the air, Herschel guessed that he was somewhere in northern Tel Aviv, a rural part of the city known for its orange groves.

His guards were Jews, which could only mean that he was a prisoner of Haganah and that this was one of their safe houses. Two guards came for him late one night. Waking him up, they dragged him from his mattress and downstairs to the basement.

He steeled himself for the worst. The fact that he was a prisoner of Jews did not mean that he would be gently treated, and a Jewish hand holding a club would not make the blow any less painful. He was determined not to talk. The fact that his captors were Jews only deepened his resolve. No quarrel was as bitter as a family quarrel.

The basement was well lit and very clean, with whitewashed cinder-block walls. Herschel allowed himself a spark of hope when he saw that there was no interrogation equipment there. The only furnishings were a plain wooden table and two chairs.

“Sit,” one of the guards ordered in Hebrew. He sat under his escort's eyes, his back to the stairs, and waited. He rested his hands on the table and found that it was wobbly. He idly shook it a few times.

He heard the steps creaking as somebody came down. He did not turn around, but kept wobbling the table. His jailbird habits had come right back to him, he realized. Prisoners usually turned childish, and here he was.

“You two can go,” the newcomer told the guards in Hebrew.

A sabra, Herschel thought, listening to the accent.