“Grab your cocks and pull up your socks, here we go!” Cliff Morris shouted over the intercom.
Down the rain-slick runway at Rackreath Air Base raced the Bâ17E with a red, white, and blue rainbow painted below the left cockpit window. She was fighting for airspeed with two tons of bombs in her belly and a ton of high octane gasoline in her fuel tanks. In the pilot's seat, Cliff poured on the power. The four Wright R1820 Cyclone engines responded with a deepening roar. When the airspeed indicator read 110, he gently pulled back on the control column and
Rainbow Express,
all thirty-three tons of her, lumbered into the air for her seventeenth mission over Germany.
“Ain't she beautiful?” Cliff shouted over the intercom.
“She's got my vote,” Mike Shannon whooped. He was hunched in his tail gunner's seat, watching the rest of the 103rd Bombardment Group take off behind them. No one else aboard the
Rainbow Express
said a thing. Their morale was as low as the rest of the 103rd, which was as low as the rest of the Eighth Air Force in the spring of 1943.
Below the cockpit, in the Plexiglas nose, navigator Dick Stone hunched over his charts and remembered what Colonel Darwin H. Atwood had said when the 103rd Bombardment Group reported for training at Kearney Air Force Base in Nebraska in mid-1942. “Don't get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You've got dirty work to do and you might as well face the facts. You're going to be baby killers and women killers.”
Tall and balding, Colonel Atwood had been a professor of modern history at Stanford before his elevation to rank and power. He seemed to carry history
like a burden on his slumped shoulders. An unspoken pain lurked in his squinting eyes. If he did not know better, Stone would have sworn he was Jewish. Atwood knew all about the strategic bombing campaigns of World War I, which had killed hundreds of civilians in Paris, London, and German cities in the Ruhr.
Dick Stone was vulnerable to doubts about bombing German civilians. His paternal grandfather had been a professor of German literature at the City College of New York. Born in Germany, he was one of those Jews who were forever torn between admiration for its culture and dismay at its virulent anti-Semitism. He loved Goethe, Heine, Schiller and insisted on Stone learning German as a boy so he could read them in the original.
The pilots in the 103rd despised Colonel Atwood. For that reason alone Dick Stone was inclined to defend himâor at least take him seriously. Atwood had given some thought to what they were going to do over Germany. As far as Stone could see, none of the pilots had ever had a thought beyond their arrogant affirmation of their flyboy status and the inevitable superiority of the Bâ17.
Cliff Morris personified the goggles-and-scarf tradition Colonel Atwood struggled in vain to eradicate from the 103rd Bombardment Group. On their first flight Cliff had buzzed the field at fifty feet, missing the tower by inches, according to the terrified traffic controllers. Colonel Atwood threatened Cliff with a court-martial. “I was trying to give my crew some positive leadership,” Cliff replied. “It's in short supply around here.” When the outraged Atwood reported Morris to the commanding general, nothing happened. Morris's stepfather, a World War I ace, knew bigger generals.
Everyone in the
Rainbow Express'
s tenâman crew except Stone soon worshiped Cliff Morris. He made them feel like fliers. They joined his campaign to outdrink and outscrew every other airman in the Eighth Air Force. Stone went along on their “reconnaissances” in Nebraska and in England but he remained aloofly sober and disdainful of the girls they picked up. He was a rabbi's son and he felt he owed his father moral allegiance, even if he no longer agreed with his theology. Rather than try to explain anything so complicated, he cooked up the fiction of being engaged to silence Cliff Morris and other nee-dlers in the crew.
“Hey, Stone,” Cliff said as they reached their prescribed height of 20,000 feet and plowed through the icy sky toward Schweinfurt. “You got Little Miss England so upset with your criticism of the RAF, she couldn't wait to show me how true blue she was.”
“What was blue? Once you got rid of her uniform,” said Beck, the bombardier, who preferred London prostitutes to nice girls.
“Her eyes, you miserable whoremaster. I didn't have to pay for it either. The old record is still intact.”
Cliff was inordinately proud of his ability to seduce women. They all listened while he gave them a condensed version of his line with Sarah Chapman. He
always talked about a seduction as if he were a movie director setting up a scene. Dick sighed and wondered what Sarah Chapman thought of it now, two days after she sobered up.
“You should have heard the stuff she babbled on the way back to Bedlington,” Cliff said. “Something about a skylark in a gale trapped in a cage. She got so excited we stopped in a lane just outside the base and did it once more for good measure.”
“Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage,” Dick Stone said.
“That's it, Shylock. What the hell does it mean?”
“It's from a poem by someone who feels spiritually trapped and discouraged,” Dick said.
A groan filled the earphones. “Don't knock it, you fucking atheists. She's gonna pray us back,” Cliff said. “We could use some prayers flying this miserable crate.”
Back in the States during their training, when Cliff was not talking about girls, he talked about the Bâ17. Again and again he proclaimed it the best plane ever built. Family pride was partly involved. Buchanan Aircraft was turning out hundreds of the big bombers under a contract from the original maker, Boeing. Cliff had named their bomber after the Buchanan company symbol, a plane soaring over a rainbow.
Now no one, including Cliff Morris, was sure of the Bâ17's superiority, though he usually tried to disguise his doubts with bravado. On the first few raids over Germany their losses had been light. Everyone assumed the Germans were afraid to attack the Flying Fortresses, with their bristling array of machine guns. Alas, the Luftwaffe was only reorganizing its defenses, which had been devoted to defending the fatherland against British bombers by night. The American decision to bomb in daylight and prove the precision of the Norden bombsight and the invulnerability of the Bâ17 took the Germans by surprise. But not for long.
Soon the sky above their targets was thick with ugly black bursts of .88 millimeter shells. An .88 could knock out a Sherman tank. When it struck something as fragile as a plane, the results were horrendous. Bâ17s exploded into fragments, broke in half, spun down with wings or tails gone. Out of the sun hurtled swarms of FockeâWulf and Messerschmitt fighters firing 20â and 30-millimeter cannons. Formations dissolved. Bâ17s began burning all over the sky or spinning down with dead pilots and copilots in shattered cockpits. Instead of the eight or ten planes that they had expected to lose on each mission, they started to lose sixty or seventy. Whole squadrons were wiped out.
People with mathematical ability soon estimated that only 34 percent of them would make it through the required tour of twenty-five missions. Colonel Atwood addressed this chilling computation with his usual candor. “I'll give you a little clue on how to fight this war. Make believe you're dead already. The rest will come easy.”
On the Bâ17s plowed in two huge box formations. Below them, Europe was invisible as usual beneath its semi-permanent clouds. The weathermen said
the skies would be clear but they had been wrong so often, no one even bothered to curse them anymore.
Dick Stone found himself thinking about Sarah Chapman again. Amazing how poetry could connect people. He still felt linked to his grandfather by certain poems by Goethe and other German writers that the old man had read to him. He identified with that poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins because he too felt trapped in a spiritual cage. In an odd way he also identified with the word
Catholic,
spelled with a small
c.
He could hear his grandfather saying:
catholic, that's what we all must become. That's what America is about, catholicity, diversity yet brotherhood.
“Any fucking cultural monuments you don't want to hit on this run, Stone?” Cliff asked.
On a recent raid the primary target, Dusseldorf, had been invisible under heavy clouds and they had scattered to bomb secondary targets. Breaking through the overcast to get some idea where they were, the
Rainbow Express
saw a city full of church spires and eighteenthâcentury houses, with some factories on the outskirts. Dick Stone flipped his maps, did some rapid calculations of their airspeed and course and concluded it was Weimar, where Goethe spent most of his life. He urged Cliff not to bomb it. The place was a living museum. Cliff had bombed it anyway and was still needling him about it.
“Nothing to worry about but women and children,” Dick said.
They droned on in subzero boredom for another two hours. Finally, navigator Stone informed Captain Morris they were less than fifteen minutes from Schweinfurt. Below them was a growing number of fleecy cumulus clouds. In ten minutes they began to darken into a gray cumulonimbus blanket. The weathermen were wrong again.
“Bandits at two o'clock!” screamed the top turret gunner, Smithfield. He was coming apart. He started firing his guns when the Germans were at least a mile away, hysterically holding the triggers down, instead of squeezing off threeâ second bursts. The planes were thick-bodied FockeâWulfs. They did a barrel roll and came down ready to work on the outer edge of the American formation where the
Rainbow Express
was flying. It was known as the Purple Heart corner.
Smithfield was not the only member of the crew Dick Stone worried about. Cliff Morris was also showing signs of strain. He was getting drunk much too often at the Rackreath officers' club. Already a licensed pilot when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Cliff had a personal motive for seeing action. His stepfather had told him a good war record guaranteed him a job at Buchanan Aircraft. Cliff had converted this promise into guaranteed jobs for all of them. But Cliff had never imagined that winning this pot of gold involved sitting behind a half inch of glass watching FockeâWulfs closing on him at a combined airspeed of five hundred miles an hour, their wings aflame with machine guns and cannon.
Cliff shoved the
Rainbow Express's
nose down, putting her into a shallow dive to give top turret gunner Smithfield a better shot at the oncoming Focke-Wulfs. The Germans' wings flickered fire. A slamming tearing sound, then a
scream of anguish over the intercom. “Smitty's hit!” shouted the radioman.
“Get up there and man his gun,” Cliff said.
The FockeâWulfs rolled into a dive that brought them beneath the formation for another blast of cannon fire. A new cry of anguish. Dick Stone turned to find bombardier Beck slumped over his bombsight, blood gushing from his mouth. Dick dragged him aside and told Cliff he was going to bomb.
Cliff held the
Rainbow Express
on course while Dick flicked on the rack switches and the intervalvometer switch that controlled the spacing between bomb drops. He peered through the sight at the target area. The clouds were now shrouding Schweinfurt. But the bombers were all too visible on German radar. Up through the clouds hurtled a firestorm of .88 millimeter shells. The blue sky looked as if a madman was flicking gobs of intensely black indigo paint on it.
“Marvelous Mabel'
s hit,” shouted Mike Shannon from the tail. She had been flying directly behind them. A shell had blown off
Mabel's
wing. As she spun down the leggy blonde on the fuselage below the name seemed to smile up at them. “Not one goddamn parachute,” Mike said.
Baby killers and women killers, Dick Stone thought, waiting for a break in the clouds to give him at least a glimpse of their target, ballbearing factories on the outskirts of Schweinfurt.
“Open bomb bay doors,” Cliff said. A blast of freezing air swept through the plane. Dick could feel the motors straining against the extra drag.
A tremendous crash. Stone saw flames gushing from the number-two engine. “We're in trouble,” Cliff shouted as the
Rainbow Express
lost airspeed. “Get rid of those goddamn bombs. Now.”
“I can't see a thing,” Dick said.
“I said
bomb!”
Cliff said, pulling the CO
2
switch to douse the fire in the burning engine.
Dick Stone's grandfatherâor was it Colonel Atwoodâbegan reciting a poem in Stone's head. It was by the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, asking his mistress to listen to his breaking heart. He said the hammering sound was a carpenter fashioning a coffin for him. Now the coffin maker was in the sky and Stone's heart was hammering not from love but a berserk mixture of fear and revulsion. What if he refused to press the bomb release?
“Stone, I said
bomb!”
Cliff Morris roared.
Dick pressed the button and the four five-hundred-pound bombs fell from their racks. He pressed a second button that fired a white flare, a signal for the rest of the group to bomb at the same time. God only knew what they were hitting in Schweinfurt.