Authors: Jim Shepard
“Did anybody see that son of a bitch who just came over?” Lewis asked from the tail. “I think his wingtip hit my guns on the way by.”
Behind
Archangel, Quarterback
was washing around in formation. Its upper turret was a red smear, cracked and jagged. One of the gun barrels stuck up at a bizarre angle. The flight engineer climbed out of the smashed shell like a bloody chick, dazed perhaps by the explosion. He held on and swayed, impossibly, against the force of the air. Bryant felt acutely their interchangeability. That was
Paper Doll
, this was
Quarterback.
Someone in
Quarterback
was trying to pull the gunner back in. The gunner held a finger into the battering slipstream like a man testing the wind and reached back for his parachute too late, as if remembering something, and was blown away behind them, out of sight.
“Who's that? Who's that?” Snowberry called. Bryant looked right and left and caught a column of smoke diagonally looping away beyond the tail.
“It's
Boom Town,
” Lewis called. “Charley Rice. Three out. Four.”
Bryant remembered Hallet, fighting with him after the cat throw.
“Stop counting,” Gabriel cut in. “They're coming around again.”
Way off to their right the Germans were flying alongside, passing their formations easily, pulling ahead to come around in more head-on passes. Bryant watched them all stream by outside of the group's range, lining up like kids at the city pool to use the diving board, running along the edge after a dive to get back into the forming line.
They flew into the far distance and massed, wheeling, and a fraction detached, seven, and turned toward them. Others swept out at the higher squadrons.
The new group closed like the first without firing, sliding from side to side slightly as if they were projectiles out of control or a squadron of drunks, and Gabriel said, “Smart bastards, smart bastards,” and Bryant understood from an earlier briefing that the sliding represented their keeping watch in case any of the bomb group's escort were still around, and knew then that these were veterans, old bomber killers, and felt himself wanting to urinate with nothing left and whipped his guns from one target to another, and at the very last moment they started firing, yellow and white lines looping past his turret like liquid light, and his tracer lines ratcheted out and too low and they roared overhead still in line, firing at the Forts behind. He skidded his turret around to the rear and fired short bursts but they were gone and pieces were flying from bombers way behind them in the stream.
Subsequent lines were sawing through the upper squadrons. A bit of debris with something fluttery on it went by his turret from above.
“Oh, God,” Eddy was warning. In the distance Bryant could see below the massed fighters slow sprays of specks lifting off postage stamp airfields, new planes rising all along the corridor ahead.
“Look at them all!” Snowberry said. “Look at them all! There's a jillion of 'em!”
Lewis called in the lines that had gone through and were regrouping behind the formation. Piacenti called in the groups to the right passing them for another head-on attack. Snowberry and Eddy were trying to estimate the numbers ahead.
“Get off the goddamn interphone, everybody off the interphone,” Cooper said. “It's like a Chinese fire drill.”
They were momentarily silent, watching the filling sky. Bryant could feel in the silence a dawning awareness on everyone's part that something had gone, and was going to go, very wrong.
“Glad to see you're still with us, Lootenant,” Lewis finally said from the tail.
More lines of fighters were separating out toward them from the groups ahead. Bryant registered the formation above him closing up, filling the gaps left by the last passes, and he watched two lines of seven Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts apiece bear down on them and felt keenly the isolation and helplessness of this kind of war, hanging there in his sling and aluminum capsule, as exposed, as far away from a place to hide his head, as anyone could be.
He could see growing to the left of center in his gunsight the narrower nose and longer wings of a Messerschmitt, the pale blue of the spanner visible even at this distance. The lines came on with the Focke Wulfs echeloned behind and above the Me-109's, and they all opened fire together. Bryant was reminded of plugging in the lights on a Christmas tree. He was hearing hits on
Paper Doll
and other rows of fighters were detaching from the mass and coming on, one after the other, and Bryant fired and fired, worrying now about overheating guns, trying hard to keep his bursts short.
Paper Doll
rocked back and bucked with all the forward firing guns going, the notion of ammo conservation gone forever.
The sky went white from a blinding flash and above him a Fort's tail flew upward alone from a huge fireball, the concussion shoving
Paper Doll
down and the explosion audible through their headphones.
The fighters went through ragged and uncertain, disconcerted by the light and the blast. The tail had fallen through the formation without producing a chute and there was nothing else left. Whoever they were, Eddy called, they musta taken a shell in the bomb bay.
Hirsch seemed the first to recover and was shouting in new lines.
“Get your nose up! Nose up!” Snowberry was calling in frustration. “Give me air!” He could see the oncoming fighters but couldn't fire, with
Paper Doll
's nose above him too close to his aiming point. “Give me air!” Snowberry was calling and Bryant was firing and firing and the three-Fort vee in front of them went yellow and white and jerked upward and Bryant was blinded. He could feel the whole ship rock backward violently in the shockwave and when his vision returned with ghostly afterimage colors all three planes that had been flying in the vee ahead were gone.
Paper Doll
was wallowing stupidly along, nosing around for something to follow. Bryant could see the dorsal gunner in
Plum Seed
beside them with his hands on his head in a melodramatic gesture of shock and surprise.
“They're all gone!” Snowberry cried. “They're all gone! Where are they?”
“Christ amighty,” Gabriel said. “All three of them just like that.”
“What? What?” Lewis shouted. “What happened?” Bryant could imagine his frustration, as tail gunner in an endless series of head-on attacks.
“They got the whole element in front of us,” he told him. “One swoop.”
“Who was it? Who was it?” Lewis called. He had friends everywhere in the formation.
“
Banshee. I'se a Muggin'. Training Wheels
,” Gabriel said.
Lewis was silent. Eddy was screaming at his guns. Snowberry was crying and asking for air, a clear shot. He said Gabriel was an idiot and they were all going to get killed.
A beautiful and horrible diamond of fighters swam free ahead in a long loop and dropped deftly and in perfect order down toward them, resolving itself into a line staggered upward in altitude, each following plane higher than the one before it. The effect was that of an immense javelin or spear coming through the formation. Bryant's arms hurt and his eyes hurt and he tracked and sighted and fired with a furious haste and effort as pass after pass became simply horrible and intense work. The casing shells overflowed from the huge metal chutes flanking his legs in the turret and rang and clattered past his feet to the floor of the fuselage, spilling further down the companionway to the hatchway door below to Eddy and Hirsch's stations.
There were further explosions from ahead and above, and a man went spinning by his turret, a startled look on his face, knees up as if executing something tricky off the high board. A hatch door flipped by, and a flak helmet.
“Four o'clock!” Piacenti cried, “High!”, but when he looked there were no fighters up there but two B-17's inexplicably together, frozen in contact for a moment as they collided, until they exploded in a long liquid tongue of fire, wings and control surfaces spinning outward.
The fighters behind them were banking around to return. The fighters ahead were circling to gain altitude, a few minutes away. Cooper called in a lightning oxygen check, station by station.
Quarterback
beyond
Archangel
was streaming gasoline from its number three engine, the sheets of fuel fluttering into rain as they left the wing. Every so often pieces flew from the shattered dorsal turret.
“Man,” Piacenti said from the waist, evidently getting an eyeful.
Quarterback
could not keep up. “We're a losin' ticket,” he said. Bryant flashed on Snowberry's journal and its warning about Piacenti.
“Close up! Close up!” Gabriel was calling to
Quarterback
's pilot. It drifted further back, and soon hung distantly off
Archangel
's tail, Lewis reporting as it slipped still further back. From the belly Snowberry called in other losses in a congested voice. “
WAAC Hunter,
” he said.
“Paddlefoot.
”
Bryant looked up and back into the main body of the formation. Prop wash from the massed planes was deflating and collapsing the small parachutes that were drifting downward. He watched one of the white ovals puff and fold and thought,
Survival is out of your hands.
“More more more,” Eddy said. “And my fucking gun is shot.”
The fighters ahead seemed to have misjudged the necessary altitude and were hurrying down to them, having wasted precious fuel. There were limitless fighters, Bryant imagined. They were all going to go down, one by one. The question was really the order. They weren't going to get back. What he wanted at this point was to reach the target.
They came through in waves, steady lines, and in the chaos Bryant and Snowberry and Eddy and Hirsch and Piacenti and Ball and Bean and Lewis lectured and jabbered, shrieked and called out fighters, and hit almost nothing. Something nearby exploded with splintered pieces slashing outward, end over end. A Messerschmitt of a startling green appeared following a palisade of tracers to Bryant's left. A Focke Wulf came in from abeam and stalled, and falling away raked their belly, and he could feel the hits banging into them. “Son of a bitch!” Snowberry was screaming. “He was
right there!
Son of a
bitch!
” And they were gone.
“Comin' around,” Piacenti called. Someone whimpered.
“They came a long way,” Lewis observed. “I don't think they got too much juice left.”
They came on loose, every man for himself, maybe without the fuel to form up, some from the side and even the rear, and Lewis finally had something to shoot at. A Messerschmitt side-slipped by upside down, shooting at
Archangel
, and above them in a higher squadron Bryant saw an engine torn off and tumbling backward, the Fortress wing folding and shearing away. While he was watching, something elseâa Messerschmitt?âcollided head on with another Fortress, half rolling into its nose and shattering pieces outward before both planes exploded and the belly turret and its mount fell away free like a small barbell or a baby's rattle.
He slewed his turret around and a Messerschmitt was on him in a quartering turn, the nose flashing, and the yellow dazzles of 20mm bursts walked toward his turret, one two three four five, banging the ship, and stopped, and the cowling and wingtip flashed by.
“Bryant!” Gabriel called.
“Bryant's hit!” Ball said. “I saw the guy go past.”
“I'm okay,” Bryant was able to say. He felt like a ventriloquist's dummy.
“Frankfurt! Frankfurt!” Hirsch was clicking the call button on the interphone in his excitement and it sounded like chattering teeth. To their left the sun showed silver and wide on two huge rivers, the Rhine and the Main. The whole formation was turning north and east toward the Initial Point.
The fighters were gone. Hirsch called in a time check. It had been more or less thirty minutes since Eupen. Bryant found that impossible to believe. Snowberry said, “You shoulda kept a better watch. You shoulda given that one to Stormy.”
Behind them Lewis was counting chutes. Bryant said, “The top squadron in the lead high group is gone, near as I can tell. Completely.”
“The 525th,” Gabriel said.
Quarterback
had drifted out of sight, straggling back beyond the rear group. In that direction they could see on the curve of the earth a series of small fires generating spiraled pillars of black and gray smoke. The sky between the pillars seemed filled with confetti and litter, the hundreds of white American and occasional pale yellow Luftwaffe parachutes mingling and floating down like a chaotic airborne invasion. A Fortress miles away caught fire and fell from its vee, a quiet bundle in the sky.
“They're pruning,” Snowberry said, and his words affected them all. “They're pruning the 8th Air Force.”
Bryant remembered himself and checked the functioning of the four engines on his flight engineer's panel, checking as well the fuel transfer, in case Cooper and Gabriel had forgotten. His rear end hurt and he was glad to be out of the sling seat. Hirsch announced they were passing over the IP and after a beat Lewis asked what it was.
“Dink town,” Hirsch said. “Gemünden, it's called.”
“Just wanted to know,” Lewis said. He sounded miserable.
Bryant debated whether or not to get back into his turret and decided against it, in case there was trouble with or damage to the bomb bay doors. He'd hooked into a walk-around oxygen bottle and the rubber of his mask was cool and sloppy with sweat. He plugged in his interphone at the flight engineer's panel.
“Now hit the target, you son of a bitch,” he heard Gabriel say to Eddy.
It felt as if they were accelerating, though he knew that wasn't the case, and he imagined the flat and featureless landscape preceding Schweinfurt that he remembered from the briefing, imagined the flak batteries minutes away with infallible Nazis loading up and calibrating their elevations.